The first paper that danah boyd and I wrote together based on our research at MSR last summer has been published!
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.
If you have access to a university journal subscription, you can access it here. If not, you can download it here [PDF].
I am very proud of this paper and would love to hear feedback on it.
It has been a LONG time since I posted anything in this blog– I used to be so conscientious! But I have some very exciting news. In September 2010, I will be joining Microsoft Research New England as a postdoc, working with danah boyd for the next two years. I will be finishing my dissertation this summer and moving to Boston in late August.
Danah has been an enormously significant mentor and friend during my academic career. I interned with her last summer, and we wrote two terrific papers, both of which have been accepted for publication, one in New Media and Society and one in Convergence (more about that in a future post). She is serving on my committee as an outside reader, and we have appeared on many panels together. I have learned an enormous amount from danah, not only about technology, but about professionalization, ethnography, method, and ethics. She is a superlative scholar and I am super lucky to be working with her.
I have worked with Microsoft many times before, starting as an intern on Windows CE 1.0 in 1997! Microsoft Research could not be a better place to work - the researchers are fantastic, the resources are unbelievable and I will have a great deal of freedom to design my own wacky research projects (last summer, as an intern, I studied celebrity and micro-celebrity on Twitter). Danah and I plan to do a lot of fieldwork and continue to write together, and I will be pursuing my own research agenda as well (I am so caught up in finishing the diss that I am not entirely sure what that will be).
In summary: yay! I need to thank my committee, Marita Sturken, Helen Nissenbaum, and Biella Coleman, for being tremendously helpful, and my partner, Harry Heymann, for helping me figure everything out (and serving as a beta reader for my dissertation). And of course all my other colleagues, mentors, and friends. I am confident that MSR will be a great place for me to begin my post-PhD career and I look forward to what the future will bring.
Here’s the @100interviews video of me from SXSW. Note I look exhausted. That’s because it’s halfway through South by and I was exhausted. Good basic overview of my dissertation.
So my ROFLCON keynote on internet celebrity is finally online in its entirety at the Internet Archive. It took me this long to find it because it’s tagged as “Alex Marwick.” Oh well, we all need to start somewhere! It’s about a half hour long and touches on many of the things about internet celebrity that I’ve written/talked about elsewhere, but I wrote it to be funnier than a typical academic talk. I’ll upload it to YouTube eventually and post it here when it’s done.
It’s about that time: the time when the dorkiest Web 2.0 dorks in the dorkosphere all descend on Austin, TX for a week. This is my third SXSW Interactive, and as such I finally feel veteran enough to comment on the experience.
Tuesday, March 17, 3:30 - 4:30 PM. With Adam Fisk (LittleShoot, LimeWire), Ian Clarke (Uprizer Labs, Freenet, Revver), Wendy Seltzer (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, co-founder of Chilling Effects), Aaron Ray (The Collective, lots of film/music projects).
I’m so excited to be added to this panel, as it has some slam-dunk academics on it: my friend and future co-worker danah boyd (Microsoft Research) and my former advisor Siva Vaidhyanathan (UVA). Judith Donath rounds out the pack - her current work on signalling is amazingly interesting and I can’t wait to hear where this panel goes. I’m stepping in to sub for one of my terrific advisors, Helen Nissenbaum (NYU).
Tips
If you’re trying to decide between two or three things, pick the one with the most famous person. That way you can always say you saw them, even if the event is a bummer.
Do not use your laptop while you’re in a panel, because you won’t pay any attention to the actual panel. Did you go to Austin to hang out and meet people and learn stuff, or to obsessively check Twitter?
Get to parties about 30 minutes after they open. Earlier and you’ll be the first person there; later and you won’t be able to get through the door.
VIP party passes are your friends, beg, borrow, and steal whenever possible.
As a non-drinker, I avoid the worst curse of SXSW: being so hung over every day that the week becomes more like an endurance test than a fun experience.
SXSW Sched.org: this was the best app of last year. It’s been supplanted a little bit by SXSW’s own home-grown calendar solution, but it’s still really excellent, and updated daily.
The Geek’s Guide to SXSW Film. Every year I say “I’m going to a movie!” and I think I have exactly once, to see one of my friends’ short films. This year I am, at least, going to see the new Paul Rudd/Jason Siegel movie I Love You Man. I’m an Apatow sucker.
For the third year in a row, I am speaking at SXSW Interactive. Last year’s discussion about internet fame was a huge success, and I really enjoyed meeting and talking to everyone who came.
This year I am speaking on “P2P 2.0 and the Future of Digital Media,” a panel about the possibilities and futures of peer-to-peer content creation, distribution, and collaboration. This is a great panel put together by Adam Fisk (LittleShoot, Limewire) and also features Ian Clarke (FreeNet, Revver), Wendy Seltzer (EFF, Berkman Center), and Aaron Ray (the manager for Linkin Park). I’m really excited. As with any panel, I’m sure it will evolve and change as we get closer to the date, but I’m thinking about talking about commercial internet sites and their effects on content creators (copyright infringement claims, content ownership, advertising, selling of personal information, etc.).
So if you’re at SXSW drop by. I was also thinking about organizing an Academics at SXSW meetup- any interest?
Lately I’ve been paying close attention to just who I’m paying attention to when I go to a tech conference (academic or industry). Places like SXSW are pretty good about gender balance, but others will have panel after panel of white dudes, or at least four white dudes and a white woman.
A list of potential female tech speakers would be a very long list. But while I can think of several female startup heads (Mary Hodder, Dina Kaplan, Gina Bianchini, etc.), generally it’s the young male CEO/CTO/COO’s who land on panel after panel and demo after demo. A recent demo session I went to had 25 companies presenting and not a single woman.
The hand-wringing over “Women in Tech” isn’t the point: there are plenty of women in technology already, and there needs to be a more proactive effort to include them on lists, conferences, panels, et cetera. This is the opposite of tokenism; instead, it’s an attempt to replace the friend-of-friend attitude that has dudes organizing conferences and booking their dude friends on panels. The more visible women in technology, the more younger women will see technology as a space for them.
So: Do we need a list?
(Note that there’s something totally wackadoodle about this blog lately, technically; I’ve been meaning to devote an afternoon to un-gunking it and haven’t had the free time yet. I apologize for the continued broken comments, etc.)
I’ve moved to San Francisco to work on my dissertation, an ethnography of social status and elitism in the Web 2.0 startup community. I’m hanging around with people who work at Web 2.0 startups, internet celebrities, tech journalists, and various other highly-wired people with highly-mediated social relationships who are connected to the entrepreneurial San Francisco social media “scene.” I’m looking at status markers, status practices, and status hierarchies, in order to analyze how social media is creating a new status culture, and how “traditional” status is expressed online.
When we talk about Web 2.0 as participatory, creative, freeing, liberatory, or various other positive adjectives, we’re drawing from a discourse of computerization that assumes more computers = better. Likewise, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, and many writers and thinkers, start from the assumption that social media is a positive thing. I’m choosing to drill down into this assumption by looking at a particular thread of it: status. Understanding social status is a way of understanding power. (A similar ethnography might have looked only at gender in social media).
I wanted to look at a community that was highly wired, one on a certain end of the bell curve that would give me lots of rich information about technology use online, but also how technology is used in social spaces. I’m not interested in “online ethnography;” I wanted to do an ethnography that existed both in face-to-face environments, and through various websites and mobile technologies, as that is how many people experience their social lives today.
On the other hand, the way hyper-wired Americans (or Koreans, or Swedes) use technology is not universal. It’s a quite specific culture with a quite specific understanding of technology. I’m hypothesizing that the assumptions made about technology use by those who create it — who are often the most connected, and often very wealthy, people– are inscribing a particular cultural understanding of technology.
When I tell people this is my dissertation topic, I get one of three reactions:
1) That’s awesome! You should talk to X and Y. I have Z thoughts on the topic. (obviously this is my favorite)
2) Did you just design a project so you could hang out with your friends in the Bay Area?
3) [Complete confusion][Often people think I'm studying status messages, like Facebook status.]
I’ve noticed that the people who reply with #1 are usually the people most immersed in the highly mediated technoculture of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. They understand the status signaled by having a thousand Twitter friends, or filling a bar on a Saturday afternoon by sending a single Facebook status update. (See, here’s that confusion again.) And most of them have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, and see the value of the project immediately.
Reaction #2 is a bit more complicated. Obviously, the fact that I have a lot of friends in the Web 2.0 culture does allow me access to areas I wouldn’t get into otherwise, like TechCrunch parties, or just provides me with enough insider knowledge to know where to find the people I’m looking for. But this is tempered by the knowledge that it’s unethical to collect data on my friends; I have to create a clear boundary between friend time and research time. This is something all ethnographers grapple with, but probably not usually to the extent that I’m grappling with it.
(Reaction #3 is often due to my poor explanation, and I’m working on elevator pitches).
I’ll be in San Francisco for nine months collecting data, talking to people, observing events, reading, and analyzing. It’s a long time to be away from home, but so far it’s going very well. Throughout this time, I’ll be checking in and sharing thoughts and anecdotes from my research; please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, especially if you’re in the Bay Area and would like to talk.
This article discusses the panic over “online predators” on MySpace and how it’s not based on fact. I analyze media coverage of the cyberporn panic of 1996 and its links to internet content legislation, and compare this to the current hysteria around MySpace. My conclusion: there is no problem with online predators, the real problems of child abuse and child pornography are ignored by the proposed legislation, and the panic worries parents and restricts teenagers unnecessarily.
Formal abstract:
This paper examines moral panics over contemporary technology, or “technopanics.” I use the cyberporn panic of 1996 and the contemporary panic over online predators and MySpace to demonstrate links between media coverage and content legislation. In both cases, Internet content legislation is directly linked to media–fueled moral panics that concern uses of technology deemed harmful to children. This is of particular interest currently as a new Internet content bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), is being debated in the U.S. Congress. The technopanic over “online predators” is remarkably similar to the cyberporn panic; both are fueled by media coverage, both rely on the idea of harm to children as the justification for Internet content restriction, and both have resulted in carefully crafted legislation to circumvent First Amendment concerns. Research demonstrates that legislation proposed — or passed — to curb these problems is an extraordinary response; it is misguided and in many cases masks the underlying problem.
You can see a sneak preview of part of the talk here:
I may or may not upload the deck - it’s enormous, most of the pictures aren’t credited (which isn’t very fair to the creators) and I think the talk stands fine alone, as the deck mostly just added humor for the audience. Enjoy!
Alice E. Marwick (alicetiara) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. This summer I'm interning with danah boyd at Microsoft Research. I study social technology. This blog focuses on that, pop culture, communication, and media studies. Click on "About Me" for more blathering.
What is this “Fake” in the Fake Sartorialist? « threadbared But it isn’t just Web 2.0 technologies that have opened up a space in the fashion world for those outside to enter and occupy it. For the past 8 or 9 years, cheap chic fashion and democratic design have been valorized as enabling non-elite consumers to access and own the look of elite classes. The democratization of fashion ushered in a new cultural politic that values and legitimizes (some) knockoffs. It is against this political economic and cultural backdrop that the real and virtual consumption and circulation of fashion images, objects, and discourses are given new meaning.
Comment: Down with meritocracy | Politics | The Guardian Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy" as a dystopian critique, weighs in on the contemporary use of the word and how it creates a new disenfranchised underclass
Das Racist: Thanks, Internet! The three-man creators of "combination pizza hut and taco bell" reflect on the implications of internet fame and drop some science on corporate mythmaking.
How Diverse is Facebook? | overstated Fascinating report from Cameron Marlow et. al. about racial diversity on FB: It is, he says, and getting more so.
