My initial thoughts on Leveson

December 3rd, 2012 by

Having read much of the Leveson Report and listened to much of the debate in Parliament so far my conclusions are this:

  • Journalists and editors should have to be a member of a professional body, which can fine them and suspend them. This could be any professional body approved by the Privy Council. In the case myself, as editor of The Crocels News, this would be BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT.
  • Media Corporations should not be subject a dedicated regulator, but the same regulators/Ombudsman services as other corporations. Information misuse should be subject to the rulings of the Information Commissioner for instance.

I would now transfer the powers from organisations as follows:

  • The BBC Trust, OfCom, and the PCC for content regulation in terms of standards and decency in content to the British Board of Film Classification. The BBFC is one of the most respected and independent content regulators in the world.
  • The PPC powers for regulating the conduct of editors and journalists should be transferred to professional bodies of the editor or journalist’s choice. They may be entitled to representation from the National Union of Journalists. Members of the public should be entitled to LegalAid, where certain qualifying criteria are met.
  • Powers from the Advertising Standards Authority or any other content regulator would be transferred to the BBFC.

The above would ensure that media content and other aspects of the decisions of media corporations is independently regulated without state interference, which would be separate from the regulation of the conduct of journalists and editors, who should be expected to be professionals like medical doctors who are members of the GMC and lawyers who are members of the Bar Council or Solicitors Regulation Authority, for instance.

Welcome to Multimedia Studies Whitney Phillips!

September 27th, 2012 by

I read on on the blog of Whitney Phillips, the English PhD graduate who misrepresented the flame trollers on 4chan as “trolls”, an article by her that she is apparently running a “new course” on New Media.

Well Whitney Phillips, welcome to the world of Multimedia Studies! I did this module over ten years ago! In fact I did two courses on New Media – One called ‘New Media Cutures’ and one called ‘New Media Societies’.

They were put together as a way to bridge the Multimedia Computing modules accredited by BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT with the Media Studies and Media Practice Modules. The pioneer behind this course which I completed, the BSc(Hons) in Multimedia Studies was Dr Mike Reddy, now a Senior Lecturer at Newport University which is merging with Glamorgan where he designed the course.

Mike Reddy’s degree has spawed many PhDs and other leading professionals. One of the leading advocates of using Activity Theory in Participatory Design, Dr Steve Harris is one such example.

Multimedia Studies is now taught at many universities, and even has its own Wikipedia article.

This lack of appreciation of existing concepts seems evident in Whitney Phillips’s work. I was in fact talking to my sister, a PhD supervisor, about how I think literature surveys should be an important part of the PhD process and regularly updated throughout the programme of study. Had Whitney Phillips done a literature survey she would have come across my work on trolling and new media culture, including this paper, first published in 2008, which in my view her PhD appears to be a replication of. You can see the stark similarities in the table below.

 Whitney Phillips’s 2012 PhD Abstract Extracts from my 2008 Research Chapter

Ethnographic in approach, this dissertation examines trolling, an online subculture devoted to meme creation and social disruption. Rather than framing trolling behaviors as fundamentally aberrant, I argue that trolls are agents of cultural digestion; they scour the landscape, repurpose the most exploitable material, then shove the resulting monstrosities into the faces of an unsuspecting populace.

Undertaking the ethnography proved to be time consuming, though revealing about the nature of online communities and the characteristics of theactors that use them. Of the eleven characters iden-tified in the proposed character theory, eight werefound in the investigated online community.

 

Within the political and social context of the United States, the region to which I have restricted my focus, I argue that trolls digest and often perform a grotesque pantomime of a number of pervasive cultural logics, including masculine domination (Bourdieu 2001) and white privilege (Dyer 1997).

The rise of online communities in Internet environments has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them, with those vendors who understand this transfer of power and choose to capi-talize on it by organizing online communities and being richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns.

Additionally, I argue that the rhetorical and behavioral tactics embraced by trolls, including sensationalism, spectacle, and emotional exploitation, are homologous to tactics routinely deployed by American corporate media outlets. In short, trolling operates within existing systems, not in contrast to, immediately complicating, and often ironizing, knee-jerk condemnations of trolling behaviors.

The ecological cognition framework has the potential to radically transform minor Web sites into highly persuasive and engaging communities where relationships between vendors and customers can be enhanced and the goals of each can be met. While there is also the possibility that a corporation that understands online communities can manipulate its members in such a way that it can easily exploit them, the model could be used by vendors with more of an interest in helping customers meet their goals to market their products and services effectively.

Taming the Chatroom Bob: The role of brain-computer interfaces that manipulate prefrontal cortex optimization for increasing participation of victims of traumatic sex and other abuse online

March 15th, 2012 by

Chatroom Bobs, which derived from the concept of ‘Uncle Bob’ being a name for a less than responsible family man, are characterised by being online community users driven by seeking out satisfaction for their ‘urgeances’ (or biological drives). Some of these are akin to the ‘office loser’ who tries to impress others but is despised, others have more ulterior motives for sexual satisfaction. This paper presents an intervention – called MEDIAT – which uses TAGTeach to retrain people who are sexually damaged by society and demonstrate impairment in how they interact with others. The paper presents an equation for measuring such ‘social orientation impairment’ as a reflection of its relationship to serotonergic and dopaminergic activity in the prefrontal cortex as a result of differences in ‘Neuro-response plasticity’. The paper concludes that by using MEDIAT to reverse dopaminergic-serotonergic asynchronicity caused by traumatic experience can lead to increased constructive participation in online and other environments.

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Transforming Lurkers into Posters: The Role of The Participation Continuum

September 9th, 2011 by

Citation

Bishop, J. (2011). Transforming Lurkers into Posters: The Role of The Participation Continuum. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA’11), Glyndwr Univeristy, Wrexham, September 2011.

Abstract

Encouraging participation has long been seen as a way additional to new technology of helping online communities to grow. Online community sysops may well advertise their website on other service platforms, but with up to 90% of the visitors to their site being non-participants, referred to as lurkers, they could do no better than improving their website to tackle lurker fears. This paper presents the ‘participation continuum’ for understanding why some users are posters, and do participate, and why others are lurkers, and do not contribute. The paper considers the fears of reluctant lurkers to participation and shows how as a result of trying to resolve the incongruence between wanting to post but fearing the consequences they will often be stagnant in a state of rationalization, giving excuses for non-participation. Through intellectualizing after being provided with new evidence from sysops, they begin to mediate towards enhancement where their participation will increase. The determined lurkers are quite happy lurking, and preserving non participation, and therefore need more help to bridge the ‘Preece Gap’ between where they are currently participating and where they could be with more help.

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Transforming Lurkers into Posters: The Role of the Participation Continuum

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The New Field of Network Politics

July 18th, 2011 by

Citation
Solo, A.M.G. & Bishop, J. (2011). The New Field of Network Politics. In: Proceedings of The 2011 International Conference on e-Learning, e-Business, Enterprise Information Systems, and e-Government (EEE’11). Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 18-20 July 2011.

Abstract

This research paper defines a new field called network politics. Network politics refers to politics and networks. These networks include the Internet, private networks, cellular networks, telephone networks, radio networks, television networks, etc. Network politics includes the applications of networks to enable one or more individuals or organizations to engage in political communication. Furthermore, network politics includes political regulation of networks. Finally, network politics includes the accompanying issues that arise when networks are used for political communication or when there is political regulation of networks. The domain of network politics includes, but is not limited to, e-politics (social networking for driving revolutions and organizing protests, online petitions, political blogs and vlogs, whistleblower Web sites, online campaigning, e-participation, virtual town halls, e-voting, Internet freedom, access to information, net neutrality, etc.) and applications of other networks in politics (robocalling, text messaging, TV broadcasting, etc.). The definition of this field should significantly increase the pace of research and development in this important field.

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The New Field of Network Politics

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Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction

July 1st, 2007 by

Citation

Bishop, J. (2007). Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(4), 1881-1893.

Abstract

Online communities are becoming an accepted part of the lives of Internet users, although participation in these communities is dependent on the types of people that form them. Some of the online community’s members do not participate, people referred to as lurkers, whereas others who have been in the community for a long time, referred to as elders, participate regularly and support others. Understanding what drives these individuals and how they chose whether or not to participate will lead to online communities that thrive. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to describe what drives such individuals to carry out actions such as posting messages and adding content (level 1), the cognitions they use to determine whether or not to take such actions (level 2) and the means by which they go about carrying out the action in the environment (level 3). Finally, the framework is applied to the problem of encouraging members to participate by discussing the methods by which people can be persuaded to participate by changing the way they interpret their desires and their environment.

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Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction

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Awards

This seminal paper above has received the following accolades:

  • Rated as one of the Top 8 Posts about Online Communities by FeverBee – The Online Community Guide.
  • Ranked as one of the Top 25 Hottest Computer Science articles of 2007.
  • Ranked as one of the Top 20 most cited papers of all time in Computers in Human Behaviour.

Factors shaping the form of and participation in online communities

August 1st, 2003 by

This article discusses the structure of virtual communities and why people participate in them. It investigates the reasons why people participate in these virtual environments and what shape they may take in the future.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). Factors shaping the form of and participation in online communities. Digital Matrix, 85(2003), 22-24.

The Internet for educating indviduals with social impairments

March 19th, 2003 by

Citation Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 19 (4), 546-556.

Synopsis Investigates the social and practical implications of using Internet technology to deliver information relating to participation in a social situation.

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The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments

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Supervisory Team

Doctor Mike Reddy.