Tag Archives: facebook

Choose Your Own Adventure on Facebook

October 15, 2007 By in cyberculture, digital fiction, New Media Literacies Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Following a lead from Writer Response Theory, I started reading Sugarcane, a “choose your own adventure” application on facebook.  At first glance it looks a bit tiresome, with pretty closed choices to click on to follow one of several pre-planned paths.  But on closer reading, it actually includes options for editing the story and adding in new pages through a wiki-style editing system.

Sugarcane is a collaborative writing system. Wander through the world of Sugarcane, choosing from multiple paths and contributing to not, as yet, extant locations.

There’s a story map which is clickable so you can enter at multiple points (so the narrative is more like a puzzle to unravel), and you can link your narrative threads to other people’s. You can also see who is reading and responding to your contributions.  The writing is described by one reader/writer as:

Sugarcane is obviously new, but already it is hosting eclectic writing styles. Some writers have opted for a surreal, Alice in Wonderland world, others for (somewhat!) realistic adult fiction, and still others for sci fi or fantasy.

I’m enjoying what I am reading so far and I really like the way writers are thinking and writing about how to make individual threads link together in this genre, e.g.:

If you have a situation where the character has a run-in with the law, you can now send them to “A Night in the Cells”.

For example, your character is doing something bad and someone catches them (this may or may not be the police). You have one idea where they talk their way out of it – but that leaves you with a linear storyline. Instead, you can give the reader a secondary option (eg start an argument, resist arrest, hand yourself into the police, push the shopkeeper out of the way and keep shoplifting etc)

Although it’s not finished yet, the storyline after “A Night in the Cells” will be deliberately broad – the story can apply to male or female characters, and all sorts of prior circumstances.

This is really lovely framing for writers new to the genre. I suspect it will catch on because its collaborative and interactive and game-like. But beyond the actual story is the fact that its on facebook, so you can friend other writers and learn about their life stories, kind of creating mini meta narratives in a way that hasn’t been quite so possible in other forms of digital fiction. A Million Penguins (which I wrote about in February) had a looooooot of meta-fictive melodramas, so it will be really interesting to follow Sugarcane. Perhaps with all the narrative path choices and the visibility of the thread links through the map it will be more about groups of writers creating multiple genres from the original UR story (why isn’t UR in the scrabulous dictionary by the way?) – rather than a competition to get your own thread heard.

Anyway, if anybody else is writing in Sugarcane, let me know so we can link threads. I’d like to explore it a little more from the inside!

What are you doing? A seemingly innocuous question, but… think again.

September 13, 2007 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

DSC01125Kittens

I’ve been studying with interest my 100+ friend’s status reports on facebook as they regularly change, and to a lesser extent my twitter followers responses to the question “What are you doing?“.

As most readers of this blog will know, I am fascinated with the way language constructs identity and the sorts of discourses that can be revealed about identity through a grammatical analysis of text.

This is easy to analyse with some accuracy in facebook status messages as they get fed into the news feed and changes pop in in a seperate window if you allow notifications and enable the pop-up through firefox extensions.

Chris Finke did a twitter analysis of the verbs people used to reveal what they were doing and discovered the following top 20 verbs.

1. going 8271
2. watching 5248
3. listening 4870
4. getting 4694
5. playing 4085
6. working 3634
7. trying 3599
8. reading 3269
9. waiting 2558
10. looking 2487
11. doing 2312
12. having 2215
13. being 2098
14. thinking 2072
15. wondering 1866
16. eating 1862
17. heading 1710
18. feeling 1705
19. making 1541
20. meeting 1452

What I am really interested in is any grammatical patterns I can find within groups that are common in defining their identity. Are the educators all using thinking verb? Are males all using action verbs? Are females using sensing and existential verbs? Do older users do this consciously as they have an identity management and reputation management system already carefully constructed? Do younger users think at all about how even their verb choices in their status constructs their identities in certain ways?

And this is not to mention the implicit communicative function of status messages, which would be more evident in twitter by a direct use of the @ symbol – but I see people in FB sending semi-coded, semi-public messages to each other through their status messages to create a blended kind of private/public dialogue.

And whilst twitter is poetic micro-fiction narrating the every day lives of your followers, the status message is more like an in joke, where threads of several messages relate to threads of others, and its like a cross-media narrative and puzzle to work out what all the relationships are.

Check back on your status messages and twitters and let me know – how are you constructing your individual or group identity, what processes are you using, do you have particular subsets of friends in mind you either explicitly or implicitly hope they engage with you.

One of the significant things for me is that people are learning how to do these practices within the community of practice. There is a seeming lack of “rules” to it, which provides scope and freedom for people to be innovative and playful with it. Precisely because it is an amusement, people don’t even necessarily use the words themed as the starter for the sentence “User is….”.

So… what are you doing?

My Digital Fiction Presentation for Futures in Literacy Conference

September 4, 2007 By in cyberculture, digital fiction, personal, Second Life, Virtual Worlds Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

My Students on Facebook

August 31, 2007 By in cyberculture Tags: 6 Comments

Just like a lot of other social networking spots before it (youtube, myspace, and even way back in the days where IRC was all the rage), facebook is beginning to get some negative press and there are calls to ban it in the workplace and to ban it in educational institutions.

Some of my undergrad English students have facebook (not all of them) and even smaller number of students friended me when I mentioned I’d use it as another space to deposit lecture notes for them.  It’s not really a course management space though I will trial a few features and see whether there’s any interest from the students.

What is most interesting to me though in light of all the sudden bad press about facebook is to see what sort of interactions the students are having with each other.  I am not spying on them by the way! And I do not have ethical approval to use anything.  But as a friend I am getting notifications and see a little of what they are doing and saying, and which groups they are joining through my own feed.  So its impossible not to see some stuff!

Here’s what I see:

A lot of discussion about assignments, clarification about criteria, support of each other prior to presentations, support and feedback to each other after presentations, and general discussion of their various units

Comments which are fair though perhaps bordering on harsh about their lecturers (x is such a hard marker, I had lecturer y and she is much easier). These comments are ones I often overhear as I walk into a class before it begins though so they do not surprise me

Some of the groups they join are kind of funny:

“If you can’t differentiate between your and you’re, you deserve to die” – oh yeah I approve of that one;

“Keep your f****** hand down in lecture and shut up. No one cares.” – well hmmm… it depends on the question. Once I had just finished explaining something in a lecture and then a student raised her hand and asked the very question I had answered, so I said “well this is a good test of who has been listening and paying attention, who can answer her?” and had another student answer her;

and “If a ginger kid bites me, what should I do” – I know this is a joke but hey, when you teach young kids and this really happens it is no laughing matter I can assure you!

I see some of the students talking and worrying about how much time they are spending on facebook, so they are conscious of balance and fitting things in.

I would never support banning of any form of social networking in an educational or work environment because so much of the talk and interactions are based on sharing, support and community building.  The jokes and silliness and play that goes on are pretty crucial to the sense of community and to developing trust.  As they trust each other more, they support one another more.

What I worry about more is the groups of students are not on facebook and who aren’t getting that same level of support and rapport developing with their peers. Facebook should become compulsory!  Oh wait… then it wouldn’t be fun…

Rate My Dorm Room

August 11, 2007 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , 1 Comment

ratemydormroom

From the article: Old media targets the facebook crowd comes this:

…many traditional media companies are also seeking to capture the Facebook crowd. But one such “old” media company hoping to make big a youth push that might surprise you is E.W. Scripps (SSP), the newspaper publisher that also owns cable channels Food Network, DIY and HGTV.

The company’s HGTV.com Web site has launched a popular feature called Rate My Space, which lets people upload photos of bathrooms, kitchens, yards and other “spaces” so that people can judge them and offer comments, tips and friendly advice. Charity Curley, the vice president of HGTV.com, said that the Rate My Space section of HGTV.com has 41,000 registered users and has generated 44 million page views since the end of February.

But for the most part, HGTV has catered mainly to an older audience. Now, HGTV is going after the kids as well. The company has quietly launched a Rate My Dorm Room feature on the site in order to attract the people that are most familiar with the concept of social networking and user-generated content.

I’m wondering whether the ratings system is used differently with the younger crowd to the adult crowd.  It kind of reminds me of the research that was done (about 10 years ago now – before myspace and facebook even existed) on how youth websites were analagous to their private bedroom spaces and a form of identity play. But it also makes me want to click on the photos on the cork board to get a close up!  It’s like the web has now moved so close to reality now that we want reality to be more web-like.  Or something.

The Cross-Media Self

August 3, 2007 By in cyberculture, Second Life, Virtual Worlds Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

andypart1

Yesterday when I added Andy Piper as a friend on Facebook, I flippantly said “now we’re friends everywhere” – since I knew him on Second Life, on Facebook, on twitter, on flickr, on his blog, and through his comments on my blog.

He paused for a while, then replied with a wide ASCII grin:

“friends *everywhere*? 8-) see http://onxiam.com/people/andypiper“ 

I clicked the link, and my jaw literally dropped in astonishment at the number of tracks Andy makes across the web.  How the HECK can any one person do so much?!?!

Right now I feel pretty overwhelmed by the number of social media spaces I seem to exist in: 3 blogs, 3 or 4 roleplaying forums, a fan forum, a zine, flickr, linkedin, twitter, facebook, Second Life (plus an alt), 2 youtube accounts, gmail, work mail, skype, google chat. People keep inviting me to new things but I just don’t have the time!  And each one of these has channels or groups or threads – I am in 63 flickr groups, 19 facebook groups, subscribe to numerous blog feeds, several podcasts and a number of youtube channels.  I’m part of 2 high traffic email lists (Association of Internet Researchers and Second Life Education), and about 10 low to medium traffic ones.

My solution at handling them all is to concentrate on two or three at a time.  The amount of reading and writing and uploading and downloading and viewing and clicking I do every day is becoming ridiculous.  I am a terrible commenter on friend’s blogs, I only blog once every day or two, I barely post to email groups, and I only keep up with urgent emails.  If I tried to fully engage in everything I wouldn’t ever get any work done!
Andy wrote a post about his experiences called The Quicksand of Web 2.0, in which he debates some of the pros and cons of different applications and talks about addiction and his “off switch”.

Its all left me wondering about the kind of identity play we engage in across all of these different spaces we inhabit, and the type of narrative constructions other people are making about us as they make connections between our multiple cross-media selves.

And is it possible for people who read your work across these spaces to suddenly get turned off by a bad case of TMI (too much information)?  Or as one of my literary colleagues is wont to say, “that person just has too much narrative going on.”

But not you Andy :)

On Facebook and Twitter: more from me and my new friends

August 2, 2007 By in cyberculture Tags: , 1 Comment

fbfriends

On Facebook:

Here are two fantastic podcasts to listen to about Facebook:

Tama Leaver discusses the recent MySpace / Facebook class meme that has generated a lot of International media attention, on Australian radio

Robert Scoble (and Calacanis and Felder) debate the value of facebook, particularly for the business community and its potential for viral marketing

I am totally hooked on Facebook, well at least for now *laugh*. I think the chance to play asynchronous games of scrabble has a lot to do with it!! But there are a couple of key reasons I find it culturally intriguing:

1. I’m really interested in the way it seems to conflate all my different life groups together and what that might mean. In Second Life there has been some blurring of boundaries between work and play, but there are some pretty clean demarcations of space which construct different areas as one or the other. Facebook on the other hand is much more like one single space, and so everybody you invite in will kind of co-exist. Right now for example, I have family, colleagues, friends and strangers all seeing me interact within and around all these various groups. Now although I have quite an extensive social presence online with my blog, flickr, podcasts, slideshares and so on, I am still quite a private, reserved person in general. So to have people seeing a much wider picture of who I am – like seeing me joke around with my niece, or dedicate a soppy song to a guy I like – is somewhat confronting to my sense of public vs private persona.

Australia has been late to come to Facebook. FB only became international in September of last year (I think) and our Universities have been slow to adopt. Right now there are only a few faculty members in all of my University using it, and none of my immediate Education colleagues have it. I’ve asked some of my students if they have it and have been met by blank stares. So although I don’t really mind for now that all my friends see so many aspects of my identity, I suspect I might come to censor it down the road a bit if it becomes widely used amongst my students.

2. The whole “friending” thing has been theorised really well by others who write about MySpace, and some people have called it a performance of identity that is contrived and fake. It’s also similar to the whole linking on blogs thing – as if who you link to might make you somehow better perceived by others just by association. But Facebook feels a bit different because its a reciprocal thing, so people are only listed as my friends if they choose to be. I have to confess that when Howard Rheingold became my friend I was thrilled, because it opened up a dialogue and we’re now also friends in Second Life. But I am equally thrilled when somebody I don’t know so well becomes my friend because I feel as though I have been invited into their personal domain – the flip side of the concern I had in point 1! People I didn’t know very well before, I now feel a lot closer to. I am exchanging messages with blog friends whose blogs I (shamefully) barely comment on (Scoble and his friends talk about this phenomenon in the podcast I linked to above). I am playing scrabble with people I might only have exchanged 2 emails a year with before! (I get hundreds of emails a day and am terrible at keeping up). Perhaps this is a false sense of friendship or community or relationship because I am just projecting here, but for now I am all wide eyed about it all.

On Twitter:

Here are some great posts about twitter I have noticed in the past two days:

Chris Duke talks about the uniqueness of twitter, what makes it special to him, and further elaborates on ambi-synchronicity

Alja writes a detailed and fascinating blog post titled “What makes Twitters Tweet?”

Cogdog and Andy made some great comments here on my last post in case you haven’t seen them, about economy of words and the multiple ways that people use twitter.

Personally I can’t seem to quite get the right feel for twitter yet, and I think that is entirely because of my time zone. I’ve taken some time each working day from the office to have twitter running – at lunch or in the background while preparing lectures, and its been very active and noisy and would be GREAT if I wasn’t trying to work. But with the new semester and hundreds of students (well ok I have 200 students) and lectures and workshops and everything, I just haven’t had time to join in during the busy times. And in the evening when I do have some time to join in, nobody is there until quite late. I’ve really wanted to explore and enjoy and participate, so its meant staying up a lot later than usual, and I won’t be able to sustain that for very long :) I guess that means I need to expand my twittering network.

The other embarrassing thing that happened to me is that I added lots of people to “follow” (i.e. I see everything they say) – and started twittering back in response to the things they were saying because I wanted to join in… and then discovered that they hadn’t added me so they couldn’t see anything I said to them! So it was like I was chatting away to an empty space and… you know what they say when you start talking to yourself, right?

So the synchronous side of things isn’t quite working for me, but its still been amazing from the asynchronous perspective. I found out about the first four links above to podcasts and blog posts from twitter, for example.

And more on the economy of text – the 140 characters you are permitted to use allows people to really play with their language creatively to get their ideas across. This is not new – sms and texting “language” has been around, debated and discussed for some time now. But I have found that with phones extending the number of characters allowed (and adding email functionality to them) that the creativity of language has become less essential in recent times. I’ve found it very refreshing to see this being rediscovered now with twitter, and I really hope they do NOT extend the character limit. I’m so tempted to give my students an assignment in which they have to respond to an essay question in one tweet, so that they learn how to be succinct and clever with their language, instead of some of the long-winded drudgery I get handed up to me :)

OK, midnight scrabble beckons.

The Writing and Communication Process in Facebook and Twitter

July 31, 2007 By in cyberculture Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Thanks to cmduke, my twittering pal, I have now discovered the perfect word to describe the communicative event: ambi-synchronous.  My genre colleagues will love this :)

I’m still learning what I can and cannot say on twitter.  I love the economy of signs/text, I love the interaction, I am fascinated with the different identity styles being played out in progressive 140 character tweets over time.

Next stop: twittervision

And Facebook is still feeling like a space to play.  My niece makes family jokes to me on my wall. My cats (which haven’t even arrived yet into my rl home for another couple of weeks) already have their own catbooks and are friends with the cat belonging to Kate in the US.  Its all making me LAUGH a lot and because I am enjoying it I am getting into the spirit of it by adding all sorts of weird and wonderful applications to share.  I am receiving the most thoughtful fabulous virtual gifts from friends (who clearly know me well given the nature of the gifts), and generally discovering new layers to people’s identities – in turn bringing communities closer together.

Its difficult to find time to really play as much as I liked – I wanted to develop a gorgeous habitat for my adopted pet, but that means running about petting other people’s pets before the kharma returns in the form of munney.

Please, dear readers, be patient with the ramblings of a newbie here as I get into both and then analyse them to death :)

But those who are expert twitters, was it “wrong” or a bit too “out there” for me to report news of absolutely no interest to my followers?  Where do I go to get more followers? What is the art of the 140 character solicitation? All these questions and more….

Am beginning to collect links about facebook by bloggers, anybody recommend any?

Facebook: A Space to Play

July 27, 2007 By in cyberculture Tags: , Leave a comment

facebook

I’m now on facebook!  Thanks to my friend Kate who I bumped into at the BlogHer Conference in Second Life, and who told me that you can play scrabble through facebook, I stopped resisting and joined up, and yes… now I am addicted! And enjoying a long distance one word a day game of scrabble.  I can’t believe how many widgets and STUFF you can do/add – and unlike my blog which I try to keep at least semi professional, it feels like a much more playful space.  Or maybe its just because it is new and the personal/professional boundary is still distinct.  Anybody else want to play (a slowish game of) scrabble?

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