At what point does the term “missed connection” abandon it’s craigslist roots and run a-muck with an evolving definition of its own? Over the past year I have heard the term increasingly used outside of a craigslist context, and so I ask you: What would you define a missed connection?

Take the recent Levi’s commercial:

(As a side note, Levi’s ran two seperate ads, one with a man and one with a women in the phone booth. You can see the other one here.)

I have spent the last few months fascinated with this ad, but haven’t been able to put my finger on why. (more…)

gnovis ran an article of mine today on Facebook Relationships. Here is a teaser to convince you go and read it:

It is an age-old story, boy/girl/* meets boy/girl/*, they go on a few dates, and all seems well. Then one of the two (or three?) brings up a daunting topic: the Facebook Relationship status.

Read it here!
Facebook Relationships and Information Architecture @ gnovis

Fred Stutzman on his blog Unit Structures mentioned an NPR segment on privacy issues online from the most recent Weekend Edition. Fred’s humorous prediction of paranoia in listeners is unfortunately not far off. While scholars James Rule and Kathryn Montgomery were both quick to point out that different generations have different notions of privacy, I am generally frustrated that we do not discuss the value of privacy in relative terms.

I am split on this issue. I find it disappointing to hear Dr. Montgomery (director of American University’s Center’s Youth, Media and Democracy project) answer these difference by suggesting that “we need to help them understand what privacy is and to make more conscious decisions about what they share.” (more…)

One of the more difficult task I had this past semester was to present on the Lee Edelman’s daunting work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Judith Butler shows us the way in which heteronormativity is performed, and Judith Halberstam explains how queerness situates itself is both space and time. Through Edelman, queerness is divorced from anything gay and reinvisioned as a disrupting force for heteronormativity, the children it produces, and the future into which we all invest.

Making his clever argument through a Lacanian psychoanalytic and semiotic framework, Edelman questions our conception of the future. If our notion of the future is constantly changing, he asks, why then are we mortgaging our present in the name of a future we will never reach?

Want more to know more? Check out the poster.

Coincidentally, I found a brilliant review of Edelman’s book on k-punk’s blog. Unfortunately I found it too late to help me on this project, but it is a great review of his work, and certainly worth a read.

If you had surveyed the Facebook status of CCT students during finals you would have seen something strange. During finals you always see a predictable number of Facebook/IM/<communication device here> messages that are mildly suicidal. I must admit that I took to wandering around the library in the middle of the night (taking a “break” from writing my papers) and navigating to this LOLcat on a dozen or so catalog computers. (I have been informed that this is not funny, but at 4:30 am I found it hysterical.)

1st year students in CCT, however, had a different type of project ahead of them. There were requirements, of course, but nothing to restrict the form of the final. I think Tatyana’s Facebook status captured it best:

Tatyana is I can’t believe i’m writing a monologue as a FINAL PAPER. :P.

There is a tale of former student (and by “former student” I mean my friend Molly Moran, and by “tale” I mean she confirm the story) who turned in a maniquine covered in philosphy quote for her final; a sculptural piece of sorts.

As for me? You remember this guy right? Well, would you like to the biography of the Dramatic Prairie Dog?

I ran across this video piece from mobuzz.tv while running around the nets this morning. It seemed particularly salient given all of the research I have been doing on anonymous online behavior on craigslist’s Missed Connections (here, here and here).

The content we generate on the internet always has a context, even if we are attempting to distance ourselves from those contexts. As this newscast illustrates, it seems we are all still unsure about how to negotiate our relationship with internet “anonymity.”

On the lighter side, check out Craigslist Curmudgeon, a blog that extends shaming beyond the confines of craigslist by featuring some of the more rediculous posts.

Each time I finished showing my video, and the first question I was always was “How did you do the posts?”

“Oh, I just posted them to the website,” was my casual and rehearsed reply. The posts they are referring were those posted to craigslist’s Missed Connection section, quoting the various theorists that I included as a means for driving the narrative. Yes, the posts were actually there (Washington D.C., m4m), always accompanied with a little message low enough on the screen to be kept out of the shot, apologizing for the off topic nature of the post.

The next question I would get was one for which I had no rehearsed response: “Did anyone respond?”

The first time I was asked this I just laughed. “No, no one replied,” I said simply. Why would they? The content I was posting was not even close to a missed connection. In fact, craigslist users flagged and removed all of them within a few short hours. Except, what I said wasn’t true. When I finally did get back to the junk email account I used for this project, I found two unexpected responses that made me stop and rethink my argument.

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The semester is wrapping up, which means the last few weeks have produced an insane amount of academic product. I hope that some of it will end up here, but first I have to add some spit and polish. But here is one that seems ready.

For my Gender, Sexuality and the Body seminar, I created what Dr. Coventry calls a “Digital Storytelling Project.” I call it “One of the hardest finals I have ever had.” A Storytelling Project is basically a theoretical argument made in video format. In one vein of my semester’s worth of research on anonymous online behavior, I was looking at peer-to-peer regulation across digital and real world spaces, and in particular, public responses in the Missed Connections section of craigslist (A follow up of sort to some previous research).

Video after the jump. (more…)

Those who have been around me as of late, enduring my alternating states of exhaustion and over-caffeination, have probably also endured some conversation about LOLcats and their relationship to online communities. Imagine my surprise when Michael sent me this bizarrely accurate cross over.

Drop the cat and replace it with… Foucault? Or how about my personal favorite, Althusser!

Enjoy the best of them here.

Recently I posted an entry on an idea I called the “Listening Application.” This idea has generated a number of conversations with peers of mine, many of which inevitably result in listing applications that seem like they might be “listening”, only to eventually rule them out.

For the record, here is a list of applications that are deemed to not be listening:

1. Facebook, MySpace or other Social Networking Sites
2. Instant Messenger
3. Email
4. Blogs
5. YouTube

I am not surprised that these applications are offered as candidates. When describing a theoretical application that is “gratifying, [and] deepens connections with its users while empowering them”, it is easy to think about the current social revolution that has enveloped the web by allowing users to easily produce and publish content. The ways in which the technologies listed above have deepened and multiplied connections between internet users are countless.

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