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News from the Future of Public Media
Participant-Observation and the Future of Public Media
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Nov 23, 2007 at 3:14 PM
Social Networks, Web 2.0, the “semantic web”—these are all unexplored territories for media scholars more accustomed to the terrain of broadcast, print, and even regular old hypertext. But a new generation of researchers are donning their virtual pith helmets to report back from parts unknown, providing accounts of platforms, spaces and practices that might support future public media. Here’s a short list of notable projects:
Digital Ethnography: Kansas State University professor Michael Welsh is working with his students on an ethnography of mediated culture. In the process, he’s created a set of provocative and popular YouTube videos that harness old and new information-sharing techologies to explore the nature of current communication—from handwritten text, to the card catalogue, to the Google search field, to Wikipedia entries and beyond. His newest video (above), “A Vision of Students Today,” was created in conjunction with his class, and contrasts antiquated classroom routines to their everyday experience of a media-saturated, interactive, multi-tasking lifestyle.
Danah Boyd: Like a classic anthropological participant-observer, Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd lives where she works—online, across myriad social networks, blogging sites, and other read/write digital spaces. In June, she created a splash by suggesting that teens choose between MySpace and Facebook on the basis of race, class and social status; her response to critiques of that blog post is itself a study in the ways that a public debate can rage across the Web’s open platforms. Boyd recently co-edited an issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on social network sites; the opening essay serves as a handy guide to current research and emerging questions.
Henry Jenkins: Prolific, enthusiastic and relentlessly immersed in media of all kinds, MIT professor Henry Jenkins identifies himself as an “Aca/Fan”—”a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic.” From this perspective, he’s authored several books examining the connections between pop culture, politics, and the active relationship of audiences to the media they love—or love to hate. The Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Jenkins also recently helped to launch MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, a joint project with the MIT Media Lab that promises to “work to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information.”
Digital Natives: A joint research project between the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, the Digital Natives project explores what it means to be “born digital.” As the site—itself a Wiki that invites d-natives and their “digital immigrant” parents to contribute—explains, “Digital natives share a common global culture that is defined not by age, strictly, but by certain attributes and experiences related to how they interact with information technologies, information itself, one another, and other people and institutions.” Topics include digital identity, safety, privacy, creativity, piracy, information overload, information quality and education. Check out their Twitter feed for the latest updates.
Random Acts of Media: A project of media think tank iFOCUS, Random Acts of Media is a collaborative site that invites users to become “scouts,” sniffing out and uploading examples of media that demonstrate how humans connect, learn, and communicate online. The site is described as part of “a digital ethnography that iFOCOS researchers and social scientists use to report on the habits and behaviors of a culture immersed in media.” The think tank also organizes an annual conference called We Media.
Know of other digital ethnographers that are helping to reshape our understanding of online culture? Please let us know what we’ve missed in our discussion section, below.
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