Happy birthday!

[altariel]

A very happy birthday to the splendiferous toft_froggy! I hope you're enjoying your day and I wish we could have flown you in for the Slash Fiction Day so we could have given you bumps!

Comments

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Good god, you made me flash back to primary school for a second, there. Um, thankyou! I am sorry I missed the Slash Fiction Day, it sounds like it was good fun this year, and of course I would have got to see you!

[nixwilliams.livejournal.com]

hola! so, i've seen you around on the interwebs, but yesterday i was talking about an event i attended, and having ponderings about future events gair said she thought you did your PhD on the topic or at least knew lots about it:

the ways in which the structures of different online {formats/software/sites} {create/influence/circumscribe} the kinds of {relationships/discussions/politics} that happen there. (http://nixwilliams.livejournal.com/188579.html)

so, i was wondering (if you don't mind me asking, and have the time, etc) if you could recommend any good resources or articles on the subject (INCLUDING YOURS, NATCH!) . . .

thanks in advance!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Hey there! :-D gair is right that my PhD touched on some of these topics, and I'm more than happy to rustle up some resources. I'm just about to start on this week's inevitable cycle of essay marking/tutorials, so I won't get a chance until the weekend, if that's OK?

I'm a little dusty, having not really looked at this stuff in the past couple of years, but the early stuff is still solid. A good starting point would be Sherry Turkle, whom I see someone has already mentioned on your blog: The Second Self and I particularly recommend Life on the Screen as a great introduction to all this.

Ooh, I was at a slash fiction conference at the start of the week: one paper (on last year's various discussions of race in online fandom) discussed Wendy Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Internet Optics. I haven't read it but, paraphrasing the abstract of the paper, Chun apparently argues that the early utopian marketing of the internet was based on an essentialist conception of race; the internet was marketed as offering a chance to escape from the "problems" of race - basically, a chance to pass. As I say, I haven't read it, but it sounds like there might well be good stuff in there. (The title at least presses all my buttons!)

Just a couple of starting points, and I'll try to come up with something more substantial over the weekend!