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Query on Research about "Too Much Communication"
by Catherine Middleton 13 Aug '10

13 Aug '10

A colleague and I published a paper a few years ago about the dysfunctional aspects of mobile email. It's focused on corporate users, and doesn't reflect concerns about too much texting etc. (partially because the data was collected some time ago). But it does reflect the 'double-edged' sword nature of always-on devices, as Naomi Baron noted in her post. Middleton, C. A., & Cukier, W. (2006). Is Mobile Email Functional or Dysfunctional? Two Perspectives on Mobile Email Usage. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(3), 252-260. Preprint is here: http://www.broadbandresearch.ca/ourresearch/middleton_cukier_EJIS_2006_prep… Catherine Middleton catherine.middleton(a)ryerson.ca Ryerson University Toronto

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Wikipedia Research Conference: CPOV in Leipzig
by Niesyto, Johanna 13 Aug '10

13 Aug '10

[[Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt]] September 25-26, 2010 University Library Leipzig, Germany On 25th and 26th of September 2010 the German speaking conference [[Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt]] ([[Wikipedia:Critical Point of View]]) will take place at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany. The conference will gather Wikipedia researchers, critics as well as community-members from the German-speaking world for an interdisciplinary debate. In particular the significance of Wikipedia for education, politics, culture and society will be discussed. Wikipedia is one of the largest, if not the largest, self-contained general knowledge reference of our time. It offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, impact, production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution, and relation to power (re-)constitution. New strategic and tactical operations of knowledge and power are clearly at work through Wikipedia. Of specific interest is the concept of 'the open', which is ambiguous within the social formation(s) constituted by Wikipedia, serving as both a rallying concept of digital democracy enthusiasts and as an ideoglical nodal point masking new agonistic encounters. In both material and perceptional ways, every new technology modifies the conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of knowledge, and today both medium and message may reflect the ideas of the (organized) network, multitude, or the Deleuzian machine. It is through a selected mix of technological and normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist – that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or will to know. The main topics of the conference are Wikipedia & The Politics of Open Knowledge, Digital Governance, and Wikipedia & Education. These topics derive from the significance of the online encyclopedia in the reconfiguration of knowledge (re-)production and its consequences for the public, architectures of participation, and political education in a media democracy. Alongside presentations of established scholars like Christian Stegbauer, Peter Haber, Rainer Hammwöhner, Ramón Reichert, and Ulrich Johannes Schneider, the programme of the conference will consist of a panel discussion of Wikipedia community-members and critics, as well as Wikipedia-workshops and a research network meeting. The research network meeting addresses Wikipedia researchers to discuss their current research and draft new research projects. Especially aimed for young academics, the research network meeting is planned as open space, allowing its participants to actively engage in the event as questions and topics are shaped and discussed among the group. To participate, we ask for a registration by email not later than August 31, 2010 to info(a)cpov.de. Please include a description of your research interest or abstract of your research on one page and tell us, if you are interested to make a short presentation. The Leipzig conference continues the series of international conferences of the Wikipedia Research Initiative Critical Point of View from January and March 2010 in Bangalore (India) and Amsterdam (Netherlands). It is hosted by cultiv – Gesellschaft für internationale Kulturprojekte e.V. in cooperation with the Research Initiative Critical Point of View and funded by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. The conference will be open to the public. There will be no participation fee. Conference language is German. For further information please visit the conference website: www.cpov.de Deadline for the Registration for the network meeting: August 31, 2010 Concept and Editorial board: Geert Lovink, Johanna Niesyto and Andreas Möllenkamp Contact cultiv Gesellschaft für internationale Kulturprojekte e.V. Bernhard-Göring-Str. 65 D-04107 Leipzig Tel. +49-341-2228893 Email: info(a)cpov.de www.cpov.de

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Query on Research about "Too Much Communication"
by Naomi Susan Baron 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

In response to Nancy Baym's question regarding research on user complaints about "too much communication": Recently I did a cross-cultural study of attitudes towards mobile phones among university students in Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan, and Korea. One of the themes that surfaced over and again was how much users felt that communication via mobile phones was a double-edged sword: They both liked the fact they could reach others but felt trapped by the fact others could always reach them. Among the words of complaint were "addicted", "stressed", "chained" -- you get the idea. I've just finished a paper called "The Dark Side of Mobile Phones", in which I provide both quantitative and qualitative findings. If anyone is interested in the study, please contact me off-list. Best Naomi Naomi S. Baron Professor of Linguistics American University Washington, DC USA nbaron(a)american.edu

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Academic vacancy in New Zealand
by Erika Pearson 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

Hi all Just fyi, a position for an associate professor (confirmation path) in communication studies has opened up here in NZ. Information is online here: http://www.otago.ac.nz/vacancies/academic/otago010355.html thanks erika ~~ Dr Erika Pearson Dept. of Media, Film and Communication Internet Research Group of Otago University of Otago, NZ

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Extended deadline 31 Aug 2010 for Game Studies Special Issue “Game Reward Systems”
by Olli Sotamaa 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

Due to numerous requests we announce an extension for the call for papers for the Game Studies special issue on Game Rewars Systems. We need all submissions by the end of the month. No further extensions will be possible. New Deadline: 31 August 2010 Original call: CFP: Game Studies Special Issues “Game Reward Systems” Guest editors Mikael Jakobsson (mikael.jakobsson(a)mah.se) and Olli Sotamaa (olli.sotamaa(a)uta.fi) Digital games have a long history of rewarding players for their efforts. It can be in the form of treasures, items, easter eggs, highscores, character outfits, achievements, or badges. The prolific use of rewards indicates that they play an important part in shaping the gaming experience. On one hand, it seems obvious that we enjoy being rewarded, but on the other hand, it is harder to understand the fascination with these seemingly empty gestures, given their virtual nature. This special issue of Game Studies is dedicated to the exploration of all aspects of game rewards and game reward systems. We invite our potential authors to think about the topic in relation to game culture as well as game design, but also hope to attract papers exploring connections to other areas of research such as psychology, sociology, economy, education, and law. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: - Means for approaching and understanding game reward systems - Reward typologies: characteristics and qualities - The role of reward systems in relation to other game mechanics - Player motivations in relation to game achievements - History of reward systems within game culture and beyond - Reward systems in social media applications - Understanding rewards as motivators The call is for full papers in English. All submissions will undergo a double blind peer review process and be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Papers should be submitted to submit(a)gamestudies.com. Please see the Game Studies submission guidelines for further details: http://gamestudies.org/1001/submission_guidelines Timeline Publication: November - December 2010 About Game Studies Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming. Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org. Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon. Please help us spread the call to anyone you think might be interested. It is also available on the web at: http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/cfp_game_reward_systems // Olli Olli Sotamaa // Senior Research Fellow INFIM // University of Tampere olli.sotamaa(a)uta.fi // www.uta.fi/~olli.sotamaa/

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Multiple Childhoods/Multidisciplinary Perspectives: Interrogating Normativity in Childhood Studies
by Patrick Cox 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

Dear Friends and Colleagues-- The Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers-Camden, New Jersey, USA is happy to announce a conferenece on *Multiple Childhoods/Multidisciplinary Perspectives: Interrogating Normativity in Childhood Studies,** May 20-21, 2011* at our campus in Camden. The full Call for Papers is now available at http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/multiple-childhoods. Kindly distribute the information to your networks. Hope to see many of you there. Thanks much. Kind regards, Dan Cook -- Patrick Cox PhD Student 2010-2011 David K. Sengstack Fellow Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies "In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." --Albert Camus "Don't let your studies interfere with your education." --Colonel Henry Rutgers "the jUdges of nOrmalitY are present everywhere." --Foucault, of course

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Re: [Air-L] Blogs for social science research: Dilemmas
by Carmel L. Vaisman 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

Hi Juan. I dealt with some similar questions in my doctoral dissertation (ethnography within the Israeli blogosphere). When the same author had more than one blog or engaged in a playful interaction on another blog, connected on ICQ or met in bloggers meetings in real life, I often had to "travel" with that to make meaning of blogging practices. My core methodology was connective ethnography so I could basically do that, but you seem to require a clearer boundary to begin with. You should be fine with the methods you chose if your blogs engage mainly in written discourse. but you might need to check if there's a back channel, if these bloggers know each other or get to know each other/form a community that crosses to real life (especially when they arrive in Montreal) or other online platforms. in that case it will be hard to analyze the blogs as standalone and you might find yourself in a connective ethnography too. it depends how deep down the rabbit hole of your topic are you willing to follow your bloggers?.... Carmel Vaisman http://www.absolutecarmel.com Twitter @carmelva

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too much communication!
by Nancy Baym 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Hi all -- At times I've seen people on this list mention the sense many people seem to have that they are bombarded by too many messages throughout the day, specifically in the form of friends continuously sending them text messages and using social media to reach them (and presumably expecting prompt responses). Can anyone point me to research papers that addresses this phenomenon of feeling anxious or stressed about how much friends communicate with them through technologies? Thanks, Nancy -- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Associate Professor, Communication Studies, University of Kansas New book! Personal Connections in the Digital Age http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745643311

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Re: [Air-L] Missing Data in Qualitative and Online Research
by Julian Hopkins 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

I'd like to echo some of the comments made already. In my research on personal blogging, I found that the interviewees often mentioned 'backchannel' contact: via MSN in particular, but also emails and SMS. More recently Twitter has increased in significance, and DMs are the obvious backchannel there. Sometimes, edited MSN conversations are reproduced on a blog, using screenshots, and thus some missing data is ostensibly provided, but of course it's only what the blogger wants to blog about. Meeting bloggers offline in blogmeets was an important way of filling out some missing information: the hierarchies and clustering of bloggers were more evident; and seeing how those offline meets were re-presented online was an interesting window into the mediation of those encounters. Overall, as others have pointed out, the assumption that all online activity is public and available is a fallacy that should be addressed further. Cheers, Julian ++++++++++ Blog: www.julianhopkins.net Twitter: @julianhopkins Skype: julhop -----Original Message----- From: William Dutton <william.dutton(a)oii.ox.ac.uk> Subject: [Air-L] Missing Data in Qualitative and Online Research To: "air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org" <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 8:17 AM Dear List Members, My colleagues and I would greatly appreciate your input to an exploratory project on missing data in qualitative and online research.* We would appreciate anything from your immediate reactions while reading this e-mail to detailed references to literature that has addressed our questions. There are two very general but heuristically useful questions. Your views on either would be welcomed. Feel free to reply privately or to the list, as you wish. 1. What is ?missing data? in the context of qualitative research and how is it dealt with? 2. Likewise, in computer-mediated research, are researchers missing particular kinds of data, or believe that they are missing particular kinds of observations, and how are they compensating or otherwise addressing this gap? Thoughts? Thank you, Bill *This is a collaborative project between the ESRC?s National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) ?hub? (Graham Crow, Rose Wiles), WISERD (Amanda Coffey), Oxford eSocial Science ?node? of NCeSS (Bill Dutton, Alison Powell), and Qualidata/Timescapes (Libby Bishop), based on our recognition of a shared but not well developed problem. William Dutton, Director Professor of Internet Studies Oxford Internet Institute 1 St Giles', Oxford OX1 3JS? UK e-mail: william.dutton at oii.ox.ac.uk Web: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=1 Phone: +44 (0)1865 287 212 Cell: +44 (0)7768 823906 _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

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Blogs for social science research: Dilemmas
by Abrile Juan 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Hola, I'm Juan Abrile, a new arrival in the the AIR-list serv. I'm a doctoral candidate in an interdisciplinary program at Université de Montréal. My dissertations will be about the representations of language, immigration and integration on the blogs of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans as they prepare for immigrating to Quebec and experience the early settlement in Montreal. Currently, I'm in the process of revising my thesis proposal...and it is in the midst of this thinking process that I'm confronted with certain issues which I am not sure how to deal with. That's why I'd really welcome your thoughts, comments, suggestions etc. This is, in a nutshell, where my thinking is at in terms of methodology I have formed a corpus of 14 blogs, each of which I will consider as a case. Within each blog, I will focus on the blog posts whose content (e.g., oral and written texts, visuals and hyperlinks) has been created by the author of the blog and explicitly refers to language, immigration and integration issues. I will not look at the comments of other blog readers and neither will I look at the content displayed elsewhere on the web pages (e.g., links to Facebook, clickable ads, etc. which are part of the general configuration of the blog). I am, however, interested in looking at the websites / web pages which are "external" to the blog under analysis and which can be accesed by means of the hyperlinks included in a post. For analyzing written and oral texts, I'm drawing on Faiclough's CDA (1992, 1995, 2003) approach, chiefly his way of analyzing discourse representation and assumptions. For exmining visuals, I'll be using Kress and van Leeuven's (2006) stance on visuals as ideological statements advancing a particular representation of the social world, social actors and social processes. Finally, for coping with hyperlinks, I'm considering Burbules' (1997) view of links as rhetorical artefacts, which may tie in well with Myers' (2010) taxonomy of links (I'm also aware of Lemke's) Now my questions: 1) Can one treat a blog as a case, chiefly considering the difficulty of delineating the boundaries of the blog? 2) Is it feasible to look at 14 blogs, even though I won't be examining every little component? How many would be "enough" for a dissertation? 3) Isn't it rather ambitious of my part to analyze texts, visuals and the content of the webpages which are connected to a given blog post by means of the hyperlinks embedded in that post? 4) If I just looked at one mode of semiosis (e.g., written texts), what would then be the point of looking at these texts online if one does not attend to the words or stretches of text which fulfill the double function of being part of the text and nodal points? Thank you so much for taking the time to read such a long e-mail. Looking forward to your comments, Juan Juan Abrile Doctorant en Sciences humaines appliquées Université de Montréal

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