Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

You Don't Know Me (dissociative anonymity) You Can't See Me (invisibility) See You Later (asynchronicity) It's All in My Head (solipsistic introjection) It's Just a Game (dissociative imagination) We're Equals (minimizing authority)

An attempt at blocking an HD-DVD key from being published on Digg caused uproar when cease-and-desist letters demanded that the code be removed from several high-profile Web sites. This led to the key's proliferation across other web sites and chat rooms, in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the Internet". Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, and had appeared in a song on YouTube which had been played over 45,000 times.[15][16][17]

After 470 auctions, Resnick found that the Swansons’ main account, with its high customer rating, earned an average of 8.1 percent more per transaction than the fakes. It was the first hard proof that a feedback score — a number generated by a collection of unrelated people — carries quantifiable real-world value. “What we’re seeing here is a new kind of trust,” Resnick says. “It’s a kind of impersonal trust geared to situations with lots of interactions among strangers.”

Mr. Greenwald’s McCain videos, most of which portray the senator as contradicting himself in different settings, have been viewed more than five million times — more than Mr. McCain’s own campaign videos have been downloaded on YouTube.

Mr. Greenwald shows how technology has dispersed the power to shape campaign narratives, potentially upending the way American presidential campaigns are fought.

But in the 2008 race, the first in which campaigns are feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web, the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world. In some cases they are amateurs operating with nothing but passion, a computer and a YouTube account, in other cases sophisticated media types with more elaborate resources but no campaign experience.

Within 24 hours of posting, the Pelosi Rickroll video had been viewed nearly 60,000 times and garnered some 200 comments. Viewers were stunned ("Not gonna lie, that's totally surreal"), impressed ("My faith in House Democrats has just increased tenfold"), not impressed ("It is bad enough that she is in power, and now one of her interns has to Rick Roll me.") and outraged ("CURSE YOU PELOSI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!")

The real contribution of Baker's book, however, is that he sees in Willis's career a host of important issues that drive to the heart of antebellum celebrity culture: the commercialization of intimacy, the marketability of exposure, the public's desire for scandal, gossip, and confession.  Other commentators have described this version of celebrity as a twentieth-century phenomenon.  Baker corrects the record, demonstrating that by 1840, celebrity culture was thriving in the trans-Atlantic world.  -- DHB

"The Glorified Self: The Aggrandizement and the Constriction of Self."

these players developed a "reflected self" based on their perception of how others saw them

"What we tried to be on YouTube was the actual television show," says Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's New Media director.

That would explain why Obama first used his channel to respond to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy and later to break the news that he would forgo public financing for the general election.

McCain had his "Bomb Iran" moment, which folks were reminded of well into the presidential debates. Obama had the Reverend Wright clips, which forced him to address his relationship with the preacher and eventually renounce the man.

"After that, I think the assumption was that this was going to be a gotcha medium," says Steve Grove, YouTube's news and politics editor.

When the election ended, all YouTube videos mentioning Senator Obama had received a total of 1.9 billion views compared with Sen. John McCain's, which got 1.1 billion views.

Obama's YouTube channel alone were watched the equivalent of 14.5 million hours, with McCain's channel racking up about 488,152 hours

In politics today, what Fitzgerald was witnessing was the hunt for the "macaca moment," which got its name after a now infamous off-the-cuff remark made by then U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Virginia, during his 2006 re-election campaign.

So infamous are the gaffes, the GOP incorporated the phrase "macaca moment" into its official candidate manuals starting in 2007.