canarytrap.net » weekly round-up

research link dump: (mobile) branding, (geo)tagging, and (virtual) graffiti

Xiaochang Li — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:56:23 +0000

So this weekly round-up is a bit different from my usual semi-regular link dump of stuff I’ve been reading. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been lax on blogging the past couple of weeks because I’ve been busy firing my little synapses at issues surrounding the how branding + geotagging/location check-in (e.g. foursquare, gowalla) affect how we encounter urban and public space (and each other within it. It’s quickly turning into a full blown captical-P Project. I’ll start posting some prelimenary thoughts/questions next week, but for now, some of posts, articles, and books that I’ve been drawing on in the initial concept mapping phase.

So, in a way, this is part link-dump, part project-emergence-documentation.

I started thinking about these issues with the recent surge in discussions of brand collaborations with popular geolocation social games, especial with all the chatter in SXSW reports about the rise of location-specific (I know people are using the term geolocation, but I’ve yet to really embrace that tautology) games and social networking tools.

Daniel Terdiman reported that Foursquare and Gowalla trumped twitter this year in terms of cutting through the noise of the conference backchannels.
And the prevalence of location check-ins was one of the biggest take-aways from Jay Baer’s SXSW observations.
Clement Yueng at Social Media Examiner writes about how businesses can leverage geotagging to build their brands.
Last month a number of Entertainment and Media brands linked up with Foursquare
And universities are jumping on the wagon, with Marc Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the rise of “virtual graffiti” initiatives.

Location check-in networks therefore have two obvious precedents: display advertising and graffiti culture.

For display advertising and public space, I’ve been digging into City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York by David M. Henkin, which discusses the way branded communications and marketing transformed public space and how we perceive information as a culture.

One of the (geographic) sites of interest is Sao Paulo, a city famous for its unique graffiti culture and for banning outdoor advertising. Hector Fernando Burga’s briefly outlines [pdf] a number of papers given at the Decentering Urban Theory conference at UC Berkeley focusing on new productions of urban space, including one by Prof. Teresa Caldeira on the “auto-construction” of Sao Paulo, where citizens engage in slow, collaborative, ad-hoc rebuilding of the city. These and other sites like it reveal “another dimension of place-making” that geotagging and location check-ins also seem to fit into.
Also on the urban theory front, I’m looking into a classic in the field, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City.
And going in the other direction, I’m trying to think of how to situate the geolocation social activities between public and private, and starting with The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, which explores how we encounter the most intimate and domestic spaces.

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Weekly round-up [3/05/10]: the science of art, old media interactivity,

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:20:10 +0000

I should probably acknowledge that my weekly round-ups aren’t so much weekly as they are “periodically,” but it’s a little too late to change now.

So in honor of the approaching Oscars, the NYT recently released a piece on how shot pacing in films matches our brain rhythms. Interesting observations, but it begs the question: what does this tell us that we didn’t already know? That films written, shot, and edited by human beings have an increasing tendency to suit the pace of how humans think? How is this news to anyone? In the same vein, have some mathematical descriptions of movie composition.

Moving on: CMS colleague Nick Seaver has a great piece on interactivity of player pianos. He makes great points about mediation and reproduction and other issues that are central to new media concerns, illuminated in a new way. We can only learn so much about new media by looking at it in isolation — it’s by connecting it to the once new technologies that the larger social patterns emerge.
Oh, and speaking of thought to be obsolete, there may be life for Google Wave yet.
Clay Shirky entreats us to stop talking about information overload. The problem, he points out, is not too much information or too little attention. Too much information is an old media problem, existing since after the Dark Ages. The issue is that we haven’t mastered the systematic filtering and sorting of this information.
This Open Net Initiative piece on keyword filtering by Microsoft Bing in ‘Arabian Countries’ reminds us too that solutions for “information overload” in one context can quickly resemble censorship in another.
And sort of related: insights from a mobile Q&A rising star. Frost & Sullivan has a piece on youth market insights from an analysis of ChaCha. Full disclosure, stuck without a smart phone, if not for ChaCha I may still be lost somewhere in West Texas.
And what’s with all this bzzzzzzz — AT&T has a new service Buzz.com that some think will actually supplant Google’s offering due to its facebook integration.

And on a last note:

“You came in with dreams and now you stand with spreadsheets”: Rishad Tobaccowala cuts right to the point at his 4A Transformations talk on incentivizing talent. The three types of wealth — experience, education, and economic — resonated because his emphasis was on wealth as a diversity of these things, not a sheer quantity. I had been spoiled for the first two at MIT — and range of experiences you could have, things you could create was matched only by the immense generosity of the minds around you. In the current economic climate, I’ve yet to see media and advertising industries match that kind of intellectual ambition or reciprocity, though my hope is that speeches like this mean there’s a thaw — not just economically — around the corner.

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Weekly round-up [2/19/10]: Old media memes, new media TV audiences, race + tech, and awesome uses of twitter

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:17:03 +0000

First, a couple of pieces that looks at “traditional media” concepts in light of new media practices and insights:

Over at Harvard’s Berkman Center, there was a recent talk from Jure Leskovec that tracks quotations-as-memes use in news cycles. While I’m more of a qualitative gal myself, I do have to admit a certain amount of geeky quant envy whenever I hear “mathematical model.”
C3 2009 white papers are going on official release over at the Convergence Culture Blog. First up is my esteemed colleague Sheila Seles discussing audience models and online video.
Pat Hanlon, whom I’ve had the fortune of working with at Thinktopia, has an insightful and galvanizing post about smart product design and innovation as a vital part of branding.
Speaking of design, basic web publishing is almost “traditional media” by now too, isn’t it? BBC breaks down its design overhaul in light of how digital publishing has changed, making it more social, accessible, and global.

On the media+globalization front, there’s an interesting post by C. Custer that asks if Twitter use in China might not be more dangerous than liberating. I brought up a similar post in a post I wrote for C3 back in early 2008 about how the discourse on Chinese digital censorship has been too tech-focused. Pervasive and deep censorship operates at a much more profound level through social, economic, and political controls — blocking websites is merely a surface symptom.
Jace Clayton has posted up excerpts from an interview with himself and Kelefah Sanneh from Bidoun Magazine all about noise music. As he puts it, it’s for anyone who’s ever wondered about “what that distortion pedal has to do with American race relations.”
Race-relations related, Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb reports that Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and Oracle refused to release the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of their employee base, declaring the information a “trade secret.” Either they’re afraid of bad press due to their white male make-up, or they’re stockpiling minority innovators and don’t want all the boys’ club tech companies to know that minorities and women can be good at innovation too.
And on the less political, more wonderful side of technological innovation, a simply gorgeous sound visualization project from Jonas Friedemann Heuer.

On the media consumption side, I’ve been marathoning Lost, hoping to catch up before the end of the season, since I’m pretty sure there’s no way to remain unspoiled for the finale. Plus, it’ll make Lost fans less annoying.
I’ve also gotten hooked on Echobazaar from the folks over at FailBetterGames, a great little indie twitter-integrated social game with wonderfully evocative worldbuilding in a twisted-classic seedy steampunk London underworld, and infuriatingly addictive game-play mechanics. My only complaint is that there’s no way to send direct invites to my twitter followers so that I can recruit more compatriots for my shady dealings.
Another great twitter-related amusement: New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson is tweeting the best sentences he reads everyday. Awesome use of twitter as an on-the-fly curation tool.

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Weekly round-up [02/05/10]: Tech and global development, online video, crowdsourcing and collaboration

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:17:36 +0000

So coming off the Luce days, a few things about internet + the world at large:

The Open Net Initiative has released it’s annual review of filtering, surveillence, and info warfare. What’s particularly interesting to me as I glanced through it is how different regions filtered content. Some focused on content type (e.g. pornography), while others blocked sites due to certain events or types of sites (social networks, forums, twitter).
An interesting piece by Byron Acohido suggesting the possibility that the Chinese government wasn’t behind the google attack isn’t definitive but does point out how quickly public discourse was to assign blame and depict China as a monolithic entity.
Also very interesting is the summary of who’s writing about ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) for development by Ivan Sigal at Global Voices. Especially provocative are the observations regarding the challenges of reconciling development experts and ICT solutions and implementation.

Speaking of groups typically overlooked by new media guru types — it turns out that blogging is on the rise amongst older adults.
And speaking of neat stats and charts, a couple of pieces by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan in TechCrunch discusses the state of online video puts the emphasis on context in online video consumption.
These read nicely next my CMS/C3 colleague Sheila Seles’ piece on why Apple hasn’t revolutionized TV (yet).

Finally, a couple of pieces contemplating crowd-sourcing:

BBH labs asks where the agency ends and the crowd begin in terms of creative and strategic development. This topic is one that touches on a lot of conversations I’ve been having recently, not the least of which is a fan labor/virtual sharecropping discussion that’s been occurring on and off on the ROFLcon organizing list.
Through the comments on the BBH piece, I came upon the work of Daren Brabham, including his short piece in Flow about crowdsourced advertising.
Related to the issues of crowdsourcing and co-creation, Harvard’s Radio Berkman posted up a talk on the Failing Fantasy of Intellectual Property
And to balance out the Cambridge set, MIT’s CMS Colloquium podcast tackles old/new media and “re-fashioning” with speakers Wayne Marshall and Joel Burges. Listen for the ultimate “hmmmmm” line: “how do we theorize time?”

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Weekly round-up [01/29/10]: Data Privacy!

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:15:37 +0000

So I’ve been a little lax on my “weekly” reading round-ups, but slowly trying to get back in the swing of balancing out intake to output.

As many of you know, Thursday was Data Privacy Day.

Google released a video and written listing of its privacy principles, explaining how it uses its user data.
Speaking of privacy and google, a recent CNN piece by Bruce Schneier reveals that Chinese hackers were aided by US government policy
And of course, we can’t talk data privacy without talking Facebook, who posted 5 key privacy tips. Which is nice and all, but just another consolation prize in a long line of Facebook v. your data.
Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb write about Facebook’s history with privacy with a distinctly positive view of the long-term implications. While I see his point, I remain somewhat discomforted not because of privacy, but because of ownership of my data.
An article from 2005 on CNET by Kimber Spradlin comparing privacy legislation in the US and Europe is interesting in this context. Although she focuses on commerce and security issues, she does note that in Europe, individual data can be loaned for use by companies, but ultimately is owned by the individual, an attitude that isn’t prevalent in the US. It brings me back to a point that I think always bears repeating, which is that “privacy” violations are often more about use and ownership than wanting to keep information locked away, about who has rights to profit from our information, and what control we have over that.

I’ve kind of avoided talking about the Ipad (which, I know it’s been pointed out ad nauseum by now, but . . . that’s what you decided to call it?). New technology is cool, but what I care more about is the technological use side of things. I want to see what happens once the new gadget has been incorporated into our lives and cultures, what standing needs it fulfills (and what new ones it brings to surface). But I did enjoy Annalee Newitz’s i09 piece about Apple’s Crap Futurism, which gets to the point of why I find the ipad so lackluster. For something that I think many of us fantasized about as a sort of sci-fi future artifact — something that would come in handy as we stage a guerilla resistence in the face of a fascist dystopia built on the rubble of the world is once knew — it just doesn’t seem all that useful. But again, we’ll see. Technology alone doesn’t change how we think. How we think about technology — its role, its capacities, its uses — is what moves us forward.

And, oh yeah! Jürgen Habermas, social theorist and communications guru before the time of gurus, now apparently has a twitter account. I can’t decide if it’s more awesome if it’s actually him or someone pretending to be him. Either way, I can’t believe it took so long.

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Weekly round-up [01/15/10]: Culture Matters, Globalization and the networked world, and Google v. China

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:25:50 +0000

Like many, I’ve been following the whole Google/China situation with some interest, it part because it really touches upon one of the central tensions surrounding increasingly globalized cultural and information networks and technological/legal infrastructures still organized around the nation-state. There’s been a ton written on it, but a few more comprehensive/interesting pieces:

Of course, the official google blog statement regarding the matter and the Chinese government’s response.
Darmishta over at the Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw blog has a pretty solid news round-up of the issue, including a link to the open letter from Issac Mao, a blogger in China, appealing to Google not to pull out.
And I admit, I’m biased, but C3 also has a good roundup of key pieces in the discussion, as well as some commentary on the whole global/national tensions present in digital culture along the language and acess angle.
ReadWriteWeb’s Richard Macmanus also discusses how this relates to google’s big competitor, Baidu. And Sarah Lacy over at TechCrunch points out that the whole Google or Baidu question isn’t just about China.

On the globalization and media tip, a few less newsy and more thinky things:

Starting first with Aswin Punathambekar’s syllabus for his Media Globalization graduate seminar, which has lots and lots of great readings to dig into for anyone interested in how to think about media in a transnational context. Which, I think given how relevant we consider Google/China to our everyday lives, should be just about everyone.
In Aswin’s syllabus is a link to a piece by Amitava Kumar about the limits of postcolonial theory, which in a way is also about the limits of theory as a whole.
I’ve also recently been recommended the work of David Harvey, which I’ll start in on as soon as I procure some ebooks.

Back to more immediate media + culture stuff:

If you haven’t by now, everyone should be reading Grant McCracken’s new book Chief Culture Officer. I admit, it’s another bias of mine, not just because Grant is full of awesome 24/7, but also the book basically makes a case for why people like me and many of my friends and colleagues should exist. Cultural understanding is crucial to the health of corporations, brands, media producers and it isn’t just something that happens. It’s a studied, systematic process, a skill-set that should be nurtured and deployed.
A couple of pieces following Ford’s push into the media space: Karl Greenberg over at Marketing Daily and the AdAge Mediaworks piece from Craig Daitch. Have yet to gather my thoughts on this, but it does seem something worth watching.
Finally, in a back to roots kind of move, I’m looking to start in on some of the readings listed in Henry Jenkin’s Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 syllabus. I didn’t even realize it when I first glanced at it, but if you scroll down to the section on global media, there’s a chapter from my thesis in there.

On a totally random note, I just realized that the two videos that were part of a project that I did with Kevin Driscoll, Whitney Trettien, and Lauren Silberman at MIT regarding Soulja Boy back in 2007, where a bunch of us in lab coats and GNU Richard Stallman danced the Crank Dat dance now has nearly half a million hits (almost 390,000 on one, and 80,000) on another. Granted, these numbers are nothing by YouTube standards, but still, a bit trippy for a random class project video done on an east campus lawn.

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Weekly round-up [11/06/09]: Post-broadcast TV, piracy from porn to academia, and finally a manual for google wave

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:34:13 +0000

A quick scattershot of readings this week. First, two pieces that discuss the shifting role of television in a post-broadcast era:

Over at Politico, Michael Calderone and Daniel Libit report that people are turning to Twitter over Cable TV for up-to-the-minute political coverage, especially for election updates.
Tim Jones over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation maps the evolving relationship between DVR and the TV industry as a case of how some knee-jerk efforts to “fight piracy” against developing technologies have often hurt, rather than helped, the entertainment industry.
That piece comes as a response to a recent article by Bill Carter in The New York Times that reveals studies to show that DVR helps live ratings.

Speaking of piracy, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Ben Terris reports that it’s not only music, film, software, and TV that are being pirated. Unauthorized distribution of academic journals is also on the rise.
Future Perfect has a piece on the pirate marketplace for pornography in Afghanistan, and its cultural and strategic implications.
A new project, Threatened Voices, is tracking the suppression of speech online.

The Dachi Group has an interview with Bruce Nussbaum where he discusses crowdsourcing, innovation, and participatory culture and its business implications with David Armano.
And on the sheer utility front, The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. If you’re like me, you’ve been spending the past several weeks since you got your google wave invite going “oh hey, you have it too! So let’s . . . wave something? Or . . . yeah.”

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Weekly round-up [10/30/09]: Audience measurement online, globalization, and more spreadable media in your future

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:12:00 +0000

I’m going to start by carrying over a topic from the last weekly round-up: Waern over at Pervasive Games does a great break down of what went wrong with Toyota’s Your Other You campaign, tracking its development history and explaining some of the problems in the campaign’s assumptions about its target audience.
CMS alum and C3 colleague Sam Ford explains the 10 Thing Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling. Much of his advice focuses on insights on how (and why) to understand and respect your audience and their practices in order to engage their loyalty and energy around your product or services.
Speaking of audiences, Jim Louderback wrote a piece in Ad Age calling for more scrutiny online viewership metrics. The article calls for both a better sense of proportion over what counts as notable numbers, as well as more clarity and transparency over what is getting counted, how, and how numbers are evolving over time. This pairs well with a couple of pieces that came out last month, one by Kristina Grifantini in the MIT Technology Review on distortion in online recommendation systems and the other by MG Siegler for TechCrunch about how useless YouTube ratings are.

In miscellaneous reading, I’m just now getting around to cracking Sakia Sassen’s now-classic book, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo, which looks at the structural dynamics and strategic formations of transnational centers of commerce and policy.
And on the topic of globalization, I found the Gizmodo piece explaining the origin of the approximately dozen or so different types of electrical plugs totally delightful and engaging. I learned that all that post-colonial reading really is good for practical knowledge (if a few steps removed) and that El Salvador is the best place to chill if I want a good excuse for never answering my phone or email.
That little armchair theoretical physicist in me is totally fascinated by all this talk about how the Hadron Collider is being affected by a “malign influence from the future”. While still a theory, I do love the possibility that one day comic book artists and speculative fiction writers will get to go “seriously, what have we been telling you?”
And speaking of the genres, I just started Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Two things for future consumption:

First a free webinar on November 6th on Moving from Sticky to Spreadable with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford. The three of them are currently working on a book on Spreadable Media, coming out of the white paper I co-wrote in 2007 along with Henry Jenkins and C3 colleague Ana Domb and Joshua Green. The book is set to feature contributions from a laundry list of C3 researchers and affiliates (myself included), but in the meantime, check out the free webinar for a taste of what’s to come.
I also just read the first part of a new 3-part play entitled Miraculous Lives by my close friend Trystan Trazon. It’s utterly mesmerizing and densely textured and some of the best work I’ve seen from this amazing young playwright, and I say that not just because we’ve been BFF for nearly a decade. He’ll be having a reading of part 1 at the Bridge Theater Company next week, though I’m not sure yet if it’s open to the public.
What is open to the public is a reading of Psychomachia by Jennifer Lane tonight, also at Bridge Theater Company, which I will be attending. I’m generally not a theater person, but I’ve heard great things about this piece.

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weekly round-up [10/16/09]: Toyota’s “prank” suit, interactive fictions, and biopolitics

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:45:34 +0000

This week, I seem to be reading heavily on a theme of interactivity — gone both good and bad — in narrative construction.

There’s been some talk lately about the lawsuit again Toyota over their “prank” campaign, much of which has been fairly negative. I would love to see any examples of the emails people received, or the opt-in statement that they apparently agreed to to get a better sense of the level of transparency that was practiced.
I wonder too if this particular effort was meant to create a sense of intimacy between the brand and its consumers, given the feeling expressed by Toyota CEO that their decline is the result of the brand becoming “too big and distant from its customers.” On a side note, it is somewhat amusing/telling that the justification all these articles cite for assuming the campaign character was real is the existence of a myspace page.

A quick write-up in AdAge Mediaworks about branded, short-form content on the web, focusing on HBO Imagine. While I haven’t had a chance to explore the HBO project in-depth, the description of “Rashamon meets Choose Your Own Adventure” reminded me of the structure of early hypertext novels.
That led me to revisit the article “Just Tell Me When to Stop: Hypertext and the Displacement of Closure,” from the collection The End of Books or Books Without End: Reading Interactive Narratives by Jane Yellowlees Douglas. The article analyzes several pieces of hypertext fiction, including the classic Afternoon by Michael Joyce, focusing on the question of closure in narratives that don’t have set orders.
Speaking of hypertext and lack of order, a colleague of mine from CMS who is currently at Duke sent me this from Postmodern Culture. I find it equal parts intriguing and incomprehensible.

On an even more (more?) egg-heady front, I’ve come by a cache of readings on biopolitics and political economy, courtesy of another colleague of mine. I’m starting out with Robert Mitchell’s “The Laws of Mo(o)re: waste, biovalue, and information ecologies,” chapter 3 from his 2006 book with Cathy Waldby Tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism

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weekly round-up [10/02/09]: China, Gift Economies, and Zombies

Xiaochang Li — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:46:17 +0000

I’ve been having a my strangely under-productive week, which I blame the sudden cold for, so this post will be relatively short. But hopefully, this amazing photo makes up for it:

The above image comes from Boston.com’s photo essay China Celebrates 60 Years, documenting the 60th Anniversary celebrations of communist rule in China. I’ll spare everyone the diasporic musings, and say only that this collection of images was a source of immense, and conflicted, wonder. And also that one of my own childhood photos features me in a tutu, toting a toy machine gun. Just sayin’.

A couple of pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Education, first a study indicating that free electronic copies don’t hurt print sales of (crazily overpriced) textbooks, and another piece that breaks down the war between libraries and the ubiquity of online search.
Apparently I’m all about numbers and figures this week, so also an article from the New York Times about slowing rates of decline in global ad sales, which breaks it down by type and geographical region. Not earth-shattering, but notable.

My MIT C3 Colleague Grant McCracken has an interesting post on the gift economy, about his recent experience at one of Pip Coburn’s lunches, comparing exchange in the good exchanges (as in goods, not exchanges that are good) to those in gift exchanges and the kinds of values and expectations they bring.
In Media Res this week is all about Zombies! Braaaaaaaaains.

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