OK so my disclaimer here is that I was just not in the liveblog zone today. It takes a certain amount of cognitive function to both absorb and get what’s happening on the computer at the same time, and discussion is especially hard for me. Jeff, Marty, Mike or whoever has editing powers, please do feel free and add/take away from what I have here.

We all voted that we continue with presentation that we hadn’t quite finished on Tuesday, but first HyeWon’s question:

 

It seems that over time stuff that starts very amateurish becomes more and more professional over time. Where does this leave professionals? Will these really good amateurs end up “beating the pants off” those of us who have managed to get degrees.

—

Forgot to capture discussion

—-

Jeff says that the idea of a singular ;linear progression from amateur to professional is crap.

 

Disney is intellectually and morally bankrupt, but lovingly produced

 

Neil Cicerega quote from before–

He is now making harry potter puppets stuff on YouTube.

So it’s hard to say that this distinction of amateur and professional is a productive one at all. The guy who made Still Seeing Breen now making his real life living doing all this kind of thing

Marty says that the idea of an auteur is coming forth in the amateur and Aaron agreed that the amateurs can be more artist-like, but Jeff and ___ disagreed saying that they DO have deadline and constraints.

Christian says that if people are making this stuff with the idea of getting professional credit or putting adwords on the page and making money that way.

Jeff brings up the fact that, yes, people are making money doing this amateur stuff in SL.

 

So back to the question: What distinguishes amateurs from professionals is the level at which creativity is happening. In a professional setting it happens in a smaller unit in a design team or whatever, but web 2.0 is massively collaborated to bring about new genres and do things together. Jeff may be full of it but he does the best he can.

 

So is there a language of HCI? No there are a bunch of languages out there and they don’t interrelate.

 

Gillian Smith talks about the language of film, and punctuation in film: wipes, fadeouts etc, and so for HCI we don’t have “a language” and maybe we never will because of how different HCI is compared to film.

 

So back to the presentation:
Fashion

We have a stabilized critical language of fashion

 

Disclosures/policies-

So there was a series of incidents where people were blogging about friends stuff so they came to a consensus about disclosure.

Seen in world, review copy, friends list

 

Common Characteristics (See slide)

Made out of readily available prims

Composited out of libraries onto a specialized technical canvas

Liberally borrow from external visual languages

Fusion of external and internal languages for meaning

And comment on both, often as parody

Inside jokes and reference to your micro community

All this with low production quality

 

 

When I hear the mainstream media talking about SL it makes me want to pull my hair out, and that’s bad because I spend a lot of money on my hair, and it’s coming out anyway.

 

Out of the subculture and into the Mainstream

 

So while this started in this small communities it ends up in the mainstream

We started saying the tools shape amateur media, and amateur media influences and shapes mainstream culture therefore the tools we create in HCI are in fact influencing on a massive scale.

 

Star Wars Kid Montage (as foreshadowed by David “thuderstealer” Royer

 

This is a golf ball retriever

 

Researching Amateur Multimedia: Towards and Agenda

 

Summary of Problems

Massive number of dispersed users (not easy to do ethnography!)

Multimedia content is non-textual primarily (which is harder to analyze, or at least all the tools out there are for text)

Meaning emerges in micro communities (much of the meaning only comes from the understandings in that community)

Knowledge/information versus affect/experience

 

My Strategy: Habitus or Sensibility

 

Stoltermans sensibility:

A developed taste for a material’s special qualities

A wine lover’s wine; a literature lover’s poem

 

Borudieu’s habitus

A “system of dispositions” that incline actors to perceive and act in certain ways, a “feel for the game”

It can be shared by large groups (e.g. a social class) (for example what Hillary Clinton says is filtered by one’s political standing)

 

A hermeneutics of AMM

 

Understanding arises by fusing AMM participant’ habitus with the researcher’s

 

Philosophically problematic (sorry)

To cultivate this habitus, we need to understand an

The field of digital culture production

 

“field” is understood in bordieu’s sense

A socio-cultural-economic space of possible positions, and in which actors must take positions

Good versus crappy animation, high vs. low are, symbolic capital, innovation

 

AMM Network Theory

 

Not simple networks, but networks of networks

SL fashionistas blogs, MySpace, virtual mags

Postmodern identity factories

Loosely anchored to the RL self( in a way I have a network relationship to myself) OY!

 

AMM Critical languages

 

Criticism

Complex systems theory

Emergent systems

Memes (elements of “cultural DNA”)

 

Participating in Participatory Culture

YOU NEED TO GET IN THERE!

Learn authoring tools as a prerequisite

 

Conclusion

(See slide)

 

The idea of getting in there, doing your ethnography, fusing lifeworlds and creating habitus, then abstracting back out and using the series of oppositions