Snurb's blog

A little while ago, I posted a request on this blog asking for graphics artists who would be able to convert my rough sketch of a graphic to illustrate the idea of the soft gentle slope of cultural participation into something a little more attractive. I was delighted to have received a very quick response to this request, and I'm very happy to post the updated image here. Update: in light of Jeremy's comment, I've also changed the term from 'soft' to 'gentle slope'. Thanks for that, Jeremy.

It may have taken a little while, but there were some interesting developments around my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production recently. To begin with, readers can now finally browse the book online at Amazon - of course the book itself has been available there for a couple of years already, but it's now been scanned and is available to explore in some more detail. Check it out...

On the other hand, there's also been some news from the real Amazon - a review of the book by Marcelo Träsel was published a little while ago in the Brazilian journal InTexto. Obviously, the review is in Portuguese, so I'm not entirely sure what it says, but the Babelfish translation looks generally positive. Thanks for letting me know, Marcelo!

Regular visitors to this blog may have noticed that for a few weeks now, there no longer is a trackback facility here. I'm a strong believer in trackbacks; they're an important tool for better connecting the distributed conversations which take place across different sites in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, however, trackback as it exists today remains a highly vulnerable technology; because of its extremely lightweight protocol, there's no reliable way to protect against spammers trying to game the Google PageRank of their Websites by posting thousands of trackbacks with links to their sites all over the Web.

Yes, there are trackback spam filters or general pre-publication approval functions which will at least ensure that such spam trackbacks are never visibly posted to my site; all that's left for me to do is to delete the spam from my trackback queue and to publish the small number of legitimate trackbacks buried in all the spam. But as I found out the hard way, by the time the spam has arrived, the damage is already done.

Heh. At least it seems like the Higher Education section of The Australian has managed to quarantine itself from the melt-down that's occurred amongst its political journalists. There's a nice piece there today about our efforts at QUT to develop the C4C framework of collaborative capacities required of graduates in the developing produsage environment - an article which was sparked by our paper at Mobile Media 2007 (and a similar paper I presented at ICE 3 earlier this year). Campus Review also reported on this recently, following a Sydney University press release. Neither note Trendwatching as the originators of the 'Generation C' meme, though, which is unfortunate...

In the meantime, and especially after reading Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture, I'm beginning to think that we may have to expand our C4C of creative, collaborative, critical, and communicative capacities to a C5C, though, which would add a further combinatory capacity. In addition to what we've said in our papers so far, this fifth capacity could be described as follows:

I'm very happy to announce the next issue of M/C Journal:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 9 July 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue three in volume ten of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'complex' - Edited by Jayde Cahir and Sarah James

Sydney's City Rail has recently launched an advertising campaign with the slogan of "untangling our complex rail network". City Rail position Sydney's rail network as a complex system. Describing something as 'complex' can be the answer to many questions. Rather than positioning 'complex' as the end result we would like to explore it as a starting point. What is complex? How is it complex? Why is it complex?

Sydney.
I chaired another session in the morning, and so I couldn't blog it... The first post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with a paper by Marsha Berry, whose interest is in cartographies of mobile mediascapes; mobile places are places in between, threshold places, sites of reception and production which are characterised by the interrelationship between imagination and bodily experiences. In these spaces we find ritual gestures (such as the use of SMS as quasi-postcards) and the performance of the self; they raise perennial questions of embodiment and consciousness of our own experiences. Additionally, we are also surrounded constantly by surveillance in such spaces, as well as enacting a form of sousveillance through our own cameraphones and mediamaking. Telepresence is ubiquitous.

Sydney.
The final day of Mobile Media 2007 has started, and the opening keynote today is by Misa Matsuda (the other scheduled keynote speaker, Shin Dong Kim, unfortunately couldn't make it here). Parent-child relationships are now mediated by mobile technologies, and this provides and insight to the complex relationship between technologies and society overall. Japan is at the forefront of this, as it has the highest up-take of mobile Internet access, which may be seen as foreshadowing the future for mobile technology overall. This began with DoCoMo's introduction of i-mode phones, and is enhanced now also by GPS, data transmission, and music download capabilities, for example. Japanese society's transformation may therefore be indicative of future global changes, too.

Sydney.
The second keynote this evening at Mobile Media 2007 is by Leslie Haddon, who shifts our focus to children's uses of mobile technologies. His research focussed on 11-16-year-olds, and looked at as well as beyond their communicatory practices - including also uses of mobiles as cameras, music players, content transfer devices, games consoles, Internet and television platforms. Some of the teens involved in this study obtained their first mobiles at age 8-10, and many had already owned more than one phone in their lives (often traded down from parents and siblings). Gradually, they had acquired more and more functionality, and they therefore have an understanding of the history of fashionable phone features and uses over the past years; upgrades were motivated in part by fashion, but also by the wearing out of existing phones.

Sydney.
We're now in the final Mobile Media 2007 keynote session for today, which opens with Rich Ling. He begins with some data collected in Norway, which show that in age groups between 9 and 25, there is a tremendous change in the use of SMS, mobile, instant messaging, and email, as opposed to landline telephony. It is also evident that since the late 90s, mobile phone ownership amongst teens and adolescents has grown to close to 100% in Norway, and these groups are also the most prolific senders of text messages. Why this quick and thorough growth in mobile phone ownership especially in the teen age range? Rich suggests that teen emancipation is a key driver here.

Sydney.
I'm afraid I missed out on blogging the last session at Mobile Media 2007 as I was chairing it, so we're on to the post-lunch session already. My paper with Liu Cheng is in this session, and the PDF is available here, Powerpoint here. The first presenter is Jayde Cahir, though - one of the editors of the 'complex' issue of M/C Journal which we've just launched. Jayde begins with a focus on the Cronulla riots on December 2005, during which text messages and emails were instrumental in organising both sides of the riot which took place broadly between Anglo and Lebanese Australians. This led to the introduction of strong new laws criminalising the transmission of messaged inciting hate, and allowing for the confiscation of mobile phones.