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cult-of-me

  • [Cult of Me] Research Questions (v1)

    Wednesday June 29, 2011 @ 11:12 AM (UTC)

    I’ve been incubating the Cult of Me as my next empirical project for the last 18 months. It started out as a single book proposal, and – with the help of readers, friends and (existing and future) collaborators – has now evolved into a three-book series based on the research I have already done, and the fieldwork I intend to undertake.

    There will be more detail in a future post, but to whet your appetite, here is a list of the initial research questions that I will be exploring over the next three-or-so years:

    How are the web technologies that we use in the West reflective of how we express personal identity (eg, Barry Wellman’s networked individualism) and how we ‘do’ relationships?

    How is this different to the ways collectivist cultures (China, Japan, Korea in particular) express their selves and relationships using web technologies?

    What are the culturally-embedded ideological indicators of the popular web services we use (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google), and how are they distinct from those used in China, Japan, Korea?

    How will the exchange of technological solutions (code, practice) between developers creating technologies within individualist and collectivist cultures affect how we express personal identity and how we ‘do’ relationships in the future?

    If you have any thoughts on these questions (pointers, research, contradictions), please do add them to the comments below.

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  • [Academic] Missing out on meat-space: Ubiquitous computing and the human experience of 'being online'

    Friday July 16, 2010 @ 12:58 PM (UTC)

    I gave the after-dinner talk at the recent Horizon Doctoral Training Centre’s Summer School at the University of Nottingham to a roomful of extraordinarily inspirational PhD students who are doing their research in the field of Ubiquitous Computing and the Digital Economy.  In it, I focus on what it is that computing cannot (currently?) capture about the human experience when online (accurate readings of friendship, social capital, trust, reputation and identity), but how applications like Twitter are helping populate the empty spaces that binary digits are unable to represent.

    This is a first stab at the synthesis of these topics based on my research and reading in this area with the aim of turning it into a chapter/chapters in a book,  and I was pleased to receive feedback and comments from the audience. For example, is it possible to quantify social capital in some way and then use that as the basis of a game to influence attitudes and behaviours? When I re-posed this question on Twitter, Matt Locke at Channel 4 Education (a publishing hero that has an award-winning stable of games for change) was adamant that, “games may create social capital, but it’s not a game in itself… It’s dangerous to think of social capital as an asset that can be measured or created… social capital is a story, not data.” I’d love your take on it too.

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