My experience with computers began in 1985 as I learned the beauty of Logo on a Packard Bell computer at the vocation school and the ability of a turtle to move through an electronic field by giving the turtle directions. I’ve enjoyed writing programs for computers in BASIC, simple JAVA and ActionScript for years. The connection to the world of cyberstudies came from my first experience on a bulletin board system (BBS) during my middle school years. I got to see virtual interactions on a textual level. Little did I know that I would be studying those interactions for my doctorate later in life.

Guided Ethnography

The third method that I used in my dissertation was the guided ethnography. The purpose of the post is to describe in some detail the process I used and the rationale why I followed this process. This section began at the end of the interview stage. The ethnography was designed...

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Gaia as a Cybergoddess

After finishing my dissertation, I wanted to archive some of my previous presentations. During the course of looking through old submissions, I came across the first presentation I did as a grad student and academic professional. Ohio University hosted Global Fusion 2005. My masters' cohort at the time figured that...

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SxSW 2012 Panel Proposal

The SxSW 2012 Panelpicker has finally opened up and our panel is listed. The battleplan for our panel “Festivals in the Age of Instant Access" will be to answer these questions in the first half of the panel: How do presenters communicate with connected conference community?How do attendees transition information...

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Coco-netics

During the first half of 2010, I decided to study the impact that social media was playing on traditional media channels. The feud between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien about the Tonight Show was happening during the same time. The original plan was to conduct a multi-method study looking at...

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Twitter and its Impact on American Governance

I was happy that one of my articles was selected for Communication Currents, an amazing produced by the National Communication Association. Communication Currents is an online web magazine of the National Communication Association. This site is designed to translate current communication scholarship published in scholarly journals of the National Communication Association. Working from recently-published...

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How Networks Make Networks

As Monty Python Flying Circus used to say, "Now for something completely different!" I am going to attempt to define two complex concepts and attempt to connect those concepts to the everyday world of social media. Those two terms are infotaxis and stigmergy. Both refer to a similar natural function, that is changing...

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Microblogging

Microblogging (Jaiku, Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, identi.ca, et al.) is considered a minimalist communication tool designed to fit the needs of an end-user. This channel allows the user to post information 140 characters at a time, which are called tweets. This configuration of characters could be as simple as textual information...

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Cybersecurity and You!

It seems that I've been focusing a lot on security and fraud on microblogging sites. However, there is more online than microblogging sites, despite my attraction to the concept. As a way of approaching cybersecurity, I finished reading the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Commission on Cyber Security for the...

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Virtual Ethnographies Revisited

The last three months of the research process will be the virtual ethnography research method. I will talk to ten students from each of the universities based on the interview pool or if there is attrition in the pool, a new group of students from those who took the survey...

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