Category: Young people & museums

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Digital storytelling Interactive Media Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Jenkins on ‘crud’ in participatory culture

There is an excellent recent post by Henry Jenkins titled ‘In Defense of Crud‘ in which he examines some of the recent debates around fan fiction, YouTube etc. Jenkins’ response to some of the criticisms of ‘participatory culture’ is wonderfully distilled into seven precepts which can be broadly applied.

1. We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better.

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making.

What is the opportunity cost for museums of not engaging with participatory culture? I’d wager that the issues we face when we do engage are significantly less problematic than if we do not engage. Our audience are already engaging in a participatory culture – its very hard not to do so in a mainstream life – even our television shows are forcing us to vote or their outcomes.

Categories
Interactive Media Young people & museums

Internet-connected plush toys

First, Snarkmarket reports on a wonderful dialogue on Metafilter about a prototype from the late 90s – an internet connected teddy bear that would tell children stories from a central server, contributed by parents.

I came up with the (again, patented, but the patent dropped) idea of an internet-connected teddy bear that contacts a web site to tell stories. People would tell stories to the web site, and in return for these stories, they would be paid per listener. Bear purchasers would pay a monthly subscription fee. The child would get access to every single story ever told via the breadth of the lazyweb, and the parents could configure the bear to tell only certain kinds of stories (e.g. nonviolent, child age 4-6, Jewish, with a moral message, etc. Stories would be reviewed and tagged.)

Then it is on to the Washington Post reporting on Webkinz. Semi-internet connected plush toys that have unique IDs activated via the Webkinz site.

“Play always reflects the adult world,” said Christopher Byrne, an independent toy analyst who goes by the Toy Guy. “It’s kids aspiring to have a MySpace page, but cognitively and developmentally, they’re not ready for that. This gives them the experience of sharing and connecting with friends.”

Except that the life of your real world Webkinz is revealed in the virtual world. Nothing happens to the toys in the real world – that would make them too expensive and put them out of the price range of their target market. But like the proposed Teddy Bear 2.0, it is only a matter of time.

Difficultly in achieving the right price point is probably the main reason why the Chumby is not here yet.

These activities all remind me a lot of two things.

The first is that these are like a children’s version of the quintessentially Australian, and very successful, Talking Boony toys that a beer company has been using during the last two summers of cricket down here. The Talking Boony picks up a frequencies in the live TV broadcast via a microphone. Those frequencies trigger pre-recorded patterns in its memory, which are meant to synchronise with the action on screen, or are time sensitive.

The second is the ever growing trend towards real-world/online interactivity.

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Social networking Young people & museums

“Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy” – New York Magazine

Nick Carr puts us on to this rather interesting and long article on the ‘younger generation’ and their interaction and identity shaping through emerging media forms.

Here’s a few pithy excerpts –

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

—

When I was in high school, you’d have to be a megalomaniac or the most popular kid around to think of yourself as having a fan base. But people 25 and under are just being realistic when they think of themselves that way, says media researcher Danah Boyd, who calls the phenomenon “invisible audiences.” Since their early adolescence, they’ve learned to modulate their voice to address a set of listeners that may shrink or expand at any time: talking to one friend via instant message (who could cut-and-paste the transcript), addressing an e-mail distribution list (archived and accessible years later), arguing with someone on a posting board (anonymous, semi-anonymous, then linked to by a snarky blog). It’s a form of communication that requires a person to be constantly aware that anything you say can and will be used against you, but somehow not to mind.

This is an entirely new set of negotiations for an adolescent. But it does also have strong psychological similarities to two particular demographics: celebrities and politicians, people who have always had to learn to parse each sentence they form, unsure whether it will be ignored or redound into sudden notoriety (Macaca!). In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it—and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Concepts of Web2.0 presented as a video

Michael Wesch from the Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, has made a rather nice and succinct summary of Web 2.0 as a video. Rather than being technical, it gives good coverage of the nature and effect of technological change on the production and consumption of meaning, identity and text.

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Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

CBBC World – a children’s ‘second life’?

This project by the Childrens’ arm of the BBC sound interesting especially in light of all the talk around Second Life and museums.

CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, said it would allow digitally literate children the access to characters and resources they had come to expect.

Users would be able to build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content.

Bosses said CBBC World would not have the financial aspects of other online worlds such as Second Life.

A spokesman said: “This kind of cross-platform broadcasting is becoming the norm for people who have been born into the digital world.

“It will give children a chance to move around a safe, secure world where they can not only interact with familiar characters but have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations.”

Perhaps the BBC has the audience reach to make this sort of project work, as for smaller organisations colonisation of other existing services may well prove more fruitful. Or, would museums be better off colonising worlds such as CBBC’s proposed world where the synergy between public broadcaster and public museum may ensure a better take up of virtual content?

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Young people & museums

Children’s participation in cultural activities in Australia

In December the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the results of the survey into children’s participation in cultural and leisure activities.

Museums and art galleries

There were 995,200 children who visited a museum or art gallery during the 12 month period. The rate of attendance at museums or art galleries was similar for boys and girls (38% and 36% respectively). The attendance rate was the same for 5 to 8 and 9 to 11 year olds (40%) but lower (31%) for those aged 12 to 14 years. Children born overseas in main English-speaking countries were more likely to go to a museum or art gallery (48% attending) compared with those born in Australia (38%) and in non English-speaking countries (26%). Attendance at museums and art galleries ranged from 60% for children in the Australian Capital Territory to 32% for those in New South Wales.

There are also interesting figures on internet and computer usage amongst this age group in Australia.

The full report can be downloaded for free.

Categories
Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Dragon & the Pearl on YouTube

We’ve put some ‘ultrasound footage’ of our resident baby dragon, from before it hatched from its mysterious egg, up on YouTube and linked from the dragon blog.

In putting it on YouTube we’ve tagged it in a way that we hope will attract those interested in UFO footage and the like, exposing our museum programme to other audiences. We’ve already started getting a few people who have seen the dragon posting about it on their own blogs, but hopefully with YouTube we can get it out to many more people.

It has been a very successful public programme and lots of fun. The dragon is ‘resting in the mountains’ at the moment but will return one last time in March.

Feel free to comment and rate it on YouTube. I’m hoping that such activities might have a similar result to that achieved by Ideum’s experiments with the Flickr ‘interestingness’ measure.

Categories
Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

Latest Pew report – teens and social networking usage

It has taken a few days for the figures from the latest Pew internet report to spread across the blogosphere. This report, Social Networking Websites & Teens, begins to problematise some of the ‘trends’ that have been generally ‘accepted’, and reveals some of the uneven use of these services by different genders and age groups.

Here is the abstract –

A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users. In the past five years, such sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users. More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The survey also finds that older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.

danah boyd presents some excellent discussion of the report and points out that some of the figures might be the result of Pew’s methodology. That said, she focusses in on some of the ways that Pew reports that different teens actually ‘use’ services like MySpace. Fred Stutzman also covers the report.

Unsurprisingly The Register takes a sobering view of the report and uses it as another example of the ‘about to pop’ bubble-like nature of everything 2.0 at the moment.

Categories
Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

The future of social networking? What of Second Life?

The arrival of a new year always brings all sorts of fascinating predictions.

Two commentators on social networking sites who I always have a lot of time for are boyd and Stutzman. Between them they have revealed much about how young people use online social networking services and how young people interact with each other. Their predictions for the future trends in these services are revealing reading.

Stuztman makes a broad range of predictions, most notably that within the US there will be a shakeout of services and that the most established (MySpace, Bebo and Facebook) will be difficult to displace. He reminds us that whilst users might visit lots of different sites, they can only actively keep their own personas on one or two at a time. Protocols such as OpenID will become more necessary to support interoperability across different services – otherwise users will leave. Two other key points he makes are that informational/transactional sites with established communities of users/visitors will attempt to social-ise their user experience and that this will increase the importance of shared experience to the emergence of community.

boyd also introduces new ideas. A few days ago she reminded us that teens do not use these social networking services in the same way that older people do (that is – us). For some, forgetting a password is an experience that is fixed by simply creating a new identity on the site, or moving off to another site. Harking back to the youth studies field, she reminds us that for teenagers and youth, these sites offer a means for identity experimentation, in a way that adults do not often have the time to do with such zeal.

In her thoughts for 2007 boyd sees a fading of enthusiasm amongst teens for the major social networking services. She cites anecdotal evidence that on one hand, new teen users are growing wary of the negative coverage of stranger danger on these sites, and on the other, those who currently use these services are being turned off by the influx of PR and marketing which is getting in the way of the main reason they use these services – to communicate to their friends in their own space. The mass scale intrusion of marketing and more recently spam into some of these services is a growing problem and threatens to make some environments as unfriendly as the ‘mall’ where if you aren’t a potential shopper then you are not welcome.

So, what of Second Life?

Second Life is, as Nina Simon writes is really a social site with the look of a MMORPG. It certainly isn’t a game, as many commentators point out, Linden Labs has set it up with only the most basic of rules. People go to Second Life to, in the words of Simon, “buy items online, view/listen to concerts online, meet up with people you already know (through work, family, friends) all over the world”.

If this user intentionality is correct then I’m very interested in applying Stutzman and boyd’s predictions to Second Life. How will it survive – especially if the churn rates are as high as Shirky believes?

Some questions.

– What of persona interoperability? Using Second Life as a platform does require significant investment from the user which will inevitability take them away from maintenance of their personas on other services. Gary Hayes is positive about this, but also suggest that as open source WordPress equivalents for setting up ‘multi-user virtual environments’ become available, Second Life will have a lot of challengers. His post on MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach is an interesting look at what is likely to fragment that user base of all environments pretty quickly.

– This, then, leads into the next issue – what of the increased presence of real world companies? Will certain user groups be turned off by the presence of the real world in their Second Life alter-reality?

– What of intentionality? A lot of work has gone in from educators using Second Life as a platform for engaging particular niche audiences with learning – using Second Life as a classroom etc. But how many of these Second Life students continue to be users/citizens after class? Does it matter?

Categories
Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Boyd on ‘writing community into being on social network sites’

danah boyd’s latest article, Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites in First Monday is a good examination of the nature of ‘friend-ing’. Like many people who actually use social networking sites themselves, boyd is frustrated that a lot of people talking about these sites seriously misunderstand how they are used, particularly by young people. These misunderstandings lead to, at one extreme, a paranoia about stranger danger, and at the other extreme, an overestimating of the real-world ‘value’ of ‘lots of friends’.

While some participants believe that people should only indicate meaningful relationships, it is primarily non-participants who perpetuate the expectation that Friending is the same as listing one’s closest buddies. Failing to understand the culture of Friending that has emerged in social network sites contributes to the fear of the media and concerned parents over how they envision participants to be socializing.

By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture of the sites. I will argue that Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally. In turn, this provides individuals with a contextual frame through which they can properly socialize with other participants. Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological affordances. I will argue that the established Friending norms evolved out of a need to resolve the social tensions that emerged due to technological limitations. At the same time, I will argue that Friending supports pre-existing social norms yet because the architecture of social network sites is fundamentally different than the architecture of unmediated social spaces, these sites introduce an environment that is quite unlike that with which we are accustomed. Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that participants must negotiate when on social network sites.

Museums need to be careful to understand the nature of use before they head to deeply into either colonising or building their own social networking sites. The LA-MOCA MySpace page I mentioned a few days ago from Jim Spadaccini’s talk at the NDF indicates they have (at last count) 6,375 ‘friends’ – but what does this actually mean?

Similarly, a few days ago a new user ‘friended’ me on Last.fm as a result of my NDF paper. What was interesting about this friend-ing was that they explicitly wrote –

Hi,I am not really sure how this works haha but I love ur
music taste and all that…not sure how ading friend thing would do…but just don’t want to forget ur page.Thank you:)