Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Context and Power

February 2, 2009 by jkd

Charles Platt, guest-blogging at BoingBoing, shared the following:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world’s largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn’t ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

…

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be. My supervisor was friendly, decent, and treated me as an equal. Wal-Mart allowed a liberal dress code. The company explained precisely what it expected from its employees, and adhered to this policy in every detail. I was unfailingly reminded to take paid rest breaks, and was also encouraged to take fully paid time, whenever I felt like it, to study topics such as job safety and customer relations via a series of well-produced interactive courses on computers in a room at the back of the store. Each successfully completed course added an increment to my hourly wage, a policy which Barbara Ehrenreich somehow forgot to mention in her book.

…

Somehow that kind of news is never as popular as denunciations of the free market written by professional handwringers such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

Charles Platt, like the vast majority of WalMart’s management – senior corporate headquarters, store-located, everything – is a white man. Perhaps this difference between himself and Ehrenreich crossed his mind and he chose to ignore it, or maybe it never came up. But to point out the very obvious: white men have a massively disproportionate about of power in the United States. Whites generally have the lower rate of unemployment and higher rate of compensation; white men have higher rates of compensation and lower rates of unemployment than white women. Non-Hispanic white men comprise ~34% of the U.S. population and the era of Obama notwithstanding, continue to control the vast, vast majority of U.S. wealth, political, cultural, [FILL IN THE BLANK] power.

Platt isn’t a racist for not acknowledging these issues, nor a misogynist, nor do I claim any particular valor for foregrounding my white male privilege. It’s a marker of how ingrained and powerful that privilege is that an intelligent guy like Platt – a man who’s made his bread as writer and cultural observer for going on 40 years – could be quite so blind to it. The most revealing turn of phrase in his account is when Platt acknowledges that “Somehow [Ehrenreich’s] book didn’t ring true to me.” Well of course it didn’t – that’s kind of the point. It’s not about Platt – it’s about the two-thirds of the population (more, when you take into account class distinctions) that aren’t Platt and don’t have his built-in racial and/or gender advatages.

More in-depth treatment of other issues of race and achievement later this week, but this kind of set me off.

Posted in identity | Tagged | 2 Comments »

Podcasts and Radio – More on the Future of Media

January 30, 2009 by jkd

In his most recent online chat, Bill Simmons offered the following exchange:

PeteFitz (chicago): Mr. Sportsguy, Any reason for the podcasts over the columns these last two weeks? I personally like the columns better (for selfish reasons, I like to read at work), so I was wondering if there was a specific reason.

Bill Simmons: (12:50 PM ET ) Again, I am desperatrely trying to finish my book – so that’s one reason, I only have so many writing hours in me each day. The other reason is that I love doing the podcasts and feel like I’m on the ground floor of a medium that is really starting to take off. It’s like radio on demand and I think it’s going to kill satellite radio in 2 years. I really do. It’s also a huge threat to real radio in my opinion, especially when people can get internet in their cars and can just cue podcasts up within 3 clicks. It’s astonishing to me that nobody has written a long piece about podcasts yet. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened with sportswriting in the late-90s where nobody was taking the internet seriously and suddenly within 7 years there were a million sports blogs, mainstream sites were crushing newspapers and newspapers were hemorrhaging money. We are headed that way with podcasts. I just think radio is going to become much more niche-oriented over these next 10 years… people don’t see it yet. Christian Slater in “Pump Up The Volume” is going to look like a genius.

Bill’s a smart guy, and he’s obviously got a horse in this fight, so I’ll forgive him a bit of rose-tinted boosterism here. The death of radio has been confidently predicted for the better part of the last half-century to no avail, because what fans of [INSERT COMPETING MEDIA HERE] don’t quite get is just what it is that radio does or is. Radio is at base a very low-bandwidth media – you click it on and it’s there, and you can listen to it or not but can also be doing any one of a number of things (e.g., driving a car, cooking, working, etc.) and radio doesn’t get in the way. TV, the Internet and even podcasts demand more attention from the audience – you have to watch TV, read (or watch) the Internet and with podcasts, there’s the matter of a multi-click process of finding and then selecting the desired program. Those three clicks are a lot more important than Simmons allows for, because you have to think before and during them – radio doesn’t ask that.

This isn’t to say that radio is going to be unchanged  by the introduction of the Internet and podcasts (which radio developed a fancy word for a long time ago, “programs”). Before the introduction of TV, dramas and comedies dominated radio – they don’t anymore, but people still listen to radio. After a long period of domination by music, the 1980s through the present saw the rise and increasing dominance of the radio airwaves by talk and news radio – NPR is at least as big a success in this regard as the right-wing talkers. And maybe the large and still-increasing relevance of online news and commentary means that there’ll be a bite out of that audience. But that won’t be the end of radio, either.

What will happen – because it’s already happening – is that there’s going to be much more of a dialogue between radio and podcasts. Because radio producers haven’t had the same hang-ups about intellectual property as TV or the movie or record industry – they’re already giving their product away free and over the air – they’ve been very well-positioned to move online, and NPR has been among the best in this regard. Taking a look at the iTunes store’s (yes, yes, but it’s not unrepresentative) top-25 downloaded podcasts, fully seven of them are produced by NPR. Eight others are produced by the mainstream media; two are President Obama’s weekly address; one is produced by iTunes, another is ringtones, and only six can really properly be called Internet-based podcasts (including the Onion). Similarly, music blogs are now moving onto radio – Sirius’ XMU channel features several hours a week of music bloggers on their Blog Radio feature, which is a good deal for both – low production costs for Sirius, and more exposure for the music bloggers.

Radio is a channel, a low-commitment, low-bandwidth channel that’s good for passive interaction and has a huge installed base of receivers that isn’t going anywhere (to wit: what car manufacturer is going to go all Apple and be the first to take the radio out of the car?). I’ll allow – and hope! – that the Internet and podcasts might turn out to be good for radio by showing that there are large audiences for audio content outside of the current top-40/urban/country/Latino/classic rock/right-wing-talk/sports talk/NPR selection of channels (go on – try to find more than a few examples of major-market broadcast radio stations that don’t fit one of those). Or it could just work to reinforce the dominance of current audio content producers by giving them another another opportunity to disseminate their content. Most likely, a bit of both. But radio isn’t going away.

Posted in media | Leave a Comment »

On Writing

January 25, 2009 by jkd

One of my favorite authors, Jonathan Carroll, maintains a decidedly non-techy blog (Bill Gibson and Charlie Stross, not surprisingly, tend to be much more webizens in their online writings). He’ll sometimes share links but usually it’s small observations of the wonder of the mundane (his or his readers’), or excerpts from his writing that are appropriate for his mood. It’s a very nice blog, actually, rarely more than a graf or two a day but always worthwhile.

Today’s entry is more involved and descriptive than most, and quite helpful. I always enjoy reading writers writing about writing (or any practitioner writing about what they do, but given that I spend quite a bit of time fiddling with words, writers’ perspectives are especially useful to me). Not necessarily because their approaches are always applicable – neither profile of creativity/productivity Gladwell explored in “Late Bloomers” is anywhere near how I work – but just to see how all sorts of people approach the same issues.

Along those lines, here is some of what Carroll discusses:

One of the questions people frequently ask is do I ever get writer’s block and if so, what do I do about it? Luckily I’ve never had that gruesome beast but I do have some thoughts about it, and those thoughts run into the idea of creativity in general.

…

I like to write. I always have. I consider writing my friend. We sit down together in the morning and do our job. But (and this is a big but) if my friend Writing (notice the capital W) says not today because I’d rather goof off, or drink coffee, or nothing at all, I say fine—no work today. If that extends to a week, then so be it. Like the wild animals living so incongruously but comfortably in a gamekeeper’s house on the Serengeti Plain, Writing stays friendly so long as I let him come and go as he pleases. If he doesn’t want to stay in the house and walks out for a while, I simply do something else like read a book or go to the movies. I never, ever grab Writing by the neck and say you sit back down here and go to work. I’d never treat a friend like that, nor would I treat a tiger like that. So why treat the thing I love as much as my creative ability like that?

I believe people get writer’s block a lot of the time because they panic when the flow stops. Then they run around the house shutting the ‘doors and windows,’ trying to trap their creativity inside. Bad idea. I do think that if they were to just move away from the work for however long, many of their problems would solve themselves. Some of you could say yeah but I’ve been blocked for six months—what about that? I’d posit it’s likely some of your block, perhaps not all, is because you are frightened and trying to close all your windows. Which in turn has scared your Writing and made IT panicky. You get my drift. Of course there are exceptions. But I really do believe the greatest trick to either get going in the morning, or after a long dry spell, or even trying to conquer the fearsome mountain of ‘I don’t know where to go from here’….is to get up and walk away. At least until you feel comfortable. Or in the best-case scenario, until you are eager to get back to work again. Because at that point your friend Writing or Creativity says okay, I’m rested and ready to go. I’m so happy you left me alone to go out into the world a while to recharge my batteries.

Obviously it’s easy to take this advice too far, and just endlessly postpone dealing with the problem of Writing the Thing. There’s probably a contrast here between professional writers – for whom eventually finishing whatever they’re working on results in a paycheck and promise of another – and graduate students, for whom delaying completion of the dissertation can (to a point, after which the “Done yet?” questions feel like lead basketballs [or so I’ve heard]) extend a very pleasant life of inquiry and intellectual discussion in a nice place.

As I write this, I’ve just received the first feedback from my advisor on a very preliminary draft of one of the several chapters of my literature review. It’s a very incremental movement of the status bar across the screen, but it’s movement, and for me that’s one of the most important parts of the writing process. I tend to view writing as a problem-solving process: solving the problem of writing [WRITING OBJECT X]. This has been true for as long as I can remember, whether it’s a research paper, a newspaper article, a two-pager, an agenda, or what have you.

The first part of this process is understanding what the parameters are of [WRITING OBJECT X] – what are the variables I need to be aware of, what does it look like when it’s completed, what am I trying do here, etc.? Once I can quantify what needs to happen, I can start assembling the various elements and putting them together, and have at least a fair idea of how it’s going. The status bar is not a perfect analogy – at least for me, there’s no explicit “XX% complete” flashing – but useful nonetheless in that as I’m working I can definitely see/feel the movement towards completion. Iterations, drafts, processing of notes and citations are of course as important (moreso, actually) for me as the actual laying of words on the screen.

I’m lucky enough that this is all a pretty enjoyable process for me, which makes graduate school both a great place and something that is necessarily going to end as part of its nature. If there’s one central takeaway that I have found as a key to this whole process for me, one piece of advice that people seem to find useful, it’s this: words are not precious. Conceiving of the writing process as a problem-solving exercise allows me to let go of attachment to any particular set of words, phrases, or formulations. Revisions become not an ego-wounding and heart-wrenching process of letting go and moving on, but rather something more like adding a second (third, fourth…, nth) coat of paint to a room – something that is simply part of the project. And just as with any project that’s a problem-solving exercise – tilling and planting a garden, putting together a bed from Ikea, etc. – at the end of writing [WRITING OBJECT X] I tend to feel not the disgust and loathing that many writers describe with their just-completed works, but simply the satisfaction of a job done.

Speaking of which – back to work, now.

Posted in research | Leave a Comment »

American Journalism 2009

January 11, 2009 by jkd

Just in time for the New Year comes this heartbreaking account of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s impending demise:

Then, on Friday, the e-mail message from Oglesby. It was a body-less e-mail, the only text being that foreboding subject line: “Please join me in the newsroom for a few minutes for an announcement.” People in both newsrooms by now had a sense that it wasn’t going to be good news for the P-I.

…

“There’s nothing to purchase,” Lewis said. “We’re a room of people in a rented building. I’d happily offer my services. But I don’t know what they’d buy. I guess they’d get a letterhead and some pretty battered laptops, but there’s just not a lot there to buy.”

That roomful of people is worth more than nothing, but I’ll return to that in a minute.

Lots of newspapers are going to go out of business this year. “Dying industry” has become a popular catch-phrase but that’s not quite right – newspapers in American cities are going out of business for the same reason that the United States’ steel industry went mostly belly-up: poor management and an inability by said management and ownership to react to a changing world. Just like it wasn’t previously-well-paid steelworkers’ fault that their employers got it wrong, so it is not journalists’ fault that their bosses have screwed up so royally. Online it’s become popular to criticize the not-getting-it tendencies among American journalists, their knee-jerk anti-blogger sentiments and predjudice in favor of the status quo ante. I’ve indulged in it myself. But that’s not too useful and, at this point, kind of cruel.

That’s in no small part because the effect of lots of newspapers going out of business, is that many of the nation’s finest reporters will be without a job (bad for them) and without a forum (bad for us). The economic downturn is acting as an accelerant on pre-existing trends – newspapers that were already seeing declining revenues (from fewer subscriptions and less advertising) now see those revenues go through the floor as their advertisers batton down the hatches for a potentially long recession. And as the PI reporter notes, with many newspapers there’s not that much to “buy” – except for the capacity to report on the news, which right now doesn’t make that much money, at least in text-version. It will, sooner than many think, as advertisers abandon print entirely and realize the value of online advertising in local contexts (Google, of course, will continue to be the big winner here), but that’s an aside.

What’s available right now for the right investor – and given the economy, that’s a big ask too, but this is a real bargain – is a burgeoning national network of world-class reporters who’ll be desperate to continue in their chosen profession. Let’s say over the course of the year a major newspaper goes out of business in 20 of the United States’ 30 biggest cities, and that there’re half a dozen truly world-class reporters at each of those papers (this is probably both too conservative and too liberal depending on the city). Hiring at their previous salaries probably won’t be tenable in any construction, but let’s say $50,000/reporter, for $300k per city; add health insurance, expenses, equipment and call it $500k for a city bureau. If there’s 20 cities, that’s $10 million for the shoeleather.

Infrastructure, however, doesn’t need to be that expensive – you can start publishing each city’s Bootstrap Newspaper on a Drupal engine, and editors and fact-checkers (who are also finding themselves increasingly jobless) can do double-duty for  a few cities, with several tech-heads to keep the servers up (easy to scale up as the enterprise increases). Give reporters a decent digital camera (or give good photogs a laptop and let ’em write) and you’ve got pictures. Call that another $3-5 million/year for personnel and infrastructure, and for $15 million/year (which is $1 million more than the Post-Intelligencer alone lost last year) you’ve got a national journalistic enterprise of unprecedented scope and quality.

The real question – could it make money? I would say yes but in the short-term that’s not necessarily that important. $15 million is both a lot of money and really not that much – given the right leadership and local buy-in, this is an effort that could be supported both by local communities who want to keep reading their favorite reporters, and by the increasingly large number of people who get their news online exclusively regardless of it source – but who have a very keen interest in quality journalism. Yes, (some/many) bloggers would support this. And an increasingly formidable local/national news site would be a great place for even those advertisers feeling the pinch of recession.

No, it’s probably not going to happen. But really it should.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Song of the Day/Question of the Day 20081217

December 17, 2008 by jkd

“Real Long Distance“/Josh Ritter

What is the lag between proposal of new theories in a field and their widespread adoption (if they are adopted at all)? Is there a consistent model by field for this lag, or for adoption? What would be the important factors to examine in a cross-field metanalysis of new theory adoption?

Posted in research | 1 Comment »

Education

December 16, 2008 by jkd

This morning has been chock-a-block full of exciting and hopeful news on the K-12 education front.

First, I was excited to hear “controversial” Chancellor of Schools for Washington, D.C. on the Diane Rehm Show (you can listen to the whole hour there). Suffice to say, the moribund state of the DC schools demanded some kind of radical action, and Rhee has been undaunted in moving forward in the teeth of sometimes-strong opposition from some elements of the teacher’s union. I’m extraordinarily skeptical of any school “reform” efforts that have as their first priority some sort of union-busting (either de jure or de facto) measures, and that I find much of the school reform movement to be basically a politically-motivated attack on teachers’ unions. That being said, the pathetic performance of DC education and too many shameful actions undertaken or defended by the DC teacher’s union have lost them the benefit of the doubt at least for now. Rhee makes a convincing case for performance pay and against purely experience-based granting of tenure. I wasn’t entirely blown away by Rhee – she made a pretty lazy rhetorical defense of an attack by a cller accusing her of creeping school privitization by noting that she was also getting attacked by charter school advocates. But overall, I remain very excited for the new direction Rhee is charting for DC’s public schools.

Following almost directly on that was President-elect Obama’s announcement of Arne Duncan as the Secretary of Education. Steven Levitt is excited and that’s a pretty good indicator as far as I’m concerned:

He is smart as hell and his commitment to the kids is remarkable. If you wanted to start from scratch and build a public servant, Arne would be the end product.

Sounds pretty good! Of course, Secretary of Education is a position that has highly variable levels of influence depending on who’s President, but given Obama’s record at the state and Senate level, combined with having school-age children, and the frequency with which he talks in an impassioned way about education issues (including at today’s presser), it would seem to be the case that Duncan will be pretty well empowered.

Finally, I stumbled across this article at the Washington Post, detailing how my K-12 school system, Montgomery County (MD) Public Schools, is doing away with the “gifted” classification:

The label of gifted, as prized to some parents as a “My Child Is an Honor Student” bumper sticker, is about to be dropped by the Montgomery County school system.

Officials plan to abandon a decades-old policy that sorts second-grade students, like Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, into those who are gifted (the Star-Belly sort) and those who are not. Several other school systems in the region identify children in the same manner. But Montgomery education leaders have decided that the practice is arbitrary and unfair.

Two-fifths of Montgomery students are considered gifted on the basis of aptitude tests, schoolwork, expert opinion and parents’ wishes. Officials say the approach slights the rest of the students who are not so labeled. White and Asian American students are twice as likely as blacks and Hispanics to be identified as gifted.

The article doesn’t explicitly mention Dweck’s and Steele’s research, but the implications of “gifted” versus non- on theories of self and stereotype threat is hard to ignore. Telling kids that they’re “gifted” leads to entity theories of self, which leads to difficulty later – telling kids that they’re “not gifted” leads to academic disengagement – and kids seeing for themselves the racial and ethnic disparities in gifted classification leads to the formation and reinforcement of pernicious stereotypes about intelligence and academic performance. A change in semantics isn’t going to change all of this, but it’s an absolutely excellent first step.

Though to be fair, this is not the best example:

Montgomery officials say their formula for giftedness is flawed. Nearly three-quarters of students at Bannockburn Elementary School in Bethesda are labeled gifted, but only 13 percent at Watkins Mill Elementary in less-affluent Montgomery Village are, a curious disparity given that cognitive gifts are supposed to be evenly distributed.

As a proud alumnus of Bannockburn Elementary School, I profess to exactly zero surprise that we have so thoroughly whipped those little slackers from Watkins Mill.

Kidding! Kidding! Doing away with gifted-ness is an excellent thing, no caveats.

Posted in education, identity | Leave a Comment »

Song of the Day/Question of the Day 20081126

November 26, 2008 by jkd

“Black Swan“/Thom Yorke

What are the factors that lead to rationalization of markets – in goods, services, thoughts, artistic expressions – online? How does this compare with rationalization of markets in a city

  • pre-newspaper
  • in the newspaper era
  • in the phone book era

Posted in research | 1 Comment »

THE_REAL_SHAQ

November 21, 2008 by jkd

via Jesse Taylor, I discovered that Shaquille O’Neal has a Twitter feed. I heartily agree with Jesse’s assessment that it’s “a thing of terrible beauty, like a fresh lilac, standing in the midst of a raging fire” and want to also deconstruct the whole project of Shaquille O’Neal having, you know, a Twitter feed.

There’s been some commentary over the last year or so of the increasing prevalence of celebrities participating in social media – Martha Stewart’s blog is a pretty great exemplar of this – and a lot of the focus has been on their utility as marketing vehicles. And of course that’s right – they allow celebrities to give their most dedicated fans even more content in what is, or what appears to be, an unfiltered and more intimate context. In addition to Martha and Shaq, you can point to Rosie O’Donnell’s often-incomprehensible blog, John Cusack’s direct involvement with several modes of media in promotion of War, Inc., Gilbert Arenas’ blog (check out especially his absurdly long Nov. 15 entry) and many others. This is purely anecdotal on my part, but it seems as if after an initial period where many celebrity blogs were heavily vetted and often rather obviously not written by their purported authors (but by, e.g., executive assistants), many more celebrity blogs really are written by said celebrities. Maybe that’s not true in every case or even most cases but I can say with confidence: Shaq is definitely writing his Twitters.

That’s pretty damn interesting. And per Arenas’ blog, he’s not the first star athlete to dialogue in this way with fans. But Shaq in particular is an interesting case for me. He’s a guy who was for a couple of years one of, if not the, biggest stars on the planet. He’s pretty clearly on the downside of his career, and there are a lot of other NBA stars who (justifiably) get more attention than he does these days. Is a Twitter feed just a way to get some more attention back for a guy so used to it? Maybe, but I’m not so sure – let’s look at some of his Tweets:

Cant sleep, the lakers embarrassed us, im pissed

Is the new james bond movie any good

THOSE R NOT TYPOS, JUST SAVN MONEY, MORE U TYPE MORE U PAY, LOL

I need help subway or schlotsskys for lunch, big game tonite

Stuart scott from espn said greg oden looks 42 , lol dats funny

Those are… exactly the kind of Tweets you would expect any other Twitter user to write: expressing frustration around life events, sharing pictures, soliciting feedback from the community, referencing shared external media, and even meta-commentary on the medium. Shaq’s not just using Twitter, not just getting some attention or marketing himself (seriously, does Shaq ever need to market himself?), he’s entirely authentically participating in the discourse of the medium. And: why wouldn’t he?

This is I think the key point: celebrities, and athletes during their seasons especially, actually live pretty lonely and socially disconnected lives. There are thousands upon thousands of fans following them but a star can’t very well actually engage with one fan in particular, without opening the floodgates. So they have to be aloof, detatched, and close in their social worlds to the team, the production crew, the hotel room. That’s very isolating, but a medium like Twitter is actually perfectly designed to inject sociability into that kind of a life. For a small investment of time and social energy, Shaq can broadcast his frustrations, desires and observations to the large universe of people who care about him and what he has to say, and receive social affirmation in return. Looking at his feed you can see that all the entries are via txt – unsurprising, as the cell phone and texting practice has become ubiquitous in both the NBA and youth culture more generally. And given that he’s got his cell phone with him everywhere, he’s able to transform the isolated social life of a star into a more intimate one. He’s following 114 people, a large but not unmanageable number to keep up with, and so creating a social universe in what could otherwise be an alienating space.

Long story short: Shaq is on Twitter and it makes total sense. That’s pretty great.


Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Status Updates

November 20, 2008 by jkd

It’s been a busy fall for me offline. My continuing work with the Bot2.0 project was a big focus, as was research on Facebook and Flickr use patterns. The former resulted in a poster at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, which you can get here [PDF], and also in a presentation I gave at the ASIS&T annual meeting, filling in for Jane Greenberg – that’s available here [PPT]. The latter two streams of research resulted, so far, in posters with Fred Stutzman and Carolyn Hank, respectively, at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Columbus, OH at the end of October. We’re continuing further analysis of the data – some good stuff there – and I’ll probably be talking more about that in the coming months. For now, here’s the poster [PDF] me and Carolyn put together – lots of fun and some interesting findings so far. Myself and Fred will probably get around to putting together a better-looking version of the poster data up at some point.

All of these updates and a few others have been logged over at static me, including an up-to-date CV, if you’re into that sort of thing.

As semester five rapidly draws to a close here in North Carolina (it started?), I find myself getting frighteningly close to thinking I might know what I’m talking about, a bit. And also aware that it’s a pretty small slice of the whole thing, but that that’s okay. Unless it’s not. That tension will, I’m pretty sure, describe the next 18 months or so of my life (current target/guess for how long the next several steps of the process will/should/might take). May or may not inspire me to get around to updating here more often; for more banal day-to-day observations check here.

Posted in research | Leave a Comment »

Gamers

September 16, 2008 by jkd

As Fred noted, there is a new, excellent-as-always report out from the Pew Internet & American Life Project – “Teens, Video Games, and Civics.” [PDF] To get it out of the way up top – no, not really, there’s not much positive correlation in terms of civics and game-playing. Nor negative. This is in part because being a teen means playing games today – 97% play some games, 99% of boys and 94% of girls. But also (and as the report points out), a single data point often isn’t enough to really draw out relationships between categories of behavior – you need longitudinal data for that, to see if, e.g., long-term people substitute civic activism for game-playing, vice versa, there’s a positive correlation between the two, etc. As of now, a first study is a good place to start.

There’s a lot to pull out here, but a few points bear mentioning especially. Teens today continue to follow the general pattern of all Internet users for as long as there’s been an Internet in one key way: a very small minority of them are involved in virtual worlds/IVEs/MOOs. For as long as there’ve been stats on this, somewhere between 5-10% of those online have participated in these worlds – for teens today, it’s 10%. That makes it by far the least popular genre of games, no contest – by contrast, 74% play racing games, 72% puzzle games, 68% sports games. MMORPGs are the next-least-popular genre of games, with only 21% of teens playing one.

I have a hard time not saying again and again, “I told you so,” here, and won’t resist the urge with this data. As fascinating as IVEs and MMORPGs might be, it is beyond a doubt at this point that they represent intensely exceptional behavior in terms of any possible population. The future keeps not being MOOs, MUDs, the Metaverse or Second Life. Because more or less everyone is online, now [87% of teens in the last Pew study], it’s not for lack of opportunity – they just want to do other things. And what they want to do is play all sorts of other games with their friends – 65% of teens play games with friends in the room with them, 27% with friends online, and only 24% play games only alone.

All of this adds up to a number of conclusions, but chief among them is that the portrait of Internet users and/or gamers as reclusive loners is more or less a total figment. Games are social, because people are social. Some people aren’t social, but most are – and in a population who all play games, and almost all of whom are online, those who play games or are online non-socially are the exceptions, not the rule.

Which is not to say that there aren’t interesting things to ask and find out about those people who are exceptions – from other data Pew collected here, it’s clear that users of IVEs and especially players of MMORPGs are different and different in interesting ways from other teens, generally. What this data calls for is more thorough ethnographic investigation of the communities of practice within the group “gamers” which is at this point synonymous with the group “teens” and, increasingly “people.” And I want that research to happen! But it shouldn’t be generalized – it should be contextualized.

Posted in research, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »