Although we are still a few months shy of wrapping up our analysis and writings, we will be doing our first major public presentation of our work on April 23, at Stanford University The event is organized by our funding organization, the MacArthur Foundation, together with Common Sense Media. We will have poster sessions featuring all of our case studies, and talks by danah boyd, Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran, and myself. We also have a distinguished panel of respondents: Dale Dougherty editor of MAKE, Deborah Stipek, the Dean of the Stanford School of Education, Linda Burch from Common Sense Media, and Kenny Miller from MTV Networks. Julia Stasch and Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation will also be presenting at the event.

You can find program details and the registration form at the Common Sense Media site.

The event will be webcast by Global Kids.

One important dimension of our research is to develop an understanding of the diversity in ways that different youth engage with digital media, and what some of the factors are that lie behind this diversity. While broad demographic indicators such as national context, socioeconomic status, gender, age, or race have been analyzed as sources of diversity in digital media adoption, we still have very limited understanding of the specific practices, social contexts, and cultural identifications that inflect digital media use in different ways. For example, while we may know the general demographics and numbers of US teens who have decided to participate in an online site such as MySpace, we know little about why particular youth decide to opt in or out of participation, and what the variables are—personal, social, cultural—that factor into these decisions as part of an unfolding life history. Why is it that some youth decide to participate in some online sites rather than others? How do social categories in youth culture such as “geeks,” “jocks,” and “cool kids” inflect participation online? How do specific hobbies, interests, and friendships factor into young people’s decisions of where to go online? As the palette of options for online participation continues to expand, it is critical that we look at the relation between the diversity in youth culture and the diversity in online engagement. The “participation gap” as Jenkins (2006) has suggested, is not simply about haves and have-nots in relation to universal resource, but about intentional decisions people make between different but equally engaged forms of online participation.

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Over a year of planning and organizing has resulted in what I think is a fabulous program. Big thanks goes to our curators who have put together the video programs, and our panel organizers. Special thanks to Charlene, Mariko, and Becky and Chris for all their work in getting the web and PR materials together. It is super exciting to finally be able to officially announce the event and start to welcome attendees.

Spaces will fill up quickly for the academic program and the workshops. The hands-on workshops, where you can get practical tips on DIY video making and distribution have a very limited number of slots, so please register early if you are interested in those.

The video screenings are all free and open to the public, so for those, you just need to show up at the event.

This event has really shaped up to be something well beyond my wildest expectations. It has been hugely challenging but rewarding to coordinate a very diverse group of curators, speakers, workshop leaders, and industry participants to get together for this. It's very important to us that word gets out to a wide range of people who have a stake in DIY, Internet and viral video, so please help us spread the word. This is meant to be an occasion for people to have conversations across the boundaries that usually separate different creative communities, technology developers, policy makers, and academics.

Registration information is here.

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE IMAGINATION: NEW MEDIA IN EVERYDAY LIFE.

The idea is that the series will showcase ethnographic and practice based studies of new media engagement, with a focus on youth practices, but not limited to them. In addition to the topic that is near and dear to our hearts, Ellen and I were united in our enthusiasm for a number of innovations in format.

One is that the books will be short and focused on ethnographic description. We feel that with qualitative studies, it is difficult to publish rich material in a journal-length piece. But often a study does not warrant a full book treatment either. Particularly with a topic like contemporary media, people often do smaller studies of particular online sites, groups, or practices, rather than holistic studies that are characteristic of more traditional ethnography. Often good descriptive work doesn't get out, particularly in book form, because genre conventions conspire against us. In the area of new media, we feel it is crucial that work gets out quickly, across a wide range of different case studies. Contributors to our series do not feel like they have to write a weighty theoretical tome or holistic analysis of "a culture." Rather, each book in the series will be contributing to a diverse corpus of qualitative cases that together constitute a descriptive base for understanding a complex and highly distributed set of cultural and social processes.

The other set of innovations that caught our interest were the publications formats that University of Michigan Press is pushing with their new imprint, Digitalculturebooks, of which our series is one component. The imprint is a collaboration between the university press and the library, and is pioneering new publishing strategies and open access. One of their commitments is to publish the books in the imprint simultaneously in print and online, and with creative commons licensing. It has been a real pleasure working with our editor at the press, Alison MacKeen, who is both enthusiastic and forward-looking.

Read on for a more official description of the series.

I had been working with Peter for three years now, on a large ethnographic project that has taken up the majority of our work days over that period of time. It's hard for me to imagine carrying on without working side-by-side with Peter, but we will eventually, and the project will become one of the many important legacies of Peter's time on this planet. Peter's contributions to scholarly life were unique in that they ranged to from foundational theoretical work in social science, to empirical studies that captured new trends in information science, to practical interventions in institution building. In addition to his work in the academy, Peter advised a wide range of organizations such as Sage Publications, the Research Libraries Group, and the Internet Archive. I was always inspired by his ability to navigate multiple social worlds, and understand the texture of culture, technology, and social institutions as an integrated fabric.

I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to get to know Peter and work with him, though our time together was much too short. Even though I knew him through many of the most difficult years of his life, when he was struggling with brain cancer, Peter never lost his serene and warm approach to life and to work. While I fretted and fussed, Peter never lost perspective on the bigger picture of why our work was meaningful, at the same time, always putting his students and colleagues first in his decision making. Even in his very last days, Peter made sure that we were all taken care of, conveying his love an affection to the people close to him at every opportunity he had. I look at Peter's relationships to his friends and family, and his stunning poise in the last days of his life as a model that I will always strive to emulate.

One of Peter's colleagues, Nancy Van House asked us to collect our memories about Peter, and here is some of what I wrote:

Since then, Daisuke Okabe and I have been conducting a longer term follow on in this work, focusing on Tokyo. We're following a more diverse set of participants over two years, looking at how their "portable kit" changes over time. Other than a short essay, we still have not published the results of this current research, but we've just completed a draft of a paper on the initial three-city study. I've posted it here.

This work on portable kits is in many ways an extension of our work on text messaging, but it has really challenged us to develop new conceptual frameworks. Unlike the text messaging and camera phone work, the work on portable objects does not center on interpersonal communication and sharing. Instead, the focus is on more impersonal and instrumental kinds of interactions such as financial transactions, and interfacing with infrastructures. We've had to delve into literature related to urban space, infrastructures and finances that has taken as far afield from the work on social relations that was central to our earlier mobile phone work.

Our current paper looks specifically at the ways in which people use portable objects to customize their relationships to urban places and infrastructures. We set up three different "genres of presence" in urban space that rely on the use of portable informational objects: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. Please take a look at the paper if you are curious about what these mean :).

We are inching towards closure on a collaborative research project that I was part of at the Annenberg Center in 2006-07. A few months ago I finished writing the introduction to the Networked Publics book that Kazys is editing, and I've just posted it here. I'm looking forward to this work getting out in print, but in the meantime, you can see drafts of the chapters on the networked publics site. Our goal for this book is to have a readable overview of current trends in Internet society and culture, centered around the shift towards the lateral networking of "publics." I hope my introduction does justice to the collection of essays represented there as this was a truely interdisciplinary and collaborative project.

The legacy of the networked publics group does not end there. Ever since the conference that we put on, a group of us at the Annenberg Center have been putting together plans for an event that focused on one dimension of the networked publics research agenda. After the Networked Publics Conference a year ago, we targeted video as the medium that would be next in the pipeline for radical reconfigutation. This hardly sounds prescient at this point in time, but we really did not anticipate the degree to which Internet video has captured the limelight in the past six months. This work to plan a follow on event is becoming more concrete, and we have recently announced it on our DIY media blog and on a new live journal community. "24/7: A DIY Video Summit" is an ambitious event aimed at making a statement and an intervention in the space of Internet video by drawing together creative, industry, and academic groups.

All of this comes at a bittersweet time because USC recently announced that it will be "decentralizing" the Annenberg Center, where all this work has been taking place, and which has been an ideal home for my research for almost five years now. There will no longer be a place for researchers and research projects at the center, and I will be moving, together with my projects and team, to another institutional home. I'm grateful for all the support that the center has give me so far - the warm and effective staff, the leadership, and fellow researchers. It really was an exceptional place to work, and the legacy of the research and relationships fostered there will have a lasting influence.

The dissertation and this paper is a cultural history of children's software, looking at the history of the industry, production, distribution and play through the lens of three key genres in children's software: academic/curricular, family-friendly entertainment, and construction/authoring. The analysis revolves around the claim that new technologies, as they become disseminated into the culture at large, become subject to genre harding, gradually domesticated and incorporated into existing institutions and discourses. In the case of children's software, many of the radical and reform minded premises of the early development context were converted into existing models of education and entertainment as the industry matured.

In many ways, the argument is pessimistic, and stresses the conservative tendencies of social and cultural structure, even in the face of promising new technologies. This may seem at odds with the more optimistic tones that often characterize my analysis of current uses of media by kids. I think it is important though that we recognize the power of existing structures, particularly the cultural and institutional opposition between education and entertainment in kids lives. It is only through understanding and addressing these structures at multiple levels--production, distribution, play--that we have any hope of transforming the conditions of learning in kids' everyday lives.

One of the few journals that I look at carefully each time it arrives in the mail is Cultural Anthropology. As a graduate student in the Stanford Anthropology department it was the journal I aspired to, and where all the cool intellectual debates seemed to be happening. I tried but didn't get published in the journal in the years when I did submit articles to journals. (I stopped doing that, but that is another story.) As I grew up as a scholar and my work turned more and more interdisciplinary, it still continued to be the one journal within anthropology that I would consider whenever toyed with the idea of writing an article for an anthro audience, or putting together a special issue. So I was happy when the new editors of Cultural Anthropology, Mike and Kim Fortun, asked me to join the editorial board of the journal. And now the first issue of the journal under their leadership is up.

I've still never gotten published in CA, but I'm enjoying being on the working board of the journal and discussing directions the journal could take. The reason why I've paid close attention to CA as a graduate student and beyond is because I could count on the journal to showcase the experimental dimensions of cultural anthropology, and to focus in on the theoretical debates that were challenging some of the existing assumptions of the discipline. As someone who was always on the margins of my own discipline, I found it empowering to see a journal taking on topics such as science and technology studies, media studies, or translocality as I struggled in my self-identity as an anthropologist. Of course these topics are taken up in other anthropology journals of the discipline, but in comparison to a journal like Current Anthropology or American Anthropologist, CA has always been a more compact journal that is focused specifically on cultural anthropology, and the more innovative dimensions of our sub-field. Mike and Kim's vision statement expresses this commitment with clarity:

Mike and Kim Fortun will strive to maintain the journal as a forum for innovative anthropological writing that helps shape new directions in the field. In their view, Cultural Anthropology occupies an important niche in what can be thought of as the ecology of anthropological publications, as a journal that actively promotes new approaches - encouraging experimentation with new empirical foci and modes of research practice, with emergent theoretical and political currents, and with new forms of anthropological writing.

Despite the fact that Neopets is one of the most trafficked sites on the web, and probably the most popular web site for kids, there is remarkably little research on it. The relatively young user base and the structure of the communication on the site are probably the main reasons for this lack of research attention. In comparison to MMORPGs or online forums, it is a challenge to research because the site attracts a large number of casual gamers, and there are no easy ways for researchers to hang out with participants on the site. We are, however, slowly accumulating some interviews with Neopets players as part of our digital youth research, and hope to have a more sustained description of Neopets engagement before too long.

This current paper was presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings, and describes some of the economic activity and exchange that kids engage with on the site.

Update, Nov 26: My personal email is fixed, and I am getting a steady trickle of old emails from early October or so. My apologies for all the non-responses!