Webkinz Assignment #2: Symbol-Using Animals
This week I’d like you to think about the use of symbols in the Webkinz world.
Everybody Wants to Be Naked and Famous?
In today’s Chronicle e-newsletter, I read “They’re Back, and They’re Bad: Campus Gossip Web Sites”, a piece outlining the new crop of gossip sites cranking up for all your college–and high school–bathroom wall writing pleasure.
Some ramblings on nudity and cyberspace relations below the cut
How Not to Conduct Research on the Web
I’m wondering if The Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed will pick up on this little gem. Two researchers (cognitive neuroscientists) at Boston University thought it would be a good idea to sell a book based on what I can only characterize as a fairly lurid and provacative set of premises about the people who write fan fiction. They proceeded to survey the community they were “studying” without any sensitivity to or sensibility of the ethical obligations they entered into when they undertook human subjects research.
Hijinks, naturally, ensue. There are many folks in fandom who are also academics.
Wearing the Juice: A Case Study in Research Implosion from Roughtheory.org gives a good overview with relevant links.
LiveJournal 101
I could write an entire series of posts explaining how to do all sorts of things in LiveJournal. Thankfully, the community has already done much of the legwork on the basics, so all I need do is point you in the right direction to get some really good help.
The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page will tell you how to do just about everything in LiveJournal. Some particular pages of note:
- How do I downgrade to Basic?: For a free account without the obnoxious advertising.
- How do I customize the look of my journal or community?: For your journal beautification needs.
- What are userpics? How do I upload them?: For the beginning of your search for the perfect electronic representation of self, the icon/avatar/userpic.
- What are Friends? How do I manage my Friends list?: For filling the lonliness of a new journal.
- How do I control who can read my journal entries? How do I view only journal entries with a certain security level? AND
What are custom friends groups? How do I set them up?: For the ultimate in micromanaging your readership. - What is a community?: For ease of finding like-minded folk in the big LiveJournal world.
Need to know how to do something else? Check the FAQ page; if you can’t find it there, leave a comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do!
Protected: Webkinz Assignment #1: Getting To Know Your Environment
Protected: First Post
“Empathy in the Virtual World”, or Why Johnny Can’t Feel What You’re Feeling
In response to G. Anthony Gorry’s “Empathy in the Virtual World”, I wrote the following:
In some respects, I believe our increased use of online communication tools demands that we become not only better writers, but better readers. I skim through hundreds of discussion threads in various contexts weekly, and I’m never a post or two away from the lack of empathy that can make an innocuous original post or comment instantly morph into a virtual and cold mud-slinging competition. I can never imagine things getting so heated in face-to-face or even voice-to-voice discussions because the web has few, if any, cues to indicate tone. We frequently have to read tone into the texts we encounter, an exercise that is itself subjective. Toss in the increasingly global makeup of those joining in the casual conversations (about shared hobbies and interests, about political viewpoints and social/cultural issues), and you have the makings of a mightly large swath of scorched earth if we can’t find a way to understand and empathize with one another.
Looking at it now, it seems more a side note than a response to the essay (and I can’t believe my typos–oy!), but I wanted to at least make note that I said something somewhere about something.
Also, there’s this interest that I have in the whole idea of tone online and how that particular bit of rhetorical earth gets disputed in some quarters–even to the point where to use the word “tone” or imply that someone’s tone is rendering them unapproachable/ineffective is met with derision. I’m speaking, of course, of the discussions surrounding race and related cultural issues in fandom, although I’ve most recently seen a space where some form of the tone argument was emerging in a discussion about vaccines. A friend in another blogging life (because I have others–don’t you?) pointed me to a study in Science that she thought had a relation to the heated discussions about race; you can find a news item here that summarizes the study.
Squaring Off
In the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s blogs this week, two voices sound off on the state of literacy or, as I like to think of it, the “Why Johnny Can’t Read 2.0” debate.
Laurie Fendrich, “Bad Student Writing? Not So Fast!”
vs.
Mark Bauerlein, “Technology and the Seduction of Revolution”
Each references a recent Wired entry by Clive Thompson relating an interview with Andrea Lunsford where she notes:
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
What I particularly like happens in the comments on the Bauerlein piece, where a reader reminds us all that seismic shifts in literacy take a long time to manifest; we need time to sort out what new forms our writing will take in this new medium, a process no doubt complicated by the increasing pace at which the medium itself changes. I sometimes wonder when we’ll hit a stable platform, what the digital correspondent of the bound book will be?
Anita DeRouen 