Dear AoIRFolk: Greetings from the glamorous Renaissance Hotel, where we are gearing up to run the Internet Kissing Booth installation today and tomorrow! Here are some things worth knowing: You can watch footage on camera here: www.stickam.com/kissingbooth You can “blow a kiss” (AKA comment) using Twitter hash tag: #ir12kiss Our hours of operation will be: Tues: 3:30pm -5:30pm; 6:00pm-8:00pm PST Wed: 10:00pm-2:30pm; 4:30pm-6:00pm PST (note: all times are three hours later for those on the U.S. east coast) So, what is an Internet Kissing Booth? Lots of you have asked what on earth this is all about, and it’s a fair enough question. The idea for an Internet Kissing Booth originated over a year ago while watching a colleague who had the misfortune of being upstaged by a Twitter stream broadcast running behind her while she spoke. That episode got us thinking about similar episodes in our own lives: --times we realized students were talking online backchannel during our lectures; --times we ourselves were Tweeting at a conference to get new followers rather than looking at a live conference presenter; --concerns many of us have about having our free-form in-class exchanges recorded for podcasts; --the general anxiety nearly everyone experiences when asked to sit in front of a camera for more than one minute, wondering what the rest of the world is thinking about our image… Since the conference theme this year is “performance,” we thought it would be a good time to think through some of these issues, starting with our own bodies. We set up the booth with a sign that says the following: GET KISSED! Here’s How: 1. Enter the booth. 2. Face the camera. 3. Set the egg timer for three minutes. 4. Watch the Twitter feed on screen, and read the world’s comments about your image. Your sound will be muted and you won’t be able to type responses. 5. Think about what it means to be watched (we’re usually the watchers!) 6. Try to stay the entire three minutes. 7. Leave the booth. 8. Have a lollipop (on us.) 9. Have a drink (you pay for that.) 10. If you can, come talk with us at roundtable: “Performance & Presence, Absence & Silence" (begins at 3:15 pm on Thursday) What Can I Do From Afar? To make this fun and interesting, we need everyone’s help. Even (especially) if you aren’t at the conference, we are hoping you will be able to watch and comment via Twitter (hashtag: #ir12kiss) when you have the time. We’ve asked people to “blow a kiss” intentionally. We’re not interested in rudeness, but in general comments and observations of what you seen on your screen. Certainly, this isn't meant to be some Skinnerian experiment in trolling, and if it even seems to be getting weird or ugly, we’ll stop the project and talk about that. Mostly, we are interested in gauging peoples’ experiences as they watched themselves being watched. And speaking of watching: I’ll run the conversation at the roundtable on Stickam for you to see remotely, if people are interested in that. Okay, that is more than enough from me. Feel free to shoot any questions to my gmail address: tsenft@gmail.com And see you on the Twitter stream! #irkiss Terri (the one with the good hair on camera) -- Dr. Theresa M. Senft Global Liberal Studies Program School of Arts & Sciences New York University 715 Broadway NY NY 10003 www.terrisenft.net www.livejournal.com/users/tsenft