Center for Network Culture

Public Talk by Professor Ben Light

irsh — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:02:42 +0000

Local Celebrity in the Internet: Making the Market Street Mincer on Facebook.

My talk will consider the potential, and processes of, the Internet-mediated construction and communication of local celebrity. This work, which I have undertaken with my colleague, Helen Keegan, and which is rooted in an analysis of the Facebook fan page associated with a particular local eccentric, suggests that the Internet has the potential to generate notoriety that transcends time and space. However, despite literatures around online fandom (Baym 2002) and micro-celebrity (Senft, 2008) it appears that the relationships between digital media and local celebrities (particularly those that might be seen as eccentric) have received very little academic attention.

Starting from Monaco’s (1978) concept of the Quasar, a category of celebrity, I will undertake a reading of the Market Street Mincer (MSM) someone known for walking around Market Street in Manchester, UK during 2001-2003. Many of the participants have now left the city but he has left an impression. The community was established in May 2007 and is still active.

With respect to the MSM, it appears that his ‘name’ was given on a radio show and there is much discussion about his path of travel. I will argue that such activities fuel the process of data gathering about these individuals allowing people to contribute and experience them further. This ‘data’ takes many forms and covers various topics. Nicknames and memories of Manchester are shared alongside speculations about the motivations and identity of the MSM. A combination of fondness and mockery characterise the dialogue around the MSM. Through this analysis, I will move to consider whether we should nuance the definition of micro-celebrity or introduce some form of category that includes such Internet Mediated local celebrities as the MSM.

Ben Light is an Associate Dean – Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and Professor of Digital Media, in the school of Media, Music and Performance at MediaCity:UK

13 March
13.00 – 14.30
Auditorium 1 @ IT University of Copenhagen

All are welcome to attend the seminar.

Download poster

Public Talk by Dawn Nafus, Intel

lauw — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:38:24 +0000

Visible Upon Use: The Neoliberal Exception in Infrastructure Building on the China-Russia Border

What does it mean for an infrastructure to be public? STS has extensively focused on public deliberation, open consultation processes and grassroots resistance to large infrastructure projects. Yet publicness is not always about democratic deliberation; in fact, we can learn much about what else notions of “the public” do when we examine contexts where democratic processes are neither idealized nor practiced. Using ethnography from the Chinese side of the China-Russia border which examined ways in which technology consumers were being constructed in an ambitious “Digital City” project, I reflect on ways in which publics are assembled and mobilized. I focus on practices of visibilization and consumptive pleasure, where imagined publics were brought into being through physical technology demonstrations of an infrastructure-yet-to-be. These demonstrations in turn selectively managed the more mobile public of Aiwa Ong’s neoliberal exception-that is, elite persons granted exceptional latitude and forms of social inclusion which otherwise run counter to political norms. By framing publics in these ways, the “Digital City” contested its peripheral status as much by making its own inhabitants peripheral as by courting national and foreign partners.

Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist based at the Experience Insights Lab (XIL), Intel Labs (Portland, Oregon), where she conducts research on technology use in order to shape new products and strategies.

22 February
13.00 – 14.30
2A52 @ IT University of Copenhagen

All are welcome to attend the seminar.

Download poster

Public talk by Annette Markham

irsh — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:12:31 +0000

Annette Markham
Department of Communication, University of Arizona

Thursday, 1st of December
10:30 – 12:00

IT University Room 4A22

Network Analysis as Bricoleur’s Tool:
Reconsidering interpretive qualitative methods for social media research.

The art of fieldwork in technologically-saturated contexts is challenging, to say the least, when the objects of analysis are both ephemeral and innumerable. These contexts of flow force ethnographers to consider the way we have historically conceptualized the object and phenomenon and challenge us to focus on methods for making sense of constantly shifting globalized terrains of meaning.

As a tool for identifying elements of a system, network analysis works well. As a method for understanding meaning in context, it remains an inadequate tool. From an interpretive sociology standpoint, network analysis oversimplifies the complexity of social life. However, when divorced from positivist research goals, the visualizations emerging from network analysis techniques prompt a range of sensemaking not available through the analysis of text. When the tools are separated from the disciplinary parameters for which they were developed, they offer a beguiling method of extending certain approaches, such as grounded theory or ethnography, and specifying other approaches, such as actor network theory or practice theory.

This talk is not about network analysis per se, but uses network sensibilities to think about how to broaden our conceptualization about what counts as qualitative method in the study of contemporary, that is, heavily networked, social life. Attention is drawn to selected concepts associated with network analysis approaches to describe a practice of qualitative inquiry that focuses on movement, connection, liminal performance, and reflexivity.

Bio: Annette N. Markham is an independent researcher and visiting scholar at University of Arizona. Her primary research focuses on methodologies for internet-mediated social contexts, ethical practices in qualitative internet research, and sensemaking in technologically-mediated spaces. Her book Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space (1998, Alta Mira) has been regarded as a foundational sociological study of Internet experience. Her most recent book Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method (Sage, 2009, with Nancy Baym) explores qualitative methodologies for internet research. Annette received her Ph. D. from Purdue University.

New member welcome!

tltaylor — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:14:21 +0000

The CNC is happy to welcome our newest member, Christopher Gad, assistant professor in the Technologies in Practice group. Christopher belongs to the ‘empirical philosophy’ branch of Science, Society and Technology Studies. His research interests range from surveillance studies, over studies of bureaucratic work practices to relations between conceptions of technology across culture and technological R&D. He is member of the board of The Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies (DASTS) and is currently involved in the research projects Surveillance in Denmark and Demtech. For more information please visit his website.

Welcome Christopher!

New publications from T.L. Taylor

tltaylor — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:35:59 +0000

Two new publications from T.L.: The first is the chapter “Internet & Games” in Consalvo, Ess, Burnett’s new edited collection, The Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). A portion of her book on EverQuest (Play Between Worlds, MIT Press 2006) was also reprinted in the Giddings and Lister (eds) collection The New Media and Technocultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 2011) under the title “Gaming Lifeworlds: Social Play in Persistent Environments.”

Symposium podcasts available

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:09:44 +0000

Last week of April The Center hosted a kick-starter symposium on Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks. The talks are now available from Vimeo.

Introduction by Adriana de Souza e Silva

Keynote by Mimi Sheller

Locative media, proximity encounters and the social construction of hybrid urban experiences by Christian Licoppe

The place of the social in gaming: A case study of intersections between social, geosocial and mobile media in China by Larissa Hjort

Can we be available 24/7? Considerations about emerging self-protection mechanisms by Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa

Round Table Discussion

Closing Remarks by TL Taylor

Kendall guest lecture, “Sociotextual Identities” – Friday, May 6

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:46:11 +0000

Lori Kendall is visiting to give a lecture on “Sociotextual Identities: Studying Personal Archiving Documents” on Friday, May 6 @ 14:15 in AUD 3. The talk is open for everyone.

Personal archiving is an emerging interdisciplinary subfield focusing on people’s practices in creating, preserving, and distributing various digital and non-digital documentary materials, including things like: family photos and photo albums, genealogical materials, scrapbooks and ephemera, institutional records, and diaries and blogs. This talk presents material from an “ethnography of a text” – a study of a family history document from a personal archiving collection blending digital and non-digital elements. I draw on intersections between archival theory, photography theory, and literary theory and present the concept of “sociotextual identities” as a way to analyze the connections between texts and identities in the study of personal archiving.

Lori Kendall is Associate Professor and 2010-2011 Centennial Scholar in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research includes studies of online community, culture, and identity.

Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks, 29th April

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:00:34 +0000

Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks, 29th April

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:54:57 +0000

Center for Network Culture is hosting a kick-starter research symposium on Mobility and Location in Social Networks. Friday, April 29th 2011 @ 9:00AM

IT University of Copenhage, Auditorium 1
Rued Langgaards Vej 7
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark

The event is free.
Registration required as seating is limited.
RSVP to net-cultures@itu.dk with name and affiliation.

See programme
See more about the event

Keynote: Beyond Networks and Mobilities: Location-aware technologies as interfaces of net locality

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:09:37 +0000

Adriana de Souza e Silvas keynote: Beyond Networks and Mobilities: Location-aware technologies as interfaces of net locality which was held at Mobilities in Motion – New Approaches to Emergent and Future Mobilities is online and can be found at http://bit.ly/fL9ftm (at 6:40:00).