October 2004 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

"Cyber-bullies" article in New York Times
by Willard Uncapher 23 Nov '04

23 Nov '04

The following item was published in the New York Times today and may be of interest to the list. Against the backdrop of idealized, more communitarian notions of evolving community on-line, notions that may expand off-line, here we have disruptive conflicts off-line entering the digitally mediated environments. I was also interested in how the messages sent were linked to the woman's cell phone. Perhaps we see the need to re-visit some notions of how to instill ethics as well. The bullying theme of the article drifts on to other times such as young folk only gradually coming to understand the power and implications of Internet communication. Willard ### http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/education/26bully.html Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar By AMY HARMON / Published: August 26, 2004 / New York Times The fight started at school, when some eighth-grade girls stole a pencil case filled with makeup that belonged to a new classmate, Amanda Marcuson, and she reported them. But it did not end there. As soon as Amanda got home, the instant messages started popping up on her computer screen. She was a tattletale and a liar, they said. Shaken, she typed back, "You stole my stuff!" She was a "stuck-up bitch," came the instant response in the box on the screen, followed by a series of increasingly ugly epithets. That evening, Amanda's mother tore her away from the computer to go to a basketball game with her family. But the barrage of electronic insults did not stop. Like a lot of other teenagers, Amanda has her Internet messages automatically forwarded to her cellphone, and by the end of the game she had received 50 - the limit of its capacity. "It seems like people can say a lot worse things to someone online than when they're actually talking to them," said Amanda, 14, of Birmingham, Mich., who transferred to the school last year. The girls never said another word to her in person, she said. The episode reflects one of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, "cyberbullies" are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks. The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented - and often unintentional - degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills. "We're always talking about protecting kids on the Internet from adults and bad people," said Parry Aftab, executive director of http://WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit group that has been fielding a growing number of calls from parents and school administrators worried about bullying. "We forget that we sometimes need to protect kids from kids." For many teenagers, online harassment has become a part of everyday life. But schools, which tend to focus on problems that arise on their property, and parents, who tend to assume that their children know better than they do when it comes to computers, have long overlooked it. Only recently has it become pervasive enough that even the adults have started paying attention. Like many other guidance counselors, Susan Yuratovac, a school psychologist at Hilltop Elementary School in Beachwood, Ohio, has for years worked with a wide spectrum of teenage aggression, including physical bullying and sexual harassment. This summer, Ms. Yuratovac said, she is devising a new curriculum to address the shift to electronic taunting. "I have kids coming into school upset daily because of what happened on the Internet the night before," Ms. Yuratovac said. " 'We were online last night and somebody said I was fat,' or 'They asked me why I wear the same pair of jeans every day,' or 'They say I have Wal-Mart clothes.' " Recently, Ms. Yuratovac intervened when a 12-year-old girl showed her an instant message exchange in which a boy in her class wrote, "My brother says you have really good boobs." Boys make many more explicit sexual comments online than off, counselors say. "I don't think the girl is fearful the boy is going to accost her, but I do think she is embarrassed," Ms. Yuratovac said. "They know it's mean, it's risky, it's nasty. I worry what it does to them inside. It's the kind of thing you carry with you for a lot of years." The new weapons in the teenage arsenal of social cruelty include stealing each others' screen names and sending inflammatory messages to friends or crush-objects, forwarding private material to people for whom it was never intended and anonymously posting derogatory comments about fellow students on Web journals called blogs. "Everyone hates you," read an anonymous comment directed toward a girl who had signed her name to a post about exams on a blog run by middle-school students at the Maret School in Washington, D.C., last term. "They would talk about one girl in particular who had an acne problem, calling her pimpleface and things like that which was really mean," one Maret student said. "That stuck with me because I've had acne, too." One of the girls who started the blog said she and her friends had deleted all the posts because so many people - including some parents - began to complain. "I didn't see why they cared so much," said the girl, who preferred not to be identified. "It's obviously not as serious as it seems if no one's coming up to you and saying it." Rosalind Wiseman, whose book "Queen Bees and Wannabes," was the basis for the recent movie "Mean Girls," said that online bullying had a particular appeal for girls, who specialize in emotional rather than physical harassment and strive to avoid direct confrontation. But boys do their fair share as well, often using modern methods to betray the trust of adolescent girls. For instance, last spring, when an eighth-grade girl at Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, sent a digital video of herself masturbating to a male classmate on whom she had a crush, it quickly appeared on a file-sharing network that teenagers use to trade music. Hundreds of New York private school students saw the video, in which the girl's face was clearly visible, and it was available to a worldwide audience of millions. Students would go online at school while the girl was there and watch it, said one student from another school, who declined to be named. Horace Mann officials did not reply to requests for comment this week, but the student newspaper reported at the time that the school had set up out-of-school counseling for the students directly involved and held assemblies to discuss issues of sexuality and communication. The incident is not an isolated one. In June, a video showing two Scarsdale High School freshman girls in a sexual encounter, apparently taking direction from boys in the background, prompted an investigation by the Westchester County district attorney's office when a parent reported that students were sending it to each other by e-mail. A nude picture of a 15-year-old in Wycoff, N.J., taken with a camera phone, is still circulating after she sent it by e-mail it to her boyfriend and he forwarded it to his friends, other students said. Online lists rating a school's girls as "hottest" "ugliest" or "most boring" are common. One that surfaced at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y., a few years ago, listed names, phone numbers and what were said to be the sexual exploits of dozens of girls. But girls are not the only victims of Internet-fueled gossip. A seventh grader at Nightingale-Bamford School in Manhattan said she had recently seen an online video a boy had made of himself singing a song to a girl he liked, who promptly posted it all over the Internet. "I feel really bad for the guy," she said. To a large degree, psychologists say, teenagers are being tripped up by the same property of the Internet that has compelled many adults to fire off an e-mail message they later regret: the ability to press "send" and watch it disappear makes it seem less real. "It isn't quite the same as taking a dirty picture of your girlfriend and showing it to everyone in the school when you're standing there holding the picture," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "Life on the Screen." "There's something about the medium that has a coarsening effect." But a growing number of teenagers are learning the hard way that words sent into cyberspace can have more severe consequences than a telephone conversation or a whispered confidence. As ephemeral as they seem, instant messages (better known as I.M.'s) form a written record often wielded as a potent weapon for adolescent betrayal and torment. A sophomore girl at Fieldston High School in the Bronx, for instance, agreed not to return this fall after a racist comment she wrote in an instant message to a friend about a boy who had spurned her ignited controversy last spring. The friend forwarded the message to the boy, and copies were distributed around the school the next day, people familiar with the situation said. Fieldston High officials declined to comment, as did the girl and her parents, who requested that her name be withheld to protect her at her new school. But several parents criticized the school administration for pressuring the girl to leave rather than using the incident as a means to teach a lesson about racist speech - and the pitfalls of instant messaging. "When you say things over the Internet, it feels like you are spewing into your diary," said Sandra Pirie Carson, the parent of a Fieldston graduate and a lawyer who offered to mediate between the school and the girl's family. "If she had said those offensive things to her friend on the phone, I have a feeling the friend wouldn't have called him and repeated what she said, and even if she had, I doubt it would have had the same effect." Many schools, ill-equipped to handle these new situations, are holding assemblies to talk about them and experts in traditional bullying are scrambling to develop strategies to prevent them. "It's so nebulous; it's not happening in the lunchroom, it's not happening on the school bus, yet it can spread so quickly," said Mary Worthington, the elementary education coordinator for Network of Victim Assistance, a counseling organization in Bucks County, Pa. "Over the last year when I've been out in schools to do our regular bullying program the counselors will say, 'Can you talk about e-mails or I.M.'s?' " For parents of several students at the Gillispie School in San Diego, such strategies were to be developed on the fly when online threats between their children and those at another school turned into a more classic form of bullying. About 30 students from Muirlands School showed up at Gillispie one afternoon last spring, carrying skateboards over their heads and calling out the screen name of one of the boys with whom they had been chatting online. Kim Penney, the mother of one of the Gillispie boys, said she had since removed the Internet cable from the computer in her son's room and insisted that he hold online conversations only where she could see them. "It was frightening to see the physical manifestation of this back and forth on I.M.," Ms. Penney said. "I just never thought of it as such a big deal." ###

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Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)
by Michele White 01 Nov '04

01 Nov '04

Dear Colleagues, Thanks for the interesting posts on space. One of my concerns is the ways that the concept of Internet space often leads to the idea that there are people on the screen or inside the interface. While there are certainly people engaging through varied technologies and they are very invested in their connections, the mediated aspects of engagement and the deeply constructed interfaces and identity representations are sometimes not addressed. This mediation significantly shapes what we see and experience. With increasing computer processing speed and connectivity, ubiquitous computing, and more detailed simulations it becomes easier and we are often encouraged to forget the technologies and representations. My hope is that we can address both user interests and the ways that traditional ideas of age, class, gender, race, and sexuality (which are conveyed through visual and textual representations) are reinscribed through technologies, practices, and depictions. I know that Ulla has asked me about alternative terminology and I often try to model this in my writing. I employ such terms as "setting" instead of space. Admittedly, sometimes thinking through our ways of speaking the Internet removes further words from my vocabulary and leads to a spluttering or form of unspeaking. As I researcher, I believe that one of my responsibilities is to consider the ways that individuals view and speak about Internet settings, contemporary technologies, and other social experiences and to suggest the problems, promises, and (as Ulla prompts) the other ways that individuals and societies can represent and produce these technologies and cultural practices. I sometimes rework a vocabulary from the humanitiesparticularly film and media studies, photography theory, literary studies, and art history to write about such depictions as the rectangular or body-shaped images of synchronous graphical settings or the photo-like images of webcams. We might also look to writings about past technologies to understand our representations of the Internet. Television and other media have been understood as live, alive, and a space. Thomas Hutchinson indicated, that with television "the outside world can be brought into the home" (ix) and Charles Siepmann argued that television was a way of "'going places' without even the expenditure of movement" (340). More recently, Rhona J. Berenstein has noted that television also had the reputation of "being a medium of immediacy: an apparatus that, more than film, offers its viewers live access to the world around them and hence it was assumed, to reality " and that television resonates "in spatial terms, suggesting a physical proximity between the viewer and the performance rendered" (26). In any case, it seems to me that each vocabulary and way of understanding the Internet produces a set of cultural perceptions that shape our understanding of these technologies and social practices, what they are, and what they can be. All my best, Michele Rhona J. Berenstein, "Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and Immediacy," Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Thomas H Hutchinson, Here Is Television, Your Window on the World. New York: Hastings House, 1948. Charles Siepmann, Radio, Television, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950.

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new reviews in cyberculture studies (november 2004)
by david silver 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

New reviews (found at http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/) include: B.H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2004). Reviewed by Ali Unlu Pablo Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT Press, 2004). Reviewed by Anne Beaulieu Enjoy. david silver www.thedaybefore.org

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Two open positions at MSU Dept. of Telecommunications, Info. Studies, & Media
by Nicole Ellison 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

Hello colleagues, My department at Michigan State University is conducting a search for two open rank positions. Please see below for details and feel free to forward to other interested parties. Thank you, Nicole ------------------------------------------------- Position Announcements The Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media is pleased to announce two open rank positions in the tenure system at Michigan State University. Candidates are sought at the assistant, associate or full professor level, with the ability to contribute to a department that provides teaching, outreach, research, and creative/design activities in a broad range of media and information technology areas. Such areas include economics, policy, management and strategy, international/comparative telecommunications, social and business aspects of new media, and traditional and new media design and production. Within these areas, the contexts for study and design among department faculty include entertainment, social interaction, group collaboration, e-business, healthcare, human computer interaction, online behavior, presence in virtual environments, game design, 3D graphics, animation, and interactivity. Candidates whose interests cross two or more of these and related areas are especially encouraged to apply. Candidates are expected to develop a substantial program of research and/or design work, emphasizing contribution to peer-reviewed outlets. Teaching opportunities will be in both undergraduate and graduate courses, with the typical teaching load set at two courses per semester. Summer teaching appointments are often available. An interest in obtaining external funding for research and creative/design work is expected. Released time is available based on grant productivity. Requirements: A relevant terminal degree is required. Those completing their degree also will be considered. Evidence of scholarship (including portfolio for creative/design applicants) and teaching ability is required. The Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University is a thriving place of scholarship, teaching, and public service. Its faculty has a national and international reputation and is actively involved in research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other major organizations. Founded in 1855, Michigan State University is situated in East Lansing, a pleasant university town just on the border of Lansing, the capital of Michigan. Our vast campus is known as one of the most beautiful in the nation and is home to over 40,000 students from 85 nations and about 4000 faculty and staff. MSU is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution. Female and minority applicants are especially encouraged to apply. Handicappers have the right to request and receive reasonable accommodation. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, names and addresses of three references, and a cover letter describing research and/or design interests and relevant experiences. Applications will be reviewed as they are received. Search closes when suitable candidates are hired. Positions are to begin in August 2005. Please mail the application to the search committee chair, Dr. Charles Steinfield, 409 CCAS, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. 48824-1212. On the web: http://www.msu.edu, http://tc.msu.edu, http://quello.msu.edu, http://mind.msu.edu, http://commtechlab.msu.edu, http://dmat.msu.edu, http://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nicole Ellison, PhD Dept. of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media Michigan State University 517.432.1667 nellison(a)msu.edu

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students, activism, the day before the US election, and a web cam
by david silver 31 Oct '04

31 Oct '04

hello! here in seattle, we've organized a pretty interesting series of events that will take place across the university of washington campus on the day before the election (http://www.thedaybefore.org) what is interesting, to me at least, is the diversity of supporters and the number of supporters (80 and growing!). the idea is simple: there are 55,000 students, staff, and faculty at UW and we think they should all vote. we expect some public spectacles, so be sure to tune in on our web cam: http://www.washington.edu/cambots david silver

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Judith Amsel/SES/SCT is out of the office.
by Judith Amsel 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

I will be out of the office starting 10/28/2004 and will not return until 11/01/2004. I am away from the office on vacation, but I will respond to your message when I return. If you need help with a Luminis CMS-related issue, please contact Amy Eagleston (aeaglest(a)sungardsct.com) You may also wish to contact Kathy Pecor at 801-257-4139.

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Fwd: [cultstud-l] cfp: The Internet and Alternative Political Practices
by jeremy hunsinger 28 Oct '04

28 Oct '04

Begin forwarded message: > From: gary hall <gary.hall(a)connectfree.co.uk> > Date: October 28, 2004 12:02:10 PM EDT > To: Cultural Studies <cultstud-l(a)mailman.acomp.usf.edu> > Subject: [cultstud-l] cfp: The Internet and Alternative Political > Practices > Reply-To: gary.hall(a)connectfree.co.uk, Cultural Studies > <cultstud-l(a)mailman.acomp.usf.edu> > > Call for Papers > > Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC) > > Issue 2 (Spring-Summer 2005): The Internet and Alternative Political > Practices > > Aiming to open up a critical dialogue on the Internet and alternative > political > practices, the second issue of WPCC is welcoming both theoretical and > applied > contributions. Stimulating this dialogue is the potential of the > Internet to > transform our notions of citizenship, democracy and political > practice. The > Internet can also be used as a tool by current social movements and > alternative > political activists, changing the way people organize and protest > around their > ideas. It may also foster alternative media practices that redefine > our notions > of the public sphere, alter social and political identities, and > facilitate > processes of development and empowerment, particularly for the > politically > disenfranchised. > > Therefore, the coming issue of WPCC will be an attempt to address > these topics > by drawing on research that focuses on the following interrelated > questions: > > Ø How is the Internet transforming our notions of democracy, > citizenship and > the public sphere? > > Ø Has the Internet changed political campaigning, both for electoral > and > alternative politics? > > Ø Has it influenced political activism, organizing and participation? > > Ø Is it transforming our perceptions of the political? > > Ø How is it used by current social movements, both local and global? > > Ø Does it foster alternative political and media practices? > > Ø Does it affect the development and negotiation of social and > political > identities? > > Ø Does it empower the grassroots and the local? > > > Applicants may submit abstracts of no more than to 350 words to > Anastasia > Kavada - anakavada(a)hotmail.com or Pantelis Vatikiotis – > p_vatikiotis(a)hotmail.com. The deadline for the submission of abstracts > is > Monday 22 November. > > Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC) is a > peer-reviewed > journal, published twice a year in hard copy and PDF format. WPCC > recognises > the interdisciplinary nature of the field of Media and Cultural > Studies, and > therefore deliberately encourages diverse methods, contexts and themes. > Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to > Popular > Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Promotional Culture, New > Media, > Political Communication, Migration and Diasporic Studies. > > A major goal of the WPCC is to help develop a de-westernised and > transcultural > sphere that engages both young and established scholars from different > parts of > the world in a critical debate about the relationship between > communication, > culture and society in the 21st Century. > > WPCC invites contributions from all scholars; particularly those at the > beginning of their careers. > > > > -- > Dr Gary Hall > Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University > Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net > My website http://www.garyhall.info > > > > > _______________________________________________ > cultstud-l mailing list: cultstud-l(a)mailman.acomp.usf.edu > http://mailman.acomp.usf.edu/mailman/listinfo/cultstud-l > > Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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Re: [Air-l] Tutorial: How to unsubscribe from air-l
by Eszter Hargittai 26 Oct '04

26 Oct '04

> one key point of communicating with the list is that you have to > send > from an email that is subscribed to the list, it has to be a > perfect > match, or the list software will discard it. > Of course, unfortunately, this setting makes it impossible to use aliases for this list, unless you're okay with not ever posting anything. Eszter

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screening out spam
by Gary Thompson 26 Oct '04

26 Oct '04

The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this: --if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc. I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations). Gary Thompson

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sunbelt social network conference -- call for abstracts
by Barry Wellman 26 Oct '04

26 Oct '04

Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at 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 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________ Many AoIR folks study social networks, whether they know it or not. Here is my favorite conference. Smart people, serious fun; warm beach in February. Call for Abstracts International Sunbelt Social Network Conference XXV February 16 - 20, 2005 Crowne Plaza Hotel, Redondo Beach Los Angeles, California http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ssnconf/ The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). Located in scenic Redondo Beach, CA, Sunbelt XXV will provide an interdisciplinary venue for social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, ethnologists, and others to present current work in the area of social networks. Workshops and conference sessions will allow individuals interested in theory, methods, or applications of social network analysis to share ideas and explore common interests. Conference Deadlines: Abstract Submission December 1, 2004 Hotel Reservation December 15, 2004 (for the conference rate) Conference Registration January 1, 2005 (for the early registration rate) Highlights: Workshops, Wednesday, February 16 Keynote Address, Thursday, February 17 Ronald Breiger Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona Social Networks and the Spinozan Problem of Order^Ô Welcome Banquet, Thursday, February 17 Freeman Award Presentation, Friday, February 18 James Moody Associate Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University (Title to be announced) Additional Events: Rationality and Society Miniconference Wednesday, February 16 More Details: To find out more about the conference visit: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ssnconf/ To submit an abstract: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ssnconf/ To make hotel reservations: Conference Rate: $159/night Student Rate: $129/night Make reservations by December 15, 2004 to receive the conference rates. Call: 800-368-9760 or 1-310-318-8888 Be sure to specify the Social Network Conference when making your reservation so it counts toward the conference Or via the web at: http://www.crowneplaza.com/redondobeach (enter group booking code A2S) To register for the conference: Visit the INSNA website, www.insna.net Potential session topics include (but are not limited to): * Dynamic Networks * Diffusion & Social Influence * Health * Inter-organizational Relations * Sampling * Network Data Collection * Network Methods and Models * Collective Action and Social Movements * Personal Networks * Social Support * Small Worlds * Statistical Models * Visualization Social Activities * Phil Bonacich will lead a leisurely bike ride along the miles of bike paths on the beach to Marina del Rey for lunch and back on Saturday morning (10am-1pm). Bikes are available for rental across the street from conference hotel. * Whale watching will be available after the conference on Sunday for all those interested in seeing the majestic California gray whales' migration to Mexico. Cost: $15/person. * No-host happy hours in the lobby of the conference hotel every evening, 5:30 - 7:30 pm * Hospitality suite open every evening, 9:30-11pm About the Crowne Plaza Hotel: This five-story hotel is across the street from the Pacific Ocean and King Harbor Marina: 2 blocks from Redondo Beach shops and restaurants, and 7 miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. Spacious guestrooms feature private balconies. Nearly every guestroom offers full or partial views of the ocean or marina. An enormous rooftop deck with a pool and a tennis court looks out to the ocean and marina. A full-service European spa and salon offers everything from hair conditioning to seaweed mud wraps. Sunbelt 2005 Organizing Committee: Local Arrangements: Tom Valente (tvalente(a)usc.edu) Rebecca Davis (rldavis(a)ucla.edu) Program: Katherine Faust (kfaust(a)uci.edu),Carter Butts (buttsc(a)uci.edu)

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