I am attending the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2013 in San Antonio, TX from February 23 to 27.  I will be pesenting a paper on Starcraft and learning that I wrote with Tim Young. I wrote a summary post here. crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=4322

Stephen Paolini is an active StarCraft II participant, and also doing exceedingly well at his high school. Interestingly, this unintuitive combination (video gaming+good grades) may be linked to his upbringing within in a video game family with supportive parents and siblings. We invited Stephen to share his story at the CLRN Blog:

clrn.dmlhub.net/content/delicate-tension-where-gaming-and-education-intersect

I am currently leading The Digital Memory Project at the National University of Singapore. It is an interdisciplinary collaboration with Kelvin Cheng and Xavier Roman Martinez. Here’s a short description:

“The Digital Memory Project aims to digitize “memories,” so that past events are more effectively collected, shared, and get passed on from one person to another. In this project, we will develop media platforms that solicit digital memories from “crowds,” whom will create, edit, and remix these memories. We will explore innovative uses of gestural and mobile interaction techniques for users to interact with and present these memories on large public displays.”

I will use this space to provide future updates on this project.

Old books sometimes give us surprisingly timely insights into current research questions. A question that is important to digital media research is to think about all the changes brought along by digital technologies bringing changes all around us. I read an old text written by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1945 that touches on some relevant subjects. Here are some of the excerpts:

[C]ulture change is a permanent factor of human civilization, it goes on everywhere and at all times. It may be induced by factors and forces spontaneously arising within the community, or it may take place through the contact of different cultures…

The anthropologist is becoming increasingly aware that the study of culture change must become one of his main tasks in field work and theory. The figment of the “uncontaminated” Native has to be dropped from research in field and study…

The very essence of history is that it has a future as well as a past. If anthropology has been very often an escape into the exotic, history has often remained the shelter for those who prefer their past dead and buried to tradition alive and active.

The above statements contain several parallels with the rise of interest in cultural studies and cultural diffusion and fusion in Human Computer Interaction.

For those who might be interested in performing “commercial ethnography” instead of “academic ethnography,” here might be something to rethink this dichotomy:

[T]here is still a strong but erroneous opinion in some circles that practical anthropology is fundamentally different from theoretical or academic anthropology. The truth is science begins with applications… as soon as the theory is true, it is also “applied” in the sense it is experimentally confirmed.

The likely truth is that theories sometimes get forgotten, until they become useful again.

I enjoyed very much the insights offered by Dijck and Nieborg in their paper titled Wikinomics and its discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifesto. See nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/855.abstract

The authors made a close reading of discourses describing media users and their roles in the new media. They argued that discourses of Wikinomics, We-Think, and participatory culture, are making claims that are being accepted universally and unreflectively. These influential works had attempted to lead us into a “new world” which boundary between media users and the media companies is blurred. Without paying attention to deconstructing the differences between the roles of users and other new media actors, we are straying further away from understanding the very “new world” we thought we have understood.

A highly recommended reading!

At times we come across an idea we really wanted to share despite all the mundane distractions. Here is a 2003 paper by James Boyle titled the “The Second Enclosure Movement.” He discusses issues we are facing in balancing the older Intellectual Property regimes against the rising user creativity. I especially like Boyle discussing I.P. as a regime to protect the “noblest of human productions” which should be “free as air.” But there is little clarity to how we can balance the playing field due to the lack of understand of the myriad of “public domains” we are trying to protect.

Social studies of the New Media often focus on the user side of the equation, while overlooking product developers and designers as key actors. This special issue, that I edited with Bonnie Nardi, put together papers from a multi-disciplinary team of prominent researchers including Dan Burk, Jordi Comas, Mimi Ito, Hector Postigo, Walt Scacchi, and Ted Tschang. I hope that the papers would provide alternative lens for examining New Media development.

See full issue.

Abstract of the special issue:

In this special issue, we present a multi–disciplinary perspective of the emergence of user creativity in new media. The papers were written by researchers in anthropology, sociology, media studies, law, computer science, and management studies. The authors examine the roles of users and commercial actors in the new media, and help answer critical questions on intellectual property, ethics, practice, and governance. Taken together, the papers expose a complex, mutable, creative ecology influencing new media product development and practice.