Apologies for the interruption in posting regularly. It’s the end of the semester and I can’t speak for Gaurav and Pav but I’ve had a lot of on-going semester-long projects. The Mumbai attacks hit close to home for Gaurav and Pav and I kept up with Gaurav’s tweets and posts during the Thanksgiving break while watching TV coverage and reading the spotty journalism online. Certainly there was a communitas and online awareness during the Mumbai hostage situations that’s unique to our times.
In mid-November, Gaurav gave a presentation during a Georgetown CCT (Communications, Culture, and Technology) breakfast chat. The CCT program, by the way, has a really cool blog called gnovis which covers interdisciplinary issues such as culture, technology, media, politics, and the arts. Add it to your RSS feed!
I assisted in covering a few slides for the presentation. Our topic was how cultural context affects social media usage in the BRIC countries and in the US.
Gaurav posted the excellent slideshow he presented, so you can check it out:
This presentation was very useful for us because the CCT students are not only already well-versed in the subject we covered, but also pointed out areas we completely overlooked, studies we used that have blind spots, and presented an argument that we should look more carefully at how the different BRIC countries and the US view issues like privacy, openness, and sharing.
So these issues I will be researching for my future posts, particularly how the word “privacy” does not translate well into other languages and is fairly confusing even in English.
I also plan to study the individual countries to see if I can isolate characteristics applicable to my studies on privacy and openness vs. closedness.
It should also be mentioned that discussion within the web developer community regarding identity, sharing data across sites, and privacy vs. advertising is extremely hot right now, so I will try to post more summaries of good stories I see out there on that front.
Happy belated Thanksgiving, and here’s hoping you have a happy holiday season, wherever you are.