For the next few weeks, leading up to Theorizing the Web 2013, we’ll be posting a series of previews of some of the papers we’ll be showcasing at the conference. This is one of those. Stay tuned for lots more!

Andrea Marshall – “Star Trek and Subjectivity: Fan Videos as Sexual Textual Critiques”

Panel: Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Star Trek franchise has produced several successful television series and film adaptations, including the most recent one of 2009. Female fans of Star Trek have for decades actively involved themselves in the participatory cultural practice of fan fiction authorship first in ‘zine’ forms and then within online communities with the advent of the internet and online fan communities. more...

In 2006, the body of Joyce Carol Vincent was found in her apartment. The TV was still on and she was surrounded by unwrapped Christmas presents.

She had been dead for three years. No one had noticed.

This might seem like odd subject matter for a game, but in fact a game was planned around it, to coincide with the release of a documentary about Vincent entitled Dreams of a Life. I finally watched it last night and then,  as I often do when I watch movies that affect me strongly on an emotional level, I went looking for more information. What I found was a Kotaku article from last year that tells the story of the development of the game, a story that ultimately ends in (partial) failure. What interests me, aside from how astonishing it is to me that someone would even try to make a game about Vincent’s life and strange death, is why the game failed in the end.

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Facebook just enabled its new Graph Search for my profile and I wanted to share some initial reactions (beyond the 140 character variety). Facebook’s new search function allows users to mine their Facebook accounts for things like: “Friends that like eggs” or “Photos of me and my friends who live near Chuck E. Cheese’s. ” The suggested search function is pretty prominent, which serves the double role of telling you what is searchable and how to phrase your search.  More than anything else, Graph Search is a stark reminder of how much information you and your friends have given to Facebook. More importantly however, it marks a significant change in how Facebook users see each other and themselves in relation to their data.. You no longer see information through people; you start to see people as affiliated with certain topics or artifacts. Graph Search is like looking at your augmented life from some floating point above the Earth. more...

Each morning, after reading the news and checking my emails, I reward myself with a quick (okay, not that quick) scroll down the Facebook News Feed.  Over a peanut butter bagel and strong cup of coffee, I look at pictures, laugh at status updates, ignore political rants, and leave small traces along the way: Likes, congratulations, the occasional snarky retort. I look forward to my Facebook time. It’s the dessert portion of my morning routine. The little sugary something that warms me into my day. And yet, this is a precarious treat—one day sweet, the next lip-puckeringly tart.

I never know quite how I will feel at the end of my scroll session. Some days, I am energized, connected, warm, fuzzy, and one with the world. Other days, I feel annoyed, left out, jealous, regretful that I let that half hour slip away while others were doing something more productive, more impactful, more meaningful. Admittedly, on most days, my feelings lie between these poles in the far less dramatic realm of mild amusement or hinted anxiety.   more...

Once upon a time in Winchester, VA, a nurse and a psychologist wondered what to name their second child (a newborn boy). This little boy would one day grow up to be a famous politician, so it was important to give him a good name. Eventually they settled on Richard (which means “powerful leader”) for a first name, and John (which means “God is gracious”) for a middle name; they gave him his father’s last name, because that was the custom at the time. Yet today, when someone says “Santorum,” do you first think of the former U.S. Senator? Or do you maybe think of columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage?

Much to the former Senator’s likely chagrin, “santorum” is an excellent example of how words (and objects) that were not originally intended or designed to be “political” can take on new meanings–as well as new politics–once out in the world. more...

Is there a Dunbar’s Number for our documentary consciousness?

Dunbar argued that we can only keep up with about 150 people at a time, at which point we reach a cognitive saturation. Can this similar sort of saturation occur with the proliferation of ways we can document ourselves and others on social media? The ways someone holding a working smartphone can document experience grows not just with the number of sites one can post to, but also the number of available mediums of documentation: audio, video, photo, and their recombinations into things like GIFs and Vines whatever else I’m forgetting or will come next. Each new app carries with it a different audience with different expectations, adding to the documentary chaos.

Or: Given the proliferation of options, how should I document this cat? more...

“JSTOR is a rent extraction mechanism that perpetuates fundamental inequalities”

“a ceremonial flyover of three combat drones”

“what is Elsevier going to do with Mendeley that warrants uninstalling it from you computer?”

“Nineteenth century viral culture is quite like today’s Internet culture”

“Seeing this as only a story about digital technologies & their risks is to overlook how cultural communication is”

“That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents”

“23 women have joined a class-action lawsuit against the “revenge porn” website”

“there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying“ more...

Check out vinepeek.com. Watch the random videos—called Vines—follow each other without context. Take it in for a moment.  more...

A great many words – though a lot of people would probably say not nearly enough – have been spent on the United States’s drone war, on what it means, on who dies, on what it suggests about what war will look like in the future, though of course we appear to remain generally unconcerned about what it looks like to civilians on the ground watching their villages explode. But a recent piece by Adam Rothstein in The State makes a powerful and provocative claim: That when we write and think and talk about “drones”, we’re really writing and thinking and talking about a thing that needs to be understood as distinct from the actual specific varieties of UAVs themselves. more...

Whether they’ve joined me on Twitter, sneakily coerced me into spending more time on Facebook, or just like to go on at length about how social networking sites are “stupid and a waste of time,” it seems my friends never tire of talking to me about social media. Given my line of work, this is pretty great: it means a never-ending stream of food for thought (or “networked field research,” if you will). This post’s analysis-cum-cautionary tale comes to you through my friend Otto (we’ll refer to him by his nom de plume), who got himself into some pseudonuptial trouble last week.

It started when Otto was invited to a “wedding party”— more...