Badgers, this is an update to this post. While my class on Internet Culture was initially approved, it wasn’t going to be able to count as a Global Studies course. They’ve asked me to instead reteach “Information Technology & Social Movements.” I’m a bit disappointed as I was dreaming of nyan cats – but, the [...]
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Normally, my blog is a space for me to think about my research. But, today I head to the funeral of a wonderful person, David Notkin. David has had a huge impact on my academic and personal life so I’m going to make a tiny space here in remembrance, a tiny space that is dwarfed [...]
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This post was written for the Jackson School of International Studies Correspondence blog. Go check out the other amazing posts! Last week I was in San Francisco to present at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Conference. I was presenting two papers. One paper was on my own research about online communities and political [...]
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This blog post is a challenge to two popular articles that were published in the last month about cyberspace and the state. Both conversations could be substantively enriched with grounding in a broader social science literature, the findings of political scientists, and others attempting to understand the relationship between the state and society. The first [...]
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Like many longtime World of Warcraft players, I am part of a very cohesive social group that meets up every week to “see” each other. As we are spread out across the world—Western Australia, Turkey, Canada, West Virginia, New York, Seattle, California—our community’s “place” is by necessity electronic. We are a close group. I was recently [...]
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Like many people, I spent all weekend reading every post and every news story about Aaron Swartz—whom I did not know, but whose work I respected. This weekend was the anniversaries of the deaths of two very dear family members as well, and so the news of his death and reading the sometimes too heartbreaking [...]
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Recently I returned to an article I had drafted about anonymity in online communities, begun while I was running on fumes during post-dissertation submission. As I have been working on it, the Reddit-Violentacrez incident has been shaping my thinking about anonymity. But what does anonymity mean? This is the question that my neglected article-in-progress [...]
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For weeks now on one of the most populated role-playing realms in World of Warcraft, a user has been hanging out and repeating explicit sexual scenarios in the trade chat channel, which is the conversation channel that has the largest number of participants. What this looks like is a paragraph of text describing a scenario. [...]
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When I first began studying Anonymous, I used to alias it. In the first talk I gave after Anonymous became so prominent and widely covered in the popular press that there was no point in aliasing the group anymore, someone said, “What possible alias can you give something that is already called ’Anonymous?’” Good [...]
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As most gamers know, Blizzard Entertainment launched Diablo 3 this May. Diablo 3 (D3) is the latest installment in a popular gaming franchise. How popular? Everyone in my guild speaks of Diablo 2 in hushed tones, much like they are discussing a beloved book from childhood. Love for Diablo 2 is so huge that forum [...]
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