December 2001 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Playing with the Future: CFP Deadline Today
by Jason Rutter 21 Dec '01

21 Dec '01

Hi All, For those of you not finished the wind down as part of the holiday season one more thing to do is make sure you get in you abstract for "Playing with the Future" as soon as possible. Jase -- APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTING ================================================= PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE: DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS IN COMPUTER GAMING APRIL 5-7, 2002 Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, University of Manchester Manchester, England http://www.cric.ac.uk/cric/gamerz/ DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: Friday, December 21, 2001. Computer games have now been taking up room in people's homes for over twenty-five years. The mid-seventies fad for the black and white block graphics of Pong has turned into an industry worth over $6 billion in the USA alone. The new generation of consoles along with the almost frenetic development in graphic and CPU technologies for PCs demonstrates a time of great technological innovation for gaming technology and this is reinforced by the growing importance of new methods of gaming-related retail such as web-based e-commerce and interactive digital television. Further, gamers are becoming increasingly organised and professionalised through growing consumer gaming exhibitions, national and international gaming competitions and arenas such as LAN parties and online gaming. At this rapidly moving point in the gaming industry the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC) will be hosting a conference of computer gaming, gamers and the gaming industry on the 5th-7th April 2002 at The University of Manchester. Bringing together researchers from sociology, psychology, games design, cultural studies, economics, management and other disciplines, along with members from various sectors of the gaming industry such as developers, publishers and retail the central aims of the conference are: * To provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas, information and analysis on the gaming industry and gamer research * To foster research links between academic research and the gaming industry and develop new networks of research activity * To offer students a supportive environment for sharing and developing their idea with more established researchers * To facilitate dissemination of work produced for the conference in printed and electronic format The organisers welcome submissions from any discipline, as well as work from those producing games and other leisure-orientated new media or working within associated industries. Panel presentations which establish connections across disciplines, institutions and/or continents are especially encouraged. We invite paper, presentation, and panel proposals on, but not restricted to, the following areas: Gamers: Gamers as producers Gaming communities Ethnographies of gamers Gender differences Gaming Industries: Organisational culture E-commerce and bricks & mortar retail Market values and sectors Marketing Strategic alliances Gaming Effects: Gaming and health Gaming and development Games software in education Gaming technologies: Technological convergence Avatars and AI Console wars Gaming via WAP, WED and dTV Games: Textual analysis Gender in games Constructing gameplay Character and narrative Gaming history Legal Aspects: Software piracy Game certification IPR and copyright Gamers as a consumer market Individual paper and presentation proposals should be no more than 500 words. For panel proposals, the session organiser should submit a 250 word description of the panel topic along with abstracts of up to 500 words for each paper or presentation in the panel. The organisers are keen to encourage experimentation with panel formats to enable exchange and development. A guide for panel submission can be found at: http://www.cric.ac.uk/cric/gamerz/panelguide.htm Abstracts and proposals should be submitted electronically to Jason.Rutter(a)man.ac.uk in RTF, Word or PDF format or sent to: Jason Rutter ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, The University of Manchester, Ground Floor, Devonshire House, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9QH PH: +44 (0) 161 275 6859 http://www.cric.ac.uk/cric/gamerz/ FOR CONFERENCE UPDATES JOIN THE DIGIPLAY LIST AT http://www.topica.com/lists/digiplay/ Deadline for abstracts: Friday, December 21, 2001. Accepted authors notified: Friday January 21, 2002

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Re: brand communities
by Valdis 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

many brand/topic/interest communities are 'emergent' -- no outside organizer forms them -- they are self-organizing. amazon.com has many such emergent communities around their products. the data to map these communities is available from the buying patterns amazon tracks makes available on each page. a 'community of interest' around a book: http://www.orgnet.com/buzznet.html Valdis Krebs valdis(a)orgnet.com http://www.orgnet.com air-l-request(a)aoir.org wrote: > > Message: 4 > From: "Dorine Andrews" <dca4(a)georgetown.edu> > To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> > Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 16:56:55 -0500 > Subject: [Air-l] Re:Company vs. community > Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org > > Might want to read something on brand communities (organic non-commercial > communities organized out of an interest in a particular product but having > no association with the product manufacturer or dealer). It appears that the > concept of "mutual benefit" and online extensions of offline social networks > apply. > > Muniz, Jr. Albert & O'Guinn, Thomas. (March, 2001) "Brand Community." > Journal of consumer Research Vol.27. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Dorine Andrews, DCD > Research Professor > Communication, Culture & Technology Program > Georgetown University > www.georgetown.edu/faculty/dca4 > email: dca4(a)georgetown.edu or (202) 784-4338 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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abstraction and community
by Jonathan Sterne 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

Hi Folks, I've only read enough Luhmann to have the opinion that he's interesting, and I'm not an online ethnographer, so let me just offer a general comment linking the two discussions: It seems to me that "community" is exactly the same kind of abstraction as "society" -- a kind of abstraction Christian is querying. Now, I'm all for abstractions in scholarship, and I think abstractions are real and exert real effects in human activity. So I'm not bothered by talking about society or community as a thing (perhaps Christian and I will argue about this, but that's for another time). But we're also circling around the old "is"/"ought" distinction (almost wrote is/ouch, which would be a *different* distinction) that has plagued philsophy and social theory for a long time. Why should we be so concerned with characterizing online activity in terms of community? This has boggled my mind for some time. I know there's a long intellectual history, starting with the Chicago School and the pragmatists, of looking for community or indexing its loss. You see the same thing with social theorists writing about mass society and the suburbs in the 1950s. You see it with television scholars in the 1970s and 1980s (and hell, how about all those subculture studies?) And again, you see it with academics writing about the internet today. Of course, people online also talk about their activities in terms of "community" so there may be an empirical basis for choosing that term, but I also think there's an underside to the community discourse that's rarely commented upon -- and I'd be interested to hear impressions from people outside the US, where the class politics may be different. In my opinion, academics and other members of the professional-managerial class in the US have an afflication whereby they find their own lives lacking in some abstract quality named community. They then go out and find it everywhere *else* in the society. There are two problems with this behavior: 1. Though I'm sure it has its relatively unique modes of sociability, I don't think PMC life carries any more or less of that elusive "community" quality than other forms of life in the US. 2. Community isn't automatically a good thing, and I find its normative value highly questionable, even if we're talking "good" communities, whatever those might be. Now, this isn't meant as an individualist rant (though I suppose insofar as I believe people ought to be able to live lives not determined by their circumstances of birth, that might be somewhat individualistic), but rather a query as to why on Earth we'd want to elevate "community" as our preferred model of social association? Why not, for instance, friendship (or friendship networks), association, kindness, organization, some metaphor of urbanity, good will, consideration, mutuality, etc.? None of those terms are without their problems, but none of them have been written about with the same veracity as "community." In short, I don't pose a simple solution, so don't hold me to one, but I've yet to read an argument for why scholars ought to use the term community to describe online interaction -- why we should want "community" as our index of online sociability. I've just seen lots of arguments about how online interactions either fit, don't fit, or transform some conception of community (all of which presume we ought to be out there looking for community) -- all of which assume a prior "should" that I haven't seen. What am I missing? Besides, it's a lot harder to characterize ebay -- or the people who run it -- as your friends than it is to characterize them as a community. Best, --Jonathan, enjoying break

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Re: Company vs. Community
by Bram Dov Abramson 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

dsilver(a)u.washington.edu: > > Not the commercialization of online communities, but the constitution >> of online communities inside commercial space. The Amazon community, >> or eBay community, etc didn't exist prior to Amazon or eBay and then >> become commercialized via Amazon's or eBay's behaviour. Rather, >> Amazon and eBay produced communities as commercial commodities. > >Ok, good point. What's your take then on something like GeoCities or even >Hot Mail? I think I'd like to read someone's PhD thesis on either one. Lots to explore. ;-) A general comment, though, might be that the dot-com business model which underwrote the infusion of capital into both Hotmail and Geocities has its own specificity, and any look at how Hotmail or Geocities were designed to marshall communities would certainly be enriched by looking at them through that specificity. I mean, Hotmail's garment-district-joke business model (so where do we make up the difference? volume!) is certainly a different way of gathering community than, say, Apple's: Guy Kawasaki may have been on the payroll for very specific reasons, but at the end of the day, Apple was looking at its profit and loss column -- not counting eyeballs or trying to convince analysts to valuate companies in new ways. cnelson(a)comm.umass.edu: >I think that personal/communal and commercial relationships do exist in an >agonistic relationship for us *when we are aware that these two are being >mixed*. Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. My point was really that there is no *necessarily* agonistic relationship: any bumping against each other is contingent, which is an important analytic distinction imho. To follow on from the above: I use an Apple laptop, I am really happy about using it, I participate sporadically in communities built around being happy about it, and I'm fully aware that Apple goes out of its way to foster this and that generally there's lots of commercial stuff going on here. It's not a problem for me. On the other hand, I also have close friends who use Hotmail and live in countries whose regulatory environments make it way cheaper for us to communicate persistently by instant messaging than by telephone. Said friends are urging me to use Microsoft instant messaging software, because MS's Passport scheme is tying Hotmail and Instant Messager together in ways that make it easy for them to build chat circles around it. More commercial stuff going on here, but here it is a problem for me because I don't really want to use Hotmail or MS Instant Messager (or whatever it's called) and, even if I did, I resent *having* to use it when an open standard is perfectly doable, in fact can be staved off only with effort. Which is why I really like when Felix says: >Perhaps another way to start a critical analysis of different >community/company relationships is to look at the tension between the >platform (both in its technological and political-economy aspects) and the >community of users that is constituted on/through this platform. One can >see that they are sometimes very closely aligned (e.g. in the case of the >WELL, for which the provision of the platform _is_ the business). Other >times not so close (in case of AOL for which the providing of such >platforms is only one out of many businesses that it engages in and their >value is judged in relation to those others activities) and very poorly in >the case of, say, Ebay for which the providing of a platform is only >justified as long as it helps drive auctions on the site. Image an engaged, >thriving user community on Ebay promoting alternative auction services. To me this sounds like he's trying to break out the community-building component of [insert commercial venture here] as a distinct analytic layer, in much the same sense that legal scholars (Larry Lessig and Kevin Werbach have been big exponents) and, gradually, everyone else are discovering the OSI stack and applying it to policy analysis. That makes sense, because it leads into looking at tying and verticalization. Which, even in 2001, remains at the heart of just about everything written, spoken, or otherwise gestured at by those whose business cards juxtapose "media" or "digital" with "strategy" or "business development". The commerce mongers who started this thread, in other words, and I think MS Passport is a really graphic example of this process in motion. cheers Bram --

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Re:Company vs. community
by Dorine Andrews 19 Dec '01

19 Dec '01

Might want to read something on brand communities (organic non-commercial communities organized out of an interest in a particular product but having no association with the product manufacturer or dealer). It appears that the concept of "mutual benefit" and online extensions of offline social networks apply. Muniz, Jr. Albert & O'Guinn, Thomas. (March, 2001) "Brand Community." Journal of consumer Research Vol.27. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dorine Andrews, DCD Research Professor Communication, Culture & Technology Program Georgetown University www.georgetown.edu/faculty/dca4 email: dca4(a)georgetown.edu or (202) 784-4338 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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company vs community
by Frederick Turner 19 Dec '01

19 Dec '01

Following David's call for new ways to think about the relationship between company and community, I want to recommend Tiziana Terranova's article "Free Labor" (from Social Text and available at: http://www.btinternet.com/~t.terranova/freelab.html) Rather than take "company" and "community" as the autonomous, bounded entities they sometimes claim to be, Terranova treats the two as often already intertwined. She then looks at the distribution of paid and unpaid labor and processes of profiting from same in several online settings. As a result, she's got a nice analytical lens for looking at the mingling of commercial and communal activities in a variety of contexts. Best, Fred Turner Lecturer in Communication Sloan School of Management MIT

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abstraction and community
by Charlie Hendricksen 19 Dec '01

19 Dec '01

Friends, Jonathan Sterne has expressed many of my feelings about the idea of community. When I see attempts to create community on the Internet, I see activism. And with activism comes attempts to involve me in activities that are usually on someone else's agenda. All of us have roles that we play in our families, neighborhoods, professional lives and, yes, even in our own minds. Perhaps it is best for everyone to create their personal network of communities to serve the roles we play, or wish to play. The Internet excels at fostering such communities, and also quickly weeds out those attempts to create communities for which no critical mass exists. -- Charlie Hendricksen veritas(a)u.washington.edu "Information technology structures human relationships." "Models relate concepts."

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Request for Hints
by Paul Wouters 19 Dec '01

19 Dec '01

We are finishing a paper on the use of search engines to collect social science data. If anyone of you have written on this topic, or otherwise know of any publication we should cite, we would be obliged. regards Paul Wouters Networked Research and Digital Information (Nerdi) NIWI-KNAW The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences PO Box 95110 1090 HC Amsterdam The Netherlands T 3120 4628654 F 3120 6658013 www.niwi.knaw.nl/nerdi paul.wouters(a)niwi.knaw.nl

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my take on community
by Barry Wellman 18 Dec '01

18 Dec '01

Folks, I'm pleased that some AOIR-niks have referred to my work on community, For a starter on this, please read the first "Network Community" chapter of Barry Wellman, ed., Networks in the Global Village (Westview Press, 1999). The rest of the book is good too, with Wellman & Gulia, "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Community as Community" being especially appropriate for AOIR-niks. Really soon, I shall mount a report I did for the Law Commission of Canada just now, which synthesizes my work on community AND virtual community. Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________

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Re: [Air-l] Re: Company vs. Community
by John D. Smith 18 Dec '01

18 Dec '01

"Sandeep Krishnamurthy" <sandeep(a)u.washington.edu> shares a question from a classroom: > "What is the difference between a (for-profit) company and a community?" And there have been several interesting replies. But it seems to me most of them assume that it's an answerable question: I think it depends on your position, point of view, and purpose. In short, on your situation. I've observed little communities in red-in-tooth-and-claw FOR-profits where the main purpose of the community was cultivating a little warmth and humanity (and resistance to the dominant culture). That's what I was looking for at the time and it made my life easier (actually led to a career change, where now I focus on communities of practice). The particular community I have in mind may have been invisible from the outside. From the inside it was fairly clear who was a member and who was not. And standing in the community depended on being an employee of the company. Similarly, I think a for-profit company looks different and IS different according to your point of view. Stockholders and executives saw a different company than the members of that community saw. Beyond that, when organizing a community of practice for the purpose of cultivating some competence (e.g., consulting skills or drilling oil wells) one is tempted to see community or its possibility before it's really "there." And that's a very useful mis-perception. Of course as I began to read about communities of practice I began to see them in all the company's nooks and cranies, although I think that for the most part they were ignored as a resource. It's a separate issue how communities manifest over the Internet, but I think the issue of the speaker or observer's situation is much the same. I host an email list that discusses the subject and one of the regularly recurring (and, to me, infuriating) assumptions is that "the email list and the community are one and the same." Even physical communities have complex boundaries that look different from the inside, the outside, at ground level or at 50,000'. John --* --* John D. Smith, 2025 SE Elliott Ave, Portland OR 97214 --* http://home.teleport.com/~smithjd V: 503.963.8229 --* Winter '02 Online CoP Workshop starts Jan 28: www.ewenger.com/edu --* "As iron sharpens iron, so one human sharpens another" -- Hebrew proverb

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