danah boyd is a scholar whose work examines technology, society, and policy. She has produced a lot of great research on the ways in which young people engage in new media. I've recently become aware that she offers a free download of her new book "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens" on her personal website. I encourage all of you to give it a read if you have time.
Crash at academic cloud service Dedoose may wipe out weeks of research
"The Dedoose data fail brings into horrible relief the fragility of cloud-based services and entrusting our data/intellectual labor there," Sarah T. Roberts, a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, said in a tweet
Players tend to reproduce many offline behaviors online, no
matter how fantastic, imaginative, and unearthly the game world
might be. Sometimes the results are pretty bleak. "Instead of an
escape from the drudgeries of the physical world," Yee writes,
"many online gamers describe their gameplay as an unpaid second
job."
Some put in extensive hours at often unrewarding work
("grinding" being the well-suited in-game descriptor of choice),
submitting themselves to "increasing amounts of centralized
command, discipline, and obedience," Yee notes in a chapter with
the sad title of "The Labor of Fun." While individual players may
explore in a leisurely, ludic way, an MMO's complexity, challenges,
and rewards elicit demanding practices from those who would take
the game more seriously.
Racism is another grim import from the real world. Online gaming
has seen the rise of "gold farming," whereby users rapidly play a
game to a successful level in order to sell the results to other
players not willing to invest the time. In short, players outsource
the grinding. A skilled gold farmer can simultaneously take a game
character to a very high level on one computer while churning out
valuable magic items on another.
Proteus Paradox doesn't dwell on the economics of gold
farming, but notes that most gold farmers are Chinese-and also that
other players tend to dislike them. Anti-Chinese racism surfaces in
hostile in-game interactions and in YouTube rants.
And then there are the ever-elusive lady gamers.
Proteus outlines how male players denigrate, harass, and
drive off female players.
But Yee offers two twists to this sadly
familiar story. First, women report wanting to play for many of the
same reasons men do-achievement, social interaction, and
immersion-going against essentialist expectations of gender
behavior difference. And second, MMOs offer a pedagogical benefit
of sorts to male gamers who play under female avatars.
This site can be used to create visual diagrams of networks. I haven't used it myself, but those of you who are interested in any kind of network analysis using digital tools should check it out.
Here is one of the articles I mentioned in class today. It was written by Keith Hampton and Berry Wellman is called "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb.
Berry Wellman has ben doing research on communities, social networks, and the internet for a long time. His work may be of interest to some of you all who are interested in how online resources affect the composition of off-line networks and communities. You can find his CV and a link to his personal website here if you like.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project provides a great deal of nationally representative data on Internet and new media usage in the United States. It may be a valuable site for those seeking survey data to analyze and incorporate into their research