The Lion's Share, A Podcast Regarding Media Research, is Up!

Dear Colleagues, Friends and Listeners,

After what has seemed to be months of haggling and work, I am proud to announce that The Lion's Share first podcast, and interview with Dr. Derek Kompare about his work on CSI, is posted and is ready to be downloaded. I am working with Media Commons and the podcast is being distributed through Old Dominion University's iTunesU. If you have iTunes installed it can be simply received by clicking here. If you do not please download iTunes at the Apple iTunes site. While you are in iTunes, please subscribe so you can the latest episodes as they are released.

The point of this podcast is to generate conversations and it will have a breezy conversational style that will help keep us up to date with what we are researching, how we are doing it and why you should care. I have upcoming podcasts from Dr. Kathleen Battles (Oakland University) on her book regarding "crime radio series" and one from Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken McCallister (The University of Arizona) on educational videogames lined up for the next week or so.

Also, if you are interested in being interviewed please email me through the Lion's Share Facebook group or through my emails of tjanders@odu.edu or loganpoppy@gmail.com. I am open to all discussions regarding academic and non-academic media research.

I look forward to growing the podcast and working to generate better, more passionate discussions about what it means to be a media researcher.

Sincerely,

Tim J. Anderson
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Theatre Arts
Old Dominion University

What I Do On Mondays When I Wash My Clothes

Being separated from my wife is hard. This is a no brainer, perhaps it's the kind of statement that necessitates not even one mention. The economy is "suck" and we have houses we can't move. But we do have jobs, two of them in fact. It gets depressing yet I try to do what I can, which means the chores of daily life.

My life is simple. I teach and I work, a lot. Monday is a 12 hour workday of workdays for me, with five hours devoted to lecturing. So, when I leave campus I like to do my laundry and just stare at something. It's my moment of being, just watching the clothes go round. There's a TV in my landromat, but I don't watch it. It's always on Heroes and Chuck, but they are too demanding. I haven't followed the shows and there is no entry point for me. The TV there has no cable and I couldn't change it if it did. Frankly, it's a problem. Because I am not committed to these narratives I am on the outside. However, so much "quality TV" demands commitment. I have and do commit to a few shows, but I miss my easy in easy out TV of yore. On a night like this I could really use a good variety show. And that's what I gave myself.

My trust iPhone provided me with the following: episodes of This American Life, a few hit singles, a couple of YouTube vids (Cats, lotsa cats doing silly things), phone calls to my lovely wife and wikipedia searches for trivia. It's not that I didn't want to think, I just didn't need another world system of meaning. I just don't care on a day this exhausting.

So when I wash my clothes, I try to rest a little. Put it all on pause and laugh a little. Life's too hard sometimes and, frankly, on days like today, I don't need great art. I need a little song, a little dance, and a few cats.

If You Write Your Social Graph, Can You Take It With You?: A Question of Social Networks, Private Property and Market Leverage

linkfluence - social graph explained from linkfluence on Vimeo.

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In January of 2008, the high-profile tech blogger, Robert Scobel, noted that he had been kicked off of Facebook for violating the service's "Terms of Use" agreement. Scobel had applied a script developed by Plaxo that could optically recognize and rip the information that users place it on their Facebook account and put it into their Plaxo account (to see Scoble's testimony of getting kicked off click here. This personal information is defined by Brad Fitzpatrick as the "social graph", "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". While there is no one place where the social graph exists, the explosion of social networks as part of a our media ecologies is the reason why Facebook has been able to become such a potent technological, economic and social force and why companies such as Google are interested in developing APIs that allow social graphs to open up and work together .

What Scoble's experiment/stunt highlighted were two questions: 1) do you own your graph if you place it on a service?; and 2) why is this graph valued? Clearly, the first question is one of contracts legal dispute, but the second question is a point for economic and philosophical investigation. For me, it is clear to me that this not only brings up a classic "is the map the territory" question, i.e. is your social graph your social network, but it asks us to consider whether or not our social networks can be enabled without an effective representation, a graph, of who we know and how we are related. For myself the answer is obvious (it cannot), but for others in these videos and the question of what it is and what it is not, who owns it and what to do with it cannot be so easily resolved. These mappings are too valuable and hold too much at stake in digital media networks for there to be a solution without considerable debate and struggle. And as this video from linkfluence shows, graphing can be utilized as a source of power not only to understand influence but to possibly realize leverage.

PS - Note - the following is cross-posted as part of the MediaCommons project In Media Res.