Todd's Sign Off

Signing Off

So here we are at the end of the semester. Hard to believe that it’s already over, but I’m sure most of you are glad to be wrapping it up. As we all look forward to the holidays and the end of all of our final projects and exams, I just wanted to give you guys a final sum-up and sign off.

It’s interesting to look back and see how far we’ve come this semester. It’s obvious through reading your blogs week to week how much you have improved in your skills as writers, observers, and bloggers. I would argue that anyone of you, given enough hard work, could take your blogs to the next level and make them go-to destinations for people seeking advice about food, fashion, sports, human rights, and many of the other topics that you have focused on throughout this semester.

You all now have the skills we talked about in the beginning of the class in terms of upkeep of blog rolls, use of links and videos, and creative writing styles. Now it is time to build on those skills and develop your skills as promoters of your blogs. You’ve discussed the various ways to make your blogs optimal for searching and linking from other sources. Use your mastery of social media to increase your readership and become the blogging powerhouses that I think anyone of you could be. Some of you are already getting there.

I hope you’ve learned a lot about the process of blogging in this class. I know I definitely have! And I plan on keeping up with each of your blogs to see how they progress and evolve. Good luck with next semester and your job hunts! If you ever have any questions or suggestions about this class, feel free to email me.

Dawes- How Far We’ve Come

Short Post - Twitter in the Mainstream

Twitter hits the mainstream. Despite what, 21 million REAL users, it's definitely memed itself out.

Why do I make this claim?

People are using hashtags as names.

I ran the Philadelphia Marathon this weekend and I saw people put their TWITTER HANDLES on the back of their shirts- - no not their names, but their TWITTER handles.

Along the course, I kept seeing signs that said #winning and #runlikeakenyan (always wonder how Kenyans feel about that)...

I was wondering whether next year I should try a potentially self-serving experiment: Could I get YOU students to organize a social media campaign for ME as I run my next marathon. E.G. could we test out Gladwell's weak ties, and see if you could get college students in another city to show up at EVERY water stop along the way of a marathon.

Some potential problems.

1) completely self-serving exercise of YOUR energy toward organizing

2) the big issue is can you actually MOBILIZE people OFFLINE v. ONLINE

This is the issue we saw with Last Airbenders, right with RaceBending

3) What's in it for you? This would be a huge test of the gift economy.

Thoughts?

What I learned in the UK- Social Media abroad

First, as you know I traveled to the UK to go to this

Embedded in all of this Mozilla Festival were so many of the things that we talk about in class - the head of the Mozilla Foundation talked about turning the world from "Media Consumers to Media Makers" -- we've moved way past production kids, and on to MAKING. Like, it's not just about submitting photos any more, it's about actually doing the mashups. But before it took a lot of effort, and now these hackers want to make it SUPER easy for you to do this.

So I went to the Web Science Festival at the Mozfest, as it was called, and saw all these neat things like Aps that will make it possible for ordinary high school kids do do what basically Imovie does now.

MIT has this thing called AAGO - which is a mobile app for Apple divices where teens and youth citizen journalists can figure out ways to make stories using mobile photos, videos and audio clips that they can arrange on their iphones and then put on the Web.

Pretty neat, right? I also heard more about Ushahidi, which we all know Dr. Livingston is obsessed with (some of the professors here, including Dr. Bailard, and Dr. Hindman) and it's back end for texting from your phone (that's right Sandi -you can text to the interwebs from your phone) -- it's a platform called Frontline SMS.

A little about Ushahidi:

Ushahidi is awesome - it allows people in crisis situations, or people monitoring elections in Kenya to have an impact, and people with #middleclassproblems, like when there are Tube Strikes in London to have that information easily visualized, and brought to the attention of the authorities and of news organizations. My interest is in, of course, how all of this collective intelligence (recognize this term) can be used for news.

So just some thoughts from the real world where things are happening in the world of social media and participation.

One of the reasons we're so interested in these platforms

Chronicles from Todd: Blog-buster Productions

Blog-buster Productions

An interesting sub-category of blogs are the type that follow the production of film and TV projects. It is through these types of blogs that we can see the marriage of older media and new media and how blogs can allow easier access to the process of production and keep fans interest-levels high for the projects being followed. Though these may not be the best written or most eloquent of blog entries, they make especially great use of video and photos. But really, the most impressive parts of these blogs is the access they give to a world that most people will never be able to see first-hand. Here’s a couple you might want to check out:

Sons of Anarchy Production Blog

This production blog follows the cast and crew of what I think is the best show on TV, Sons of Anarchy. This TV show, for those of you who don’t know, follows a California motorcycle club as it struggles to keep hold of the town it has controlled for 30 years as well as its internal struggles to go legitimate. It was created by Kurt Sutter, who used to write for The Wire and who has a pretty interesting blog of his own. One other interesting aspect of the show is that they actually produced an app where they show what they call Webisodes, mini-episodes that bridge the gap in the story between last season and this current season. Once again, it’s an interesting way to merge older style media, social media, and the new phone technology we have all grown to love. If you haven’t watched Sons of Anarchy, definitely check it out, they have the first 2 seasons on Netflix, if you have it.

The Hobbit Production Blog

This production blog follows the production and marketing efforts behind the two new film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings prequel, the Hobbit. Many of the posts are video posts from the film’s director Peter Jackson. They humor and behind-the-scenes look are pretty interesting. Here’s an example:

One issue with this blog is that hasn’t been updated in about a month. That might be due to the fact that the film is actually in production and Peter Jackson and other members of the crew do not have the time or access to update the blog. But, to keep interest high, blogs should be updated as often as possible.

Like I said, blogs are a great way to keep fans interested and a cheap way to promote a film or TV show, while also being a great way to give people an inside look into the process of TV and film production.

Does anyone have other suggestions of production blogs, perhaps not TV or film but music production or book development?

Internet Addiction

So I will admit it. After teaching about internet addiction in a variety of articles and texts, from Sherry Turkle to those New York Times articles about how obsessed we all are with being plugged in, I had to do a little self-evaluation. In fact, this class has made me think about my own problems with the Web.

First things first. I spend too much time on gchat. The days when I go invisible, I get 1000% more done.

Second, Facebook really does make me feel bad about myself. Like, legit. Just like that Slate article, when I go on Facebook I often see the following - and this is age specific, I suppose:

1) Tons and tons of wedding photos (from weddings I couldn't go to, or ones I wasn't invited to...can't tell which is worse)

2) BABIES. SO MANY PEOPLE HAVING BABIES.

3) Professional stuff. People publishing new academic articles, people writing books, people getting broad acclaim for say, being interviewed in the Washington Post.

It's intimidating to know, for instance, that my friend Ari Cohen is now a producer for a show on the Oprah Network. My friends Graham Sack and Adam Perlman are in the final stages of making their way through a super competitive screen-writing competition. To name a few. It's all very very exciting. But scary nonetheless. My college classmate Vin Vacanti's Yipit is going to make a killing now that Groupon's IPO has been show to have so many flaws. (BTW, check it out, it's awesome. My friend Lucien Smith narrowly lost a bid for state treasurer in Mississippi.

I don't talk to Graham or Ari every day, and ran into Vin randomly last year --and have supported Lucien over Facebook- So I guess you could say I see them on Facebook. So I wonder, if I cut Facebook out, would I miss this knowledge? Or would I feel in a bubble, rocking my own accomplishments?

At the end of the day, though, I'm inspired by what my classmates are able to accomplish. It's great. But I should definitely spend less time on Facebook, gchat, and all the rest, and more time focusing on my students and my research.

I think about what I used to procrastinate by doing before we had wireless, and I'm sure it was just stuff like talking on the phone and wandering down the college hallways, or listening to music. So I'm not sure it's all that different now that I'm always wired. But still, I KNOW how much time goes away.

So when we talk about addiction, we're also talking about social connection - but we're also talking about emotions, and procrastination, and a lot of complicated things.

RIP Amy

Postings from Todd: Occupy Wall Street Occupied by Censorship?

An interesting side story has been emerging from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As many of you probably know, the protests have been gaining steam over the last three weeks. Inspired and influenced by the Arab Spring protests in such Middle Eastern countries as Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, the Occupy Wall Street protests have been organized through the internet and especially through social media. Though the conditions in the Middle East might have been more extreme, it is still an interesting point in history to see Americans inspired by the use of technology in an area of the world that is usually stereotyped as behind-the-times and medieval in its customs.

Though the protests have utilized technology and social media to organize a collection of widely varying groups with their own separate agendas, it has become a growing concern among some in the movement that technology might be inhibiting the protestors’ organization abilities. First off, many inside the movement have alleged, and many major news organizations have reported, that Yahoo blocked emails mentioning the protests from being sent. Though Yahoo claims that this was an inadvertent mistake they have since remedied, many bloggers and members of the protest community have claimed foul play. One can’t help but question what Yahoo’s true intentions here were. Remember, Yahoo is a publicly traded stock.

An even more interesting (and perhaps frightening) claim being made by some bloggers is against that revered tool of democracy during the Arab Spring: Twitter. Bloggers have claimed that Twitter has, on two separate occasions, prevented the hash tag #OccupyWallStreet from being a top trending topic on their homepage, even though the tag received more tweets than others that were ranked higher. Many people sight the fact that JP Morgan Chase invested around $400 million into Twitter back in March, as a reason that Twitter is “censoring” Occupy Wall Street’s communications. Whether these allegations are true or not, it’s important to keep in mind that even social media networks have corporate interests of their own. Always keep these in mind when exploring and studying social media and its effects.

Twitter Mania

Over the past few days, there have been SO many articles about Twitter in the mainstream press. It's funny, because it comes on the heels of our in class discussion on "The Tweet Life." This article addresses how the media, and the Washington/NYC corridor may be so much more obsessed with Twitter than other places.

It also makes another valid point: That it's really easy to use social media to explain phenomena that we would have explained some other way (I found my birth mom on Twitter, or Facebook...but people were doing that already).

Elizabeth pointed an article my way (using our #SMPASOCIAL hashtag!) about how Twitter can be used to map emotional moods. This is a study that's been picked up by the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The findings are pretty interesting, but sort of what you would expect: that we get happy when we get off from work; but the underlying thing I find so fascinating is that this is a mapping of 84 different countries using Twitter from 2008-2010.

Another article - perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps on the tails of this study in Science, appeared as the large weekend section in the WSJ.

Things you can learn from Twitter data:

*perhaps mapping stock trends - and even hedge funds are getting into this (WSJ)

*mapping cross-cultural moods

*charting potential flu outbreaks

*tracking political activity and voting behavior

BUT - one must take social science for what it is. In the Science study, as Gawker (yes that's my citation for methodology) look at what the scientists did:

Cornell University sociologists used text software to detect the presence of positive words and icons (ie, “awesome,” “agree,” " :) ") and negative ones (“annoy,” “afraid,” " :( ") in 509 million tweets from 2.4 million users in 84 different countries over a two-year period. Researchers were very psyched to study people's emoticons

A few problems with that, as admitted in the NYT article.

How often do you say "I just woke up with bedhead. Awesome :)" on Twitter.

OR "The economy is doing super today. Great-O"

OR "Unemployment- my bag of tea ":)

These are, basically, variations of tweets I've seen.

So you really need to be careful with machine-coded content analysis, as it doesn't pick up sarcasm. One can guess though, that perhaps enough people aren't sarcastic so as to keep the study valid. But the researchers don't know.

Additionally, are people MORE serious about some things than other things (e.g. being interested in a particular stock vs. being interested an particular politician). Another potential question.

And another reminder: Twitter is really easy to use for scientific data. So instead of asking Verizon, say, for access to SMS (though as Morozov tells us, it's all out there) - it's very simple to get Twitter data through the public API.

So it's easy to monitor, and as we've talked about in the Tweet life article, what's your sample? The most media-addicted people in 84 countries.

I'm not convinced.