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i presented new material on ‘truthiness, dissent, and  an ‘ontology of truth’ (moving away from epistemology and towards understanding the forces behind ontology of truth–sounds fancy, but in the talk was able to show and tell with great examples: joe wilson ‘you lie,’ TDS clips, Bushin30 Second vids, etc)… using the work of jacques Ranciere (disagreement, police order, what counts as noise/audible/heard) and Nietzsche to make sense of how, in our sshrc interviews with digital dissent bloggers and video-makers, these folks struggle with truth:truthtelling:lies of media and politicans.  i break it down  to analyze moral truth, epistemological truth, truth as productive force..(and what about rhetoric? someone asked afterwards) .  many thanks to etienne turpin and kelly ladd as i prepared…and super thanks to dr. caroline bassett who offered a provocative response to the keynote with excellent suggestions.  looking forward to writing this up, hopefully with turpin, for CJC or ctheory or shorter version for first monday…

http://ir10.aoir.org/?page_id=99

Tonight Thursday October 15, 2009 on The Agenda on TVO will commence with a 15-minute 1×1 interview with Lawrence Lessig, on his essay “Against Transparency” in The New Republic.

Followed by a panel discussion on Digital Activism with Dr. Megan Boler (University of Toronto), Evgeny Morozov (Foreign Policy) and Andrew Rasiej (Personal Democracy Forum),  and Ms. Leona Hobbs from Social Media Group.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009, 5 PM to 7 PM
Fountain Room, National Arts Centre, Ottawa

The panel will be webcast live on our website.
Web participants will be invited to submit their questions online.

Opening remarks by
The Honourable Steven John Fletcher,
Minister of State (Democratic Reform)
Wael Abbas, renowned Egyptian journalist,
blogger and human rights activist

Megan Boler, Professor at the University of Toronto,
author of Digital Media and Democracy

Micheline (Mika) Lévesque, Program Officer at Rights & Democracy, and project manager for supporting Democratic Voice of Burma’s
underground journalists

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009, 5 PM to 7 PM
Fountain Room, National Arts Centre, Ottawa

Simultaneous translation.

Free public event by RSVP: [ http://www.dd-rd.ca/seminar2 ]www.dd-rd.ca/seminar2
[ http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/media/index.php?id=3036&subsection=news ]http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/media/index.php?id=3036&subsection;=news

The panel will be webcasted live on our website.
Web participants will be invited to submit their questions online.
Details available on the day of the event at http://www.dd-rd.ca/seminar2 ]www.dd-rd.ca/seminar2

]]> http://www.meganboler.net/2009/10/04/panel-october-7-new-media-and-repressive-regimes/feed/ 0 http://www.meganboler.net/2009/05/21/how-canadians-feel-about-sharing-information-online/ http://www.meganboler.net/2009/05/21/how-canadians-feel-about-sharing-information-online/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 15:49:35 +0000 adam http://www.meganboler.net/?p=737 Delvinia is a Toronto-based company that helps other companies understand the internet and make it a better place. In order to be useful to their clients they study online culture, and recently they released research into how Canadians use social networking sites and how they feel about sharing their personal information.

Personally, their findings give me a little hope because people seem to understand that blindly sharing their info isn’t a good idea. Still, there is room for improvement as to communicating the reasons why people shouldn’t put all their info online.

Another reason that people should be hesitant to share their lives online is that social networking sites don’t delete photos even if the user thinks that they have.

Delvina’s study can be downloaded here.

SOCIAL NETWORKING
Highlights about Canada’s view towards Social Networking include:

- 83% of female Canadians aged 18-30 feel digital technology allows for easier social connections, compared to their male counterparts at 76%.

- Only 6% of NGen and 4% of Gen X report visiting recent media darling, Twitter, in the last month. The same as other, less talked about social networks including Hi5, DIGG and Tagged.

- There is a significant difference between how frequently Canadians visit social network sites vs. post content. YouTube experiences the greatest difference between views and posts – for example, while 83% of NGen visited YouTube only 6% posted content. While 59% of Boomers visited the site, only 4% posted content.

(1) Unique web-based methodology: First, we are developing an innovative and experimental web-based methodology: rather than conducting the traditional “confidential” interviews, we interview female videobloggers within the very medium they themselves have chosen for public, creative, and political expression: YouTube. We will develop interview questions in a You Tube video post (filmed and posted by Kelly Ladd, under the supervision of the Dr. Megan Boler) and the female videobloggers will respond through their own YouTube channels and videopost responses. Thus the research conversation will be (a) immediately transparent and open to the public; (b) “answers” will remain under the participants’ “ownership,” thereby creating a new model of open access and transparency of research process too often hidden by traditional ethics protocols. Participants will control their own confidentiality concerns by filming their own responses and choosing how and what they wish to publish on YouTube.
(2) New research directions regarding women’s online practices. Through an online survey of 300 women vloggers and through our in-depth interviews, we aim to explore vloggers’ insights regarding
• diverse expressions of gendered identities,
• online audiences and cross-gender dialogue and response,
• our Open Access Research Design using their platform of choice, YouTube
• women’s under-representation within web-based communities

(3) Making Research Public through Digital Media: Our final aim through our “YouTube Research Channel” is to enable and invite public comments and response. Though this open and transparent process we aim to engage scholars, students, and wider publics in research that is usually “black boxed” and not made public until years after the research has been conducted. Our project will demonstrate how innovative social tools such as YouTube can be effectively used for social science and humanities research to engage subjects as collaborative peer experts. Our innovative approach to posting interviews through online YouTube videos and having participants respond via videoposts, in turn commented on by the public, allows for a truly open access, collaborative, and public research process.

Researcher Vlog:

>

three recent media appearances:

January 16, 2009 The art of Obama, Dave McGinn

http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=1185377

Jan 13, 2009 INAUGURATION HYPE: Buying into Obama, Andrea Gordon

“It’s all part of an era of rampant consumption, viral online marketing, cheap mass marketing”

http://www.thestar.com/living/Shopping/article/569834

January 16, Global TV News Hour
The Presidential Inauguration

http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/ontario/video/index.html

video for canadians

via boingboing

Just witness some of the major respected U.S. news outlets including the Chicago Tribune as part of the Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy, the San Jose Mercury News as part of MediaNews facing deep cuts, The Denver Post facing the axe, and eminent news feeds like Reuters forced to join with online upstart Politico Network while print, broadcast, and cable news shrink their news staff and news rooms, putting thousands of journalists out of work…

perhaps the fate of newspapers will be to do good not through informing citizens but warming them, as in this story of making coats for homeless people with shredded newspaper lining.
One Man’s Vision for Newspapers’ Future, as Insulation

Keep up to date on the latest through this useful index of NY Times news stories on the fate of news and technologies:
Times Topics: Newspapers

All I know thus far is that they claim they closed due to a lack of volunteers, but social media site Reddit has a submission implying that there is more to the story involving the Canadian Human Rights Commission.