New semesters bring challenges, for sure. I was expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was how disorienting my economics class would be. This semester I am taking “The Networked Economy” from Dr. Garcia. After enjoying her lectures in our Communication, Culture and Technology course last semester, I decided to take her course and see if economics was as interesting as her lectures and Freakonomics had made it seem. (more…)

I usually keep my posts about craigslist to the Missed Connections section, but when Steve sent me this ad, it made me laugh – so I am sharing it with you!

RE: Cannondale R600c Compact Frame –
NEW – $900 Stop posting! – $1

Reply to: sale-562997321@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-02-04, 6:32PM EST

I think I am not alone in saying I am sick and tired of seeing this post!!

Look buddy new or not your bike has the lowest level of components there is.

People can buy a new bike at the bike store that is a current model with current components for half of what you are asking. Give up!!

I have never flagged your ad but I see others have. They are sick of looking at it too.

A BLACK and White TV was once a thousand dollars too!! New or not you cant give it away unless it was to a museum

* Location: NoVa
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 562997321

(Academic note: Isn’t it interesting how a post about an item — the bike — can be posted multiple times, but if someone were to follow suite in a missed connection it would be disastrous? Instead the entire online dating genre is plagued with “I don’t normally do this kind of thing…” disclaimers. Something to think about.)

Just to put us all at ease, here is some more typical craigslist based regulation:

I am gay but,I have to stop reading these CL listings. I am getting sick of what people are writing it makes me sick to my stomach sometimes. It shames me to be gay ,how did gay come to be basically all about sex. I am good looking and enjoy my sexually but some of you are just sick and perverts.If half of you that hang out in the suana and showers actually spent sometime on the floor working out you would not have to lower or degrade yourself. My gym has placed a camera in the showers and locker room, theirs a small notice at the desk to cover them for any law sui.t I will not tell you what gym. (The  bold is all me.)

A bit of vindication today.

It was two weeks ago that Trish saw a picture of a cat on my laptop and exclaimed “No more LOLCats!” She is so annoyed with the cats (or rather the frequency with which I will make a cultural reference to one) that even an analysis of the visual rhetoric involved won’t warm her up to the topic.

Well, apparently there is a reason, and Yale researchers have provided it: Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

Perhaps that is why Rae Maor predicted (shouting “LOLCATS will not die”, I might add) that 2008 will not see the end of our anthropomorphized friends.

Ahh, now that is nice. So Trish, this one is for you. I R B lulzin thrus the O-8s.

(via Digg/io9)

Hall Johnson, an American composer in the 20th century, is praised for bringing African American spirituals into the concert halls. It is interesting that this transition was not brought about by a wealthy financier, or changing cultural trends. It was Johnson’s arrangements that provided the ability for these spirituals to extend beyond their original community. But one has to wonder, would I have ever heard powerful pieces such as Lord, I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired, had it not been for Johnson? And if you consider his arrangements as more or less cultural translations, have I ever heard the song at all?

In Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, he describes an interconnected world that has emerged as a by product of “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World.” The list is comprised of technological and business innovations and the cultural implications of their adoption. Windows, the Internet, Out/In-sourcing, and even Blogs are covered by the wide net cast with each item on his list. The items on his list, however, serve less to isolate particular phenomena, and instead seem to capture an innovative trend or period. Each item captures a solution to some hurdle in production, and specifically, production of the self. (more…)

Approximately one year ago, Eric Nakagawa launched a site entitled “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” and provided one internet meme the focal point with which to start one of our quirkier fads.

A year later most people are familiar with the “LOLCat”, even if they don’t know it by name. The unmistakable combination of cat and garbled text that began with Happy Cat is now inextricably entrenched workforce culture. During last semester’s finals, when disclosed that I had wandered the library navigating browsers to LOLCats, what I didn’t mention was that it was the LOLCats posted everywhere in paper form (they were being used for some flier on stress) that had me thinking about LOLCats in the first place. Some how they had escaped from the ‘nets.

Last fall I had the opportunity to learn a distressingly large amount about LOLCats while writing do research on media comparisons. The resulting paper argued that the relationships between image and text in both LOLCats and silent films share striking similarities. Both captions and intertitles were introduced to augment and extend the possibilities of the visual content. Probably more important, the paper included plenty of pictures of really cute cats.

In the name of those cute cats, I am posting it here. Enjoy!

wants moar: the appropriation of text in the framing of visual media a comparison between LOLcats and intertitles

(cartoon courtesy of xkdc.com)

It’s official. I am presenting some of my craigslist research this Spring at the Space, Place and the Imagination conference at the University of Rhode Island. “Intimately tied to our understanding of ourselves and others, our environment(s), and our institutions, space and place shape who we are and how we understand the world in which we live.”

My presentation will focus on message production and content regulation in a space absent of persistent identities. Read the abstract after the jump. (more…)

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…)

While I tend to blog along the more social and theoretical sides of technology, I thought I would share a post that Phil Windley just threw up on his blog, featuring the top downloaded content on IT Conversations for 2007.

IT Conversations provides some of the most insightful interviews and programs, including a long time favorite, Tech Nation. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Phil, in an executive director role, has definitely poured his heart and soul into it.

I actually met Phil several years ago while I was doing the Dot.Com thing in “Little Silicon” (a.k.a. Utah Valley, just south of Salt Lake City). He would host (and I hope he still does) a monthly CTO forum that brought some wonderfully intelligent people together to talk about geeky, but always fun, topics. While Phil might not know this, it was here that I first began to consider the connections between culture and digital life on the internet. (more…)