I'm happy to announce (a bit belatedly) the first book in the Technologies of the Imagination series I am editing with Ellen Seiter with University of Michigan Press' digitalculturebooks imprint. Emily Chivers Yochim's Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity is a nuanced look at the culture and practice of skateboarders. The description of skate culture draws from popular media, as well as ethnographic research with skaters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have to credit Ellen and our editors Tom Dwyer and Alison Mackeen (formerly at UMich Press and now at Yale U Press) for seeing this book through to publication, but I am super proud to be able to claim it as part of our series!

I was interested to learn from the strategic plan that Wikimedia is currently sustainable by community contributions. The Wikimedia Foundation has received support from a range of private donors, including foundations, but the core financial support for Wikipedia is community-generated. As such, it follows in the footsteps of other member-supported models of public media, but is unique in not having a history of government funding, and having a transnational scope. And of course, unlike public television and radio, Wikipedia is not only community supported, but is community created. "We" the public donate not only our dollars but our labor, keeping the centralized costs of media making and distribution at a minimum.

First, we are opening the doors today on a new Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, and it's web site. DMLcentral.net. The research hub and website is a key component of the broader MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and is made possible by a grant that David Goldberg and I received at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The Hub will be facilitating research collaboration, organizing an annual conference, in addition to operating the DMLcentral.net web site. The press release of the announcement can be found here.

The launch of the Hub and DMLcentral also coincides with the publication of two of my books.

One of the problems with a new and highly interdisciplinary field is that there are few conferences and journals that really cater to our specific areas of interest. The MacArthur Foundation helped start the International Journal of Learning and Media to address this gap. The conference is the next step in this field-building effort.

The deadline for session proposals is approaching quickly -- October 30! Please consider submitting something and joining us for the event. I am confident that we will look back at this inaugural year of the event as the start of something memorable. There is a wiki for session organizing and more details below.

We selected a set of countries where there are interesting developments in new media uptake, but there is relatively little research literature available in English. The literature reviews are broken down by country, with Cara Wallis taking the lead on Chiina, HyeRyoung Ok for Korea, Anke Schwittay for India, Heather Horst for Brazil, Daisuke Okabe and I for Japan, and Araba Sey for Ghana. We will be rolling these out in installments starting today and continuing through March. You can find the posts at our Futures of Learning blog.

Although this literature review was conducted primarily to inform our ongoing research, we are hoping that this will provide a benefit to the broader research community by posting our work publicly. We are also hoping that by doing so we can get some feedback, particularly about literature we missed our gaps in our understanding.

The project has been quite a journey, and has been by far the most challenging and rewarding research project I've undertaken so far. It tested my skills at so many levels -- fieldwork, conceptually, theoretically, and in management. I feel so fortunate to for the opportunity to have undertaken this project with fabulous colleagues and a team of graduate students and postdocs who taught me so much along the way.

I'm particularly proud of the shared report that we have just released, which was a genuinely collaborative effort, co-authored by 15 of us on the team, and including contributions from many others. We took a step that is unusual with ethnographic work, of trying to engage in joint analysis rather than simply putting together an edited collection of case studies. We spent the past year reading each others interviews and fieldnotes, and developing categories that cut across the different case studies. Each chapter of the book incorporates material from multiple case studies, and is an effort to describe the diversity in youth practice at it emerged from a range of different youth populations and practices.

You can find all the details in the documents linked below, and a summary of our report. The book is due out from MIT Press next fall, but in the meantime you can read a draft of it online. Our book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Lyman.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend, but my team will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

The first is Networked Publics, a labor of love that was the result of a year long interdisciplinary research group that I helped organize at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Big kudos go to Kazys Varnelis who did the editing work for this volume. Every chapter is collaboratively written and is a result of a weekly faculty seminar and our engagement with a series of guest speakers. The goal of the book is to provide an accessible overview of some of the broad changes in our senses of place, public culture, politics, and infrastructure that have accompanied the shift towards a networked society. The concept of networked publics is meant to signal the lateral, peer-to-peer connections between "audiences" and "users" and the ways in which these connections are transforming our notions of public participation.

You can find a few chapters, including my introduction to the book online at the netpublics site.

The other book that arrived today is Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, a book that takes stock of the current state of affairs with regards to girls and gaming. It has been put together a decade after the publication ofFrom Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, and revisits the issues raised by the earlier book. Edited by Yasmin Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Sun, the book includes contributions by game makers as well as scholars looking at girls gaming. Written at a moment where gaming by women and girls has become well established, it chronicles a moment that is quite different from the earlier book, written at the height of the "girls games" movement that was aiming to design products specifically targeted to girls. While many of the issues of gender difference and access to technology persist to this day, the issue is not so much access to games, but access to particular kinds of gaming experiences that constitute a gender divide. The book has also expanded this conversation by soliciting contributions from scholars who work outside of the U.S., and I have a piece in their that discusses the gender dynamics of Japanese games.

It's great to see these works in print now, both outcomes of productive interdisciplinary collaborations that are pushing forward new paradigms in thinking about digital culture.

As part of the transition to new projects, I've moved my primary affiliation from USC to UC Irvine. At UCI, I'll be working with both the UC Humanities Research Institute and the Informatics Department at the School of Information and Computer Science. I will still continue to have an affiliation at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and will be organizing, with Holly Willis, a talk series on multimedia literacy, as part of the Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series. Our first colloquium will be on September 9, with Liz Losh.

My move to UCI was motivated by my desire to work with David Goldberg and the Humanities Institute, and to build new bridges to colleagues in informatics, CALIT2 and anthropology at UCI. I feel that I am getting the best of both worlds by being able to stay in LA and keep in touch with things at USC, while also developing new relationships and conversations further down the 405. And the commute hasn't been half bad, thanks to my carpooling with my colleagues.

I am starting up a new effort at UCHRI to build plans for a networked studio to facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations in the area of new media and learning. The project is giving me an excuse to do a good amount of reading in the area, and to visit with people and projects in the field, both in the U.S. and abroad. After being deeply immersed in fieldwork and writing, it's been a refreshing change of pace to pop my head up for a bit and try to take a broader survey of the field and catch up on the work of all my colleagues. I'm super-excited about the next steps that we are taking in our work with the MacArthur Foundation and the potential to build synergies between research, design, youth culture, and educational practice that can really have an influence on the shape of public education.

The code identifies, among other things, six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:

• Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material


• Use for illustration or example

Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material

• Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event


• Use to launch a discussion


• Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements
  depend on relationships between existing works

And if you haven't already, check out their video -- Remix Culture -- for a great visual overview and introduction to remix video.

It was a real pleasure working with Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, and the other committee members in putting this together. I learned a lot from the collaborative process, and was much impressed by Patricia and Peter's ability to pull together the insights and expertise of a diverse committee into a super-solid document.

Although we are still a few months shy of wrapping up our analysis and writings, we will be doing our first major public presentation of our work on April 23, at Stanford University The event is organized by our funding organization, the MacArthur Foundation, together with Common Sense Media. We will have poster sessions featuring all of our case studies, and talks by danah boyd, Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran, and myself. We also have a distinguished panel of respondents: Dale Dougherty editor of MAKE, Deborah Stipek, the Dean of the Stanford School of Education, Linda Burch from Common Sense Media, and Kenny Miller from MTV Networks. Julia Stasch and Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation will also be presenting at the event.

You can find program details and the registration form at the Common Sense Media site.

Videos from the event are available on YouTube.

One important dimension of our research is to develop an understanding of the diversity in ways that different youth engage with digital media, and what some of the factors are that lie behind this diversity. While broad demographic indicators such as national context, socioeconomic status, gender, age, or race have been analyzed as sources of diversity in digital media adoption, we still have very limited understanding of the specific practices, social contexts, and cultural identifications that inflect digital media use in different ways. For example, while we may know the general demographics and numbers of US teens who have decided to participate in an online site such as MySpace, we know little about why particular youth decide to opt in or out of participation, and what the variables are—personal, social, cultural—that factor into these decisions as part of an unfolding life history. Why is it that some youth decide to participate in some online sites rather than others? How do social categories in youth culture such as “geeks,” “jocks,” and “cool kids” inflect participation online? How do specific hobbies, interests, and friendships factor into young people’s decisions of where to go online? As the palette of options for online participation continues to expand, it is critical that we look at the relation between the diversity in youth culture and the diversity in online engagement. The “participation gap” as Jenkins (2006) has suggested, is not simply about haves and have-nots in relation to universal resource, but about intentional decisions people make between different but equally engaged forms of online participation.

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Over a year of planning and organizing has resulted in what I think is a fabulous program. Big thanks goes to our curators who have put together the video programs, and our panel organizers. Special thanks to Charlene, Mariko, and Becky and Chris for all their work in getting the web and PR materials together. It is super exciting to finally be able to officially announce the event and start to welcome attendees.

Spaces will fill up quickly for the academic program and the workshops. The hands-on workshops, where you can get practical tips on DIY video making and distribution have a very limited number of slots, so please register early if you are interested in those.

The video screenings are all free and open to the public, so for those, you just need to show up at the event.

This event has really shaped up to be something well beyond my wildest expectations. It has been hugely challenging but rewarding to coordinate a very diverse group of curators, speakers, workshop leaders, and industry participants to get together for this. It's very important to us that word gets out to a wide range of people who have a stake in DIY, Internet and viral video, so please help us spread the word. This is meant to be an occasion for people to have conversations across the boundaries that usually separate different creative communities, technology developers, policy makers, and academics.

Registration information is here.