Children of the night

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This essay discusses rave culture by describing how a member performs their 'raver' identity online.

Why oh why can’t you just accept it? I’m a raver, not a f***ing drug addict! Yeah that’s right I do Es, I get plastered. Leave me alone, it’s my life, I think it’s sorted (DJ Hixxy & MC Storm, 2001).

Once an ‘underground’ youth subculture of the Gen X and Cold Gen Y age bracket in the 80s and 90s, the electronic music created by digital technologies that spawned the ‘rave’ scene and ‘dance’ culture still continues to assert its influence on youth culture and identity, on a global scale, to the present day.

The fandom created by this rave culture is evident in the continuous evolution of cultural, performative and local dimensions (de Kloet & van Zoonen, 2007) surrounding this rave and club culture community. Centred around a broad classification of ‘dance’ music with its many mutating sub genres, the idolisation of local and international DJs, as well as drugs, jargon, fashion, dance styles, and ideologies; the fans within this community discuss and ascribe to cultural elements which are neither static nor distinct for all ‘ravers’ as “rave, for the majority, is a ‘weekend’ culture of hedonism, sensation and escape” (Goulding et al 2002, p.263) that has now spanned two decades of youthful participation throughout Australia and around the world.

Fans in this community can be actively seen representing their raver identities in the Glowsticking.com (GS.C) website , dedicated to a particular prop used in the performative dance styles of rave culture, called ‘glowsticks’.

GS.C community members construct personalised profiles with the opportunity to blog, link to their existing websites, participate in various forum and chat discussions extending to Twitter and Facebook, and submit articles, photos and videos relating to rave/club culture. This allows the fan to express a representation of their identity online through a variety of textual and audio visual forms with others in the cultural community. For example, in the profile of a senior GS.C member, *+*Beautiful Starlite*+*, she states her interests in the ‘Personal Info’ section using jargon synonymous with rave culture:

Mixing Trance , Music Junkie (I love most EDM Genere's along with other Genere's) [sic], Learning new ways of Freehanding , Living Life To The Fullest, Loving As much As I Can, Laughing Till It Hurts, Smiling, and Just Being Me! P.L.U.R.R .o0o})i({o0o

Within the gallery and article submissions sections, GS.C members are able to upload personally created dancing tutorials, performative audio, videos and photos of themselves, friends and DJs at raves/clubs, and reinforce their online raver identities through attending GS.C’s ‘meet ups’ with others from the community, the outcome of which is documented on the GS.C website through photos and videos further establishing social proof of the community members’ cultural activism.

The online ‘narrative’ space GS.C provides, and the ‘techno’ music central to the performative rave culture are literal examples of how digital technology has shaped youth identity and social practices. This technological acculturation is noted by White & Wyn (2008) of Willis’ (2003) work:

“Young people creatively respond to electronically produced cultural products in ways that surprise their makers, ‘finding meanings and identities never meant to be there’.”

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^[1] Mixing refers to the audio mixing of various sound sources performed by a DJ to produce the effect of a homogenous and undisrupted sequential sound.
^[2] Trance is a sub genre of dance music.
^[3] Freehanding refers to a style of dance using glowsticks.
^[4] P.L.U.R. is an acronym within rave culture that stands for Peace, Love, Unity and Respect.

For a full list of references click here

How to add the Facebook Fan Box on Blogger

An updated version of this guide can be found here: http://maria-tan.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-add-facebook-like-box-on-blogger.html



Please note: 'How to add the Facebook Like Box' is the new version of this post.
The post you are viewing now was made in 2009 and may no longer work.

1. Get the code for your Facebook Fan Box. This can be done in a few ways, see the image above, or visit the fb Fan Box Wizard.


2. Sign in to Blogger and go to Layout > Page Elements.


3. Click Add a Gadget.


4. Choose Basics > HTML/Javascript


5. Add a Title and paste the code for your Facebook Fan Box under Content.
   


6. Click Save.


7. Preview and edit again if necessary. You can customize certain settings of the fan box.


8. Don't forget to Save the changes once you are finished :)
   

For my sidebar FB Fan Box widget to fit in snugly with my Minima Lefty template, I changed:

fb:fan connections="6"
width="200"
height="554"

Note: The scroll bar doesn't work in preview mode.

Playing dice with the universe

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This essay analyzes the role 'play' performs in media engagement, and discusses what the study of media play adds to traditional media theory.

“We are always immersed in something, whether it is narrative, a form of media, or just our own thought process” (Brooks 2004, p. 15). To ‘play’ is to begin one such process of immersion, to enter a state of mind which can ultimately define the nature of audience interaction with any form of media. As Vorderer (2001) notes in his analysis of ‘Play Theory’ and its relation to entertainment:

“Many theoretical considerations have described in detail how media users change their sense of reality by taking on the reality provided by the media while temporarily ignoring the physical and social reality in which they are actually living and in which the media is part.”

Interactivity is the media audience relationship in motion, encompassing why and how the audience connects through specific mediums, and the outcomes derived from those interactions. “Interactivity is not just a matter of usage but includes cognitive and emotional processes as well” (Carpentier 2007, p. 221).

The concept of play is important in studying audience interactivity as it denotes a subjective form of involvement that is constructed by the individual. This can in turn affect the individual’s attitudes and choices towards participation. For example, as Livingstone (2008) found in her studies of teenagers’ and their uses of social networking, self expression and creativity was not limited to simply “enacting identity” through publishing factual information about oneself, but also fictitious information that reflected the “teenagers’ playful, occasionally resistant style”.


Play also adds another dimension to both reception and effects studies in that it can augment the audience’s semiotic interpretations and representations of a text that has been either delivered to them or created by them. “Play liquefies the meaning of signs; it breaks up the fixed relation between signifier and signified, thus allowing signs to take on new meanings” (Kucklich 2004, p. 7-8).

An explanation of this can be attributed to the inherent ‘pleasure’ derived from experimentation mixed with imagination, a key theme in Stephenson’s work (1988) which contrasts the concepts of ‘work and play’ as parallel to the dualities of ‘pain and pleasure’. The subjectivity of this pleasure seeking behaviour has the potential to merge effects and reception studies due to play’s “intertextuality” and “fluidity”, an experience which Friedman (2008) describes:

“We may transition from watching a movie, to acting it out in front of friends, to re-enacting it in video games, to dreaming about it. These may be different forms of media consumption, but they are all aspects of the same circuit of play, imaginatively reworking the raw materials of story and character.”

Therefore when ‘Play Theory’ is applied to audience research, the scope of the media-audience relationship widens beyond that of effects and reception as they are intermingled in imaginative experimentation. As psychologist Albert Bandura, originally renowned for his effects related research, said during his later work on Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura 2001, p. 142):

“Analyses of the role of mass media in social diffusion must distinguish between their effect on learning modelled activities and on their adoptive use, and examine how media and interpersonal influences affect these separable processes.”

For a full list of references click here

Accepting the unaccepted

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An online example of geeks as 'resistance' and 'project' identities based on Castells' theory of the network society which explains how producers use language strategically to invite audience members to collaborate in the cause.

It’s the rise of the token smart guy, coming to a computer screen near you. Nowadays the mass media is saturated with symbols of ‘geekdom’ through tech websites and magazines, sci-fi genres, comic books brought to life, and even infamous hackers and their ‘underground’ society are now frequently portrayed in films and reported in the news. “In a new media environment characterized by sharing and creative repurposing, some fan practices and texts once labeled as ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’ seem much less stigmatized” (Tocci 2007, p. 1).

According to Quail (2009), the nerd has been historically constructed as an awkward, math-savvy, social and sexual failure which Konzack (2006, p. 2) dubs as an “intellectual cultural movement”. Drawing from Castells’ (2004, p. 8) identity structures, it would seem that nerds and geeks have formed their own sub culture of ‘networked individualism’ out of resistance and project identities as a defense mechanism from the world that shunned them.

A subset of this intellectual cultural movement would be the ‘hacker’ culture, in the mass media sense of the term, which encompasses the illegal activity of ‘crackers’ and primarily denotes advanced ICT expertise.

One well known hacker within this culture is Eric Steven Raymond (ESR), a writer, IT professional and self professed nerd and geek. On his website , ESR promotes his books, essays and viewpoints including a “HOWTOs” section on “Hacker History and Culture”.

ESR employs many techniques as elements of persuasive ‘techie-oriented’ language in the form of logical arguments and even humour found in his “Rootless Root” eastern philosophical parody of hacker culture. An authoritative voice is prominent throughout his website, using pronoun language to address the audience as though in direct conversation. For example, on his “In Case You Care” page, ESR writes: “If you are a really serious geek, you probably want to know about my home hardware.”

In ESR’s guide on “How to Become a Hacker”, rules of the hacker culture are outlined for the audience. From the outset, the audience is introduced to ESR as the “editor of the Jargon File” and other “well known documents” implying authority, and even social proof by saying, “I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies”. The audience is also appealed to emotionally through the semiotic “geek” and “nerd” identifiers, as ESR asserts in “The Hacker/Nerd Connection: Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking”. The reason why these identifiers connect with the inscribed reader is interpreted by Scott (n.d.) as a “deviant (or moral) career”:

Stigmatising labels are hugely powerful in shaping our sense of who we are in relation to significant others and to the wider society, and so a moral career can be one of the most defining influences upon self identity.

Although nerds and geeks have formed resistance and project identities in response to being social outcasts, they have also developed into legitimizing identities (e.g. Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak), whose complementary influence has become ever pervasive in modern society. Kendall (1999, p. 8) relates this to the ‘revenge of the nerds’: “Money confers status in the USA, and business and monetary success confer masculinity. Hence the ‘revenge’ of this previously non-hegemonic group."

For a full list of references click here

Leading freelance site acquired by Australian company

One of the world's largest freelance project outsourcing websites, GetAFreelancer.com (GAF), is now Australian owned, after a recent buyout by promising Sydney based communications academics saw the acquisition of GAF's Swedish parent company.

Previously owned by Plendo Sweden AB and Innovate it, GAF will now fall under the management of Australian company, Ignition Networks, under the direction of Michael Ruhfus and Pearcey Award winning CEO, Matt Barrie, who describes Ignition Networks as "a technology company in stealth mode".

Since the acquisition, GAF users have experienced delays in payment processing of up to two weeks for withdrawals of any income made through projects advertised on the GAF website.

Picture Kingz site shut down

Within 48hours of this blog's previous post on the Picture Kingz phishing scam, the website has successfully been shut down. The news was spread quite quickly throughout online social networks such as Facebook, Digg, and Reddit among other sites.

Mozilla FF users will now see an active Phishing and Malware Protection page when visiting this site, while IE, Safari and Google Chrome users will be unable to display the page or connect to the site's server at all.

If FF is not blocking this site for you, please visit http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ for more information on how to turn on FF Phishing and Malware Protection.

Caveat Emptor: Picture Kingz phishing scam

Recent spam messages sent from MSN referring you to a site called Picture Kingz is a phishing scam designed to steal your Windows Live ID account details. The messages may be spread through your friends accounts referring you to their photos or other files.

Do not enter your account details on this website. Their terms and conditions clearly state:

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination of the following: 1. Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site. 2. Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.