Today marks the launch of Harm and Offence in Media Content by Andrea Millwood Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone (I was one of the book’s contributors). You can find the press release and a link to an executive summary of the book here and if you are in the UK you can order it online via Amazon for ?18.95 (?1 saving).

Briefly, the book breaks new ground we believe because it looks at recent research across the whole gamut of available medias - television, radio, music, press, film, games, internet, telephony and advertising - as well as the regulation associated with each medium. Something there for everyone we hope! Do let us know what you think of the book if you’ve had a look and I will endeavour to answer any questions that may arise.

In a recent post on a new relationship capital group weblog - “Centrality”, Eszter Hargittai discusses how the limitations of sites which try to organize social networks constrain users’ connections - in the case she mentions because on Facebook you can only specify one school affiliation when many of us have three or four.

I have been complaining for years about a similar issue - the way American sites often make US-centric assumptions about their users (not bothering to specify when they don’t ship overseas, requiring a province/state as well as a city and country, etc).

But one of the bigger issues about social network software is not strictly technical and not fixable by a single firm. It is that with the proliferation of different social tools it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage who belongs in which groups and to get friends to sign up for them where necessary. I already have email mailing lists of my friends, Flickr profiles and more recently LJ friends lists to manage. They are not in sync and almost every time I add a new social software tool I have to get my (often technophobic) friends to sign up to that service too. So now I can’t remember who has access to what and who I have told what to where. It’s a problem that is only going to get worse unless social software companies get together and make it easy to build central profiles which people can use across different web applications.

Wasn’t the Liberty Alliance Project supposed to solve this problem? Or P3P? Or (heaven help us) Microsoft Passport? If this doesn’t get solved there may be increasing lock-in as it becomes easier to use, say, the Yahoo suite of applications like Flickr and Yahoo 360 just because you don’t have to remember multiple logins and neither do your friends…

I just stumbled across an interesting podcast from BusinessWeek - "The Blog Elite" wherein they interview leading bloggers and podcasters with a business bent. The first of these interviews was with Leo Laporte, a radio veteran who went to podcasting and started one of the most popular podcasts around - This Week in Tech.

He made a number of thought-provoking comments but what I found most intriguing is that he pointed out some differences between podcasting and blogging. Podcasting is not just blogging in sound instead of text. It is consumed differently (it can be listened to while doing other tasks so it doesn’t require your whole attention) and, he argues, while blogs are about the content, podcasts are to a much greater extent about the personality of the creators because what comes across in the voice is of greater importance. I realised that in my case it is certainly true - I listen to his radio show not so much because of what I learn there about technology but because (when it gels) I enjoy the laid-back, friendly back and forth between the participants as they talk about the tech news.

He also made some interesting (and to me worrying) comments about how because podcasts are a ‘grassroots’ medium they are seen as more authentic and that advertisers can exploit this authenticity to sell their products. Thankfully his personal view is that most podcasters will never make significant money at it so they shouldn’t try - they should instead do it for the love of it and to express and share whatever it is they wish to express.

The tile of Steven Berlin Johnson’s recent book - Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter - gives you a pretty good idea of what his argument is. I don’t want to re-cap his whole book - it’s a short and easy read in any case, and more nuanced and interesting than a synopsis would suggest. However if you haven’t read the reviews he suggests that while the content of TV shows and video games may disappoint, the increasing complexity of multi-stranded TV programming and the puzzle-solving that takes place in the better kind of video games are giving our brains a work-out and making us better at solving those problems. He also suggests that reality TV helps us to develop better “social intelligence” while watching it because it encourages us to analyse the relationships between participants (although those relationships tend to be cartoonishly exaggerated and manipulated).

I didn’t have great expectations of the book - I feared given its bestseller status it might be merely “pop science” posturing - but having read it (in part because I will be contributing to the Sage Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media) I do think the author raises some interesting points that haven’t been examined in earlier research - particularly when he talks about the increasing complexity of (at least some) television drama. That said, he is clearly and explicitly writing a polemic, so he does, I feel, underplay the importance (and potential impact) of the content of media. This was brought home to me in a passage early in the book (pp. 31-32) where he discusses playing SimCity with his nephew.

He was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up, “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally and as confidently as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”… My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development.

What that made me think of immediately is not “how impressive that a kid is thinking about urban development” but “how sinister that a video game can embed a particular (laissez faire capitalist) world view and pass it on to a kid who (because of the out of classroom context) may be more inclined to accept it without questioning its assumptions.

So I wouldn’t take the book as the last word in the long-running debates around media effects - but it is an interesting and useful contribution nonetheless. I would be interested if anyone could point me to discussions among media effects scholars about this book to see whether its suggestions are in fact old hat in the academic community.

For more of his arguments you can read selected pages via the Amazon link above or read an excerpt from the New York Times Magazine. The author has done the obligatory book promotion blitz so you can also hear him on Morning Edition. His work has also been the talk of the blogosphere (bloglines search) (technorati search). This may in part be thanks to his status as an Internet pioneer and friend to A-list bloggers like Cory but I suspect some of the favourable reception it has received online is because he is clearly One Of Us - a video game player, board game geek and fan of TV shows like Lost, 24 and The Sopranos. He starts his book with a description of his childhood love for APBA games - ‘fantasy baseball’ games played with dice and cards. Right away I was charmed….

By way of an antidote to America’s Army - which teaches young people to go to new places, meet new people and kill them - the UN’s World Food Programme has launched Food Force which teaches players (target ages 8-13) about the complexities involved in delivering food aid in a war zone. So much of the discussion of computer gaming is centred on possible harms - it is good to see an explicitly pro-social game, and one that has been well-liked as a game. Indeed it is actually popular enough that the download site seems to have been overwhelmed!

See this article for more info and links to other pro-social games.

Most games contain ‘cheat codes’ to help developers test the game and to allow users to get through the game easily if they use them. One site is claiming that the developers had a rather edgy sense of humour - eg. - OILFORFOOD: Unlimited Funds or TSUNAMIRELIEF: 100 New Toyota Land Cruisers
or (most untastefully) CONGOGIRLS: Boost Morale 50 Percent - see see here for the rest. I haven’t tested them so this claim could itself be a parody!

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