Untitled and Undecided

Back in May I attended the annual conference for the International Communications Association for the first time. It was held in San Francisco, which made it quite convenient. danah boyd and I presented a talk based on some of our research on looking at home kids put together their MySpace profiles. The context for the talk was a panel entitled “The Rise of Remix Culture: Identity, Power, and Imagination.” I wasn’t really a part of the panel organization process, and so going into the preparations for the talk, I found myself wondering what “remix culture” really meant. While I have used the term “remix” in the past as a way of describing some specific practices on MySpace, I wasn’t (and still am not) a big fan of it as an adjective a specific form of culture or as a new form of cultural expression. As it turned out, my co-panelists, Mark Latonero, Aram Sinnreich, and Marissa Gluck, also offered some of their own criticisms of the term, which made me feel a bit less like an outsider.

Here is the text from the talk. It’s not that long, but to make it even shorter here is the basic gist: With respect to the teenagers that danah and I have talked to on our separate efforts, we have noticed a few patterns in how teenagers describe how they first learned to make their profiles and how they put them together. A MySpace profile isn’t really “mine.” That’s not just a cynical way of saying it’s Rupert Murdoch’s, either. Rather, a profile is the product of collective effort and collective technical resources that is ongoing. When teenagers (and adults as well) copy and paste code to create their profiles, they are not really remixing media, at least not in the way many people use the term “remix.” Rather, they are mixing code. This is not a trivial difference.

The result is that they are mixing pointers to other people’s materials, or at least materials that are technical managed and perhaps even “owned” by others. And this leads to some interesting tensions when savvy, snarky, and irritated media hosters have to deal with those who are stealing their bandwidth (see this guy and this guy though both contain some not so pretty pictures including a quite disturbing one in the second). Presidential hopeful John McCain ran into some trouble on his MySpace page this past March.

Given the nature of the practices and the tensions that come as a result, I don’t feel that comfortable simply lumping what teenagers are up to on MySpace and the resulting network of media into some unknown concept of “Remix Culture.” Rather, I’d like to understand what is different about MySpace profile customization than other cultural practices, such as remixing music or video.

Text from the talk.

Peter Lyman’s memorial service is going to be held on on Tuesday, September 11, at the Morrison Reading Room in the Doe Library, from 5pm to 7pm. Everyone is invited to attend (Map of campus with Doe Library).

Ryan forwarded me these two links regarding an adult’s (Gabe) participation at a Pokemon tournament (courtesy of Penny Arcade). Gabe wrongly suspected that there would be other adults there also and his reflections on participating, not just watching, are quite interesting, especially with regard to the different reasons people seemed to have for choosing their Pokemon teams (”cute” vs. powers and strategy) and also his battle with a slightly less big kid.

What I really liked though is 12-year-old Nausica’s response to his story.

Says 12-year-old “Nausica”:

Then the older guys came, I dunno how old they were but they were much older then most of the other kids there, they pretty much ruined the fun of it for everyone else there. I guess they weren’t really mean, but how they acted sounded alot like the boy you described…

So afterwards I really didn’t wanna play pokemon very much, and I thought I was gonna stop playing, cause I only really play to have fun, not to beat everyone else. Then today my mom (who is a big fan) showed me what you wrote, and it made me feel a million times better!!!

I couldn’t believe I almost let some jerks take away my love of pokemon!

It reminded me something that I’ve heard repeatedly from a few of my colleagues in the Digital Youth project: that we can’t idealize or romanticize kids’ social worlds uncritically. Kids have to grapple with politics and power in out of school, out of home, activities as well.

Gabe noted that he’d be “smiling for the rest of the week.” I think I might also!

On a related note:

I know someone who has either Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism (not quite sure which and the Wikipedia article on Asperger’s notes some controversy on how to classify). He’s now an engineering undergrad at a large state university, but when in high school he loved playing Pokemon tournaments. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he was (and I assume is) a really nice kid who I think probably loved to play with kids who were younger than him.

I remember him playing in a local tourney in Dayton, OH (at a card store?) when he came for a vacation; he was proud that he won the tournament and I couldn’t understand at the time why he would be excited about being kids who were several years younger. But, I think he saw them as social peers and there was nothing strange about it. Just yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned the amount of high-functioning autistic kids she has worked with in various internships who loved playing in Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments because it didn’t require eye contact, but I barely know what I am talking about here. I’d be curious to read more about this.