Fred Turner of the Department of Communication at Stanford has just published one of the most interesting articles on a virtual community that I have read in a long time. \”Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community\” is interesting because it reveals the role of offline relationships in the origins and maintenance of one of the earliest online communities, the WELL (made famous in Howard Rheingold\’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier). Fred not only provides a detailed account of the origins of the WELL, but explores its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s. Fred\’s account is a great examples of the overlap between online and offline relationships using one of the earliest examples of a virtual community. The above link to the paper will only work if your library is an institutional subscriber, you may want to contact Fred Turner directly for a copy.
I am increasingly troubled within my own work about the imprecise nature of time use questions in surveys. We know that broad questions like \”how much time did you spend using email in a typical week\” are inherently unreliable. Time-use diaries are the gold standard, but they are difficult to analyze and very demanding of participants. I am starting to explore ways to use new technologies to automate the collection of both social network data, the use of media, and exposure to different media content. This article from the Globe and Mail recently came to my attention. It is about a pager size device that picks up inaudible sounds transmitted as part of radio and TV broadcasts to record exposure to different media. Of course it only gets exposure, not attention. Now if only we could find something similar to accurately record time spent using other media, such as email and Internet use, in context with participant\’s location and what they were doing online (reading CNN vs playing games).
Most of the literature on surveillance focuses on how government and corporate entities use ICTs. David Lyon has done some of the best work in this area, and Steve Graham recently published an edited volume, Cities, War And Terrorism, with many good pieces. However, there is another perspective, the implications for everyday ICT use on the surveillance of members of our personal networks, that is less often discussed. The exception, is the work of Nicola Green, one of my favorite articles by her is \”Who\’s Watching Whom? Monitoring and Accountability in Mobile Relations\” in Wireless World. Nicola points out the very real importance of the ubiquitous question \”Where are you\” in every mobile conversation. What has me thinking about all this is a cleaver little video short called Call Register, a good example of the impact of new media on surveillance within and with our personal networks. It is also worth pointing out the growth of recent tracking services for your teens and loved ones: article.