Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies

The  Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies is a useful hub for scholars and researchers interested in "questions emerging at the intersections of religion, the internet and new, social and mobile media" to meet.

Founded in 2010, the site includes an extensive (500-plus items) bibliography resting heavily on the convenient shoulders of Google Scholar as well as a Scholars Index of around 200 members from around the world. The Index is comprised of the list of members with individual links to brief bio and affiliation info. Expertise tags are liberally applied to these profiles. Art Bamford's expertise lies with media ecology, orality, literacy, music recording technology, music production technology, and Stevie Wonder. Good stuff. 

A nice feature is the News section which is updated on a regular basis. I notice there is a submission today.  The submission before that was 4 days previous and that seems to be about the pace.  The most recent stories feature a gospel app development contest being encouraged by the Mormon Church, a columnist from the Times-Gazette.com calling the Bible "God's Facebook," and a 3-D game developed by the American Bible Society. It looks like these news items are intended to be crowd-sourced but it's pretty much the same few folks posting.

The site is clean and attractive, pushing all the latest related books, even jobs in the field.  The blog section offers more extended (compared to the posts in News) reflections on current research, but these articles are still quite brief. The site is informative and happening, but not time-consuming, especially for lurkers.

That's my little tour of the site. Did I mention it's "located" at Texas A&M University where it was launched with the help of their Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.

July CommQuote

This month's quote is brought to us by Nick Bilton, author, professor and technology reporter for The New York Times in his July 1 Disruptions column, "Dropping the Tedium of Typing for Photos That Say It All." Given the article's length I'm excerpting way too much of it I'm sure. But it's chock full of so many interesting observations I couldn't rein in the work of my scissors (and Elmer's glue). 

"Photos, once slices of a moment in the past - sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation - are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what's for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, "Hey, I'm waiting for you," is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts. "This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment," said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are "turning photography into a communication medium."

...Snapchat is a mobile application that allows a person to take and send a picture or video, then control how long - up to 10 seconds - it's visible to the person who receives it. After the photo is viewed, it disappears forever, like a casual exchange on the street. "You have images now that have no possible afterlife," said Kelsey. "They are simply communicative."

...What's more, there are no language barriers with images. As the world grows smaller, thanks to technology, people from all over the globe can chat with images that translate into a universal tongue. Do you speak only Mandarin? No problem, you can now communicate with someone who speaks only English. Take a picture and reply. Germans and Spaniards? Snap! Send. Done.

...It's a shift that appears to be coming at the expense of the last big thing. Images sent between cellphones are on the rise as text messages continue to fall, according to CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry. An industry report released this year said 2.19 trillion text messages were sent and received in 2012, about 5 percent less than a year earlier. In comparison, MMS, or multimedia messages that include photos and videos, grew by 41 percent to 74.5 billion in 2012.

...So isn't this all bad for society? Another blow for the English language where children won't even bother to communicate in LOL-speak anymore? "We're tiptoeing into a potentially very deep and interesting new way of communicating," said Mitchell Stephens, author of "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word," and a journalism professor at New York University."--Nick Bilton, NYT, Business section, July 1

Teens and Technology 2013

Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project and the Berkman Center for Internet and; Technology have jut released their 2013 report on Teens and Technology. Read the whole 19-page report or remain blogbound with the summary here: 

Overview

Smartphone adoption among American teens has increased substantially and mobile access to the internet is pervasive. One in four teens are “cell-mostly” internet users, who say they mostly go online using their phone and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.
These are among the new findings from a nationally representative Pew Research Center survey that explored technology use among 802 youth ages 12-17 and their parents. Key findings include:

• 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones. That translates into 37% of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.
• 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.
• 95% of teens use the internet.
• 93% of teens have a computer or have access to one at home. Seven in ten (71%) teens with home computer access say the laptop or desktop they use most often is one they share with other family members.

“The nature of teens’ internet use has transformed dramatically — from stationary connections tied to shared desktops in the home to always-on connections that move with them throughout the day,” said Mary Madden, Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and co-author of the report. “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.”

Divinatio Asks: Is Democracy Sick of Its Own Media?

I usually point out Penn or open access resources but here's a rare exception.  A recent issue of Divinatio: Studia Culturologica Series (Volume 35, Spring-Summer 2012) poses the question: Is Democracy Sick of Its Own Media? 

The following scholars weigh in:

Ivaylo Znepolski: The Soft Dictatorship of the Media (Introductory essay by the issue's editor)
Elihu Katz: Back to the Street: When Media and Opinion Leave Home
Jeffrey Goldfarb: "The Politics of Small Things" Meets "Monstration:" On Fox News, Occupy Wall Street and Beyond
Nick Couldry: Relegitimation Crisis: Beyond the Dull Compulsion of Media-Saturated Life
Helge Ronning: The Social or the Interpersonal? New and Old Public Spheres
Georgi Lozanov: The Media Start Talking in Mother Tongue 
Paul Frosh: The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life  
Jaeho Kang: Digital Constellations: Social Media and the Crisis of (Old) Democracy in South Korea

It's a weighty issue, definitely worth checking out. Divinatio: Studia Culturologica Series currently does not have a website but if you want to pursue any of these articles it shouldn't be hard to get your hands on them thanks to trusty interlibrary loan services available in most libraries. While not many US libraries carry this journal (published in Sophia, Bulgaria), Stanford, Yale, Penn State, University of Virginia, University of California at Berkeley and some others have bragging rights. Seek and ye shall find. 

CyberOrient

It's a good time to be reading CyberOrient, a open access, peer-reviewed online journal of the virtual Middle East. Started in 2006, the journal is sponsored by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and based at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. In the words of journal Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Martin Varisco:

The main purpose of this electronic journal is to provide a forum to explore cyberspace both as an imaginary forum in which only representation exists and as a technology that is fundamentally altering human interaction and communication. The next generation will take e-mail, websites and instant availability via cell-phones as basic human rights. Internet cafes may someday rival fast-food restaurants and no doubt will profitably merge together in due time. Yet, despite the advances in communication technology real people in the part of the world once called an “Orient” are still the victims of stereotypes and prejudicial reporting. Their world is getting more and more wired, so cyberspace becomes the latest battleground for the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

The current issue features: The Islam-Online Crisis: A Battle of Wasatiyya vs. Salafi Ideologies?; Overcoming the Digital Divide: The Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia; Beyond the Traditional-Modern Binary: Faith and Identity in Muslim Women’s Online Matchmaking Profiles; New Media and Social-political Change in Iran; e-Islam: the Spanish Public Virtual Sphere, and a book review of Vit Sissler's Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Discourses in Cyberspace.

Digital Future Report

The Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School has just released the ninth report of it's Surveying the Digital Future, The Digital Future Project 2010, "nine years of longitudinal research compris[ing] an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and social networking. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data."

You can access summary data at the site or avail yourself of the whole 203- page report in the ASC Library. Among the study's findings:

* Americans on the Internet -- For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans -- now 82 percent.
* Weekly hours online -- The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
* Gaps in Internet use in age groups -- Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
* Low adoption of new media -- Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
* Does technology make the world a better place -- The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
* Internet and Political Campaigns -- although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
* Buying online -- 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
* Internet impact on traditional retail declines -- 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores -- down from 69 percent in 2008.
* Top 10 online purchases -- 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).

Daedalus Issue on Future of News

Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, flies under the radar when we think of Communications journals but I like to keep an eye on it and this latest issue devoted to the future of news is case in point for doing so. Still another reason is you'll find Professor Kathleen Hall Jamison and PhD candidate Jeffery A. Gottfried in this issue imparting lessons for the news industry from the 2008 Presidential campaign. See the Penn Libraries homepage for e-access to the journal.

Daedalus (Vol. 139, issue 2: April 1, 2010):

Political observatories, databases & news in the emerging ecology of public information, by Michael Schudson
What is happening to news?, by Jack Fuller
The Internet & the future of news, by Paul Sagan and Tom Leighton
The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education: improving how journalists are educated and how their audiences are informed, by Susan King
Does science fiction-yes, science fiction-suggest futures for news?, by Loren Ghiglione
Are there lessons for the future of news from the 2008 presidential campaign?, by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Jeffrey A. Gottfried
New economic models for U. S. journalism, by Robert H. Giles
Sustaining quality journalism, by Jill Abramson
The future of investigative journalism, by Brant Houston
The future of science news, by Donald Kennedy
International reporting in the age of participatory media, by Ethan Zuckerman
The case for wisdom journalism-and for journalists surrendering the pursuit of news, by Mitchell Stephens
News and the news media in the digital age: implications for democracy, by Herbert J. Gans
Journalism ethics amid structural change, by Jane B. Singer

MICHIKO KAKUTANI on Mash-up Culture

An excellent review article on the mash-up culture of the web (with mention of at least a dozen related books) appeared in the March 21 Sunday New York Times.

Texts Without Context

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: March 21, 2010

How the Internet and mash-up culture change everything we know about reading.

These were some of the books were mentioned in the article:

REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)

TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.

INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.

GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.

November CommQuote

Clive Thompson reports on the Stanford Study of Writing headed by writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford who collected student writing samples from 2001 to 2006--emails, blog entries, class assignments, journal entries, formal essays and i-chats--and came to the conclusion that writing among young people is alive and well, in fact, she thinks we are in the midst of a literacy revolution "the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." Describes Thompson, writing for Wired Magazine:

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom-life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up. It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the student’s were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

...It's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis--from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15, 000-word videogame walkthroughs--has given them a chance to write enormously long an complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others. --Wired Magazine, Sept 2009, p. 48

July CommQuote

Virginia Heffernan wrote on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in a the New York Times Sunday Magazine column, The Medium:

"What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt?

The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of ''expectation'' and how cultures congratulate themselves. First off, the Susan Boyle phenomenon truly belongs to the world of online video, whose prime directive is to be amazing. The great subjects of online video are stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets and transformations. Where television is supposed to satisfy expectations with its genres and formulas, online video confounds them." --Virginia Heffernan (The Medium, The New York Times Magazine, June 28, 2009)

Teens More "Normal" Than You Think, According to Nielsen

At the annual What Teens Want Marketing conference in New York (June 24-25), The Nielsen Company presented How Teens Use Media, to a rapt audience of post (and post post)-teens. Among the findings are that while teens are madly texting away they are still solid consumers of traditional forms of media such as television, radio and even newspapers. The love their internet but actually spend less time browsing on it than adults. And don't tell them this, but their favorite TV shows, websites and genres across media are mostly the same as their...parents.

This free report combines insights from Nielsen’s global research in television, internet, mobile, gaming, moviegoing, radio, newspaper and advertising research.

Harry Potter Readers' View of the News Media?

Gee, I don't think I've ever wondered how reading Harry Potter affected childrens' perceptions of the news media, but some folks have in the Vol 10, Issue 01, Spring 2008 issue of American Communication Journal.

Harry Potter and Children’s Perceptions of the News Media, by Amanda Sturgill, Jessica Winney and Tina Libhart.

Abstract
This framing study examines how author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of children’s books treats the news media and how that treatment could affect children. Researchers first studied quotes from the first six books regarding the media, and based on the overall categorization of those quotes, they determined the three main frames in which media is viewed: Government Control of Journalism, Misleading Journalism, and Unethical Means of Gathering Information. Based on these frames, researchers argue the Harry Potter series does not put the media in a positive light. Because of this, children could potentially perceive the news media in general as untrustworthy and controlled by the government. Given the prevalence of tabloid journalism and “entertainment” news, children’s understanding of true journalistic integrity, journalism as a career, and even positive social behaviors could be negatively affected due to this depiction, in light of the overwhelming popularity of the series.

Introducing Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that provides new and evolving tools to quantitatively examine the news media as an information ecosystem. Newly launched the Project's objectives are ambitious. They are:

• Develop an open database of the topics of all stories from thousands of sources
• Build lightweight, interactive tools that allow casual users to easily ask the database questions
• Publish open APIs that give other researchers full access to the database
• Publish the code for the system under a free software license
• Publish our own research using the database, including studies on media signatures, meme propagation, and geographic attention profiles

From the March 11 press release:

Researching the nature of news, and media information flows, has always faced a difficult challenge: there is so much produced by so many outlets that it is hard to monitor it all. Researchers have used painstaking manual content analysis to understand mass media. On the web, the explosion of citizen media makes such an approach far more difficult and less comprehensive. By automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of thousands of outlets, Media Cloud will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media
trends.

Today's launch allows a first view into some of what is possible on the Media Cloud platform. At http://www.mediacloud.org you can generate simple charts of media coverage across ources and countries. The actual capabilities of the system are much greater, and the Media
Cloud team is actively looking for other researchers who will bring their own questions as the tools are further developed. Ultimately, Media Cloud will provide open APIs that can support variety of lines of inquiry.

Visit the Media Cloud site, try the visualizations, share your research ideas with the team, and sign up for the Media Cloud mailing list to hear about functionality enhancements and other project developments.

January CommQuote

"Perpetual Art Machine (PAM) is an on-line video database begun in 2005 that provides community for artists, curators, scholars, and students....In addition to the Web site, PAM sponsors an interactive, traveling video installation that allows viewers to function as curators, choosing video programs by selecting various keywords...

Colette Copeland: How does PAM differ from other on-line media databases, such as Rhizome or Eyebeam?

Lee Wells: The biggest difference is probably funding. In operation for over ten years, both Rhizome and Eyebearm are bankrolled by institutions and key patrons... Most of our funds come out of pocket and a lot of free labor on the part of the founders and volunteer PAM artists at large. Although PAM engages multiple forms of new media, our primary focus is on the growing international video art community. Rhizome and Eyebeam broadly cover the entire spectrum of new media.

CC: ...what are some of the concerns that collectors have regarding archiving and preserving video long term?

LW: In my opinion, it's all about the digital archive files. It's just a matter of time before everyone is up to speed. The days of Gigi-beta and DVDs will come to pass as we rapidly move into the era of HD video on-demand relayed through high-speed, fiber-optic networks and secured in on-line (bank-like) storage databases. The problem is that most people who buy art still want an object to hold. At this point it still takes an enlightened and progressive collector to invsest in video and new media art."

--from "Predicate, Participate & Perpetuate: An Interview with Perpetual Art Machine" by Colette Copeland, afterimage, Volume 36, Number 3, pp. 18-19

Introducing The Journal of E-Media Studies

The Journal of E-Media Studies is a new on-line, open access journal that has recently launched their first issue. Focusing on the history and theory of electronic media, especially television and new media, its editorial board includes a rich assortment of scholars--Toby Miller, Lynn Spigel, Robert McChesney, and Anna McCarthy, to name a few. Its inaugural issue features the following essays: Toward A Visceral Scholarship Online: Folkvine.org and Hypermedia Ethnography by Craig Saper; E-poetry: Between Image and Performance -- A Cultural Analysis, by Jan Baetens and Jan Van Looy; Que'est-ce qu'une madeleine interactive? Chris Marker's Immemory and the Possibility of a Digital Archive by Erika Balsom; Horace Newcomb in Conversation with Tara McPherson by Tara McPherson; A (Very) Personal History of the First Sponsored Film Series on National Television by Stanley Rubin, in addition to review pieces.

June CommQuote

"Today we're beginning to realize that the new media aren't just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. Historically, the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Radio, film, TV pushed written English toward the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture. If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won't be because there's anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we've failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage."

--Marshall McLuhan
from "Classroom Without Walls," Explorations in Communication
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)