Breath of Life

Time to try and revive this blog. I’ll start off by posting some abstracts we are supposed to do for one of our master courses.

I’ll start off with

A Quick Look into the Article:

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

by

danah m. boyd
School of Information
University of California-Berkeley

and

Nicole B. Ellison
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University

Sites designed for social networking are quite a young internet phenomenon, and an even younger one research-wise. In an introductory article for a special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison aim at providing a conceptual, historical and scholarly context for the phenomenon they call social network sites or SNSs.

The authors define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Terms and definitions are always debatable, but I find this one to be quite good. The definition is very comprehensive but at the same time also confined enough, thus preventing excessive debating over the matter, although everything can of course always be debated if one wants to.

Previous Scholarship

Although the authors first describe the history of SNSs and then move on to describing the various scholarships that focus on studying the phenomenon, I felt going through the latter first fits my purposes better.

There are four scholarships presented in the article. Research focused on impression management and friendship performance, research on networks and network structure, research on bridging of the online and offline social networks, and research on the privacy issues that SNSs and other similar sites rouse. The authors also mention a growing body of research on other aspects of SNSs, such as the possible educational elements of SNSs.

Not being familiar with the history of SNSs research, nor the contemporary situation, I was quite surprised that such a young field is already so well defined, albeit not necessarily on a more general level. Young fields are obviously prone to terminological issues, and especially the idea of online and offline social networks – or online and offline life in general – is quite problematic. The line between the two is very porous, and as the authors note, most of people’s online social activity in fact circles around the same people as their offline social activity.

History

For me, the history-section of the article was the most interesting and educating, mostly due to being very US-centric.

According to the authors’ definition, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, was the first recognizable social network site. Although each of the three features described in the definition existed in some form earlier, SixDegrees was the first one to include them all. From the launching of SixDegrees in 1997 to the beginning of the next wave of SNSs in 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends.

The next wave of SNSs started – in theory – with Ryze.com in 2001, but in practice Friendster was the one that really kicked it off. Launched in 2002, Friendster was a social complement to Ryze.com, and designed to help friends-of-friends meet. In 2004, Friendster’s popularity surged, and the site encountered technical and social difficulties. From 2003 on – when Friendster was starting to have difficulties – many new SNSs were launched. Most took the form of profile-centric sites, but there were also so-called passion-centric SNSs, and as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing also began implementing SNS features. At the same time, blogging services with SNS features became popular, and SNSs were gaining popularity worldwide.

The latest wave in SNSs was started by Facebook. Although the history part thus far was very educating for me, this part was the most intriguing. Albeit having some sort of an idea of how Facebook, the mass media of our time, had started, I had never really looked into its history before. It was fascinating to realise that Facebook, among many other similar sites, started in 2004 as a very restricted site for Harvard students and employees only, but expanded to it’s present day vastness within just a few years. While this seems to be the trend of SNSs these days, some sites explicitly seek narrower audiences. Some intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite, others are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller.

The authors state that while websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are now primarily organized around people, not interests. According to them, this more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where “the world is composed of networks, not groups”, as they so felicitously quote Wellman in his article Structural Analysis.

It should be no surprise that the internet, built by people, for people, used by people, is all the time evolving towards the same models and structures that the offline world operates with.

References

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Wellman, B. (1988). “Structural analysis: From method and metaphor to theory and substance”. In B. Wellman & S. D. Berkowitz (Eds.), Social Structures: A Network Approach (pp. 19-61). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Essay on the Never-ending Debate

I decided to upload the essay I wrote for our first master course in hypermedia (or interactive media). It’s basically another (more thought-out) attempt in trying to situate myself in the “games as art” -discussion. Loads of the articles and books I’ve read on games and art didn’t make it to this paper, and loads more are still waiting for my eager eyes. Nevertheless, this course and essay were a nice, soft landing to the field.

The essay is a short and easy read. Please leave a comment/send email if the essay provokes any thoughts, you have some good ideas to share, or you think a certain researcher, book or article is a must for me.

(As a sidenote: I’m actually planning on gathering up a list of publications I should read, and publishing it here.)

Games as Art (manSEDANse09 -style)

First of all, let me point out that old jazz is so good I’m at a loss of words. Yes, I do realize this doesn’t seem to have any connection to games as art whatsoever. But it does, oh yes it does.

I’ll get back to that claim later. Now, back to the actual business. I had a fair share of “games meet arts” -debating today, starting with a some theorizing with Annakaisa Kultima at the soon-to-be-renamed Hypermedialab at University of Tampere, and continuing with a panel discussion at an event called manSEDANse09. As if that wouldn’t have been enough, the discussion continued after the actual panel was over, with Jaakko Stenroos (one of the panelists) and a fellow master student. After Jaakko left, we still continued the debating for an hour or two (or three) in a coffee house nearby.

The value of the “Games as Art” -panel discussion wasn’t so much in it offering me new information, nor in the panelists surprising me with their stance in the Holy War of Art and Non-Art. The value was in me obtaining good questions that didn’t get answered satisfyingly enough. For example, the classical question “are games art?” was flipped upside down by Jaakko Stenroos, resulting in “can art take the form of a game?”. Continuing from this question, and assuming the answer is yes, the next question would be “are games good art?” and “is there any artistic value in games?”. The original question Jaakko came up with was shot down by Jussi Holopainen with a counter-question: why couldn’t we just take games as art the way they are, in stead of using them as a material for making art?

Some excellent points were also made, about the true nature of art, and about the topic of the panel:

Art reveals something unexpected of the human nature and the society, something that makes you stop and think about the big questions in life, like “why are we here?”,  ”where will we go?” and “what the fuck?” (Holopainen)

The artistic aspirations don’t match with the current trends in the gaming industry. — An art game has to be unique, but when you make something unique, it’s hard to make people understand what it’s all about. This gets us back to the Dinosaurs versus Small Hairy Animals -notion in my previous post.

The division between art and games isn’t as steep as it seems. (Stenroos)

We don’t have game criticism, it just doesn’t exist. What we do have is game reviews. (Stenroos)

The panel ended with the panelists happily disagreeing on what kind of art games are, and me wondering about the question one listener posed: would someone play a game for the art-experience? I know I would, but what about the rest of the world? The Average Joes for example, would they do it?

Small Hairy Animals (MindTrek pt. 2)

As everyone knows, lectures, workshops and panel discussions are not the most important part of a conference. The most important part is everything that happens in between and after these (no I’m not referring to free food and beer).

Like I noted in my previous post, Adam Greenfields’ presentation really made an impact on me. Worrying that he might dissapear as fast as Miguel Sicart did, I hurried down to him to prevent such a situation. I’m glad I did, for it turned out he was leaving in less than an hour. Luckily, he was willing to spare some of that time for me, resulting in me having worthy information, and good hints on what I could and should do in the future. To conclude, I’d say he’s one pretty awesome dude, and I’ll definitely be following his doings from now on. Although, I have to admit I was disappointed with his attitude towards games (ie. dissing them), but I think I’ll just take it as a challenge.

After the chat, I walked around doing nothing until the end of the conference, and as I was just leaving, a guy came up to me, looking like he actually wanted to talk to me of all people. He had heard my conversation with Adam, and after he introduced himself and his ideas, I understood why.  The guy is called Slava Kozlov, and although still working for Philips, he’s starting up his own company, Summ*n, with a guy called Nikolay Yaremko. Their slogan is “We summon the futures for you to play with them now”, and it sounds very very intriguing to say the least. Obviously, their aspirations go well together with my interest in what games could be. Also, it seems that Slava appreciates what young people have to offer, and that is something I definitely admire. Can’t wait to see what happens with Summ*n!

Our chat was cut short by Slava having to go to an evening event. I had luck on my side again, and got to join the party, although I had no idea of what I was getting myself into this time.

The event was held at Demola in the Finlayson complex, and by the people running Demola. In their site, they say “Demola is a multidiciplinary open innovation environment for the creators of the next generation of digital products and services”. In practice, this means that companies (for example Nokia and TeliaSonera) that happen to have ideas they want done into real products can bring them to Demola, and teams of young talents from the three universities in Tampere get to use their skills and learn project working. Obviously, I had no idea of such a place excisting and definitely no idea someone was doing something so great in the middle of Tampere.

Not only was Demola inspiring, but the event itself was quite something too. Pardon my prejudice, but I never imagined that 40-something and older men (and women too of course, but not that many were present) could have such good and innovative ideas and such readiness for change, plus willingness to give young people some power too. On top of that, many of them are working for big, conservative companies. I loved the way the importance of humanities and art were brought up multiple times during discussion when debating innovations and the next Google. Also, an excellent notion was made:

“Everyone knows that dinosaurs used to be the ruling species, but they were wiped out, and their place inherited but small furry animals. Well, I see big companies as the dinosaurs of our time, and small, innovative companies as the small furry animals. No big innovations that changed the world have been made by the dinosaurs, but by the small, innovative and agile furry animals.”

I couldn’t agree more. Big companies are just too careful and too stuck in their ways to come up with the next Big Thing. The notion applies especially well to game companies, and is also the reason for games being pretty but brainless. Almost all of the few good, innovative games have  been made by small indie developers, not by Squeenix, Nintendo or EA. They’re not willing to take any risks, nor to think about designing games that would appeal to smaller audiences.

Enough of ranting for now, next I think I’ll look into Greenfields’ texts and jot down what kind of thoughts they provoke.

MindTrek Post-pondering

Thanks to our great faculty, we (hypermedia master students) were able to participate in MindTrek 2009 -conference. The conference was held in Hotel Rosendahl in Tampere during the past three days.

Since games are my intrest and academic is my way of looking at them, I decided to take part in the games track on wednesdays’ Academic MindTrek. Due to starting a new hobby, yoga, I missed the first part of it, so I might’ve missed something worthwhile. Unfortunately the part I did get to hear didn’t really have anything to offer to me. “Social aspects of gaming” and “”Games with an agenda” did originally sound like they might have some interesting views and theories presented, but turned out to be wasted potential from my perspective. Online-gaming, social networking and using games for serious purposes just don’t interest me, especially not from the point of view they seem to be perceived everywhere right now. MORPGs, online gaming and online socializing seem to be The Thing right now, and no matter where I go, researchers seem ridiculously thrilled about them. Ridiculously because I haven’t managed to grasp any other reason for the excitement except them being fresh, hip and new in the research world. Sigh. Trends and me just don’t go together.  Serious games, on the other hand, are definitely interesting, but there are some buts that I will discuss later on.

After such an uninspiring start, I started to get anxious about the rest of the conference. Will there be any lectures or people with interesting theories, or am I just going to stroll around the hallways, not knowing where to go and feeling very out of place? Well. The thursday lectures before lunch seemed to affirm my concerns, even if Chris Messinas’ lecture on OpenID titled “Identity is the Platform” was a very interesting one. Luckily, thursdays’ academic session started with an excellent keynote by Miguel Sicart, titled “Not to Choose – Designing Ethical Gameplay”. Damned was I thrilled! First of all, it was an excellent presentation, but it also happened to strike right at the core of my research interests. Unfortunately, that’s as far as my luck carried on thursday, because right after the presentation it turned out Sicart was heading back to Denmark in a blink of an eye.

In the end, friday turned out to be the most fruitful one, even though I arrived at the hotel very late, missing all the morning sessions. The first lecture I got to hear completely was Adam Greenfield on “Elements of a Networked Urbanism”, and boy it was definitely something. I have no idea why, but I never even thought about actually doing research on urbanism. One very thought provoking thought was the concept of ownership. According to Greenfield, owning things (ie. a car) is inefficient and unecological. What a brilliant realisation! As an (good) example he used was Spotify.

I also liked Greenfields’ realistic and anti-hype approach to technology and applications. He posed a very good question that reveals, on my opinion, his attitude quite nicely. I didn’t manage to write it down word to word, so I’ll just try to jot down the point: assuming that applications become so easy to use and comprehensive that no-one has to, say, actually find their way to meeting point X. In stead, they can just follow their navigator and find the place without using their own navigation skills. People begin to live in a kind of a fog, dulling their natural skills and senses. Well then, imagine a generation that has grown up with using such applications. What happens when (notice, not “if”) the network collapses?

On top of those, some quotes that I found interesting: 

“Nothing is more interesting than information about the place you are in or are going to be in a moment.”

“The city is for having the biggest possible number of different interfaces.”

“It’s not the advertising that’s the problem per se, the problem is the way it’s done.”

“If we’re not careful, we will end up being treated like objects”

The point of the lecture was that devices and applications should not be taken too far, because that would result in changing the urban life in a huge city completely, by destroying the element of surprise, chance and having to challenge yourself every now and then.

Well, it’s getting late and I’m feeling drained, so I’ll save the post-MindTrek fruitfulness for another time. Coming soon though, so remember to check my blog every now and then.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Defining a Research Question, part II

As I stated in my previous post, my willingness to take part in the Holy War of Art and Non-Art is nil. Trying to circumvent this issue, I struggled figure out what exactly is the thing I want to know about the combination of people, games and art/high culture. Thus, I delineated various versions of my focus around the same basic components: “do people consider games to be an art form?” or “people’s view on games as an art form”  or  ”the cultural status of games as an art form”. Somehow, all these questions felt incomplete , or even flawed.

Then it hit me. Although I do want to know the current status of games, the thing that really gets me ticking is delineating the possibilities that an interactive and powerfully expressive media form like games offers to people. What kind of a tool could they be for making art? What kind of feelings could be awoken, what kind of stories told, what kind of attitudes affected by using the technologies that already exist, or will exist in the near future?

Now, this is as far as I got, and although the focus feels a bit less flawed now, I feel like it’s still lacking something essential before I can really get down to business. Discussing the topic with my friend, I got a hint that might turn out to be more valuable than I first thought. The friend suggested that maybe the necessary tool that I need for narrowing down the topic might be doing the interviews I’m planning to do. Giving it some thought, I realised the wisdom of this notion. If I have a very strictly specified research question when doing the interviews, the possibility of me guiding the conversation to a certain conclusion increases a lot, maybe (probably?) too much. That would quash the whole point of my research, which is to let the people define what art is, not me defining it for them. So, should I take a leap of fate and let the people define the focus of my research?

The Unbearable Heaviness of Defining a Research Question

Incredible but true, I’m still not feeling sleepy one bit, although it’s already 4:30am (GT +3 due to DST). This obviously a perfect time for some Intellectual Scientific Theorizing (from now on simply IST). On the other hand, I already had issues when trying to figure out the spelling for ‘theorizing’, so this might turn out to be either interesting, embarrassing, or both. Personally, I’m trying to keep up the flickering hope of something useful turning up, so here goes, for your entertainment if nothing else.

The heading is unusually long and heavy of me (I tend to do the long and heavy -part in the actual text), but I could not imagine affiliating anything lighter with this topic. Judging from what I’ve done and learned this far, defining the research question is the Ultimate Trial. Once one has overcome the Challenge of Challenges, coming up with a new, well-defined, shiny and bright Research Question, everything else falls into place by itself. Yes, yes, of course I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, once figuring out a good research question, the rest of the work gets a heck of a lot easier, starting from source-hunting and ending up all the way in the actual thesis writing.

Although the almost-mythical Research Question seems elusive as ever (not only judged on the hearsay of graduate students, but also on my personal experiences), certain general ideas, topics and words keep catching my eye and ear time and time again. First and foremost, game studies. Mostly from a humanistic or a sociological point of view, although I’m also trying to understand the technological side of it. Narrowing down, I used to end up with game cultures, but recently the words have changed places or even form, and I’m sitting there with topics like “Games as Culture”, “Games and Culture”, “Games as Art” and “Games as High Culture”. Why? Let me open it up for you a bit.

Art as a whole is a phenomenon that has always intrigued me. Especially visual arts, like painting, sculpting and architecture never seem to lose their grip on me, and once I realized digital games is the area I want to specialize in, this art-fixation of mine started to hunt me more than ever. After my realization, some other topics have of course come up, some of them forgotten immediately, some still lurking in the back of my mind. Take Japan, for example. Some heavy lurking going on with this topic, since it even made me travel all the way to the other side of the globe for a year. While spending most of my time studying the language, I did also manage to wade some room in my schedule for getting to know the thing I went to Japan for: games. Especially people who play games, or even better, make them. Getting to know a number of people who work in the business was the final factor convincing me on the essentialness of including their views in my thesis, maybe even making it the focus of the research.

This brought up another thing that had been circling in my mind: finding out what people think about games. Game developers’, indie or commercial, but also gamers’ opinions. Very soon after coming up with this, I realized I also want and need the views of Average Joe and those of people who don’t work in development, but could otherwise be considered experts in the fields of digital games, art, Japanese gaming culture, and all these combined. The last group of people is quite a mixed bag of course. So, I’ve got both the question and the people to pose the question to, why am I still saying it’s heavy business?

First of all, I’m doing a master thesis, not a doctoral one. There is no way on earth I could even dream of including all that in a hundred-or-so -pages and ending up with a good thesis. An easy problem, granted, and solved, for example, by simply narrowing down and focusing on one group of people. That’s what I did, and ended up with this: “Are games art?”. This is the oldest version, and very, very intimidating. Defining the research question like that, I’d be forced to define not only what digital games are, but also take part in the dreaded What Is True Art -conversation.

Most of my antipathy for this debate actually results from something quite different from fear: it seems to me a very pointless and endless fight, sometimes inducing eerie similarities with that of different religious groups, and at others sinking to the level that makes a fight over which are tastier, strawberries or blueberries, seem sound. Come on people, face it: there is no absolute definition for art! I know it’s hard for a human mind to accept some things can’t be defined the same way as the tectonic structure of our planet, but that’s just how it is, so live with it. Art is something that has a different meaning and manifestation to each and every individual on this planet, and that’s the closest we’ll ever get of having an absolute definition for art. Take it or leave it, get all emotional or don’t give a shit, it doesn’t change the fact one bit.

Not wanting to take part in this Holy War of Art and Non-Art, I tried my best to find a more eloquent research question, and maybe did. Unfortunately that has to wait for another time (maybe tomorrow?), since I’ve stayed up ridiculously long and should go to bed. Stay put for another episode of some hard ISTing and exemplary Holy War -avoidance, it might be coming up sooner than you expect!

As a side-note: Damn I wish this thing had a footnoting-system. Another side-note: No laughing at typos and aberrations, it’s frigging 6:43 am here.

The Big T

Master Thesis. For some reason, these two words seem to cause an unreasonable amount of distress for a big number of people, both beforehand, afterwards, and in between the actual writing.

I say unreasonable because that’s what it seems to me.

Yes, it’s going to be a huge amount of work. A lot of concrete, hands-on, going through tons and tons of articles, literature, essays, conference papers etc. -type of work. On top of that, it requires an even bigger amount of work that is mostly unmeasurable: analysing, theoretizing, thinking and pondering. Over and over again. Last, and most probably least, is the actual writing, which will also require patient rewriting after rewriting after rewriting, with a lot of copy-paste in between. Interesting seminars, conferences and random conversations will also take up time and energy. And that’s just a quick depiction of the thing.

Sounds like a lot, so let me give you some perspective: a master thesis is about 100 pages, including the title page, table of contents, sources, appendixes etc. On comparison, the essays we write in university courses can be anything between 1 to 20 or even 30 pages, and if the subject is interesting, filling up 30 pages is not an issue. Rather, it seems to be too little. Doesn’t sound that bad anymore, right?

Well, if it does, let me add some more perspective: the usual time given for writing a course essay is about one or two months, and this is while studying full-time, meaning attending lectures and so on. The usual time given for writing a master thesis is one year, with only one or two courses on the side. A whole frigging year for writing 100 pages! Even with all the work that has to be done before the actual writing, I can’t seem to grasp the horribleness of the thing, no matter how hard I try.

On the other hand, maybe I’m a just fool trying to convince myself that it can’t be that bad. On the third hand, I spent a lot of time during the past two years trying to find out what exactly is so intimidating and life-suckingly exhausting about writing a master thesis, and this is all I came up with: nothing.

Well, no matter what my attitude towards it may be, it has started; my two-year-long journey through master studies, climaxing (or anti-climaxing) in writing The Big T.

Here goes nothing.

First proper post…

…coming up asap, hopefully tomorrow. Got loads to write about, so beware.