Thursday, November 30, 2006

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Just a little follow up from the post about SL sex the other day. Ren Reynolds has a very interesting discussion of virtual prostitution rates being a good indicator of cross-world coin worth - like the economics 'mars bar' rate.

RPI goes from Retail price Index to... Role Play... something...

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Just occasionally I hate my other half.

He took a terrible, terrible photo of me pulling a face with his shiny new cameraphoneblackberryofevil, and it is now the number two google result for 'I made you a cookie... but I eated it.'

Great. Welcome to posterity.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life

Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk

BBC - Press Office - Network TV Programme Information Week 49 Tuesday 5 December 2006: Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk, BBC One, 10:35pm

Over the last couple of months, I've been occasionally helping out Zoe Silver, a director from the BBC Arts department, as she's been working on the latest edition of the arts show, Imagine...

Skipping to the end first.... Zoe's put together a really excellent programme about the creative culture of the web. It's not hardcore geek - that wouldn't be right for the audience of the show - but it's a great overview of the way the MySpace generation are changing cultural consumption.

The list of heavy hitter interviewees should give you a good flavour of how right she's got it: Tim Berners Lee, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales, Henry Jenkins, Chris Anderson... I hope you'll agree that's a good mix of people, all of whom have really sound insights into the way the web is permeating everyday life, and how media is getting democratised.

There are some real grassroots voices in there too - David Firth, creator of Salad Fingers, was reccomended by m'estimable colleague David Thair, and looks to be in the final cut. There's Dickon Edwards, Girl with a One Track Mind, and some modern beat combo called the Horrors, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting a preview DVD - at the moment I've just read an edit draft of the script.

I got involved with the project back in July; someone somewhere asked someone else if anyone knew about the internet and might be able to find a UK video blogger, and that someone asked someone else, yada yada, and that person put Zoe in touch with me. It turns out I don't know any videobloggers (at least, I didn't at the time) but what I do know about is stuff on the internet, generally.

We sat down a week or so later in the rubbish wine bar under my offices, and I proceeded to empty my head of the history of what, back in my day, we knew as cyberculture. Poor girl; two hours with me after a couple of glasses of wine, talking about the internet... I think I must have terrified her; I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Anyway; I've been acting as an informal 'web native' advisor - every so often being around when the production team has wanted to check the wording on the voiceover is right, or when they've wanted to set up a blog, or register a domain name.

I have to say, though, that the most enjoyable thing about the whole experience happened about a month ago after Alan Yentob, the presenter (and notionally my boss' boss, or possibly my boss' boss' boss), had a chance meeting with the DG in a lift.

According to rumour, they chatted briefly about the show, and as he left the lift, Mark Thompson said 'Oh, have you heard about Second Life?' The next day, I got a phonecall:

Zoe: Hello, me again. Now, do you know about Second Life?
Me: /laughs
Me: Yes, yes I do. I was wondering when you'd ask that.

So - Alan wanted an Avatar, and to visit the world for the show. My attempt was frankly rubbish, but Alan liked it enough to commission Kisa Naumova to create a proper version for him, and to manage the shoot in world. She did a fantastic job (I'm really proud of her!) - even getting K's new band Deathline to put on a gig for the film. Apparently, Kisa gets mentioned by name!

I'll pop a couple of screenshots up on Flickr, and link to them later. But for now, I urge you all to watch BBC One on 5th December at 10:35 pm.

And if you look really closely, you'll see 'me' in the background of one of the shots...

EDIT: 9 Dec

Natalie d'Arbeloff got in touch to point out I'd missed her off; so here she is. Stuart at Feeling Listless has gathered together all of the relevant links from the show in a stirling display of public service spirit, too.



Tuesday, November 28, 2006

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

Hey! Kids! Making video for YouTube?

Watch these useful guides from the BBC, on how to make your footage look better.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Musiccubes

BBC - Radio 1 - Musicubes - Constructor

M'estimable colleagues at Radio 1 are up to bonkersness again.

Super Public, Super Sexy

I'm making my Monday rounds of my RSS feeds, catching up on a few long-unread folders. David Hayward, at Functional Autonomy, is running a very interesting series of thoughts on privacy, and transparency, in a world where social networks and online behaviour destroy conventional notions of the public/private sphere.

His discussion of Danah Boyd's apophenia: super publics, and her throwaway comments about sexual privacy in a recent talk caught my attention.

I've recently become an 'expert' in Second Life. By expert, I mean someone who spends time there, actively thinks about the experience, and reads enough secondary literature around the subject (blogs!) to be able to contextualise it for busy media executives in a series of pithy soundbites. So, not especially expert by my own standards (I'd want some kind of PHD in the area to really consider myself approaching an expert in any field), but more than enough expert for the purposes of my job - moreso when you consider it to be an extension of the social aspects of living an internet-mediated life.

When I opened my Second Life account, I had the intention of keeping it very, very seperate from the rest of my online identity. After all, the fun of an alternate existence is playing with the boundaries of your behaviour, and exploring what it might feel like to be a different version of yourself.

Any internet identity used to be good for this kind of self-extension/obfuscation; Usenet of yore was full of nobody-knowing-you're-a-dog. I suspect the compressed, disembodied nature of online communication coupled with the being-someone-else-ness of the online space goes some way to explaining why heated arguments and griefing are more frequent in virtual commons than in real world public spaces. I should incidentally relate that someone-elseness to the disembodiment of the internet experience; the having your head in a different place to the rest of you.

Anyway; it turns out that the ideal position of keeping part of my online life seperate is untenable.

I shouldn't be surprised, really; I'm not noted for public discretion about what would be considered to be my private life*. Furthermore, I suspect that the more 'real' an avatar or alternate identity feels - and that's strongly related to the (visual, rendered, realised, identified) tangibility of the representation - the harder it is to partition off the existence of that self-shard. I think that Danah Boyd probably reached that conclusion well before I did.

Ishi - my current otherself - got off to a wobbly start in the seperation stakes. A comedy misunderstanding between myself and Alice meant my real name got attached to a Second Life product. Picofame followed, and I met a few people in Second Life who understood where my other Mildly Diverting internet identity lived. A friend who only knew me in world* could attach my real name to my avatar after seeing BoingBoing, and use google to find me elsewhere. My notoriety at work as being 'girl who knows about the internet' led to helping out on a machinima shoot for a fairly well known arts presenter, and more admissions to in-world friends about my out-world life.

But why seperate? Well, basically, sex. I'm fascinated by smut; those who know me well** know this. As I started spending time in Second Life whilst on holiday (both literally away from home, and on holiday from the work-play and social work-play of Warcraft) I had the time to investigate (indluge in?) the seedier aspects of the world. It's nothing unusual for me; I've investigated (indluged in!) some of the seedier aspects of first life too; luckily there are few permanent digital records of this though.***

David Hayman is perceptive around the intersection between shame and privacy:
If there?s anything in my life I?m really, actually ashamed of, it usually indicates that I don?t understand it well enough. Subsequent investigation shifts myself around that thing, either eradicating it from me or giving me a more confident foundation in that aspect of myself.


Whilst most aspects of my sexuality have shifted myself around them over time - I'm most of the way through adjusting to being post-gay (or, if you like, have come out and gone back in again) at the moment - there are still some aspects that I feel not exactly shame, but more... insecurity about. These are precisely the areas of self-formation that become attractive loci of exploration in a safe, alternate identity-space; playing with the thing that frightens you renders it powerless. When you couple that with the colourful group of people I hang out with, some of whom are much more concerned with privacy and seperation than I am and trust me not to violate their boundaries, then also consider that I am being asked to expose my online identity in a professional context, it becomes more of a tricky course to negotiate.

It does revolve around trust.

Giving a presentation over the summer, I was asked to demonstrate embedding a youtube video in a blog. I did; this blog sat on the projector behind me. Someone made a casual joke about my self description in the sidebar. Not about liking girls, but about being too serious. Does that person now have significant information about me that might affect my future career? It depends how prejudiced she is against serious people, I suppose; I do not have enough one-to-one experience of the way she thinks (either through talking to her, or through her online presence) to make a decision about the amount I trust her. Ages ago, I demoed Bittorrent to a producer here; my dowload list was rife with smut; embarrasing, but I trusted him just enough to make a nervous joke of it. I gave an adhoc demo of Bloglines to another group of people; they probably noticed the folder of feeds labelled 'smut', but in this case I trusted them all enough that I didn't compulsively make a joke of it. I've joined a few networking groups in SL that might impact on my professional life; I wonder, occaionally, if anyone might raise an eyebrow at the other groups I belong to. Which one do I worry about? The one whose honest reaction I can't judge.


The moments of flustered embarrassed panic I have each time this happens boil down to:-

  • having exposed something that transgresses a perceived societal taboo (etiquette breaches)

  • the potential this exposure might be used against me professionally

  • in ways I might not be aware of in a system where reputation is hidden

  • do I thus trust these people enough not to weild that power over my professional reputation I have just inadvertantly given them in ways that might negatively impact me?



Then, last week, I was asked to demo Second Life to a producer, and also to make a few clips to illustrate another talk. I made an alt, fresh and clean and innocent. But I didn't use her.

Why? Practically, because it was too much fuss to send through money and objects and yada yada. But also because I realised that, you know, Ishi is me now. That's me; the more salacious things I get up to online are probably more fun for being a bit secret and furtive, but shame is probably not a healthy reaction to the situation. It's not to everyone's taste, admittedly, but each to their own. The fact I'm out there enjoying these spaces and playing at the edges means my colleagues don't have to; in a funny way, it's valuable experience. It makes my presence in Second Life authentic. I hope, in some way, that my willingness to expose vulnerability there renders a reciprocal trust dynamic.

More from Danah Boyd:
A reporter recently asked me why kids today have no shame. I told her it was her fault. Media is obsessed with revealing the backstage of people in the public eye - celebrities, politicians, etc. More recently, they've created a public eye to put people into - Survivor, Real World, etc. Open digital expression systems coupled with global networks took it one step farther by saying that anyone could operate as media and expose anyone else. What's juicy is what people want to hide and thus, the media (all media) goes after this like hawks. Add the post-9/11 attitude that if you hide something, you are clearly a terrorist. Should it surprise anyone that teenagers have responded by exposing everything with pride? What better way to react to a super public where everyone is working as paparazzi? There's nothing juicy about exposing what?s already exposed. Do it yourself and you have nothing to worry about. These are the kinds of things that are emerging as people face life in super publics.


I'm not deliberately foregrounding my sexuality in these professional situations, you understand; it's incidental. It's just one aspect of the cloud of data on me, my tastes, my behaviours that is now present for all time on the internet. In that stew of data on me, my sexual life is as weighted as my musical tastes, or my reading materials; it's all noise, just data points and only relevant if you want to make it so. Added together, though, it will probably tell you if I am someone you'd find entertaining to have a chat with in the pub.


It's just crystalised gossip. How terribly, terribly significant.



* Much to my Mother's disgust, and I suspect my father's amusement. Hi Dad!
* I suspect findable on Google due to an unusual nickname, but trying would invade her privacy; this is about my relationship with my otherlives. It's all about me. Me me me.
** And in some cases, for values of well approaching 'met me whilst a little too drunk once, and heard it all anyway'
*** My ex was less lucky. I'm not doing *that* google search in the office though.

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

I would really, really like to prepare a paper for this on gender performance / perfomative gender and virtual worlds.

It's a shame my academic knowledge is ten years out of date.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Honest in a Second Life Article

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Magazine - Get a (second) life: "Given the camaraderie that had developed between us and my looming deadline, I decided to ask if either of them wanted to have sex with me. Laura immediately offered to ?give me the full works? in return for L$1,200 upfront - about $5 in real money. Things quickly came unstuck. For one thing, I had neglected to buy any virtual genitalia, which came as a disappointment to Laura when I took off my pants."

From an article in the FT - quite a nice, honest view of the world that doesn't shy away from mentioning that yes, a lot of it is about sex. I think this is one of the only mentions of the more adult aspects of the world I've seen in big media...

Monday, November 06, 2006

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

An interesting - and cleverly done - study of user behaviour on YouTube.

The foregrounding and public nature of social networking sites should, theoretically, make this kind of information much easier to come across.

I particularly like the fact that these average active users spend about an hour a day watching clips.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Crystalising a line's walk

Sketch Furniture by FRONT

This is extraordinary. I love the looseness of the lines they make (which, of course, are invisible to them) and the way the slightly tentative shapes still feel wobbly in the plastic furniture produced.

God, we live in interesting times.

More Cats

More Cats

This is an important public service, you know. Particularly this one.

http://www.knitemare.org/cats/270916538_37c1904290.jpg

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

A week later and this is still funny

CATS!

'Im in ur survr, steelin ur dataz'.

This kept me awake giggling at 1am this morning. Damn cats. What is it that makes today's memes so sticky, so appealing?