Atlanta Media Bloggers

What's been going on with me...

Hey y'all,

I been kinda quiet this week, because something both awful and tremendous has been happening to me, and it has to do with blogging, so I decided I should share it with you folks here.

I just launched a new blog Tuesday night, into Wednesday 3 A.M., and within its first 24 hours of existence, it got more than 1,800 hits, from all over the world, starting in Australia and New Zealand, within hours of the site going live. (2,500+ hits in 48 hours)

I'm still pretty new to this group, so you probably haven't gotten a good bead on my hobby horses yet, but a REAL big one for me is studying online cybercultures and communities, and working out ways to understand how online communities work.

This makes me somewhat of a hardass when it comes to certain marketing assumptions about passive audiences, because I insist on user-centered design, and also user-co-constructed design, or ideally, entire cultures or communities collaboratively authoring their own virtual landscapes, grassroots, bottom up.

You can see why the recent attempts to commodify and commercialize the blogosphere tend to give me the heebie jeebies. These appear to me to be overt attempts to co-opt true bottom-up communities with subtle market forces, to sell soap instead of making communities the true center of interactions.

I didn't study the force and empowerment of real online communities just to be able to better think up ways to co-opt them. Working in new media causes me all kinds of moral dilemmas when the prevailing winds favor commercial forces over community, content, and communications.

Sometimes I feel like these things are another variation of an experiment Ragu did during the 1990s with "Mama's Kitchen," trying to coalesce an online community around talking about all things Ragu, all the time. I mean, there's only so many spaghetti recipes you can share, you know? And the commercial agenda was just so overt.

That's why, when I went to do my dissertation research into cybercultures and communities, and how interfaces shape and are shaped by communities, it was important to me to find something REAL, vital, something amazing. And I did. It was pure luck. That's all it was, pure luck. I stumbled upon the most amazing dissertation topic in the world.

So like Margaret Mead, I did a cyber-ethnography as a participant-observer over a two-year period in that particular online community. I captured texts, charted online personas, analyzed chat room interactions, studied flame wars on bulletin boards, listservs, diagrammed web sites, and collected the creative and communicative output of a community that was tightly-knit, more and more empowered to greater social action and activism, AND a community that both competed with and interacted with the mass media providers which gave the community its center and reason for authoring its own virtual landscape.

I entered the community, became immersed in it, and along the way, it also changed me. I made life-long friends. That was important, because the point of ethnography is to become an insider, and to establish reciprocity with the groups you interact with, so that you are not only TAKING from them, but that you also give something back, so the relationship is balanced, and not colonizing.

Many of you know by now, the community I studied was the Xenaverse, the online fans of the show "Xena: Warrior Princess." This was actually a precursor of the academic "Buffy" studies that came later (heh, I did it first, but I also owe my work to the face-to-face Star Trek community researchers who went before me). I started my formal data-gathering in early 1996, and completed the dissertation in 1998.

The terrible, terrible thing that happened was over last weekend, but I didn't find out until late Monday night, after getting home from the Steely Dan/Michael McDonald concert at Chastain.

A dear friend of mine from the Xenaverse, an active, important, dynamic member of this community and a person I've known both online and in person for more than ten years took her own life in a small trailer in Haines, Alaska, a little town where she was the doctor and director of the small medical clinic, living the dream she'd had for as long as I'd known her.

I'd known her in New York; I'd known her in California when she was going to medical school, and I'd watched her take Xena as her model for living and insist on taking her medical training to the Alaska Bush, a place she'd dreamt of for years, to try to make a difference.

What happened to lead to this tragic event is a long story that I won't go into here. The truth is, an online discussion group I manage had just gotten one of her normal emails on July 31, and there was no sign anything was remiss, although we did know she was going through a tough time, health-wise.

By the time I got off work Tuesday, I knew I had to do a memorial blog site for my friend, and I finished at 3 A.M. (I don't know if you're familiar with the genre, but I've done two others in 2003, one for my uncle, because I couldn't make it to his funeral, and one for a dear professor who passed away a month later--you can see that one here).

In some ways, I built the site as much for me as for the community that had given me so much. It was a way to deal with my grief, to honor and give expression to all the different aspects of her life, and to give the virtual communities which were so much a part of her life a place, a focal point to express their feelings as well.

My heart is still so full at the incredible response to this site, and people are still subscribing, still leaving guestbook entries. Someone contacted me about the memorial service in Haines on Sunday, wondering if I could in some way host an open chat space for a virtual memorial service at the same time, maybe in Second Life, something we had done in the Xena Palace back in the day, when "Xena" was still on the air. It was an amazing thing I documented in my dissertation, online funerals and weddings, other parties.

But this is 10 years later. Theorists write about the "strength of weak ties," but what I'm finding right now is that these ties are not weak at all, were never weak. I saw it in the way the news swept around the globe, swept across cyberspace, within hours, within days.

This is something corporate interests can never duplicate, bottle, or harness. That is the sheer beauty of it. It is something true, real, and moving. It is dynamic, empowering, and bottom-up.

I made this blog because my friend will never have a gravestone, and because she has no other family but us, so this site is her gravestone in cyberspace, a place where her people, her tribe, can find her, can remember her and tell tales of her great deeds like they were stories told around the campfire, to be passed on.

I did not create the site. I just gave it a platform, and like any memorial service, the people who come to speak about the person we've lost are authoring the space into existence with the shape of their words, their feelings, their memories.

I know I'm getting sentimental here, but I'm just in awe of what is happening, and I have no one else outside of that group to tell about it, to share the story with.

Chris

MSM Meets Virtual World

CBS News recently did a feature about the virtual community, Second Life. The replay of the package that aired is on this list, scroll down to the one called Living In The Virtual World.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/26/search/main886284.shtml?searchString=virtual+world&source=cbsvideos&sort=1&type=any&num=10&offset=0

One of my oldest, dearest friends is featured in this package, Catherine Smith. She's head of marketing now for Second Life/Linden Lab, and originally from Atlanta. Dig that pirate ship across the bay! Gotta go get me one of those, fer sure. Or maybe that rock star wedding... Hell, I could even get a date in Second Life.