media: January 2006 Archives

These are "broadly" research-oriented blogs in the area of blogs and politics.

i blog speaks in the royal "we" but a very quick glance at the last handful of posts shows they are all from wainer.

Hmmm. wainer is also the poster at reslog. This one is mostly articles, and here's some on the logic of groups that might be timely!

David Brake looks like he's tried to do something similar to what I wish for - a group blog among peers & colleagues in the media department at the London School of Economics. He seems to be the only one posting.... :-/

Aha! A sample of an "upper-level Communication course" integrating student assignments: iGenerations. :-)

And I see a professor, Alex Halavais, taunting his peers and students. That's the style I seem to approach asymptotically. :-/

This wiki of the American Political Science Association was listed in the AoIR wiki. It invites projects, apparently not only by members? The APSA website appears very academic, not activist, oriented.

There's also a wiki for electronic theses and dissertations. Might be a good resource for us grad students, eh?

and here's a wiki research blog.

This fall there will be a conference close by - in Boston: Wikimania 2006. Two other conferences and a count of current wiki researchers is provided here.

Do you think that communication via email and other activities on the Internet are taking away from more direct interpersonal communication?
This new PEW Report on Family, Friends, & Community illustrates the ways Internet usage aids in major life decisions and maintains important relationships.

Some key points:

*email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network.

*internet users are more likely than non-users to have been helped by those in their networks as they faced important events in their life.

* 45% of internet users - about 60 million Americans - say the internet has played an important or crucial role in helping them deal with at least one major life decision in the previous two years. That is a 33% increase from a similar survey in early 2002.

An article about the survey: Web skeptics, take note: The sky hasn't fallen.

Info posted to AoIR listserv by Barry Wellman (one of the PEW Report authors) and Alex Kuskis.

Steven Clift describes some lessons from attempts to generate openly collaborative citizen's media for "agenda-setting online spaces" of democratic action.

*hybrid open source software/websites
*real names for quality control
*limits on quantity per contributor

A peer group for online citizen activists might get going later this year.

is a graduate of UMass' Journalism Department. Her story was noted by the Poynter group's weekly watch on media.

"Our Jill details her personality, commitment, and personal courage. I've been wondering about courage, recently. One definition says to face danger or pain without showing fear, another says to face the same with self-possession.

The Christian Science Monitor is running updates in a blog-type format). Presently, no one knows if she's still alive or not. Is she aware of the infrastructure of support around her? She must be - such things don't materialize from nothing. Coverage has been extensive: Boston, a Marc Cooper blog entry with numerous links, a BBC story about the videotape shown by Al-Jazeera.

Yes, what is posted in a blog tells a lot about who you are and can invite a whole range of trouble. Teens and young adults may be less cognizant of these risks, an assumption that is unquestioned by this WAshington post article, which cites examples without qualifying (either rhetorically or statistically) how representative they are. Are young people as naive to the consequences as we were? When celebrities and folks we know reinvent their lives, why should we assume that the foibles of youth are irreversible?

When and how does one decide a risk is unreasonable? How compartmentalized must we be in order to protect ourselves from the ravages of a system without conscience and individuals lacking remorse? Under what circumstances can we begin to acknowledge the conditions of life/living that force us into deeper zones of protectionism and rarified self-interest and take collective action to try and change the trends?

Holly posted the link in air-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 11 and mentioned comments by Steve Jones

The 7th annual Association of Internet Researchers Conference (AoIR 7.0) will be in Brisbane, Australia, September 27-30, 2006. Hmmmm.....

There are a couple of articles that might be of interest in this online journal, especially if I manage to do more work with organizations and/or institutions.

posted by Suely to air-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 14

My horrorscope from 12 January (brother's birthday!), read during museumfreak's visit seemed to set the tone for this month: see Taurus. (And then this week's tells me to slow down. More waiting?

Mass MOCA is awesome! I'm really glad museumfreak wanted to go, cuz it got me off my duff and actually there. I want to go back when the Amusement Park opens - we got to see the installation in progress. An updated version will be completed in June including visitor's comments. Becoming Animal has some cool elements (some are weird), my favorite single piece was Pseudanuran Gigantica by Brian Conley. The entire QM, I think I call her QM multimedia collection by Ann-Sofi-Sidén requires a second visit.

Ben and I completed the Master's in Social Justice Education together, back in the mid '90s. It's good to see how far he's been able to take his work. :-) I'm wondering if it would be worth bringing his show to the Mass Communication class at UNH?

Haven't blogged about all the movies I've seen lately but it's been a nice run. Following are brief comments and links to reviews of Glory Road, Casanova, The Producers, and Syriana.

that makes Brokeback Mountain effective in depicting so-very-human lives. So three of us concluded last night after a pal saw it and joined me and LB for a debrief. So many things are left unsaid, or are said with such a range of possible meanings, or are hinted at by body language and nonverbals...for awhile we discussed the possibility of actual dishonesty but decided that wasn't really it: the storyline develops out of the tensions of people doing the best they can in circumstances that have no precedent, for which they have no preparation or models, and for which there is not only no support but outright antagonism.

Bumped into a couple of colleagues yesterday and was telling them about the audiobook I just finished, "The Light of Other Days." However it happened, I mentioned the part about the past being immutable and one of them immediately shook her head in disagreement. "Just change the narrative," she said. Of course, I said, leave it to comm majors to disagree! There wasn't time then (we were going separate ways), but I want to pursue this a bit, because I don't think one person changing the narrative changes much of anything ...

NAACP wins on "nigger" in dictionary (email from La Wanza to the social justice listserv)

A Small Victory...A Giant Step (Thanks NAACP)

Kweisi Mfume made the announcement during a speech at Virgina Tech in the spring of 2001 "beginning with the next edition, the word nigger will no longer be synonymous with African-Americans. It shall be duly noted that it's a racial slur and not what African-Americans themselves are. Along with this, all racial and religious slurs will finally be indicated for what they really are - cruel and evil slurs too often used to degrade people."

history and etymology.

Brokeback Mountain lives up to the hype.

I wonder if there'll be any similarites I'll recognize if I attend Arisia with the SF conventions I used to attend as a wee teenager?

Heather Dale sounds good!

It'll cost me $40 even though I'm a student cuz I'm over 25. C'est la vie!

Some of the movies look fun:

It Came From Outer Space in 3D 4 pm Friday or 9:30 pm Saturday
Aelita, Queen of Mars with live piano accompaniment 9 pm Friday

Spectres of The Spectrum 11:30 am Saturday

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 5 pm Saturday (this one's easily rentable, eh?)

Howl's Moving Castle anime 7 pm Saturday. Also rentable?

The Written Word looks intriguing but I'll have to be en route to work while it's being shown. :-( "This is a 1965 UNESCO documentary heralding a bright future for Nigeria led by its library system, a future that never happened. Written by poet and academician Andre Maurois, also author of some SF, this film is sad in that it shows a future that turned to dust only a few years later. In 16mm B&W, 21 min."

There's actually loads of anime.

I made a careless error the other night, a combo of fatigue and trying to hurry. This rushing thing is more and more in my face as an issue. :-/

I've tried to turn OFF the stupid trackback feature a number of times but it doesn't seem to stick, so I'm in a constant deletion battle with them. somehow, I'd flipped to the comment page and didn't realize it until I'd mechanically checked, deleted, and confirmed the delete of 20 comments spanning a three week period (17 December 2005 to 3 January 2006). I only had two backed up per someone's advice to another poor sucker.

Wouldn't you know it! neurophyre started it up last fall. And here I've been casting about, hoping!

I need to get back in touch with Radhika, too, about plans for the spring semester Intro to Mass Media courses we're trying to coordinate via freebie wiki's.

Raz sent the info on the UMass wiki by email to the comm-grad list.