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- Bringing Trauma to Your MobileNovember 24
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I am just back from a very inspiring weekend attending the Futures of Entertainment 3 conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium. One of the most exciting elements was getting to hear directly from several media producers who are doing fascinating transmedia “world building” projects in association with their television shows and movies.
One example was Lance Weiler (seen on the far left), director of the horror film Head Trauma, recently named one of the 18 People Who Changed Hollywood by Business Week magazine. He spoke about extending Head Trauma beyond the film (transcribed by Xiaochang Li on the C3 weblog — click through to read the whole panel discussion):
The movie is about the fragmentation of memory, a guy who comes back home after 20 years to settle his grandmother’s estate and finds it inhabited by squatters; he hits his head a
- The Risks and Advantages of Social Network SitesNovember 11
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I was recently a guest on Kansas City current affairs show Up to Date on Kansas City NPR affiliate, KCUR. My co-guest was Michael Zimmer of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who is an expert on issues of ethics, privacy and the web. Our guest-host Stephen Seligman led us through a lively and high quality discussion of social networking sites and what people ought to understand about their advantages and risks. It’s an hour long show with a call-in segment.
And, best of all, it’s available in mp3 form.
- Life on the Move: Social Network Roundtable audio now upOctober 22
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Last week I attended the Association of Internet Researchers’ 9th annual conference, this time in Copenhagen Denmark. One of the things I did there was participate in a roundtable about social networking research called Life On the Move put together by Daniel Skog (Umeå University, Sweden) and Lewis Goodings (Loughborough University, UK). The other panelists included Malene Charlotte Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark), Raquel Recuero (Catholic University of Pelotas, Brazil), Jan Schmidt (Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Germany) and Amanda Lenhart (Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, US).
We look at a diverse range of sites in different countries, including LunarStorm in Sweden, Brazilian use of Orkut, Danish youth on Arto.dk and more, as well as taking broad perspectives such as Amanda’s work with Pew that starts with users rather than sites. Despite this, we found ourselves agreeing on many many points, particularly the need to acknowledge that people move amongst many different sites both online
- Futures of Entertainment 3October 16
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I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at Futures of Entertainment 3, put together by the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT:
Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.
This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.
Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production De
- How Last.fm strengthens relationships and creates new onesOctober 14
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One of the big questions raised by social networking sites is what the heck those “friendships” really are. In this paper, written with my former Ph.D. student and now Ohio University professor Andrew Ledbetter, we examine this in the case of Last.fm. Based on a large survey of users, we pose the question of what predicts how strong or well developed Last.fm friendships are.
The short answer is that the best predictor is not shared taste in music (which has no effect on relational development), but how many different ways people communicate with one another. For each medium added, people’s relationships are a little closer. This means that sites like Last.fm can provide pairs with an additional way to maintain and strengthen their relationship that goes over and beyond what they get through email, instant messaging, phone calls and other means of interaction.
On the other hand, the “friendships” that begin via Last.fm don’t go very far, even if shared taste was important to the relationship’s initiation.
Overall, the “friendships” on Last.fm are pretty weak. The notion that shared taste makes people “musical soulmates” makes for good mythology, it seems, but not strong interpersonal connections.
You can download and read the paper here. For reasons I don’t understand, the tables did not get included in this PDF. If you really want to se