Carl J. Couch Research Award

I'm very flattered that a chapter of my master's thesis, "Your World, Your Imagination?: Representation and Social Expectations in Virtual Memorials" received the Carl J. Couch Research Award this past week. As a result, I'm trying to make my way to Copenhagen in October for the Association of Internet Researchers conference. If you've got a rich uncle looking to sponsor a rogue academic, give a girl a hollar.

You can read the chapter by downloading my thesis.

If you're interested in learning more about Carl Couch's symbolic interactionist approach to technology, I highly recommend his book Information Technologies and Social Orders which is a great read for those who like the works of Marshall Mcluhan or Walter Ong. Rather than merely making sweeping assertions such as Mcluhan's "media extend ourselves," Couch places these ideas within a social context and describes technology as a object which is continually being reconstructed through use and social orders. One might already see the connection to Second Life!

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa -- The Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research (www.cccsir.org) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award. The Couch Award is presented annually and recognizes excellent student-authored papers.
Richie Neil Hao, a doctoral student in Department of Speech Communication, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is the First Place winner for his paper, "Virtually Tsinoy: Performing and Negotiating Diasporic Hybridity Online."
Angela Adkins, doctoral degree candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Akron, Akron, Ohio is the Second Place winner for her paper, "The Presentation of Self in Internet Forums: Face Work without Being Face-to-Face."
A tie for Third Place means that there will be two award winners in this category. They are Sara Hebert, a master's degree candidate in Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver, for her paper, "Your World, Your Imagination?: Representation and Social Expectations in Virtual Memorials;" and Vilma Lehtinen, a student in the Department of Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland, for her paper, "Performing Diverse Social Relationships on a Social Networking Site."
The Couch Center established the Couch Award in 2002 as the centerpiece of an extensive awards program. Winning papers apply symbolic interactionist approaches to internet studies as advocated by the late Dr. Carl J. Couch, long-time professor of sociology at the University of Iowa.
Competition is open to graduate or undergraduate students of all disciplines, and winners are selected by a committee of university professors in communication studies and sociology from across the U.S.
This year's competition was rigorous, with entries received from students of all levels, from undergraduates through Ph.D. candidates, and were submitted by students from Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as North America.
Winners receive a cash award as well as the opportunity to present their papers at a national or international conference. This year's awards will be presented at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Copenhagen, Denmark, October 15-18.
The Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research is a non-profit organization established to promote the scholarship of the late Carl J. Couch and his academic associates. Couch is recognized as the founder of The New Iowa School in sociological and communication inquiry, and was a pioneer in the qualitative research of information technologies.
The Center provides networking opportunities for students and scholars who conduct social and Internet research, inspired by Couch's work.

Maya Lin's last memorial is a piece of activist art.

Maya Lin, the architect of the highly influential Vietnam Veterans Memorial is producing only one more memorial during her career. This time it'll be to the growing number of endangered and extinct species with the purpose of educating and motivating the public to take action:

Lin would like her new memorial to have global reach. She wants to use the Internet, interactive media and a book to tell people specific steps they can take to spare the environment, like avoiding plastic bags, insisting on shade-grown coffee or joining a program to "adopt" an endangered species and help protect it. She wants to unveil donated corporate billboards in locations such as Times Square, with 20-minute videos with images of endangered species and places.

Does this mean she is crossing the line from artist to advocate?

Lin paused for a thoughtful moment. As a child, the burning of toxic contaminants on Lake Erie did spur her to environmental activism. She petitioned the Kroger Co., owner of Ralphs and Food4Less, to ban animal traps and advocated for Greenpeace.

"I've always said I present history. I don't dictate what people think," she began carefully. "I don't try to preach. This one, like the others, makes you aware of it: 'Did you know the sound of the songbirds, as we knew it when we were little, are gone?' But yeah," she added with a shrug, "Definitely, I will be giving groups and people things they can do in their everyday lives."

While I believe that most of Maya Lin's work is activist media in the way challenges the public's normal engagement with memorials; her reshaping of the memorial landscape into spaces of activist art will be very overt in this memorial. I'm anxious to see it come fruition and what sort of new media applications she'll be using.

Read more at the LA Times.

PS. This really just makes me justified in what I'm studying - Hopefully one day I'll be able to incorporate Lin's final memorial into an extended essay on how the public used networked on-line spaces to memorialize and as activist media and how the memorial institutions have incorporated this behavior. Exciting!

Whirlwind writing

Wow, I can't believe I haven't posted in so long! I've been hiding out, writing a bunch on other chapters of my thesis, and in general being an overworked grad student. I'm loving it, but I'm also looking forward to June 7th, when I finally get to wear that awesome hood and get a little piece of paper proclaiming me as a Master of the Arts.

Here's a small update on what I'm working on thesis wise. I'm taking a close look at two forms of video tributes, the very unorganized efforts on YouTube related to Hurricane Katrina and the very organized efforts of http://iraqmemorial.org. The reason I'm looking so closely at just two memorial efforts is because of the way both events are critical pieces at revising American national identity and collective memory. They also vary much in aesthetic and organizing - but both have ties to activist media in that they challenge the forgetting of these people/events. I'm excited to be drawing on resources from Pierre Nora to the fan vidding and vlogging community. I'm attempting to not just look at literature produced by academics, but also by new media producers and their respective communities.

Check out the memorials I'm looking at:
Videos from iraqmemorial.org:


Video tributes on YouTube to the victims of Hurricane Katrina:


For now its back to work for me, but I'm hoping to keep blogging a bit more about my thesis as time goes on. I'm also working with Joomla! quite a bit right now, learning templating and doing some customization for a pretty rad organization in Shreveport. You guess who. Anyway, I want to share a little review of what its like learning and working with an open source community from a designer/developer stand point - so keep your eyes out for that! Aaaaand a new portfolio layout! Productivity!

Heath Ledger Facebook Memorial Group

I was wondering how long it would take for a social networking memorial to Heath Ledger to surface. It looks like it started immediately. This really shows some same qualities that spontaneous shrines have:

1. Lots of media or objects related to the person that died. Here on Facebook, there's movies, news media, images, user created media, sentiments from people ("I still can't believe it..."). There's a wide range of expressions from disbelief to claims about the validity of a suicide attempt. It is absolutely fascinating how rapidly this amount of information has been put into one place based on one tragic event.
2. Mourning in protest. There's some interesting discussion around random bits of media saying that Ledger is in hell because of his portrayal of a gay man in Brokeback Mountain. There are so many expressions of outrage at this claim made by some evangelicals, that it almost seems like the discussion thread on the memorial page has become a space for supporting gay rights. Take a look at this:

"Are people so ignorant these days that they will allow a person to be typecast for a character he portrayed and not the man he truly was? This man was a wonderful father and caring human being. He most certainly is headed nowhere near hell. Shame on these awful people for printing and saying such blasphemy. His sexual orientation (which was heterosexual by the way) should not determine his value as a human being. Have some respect for his family during this difficult time."

Memorializing Women

Lately on national holidays I've been thinking about something I read and had an "Aha!" moment. John R. Gillis notes in the introduction to his book Commemorations that there are no national holidays for a woman in the US (he also notes to the lack of them in other countries).

I'd like to propose a list of women who deserve national recognition for their dedication to the freedoms of US citizens:

• Elizabeth Cady Staton who wrote the Declaration of Statements was vital to the women's suffrage movement and was a social activist.
• Susan B. Anthony, another woman who played a vital role in the women's suffrage movement who has her own coin - ironically associating women with ownership and property once again.
• Another other woman involved in the women's suffrage movement who didn't oppose the 14th and 15th amendment openly and wanted to see rights extended to all citizens, irregardless of sex or race, like Carrie Chapman Catt. My vote goes to Catt.
  
• Rosa Parks, African American civil rights activist who capitalized on civil disobedience. There's been lots of attention to her work due to her recent death. There's lots of people honoring her - just no national holiday.

Anyone else I'm missing?

It seems more common to commemorate women through objects (coins, statues) rather than through living memorials such as national holidays or large public spaces (parks, buildings).

Benazir Bhutto Memorial in Second Life

There was a memorial service on Jan. 6 and a hopefully lasting memorial dedicated to Benazir Bhutto in Second Life. I haven't visited yet, and while this is more of a note for my own research, the quotes from two articles (Second Life Herald and GamePolitics) are extremely interesting. Here's a few making really poignant statements about the complicated method of memorialization in participatory spaces:

I give it approximately 10 minutes before it's covered in dicks. Posted by: Alyx Stoklitsky

...Regardless of how...complex...we might feel Mrs. Bhutto and her husband were in their nation's complex politics, we still can't but feel sorry and condemn this summary execution by terrorist forces. It should be thoroughly examined and Scotland Yard shouldn't be the entity doing the forensics.... Posted by: Prokofy Neva

BlackIce, Dragunov Marksman Says: Let’s hope it will stand for a little while.

lumi Says:I think this is a much better political use of SL than any of the campaigning garbage that’s been going around. I wonder if there’s some way that “Second Security” could be arranged to prevent it from being defaced. LL might want to look into that as a future service if it doesn’t already exist.

Thanks Josh!

RIP Stockhausen

Oddly enough, Just a few days after Josh and I made this lolspace in response to this article, Karlheinz Stockhausen dies. He worked to understand and compose electronically and as a result I think many people call him the grandfather of electronic music.

Oh and there's an online memorial already. Leave a testimony!

My initial thesis proposal

Feel free to download my initial thesis proposal on digital memorialization here. I'm looking at collective memory and how participatory culture can shape it through digital memorials.

Memorialization and the act of mourning have taken on new dimensions as society looks to digital spaces to collectively mourn and commemorate events centered around death. My thesis will explore how digital memorials contribute to and have the potential to change the collective memory of the landscape of tragedy. I will also observe the role of rituals surrounding mourning in these spaces, how rituals in non-virtual spaces translate to digital memorials, and what new rituals may be emerging. Also central to my thesis is the role of participatory culture, and whether or not it democratizes memorial space shifting power from large organizations and committees to the public. I will focus on specific examples of digital memorialization, or a specific tragedy and its digital memorials and place these within the context of collective memory and participatory culture.