Recently in Technology in Popular Culture Category

When I was growing up and complaining about something, my mother would often say "There is no need to make a federal case of it."  In other words, whatever my issue was, I was going way overboard in airing my grievance.

That mentality seems to have gone by the wayside in our culture with the default now being its antithesis.  Got a problem?  Make a federal case of it.

And so we have a federal court holding up a lawsuit of a game company for not including a warning that their game is supposedly addictive.  Really.

Bonnie Nardi has a new book out:  My Life as a Night Elf Priest.  The synopsis:

World of Warcraft rapidly became the most popular online world game on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers--officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience."
--Julian Dibbell, Wired

As a former player of WoW and someone who is interested in both as an entertainment experience and a technological experience, I think this book looks fantastic!

Cory Doctorow has an excellent take on the hype surrounding cloud computing.  Doctorow's analysis shows that technological determinism remains alive and well in popular discourse about technology:

The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to "the cloud" - that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.

Here's something you won't see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

The Wall Street Journal online edition has an article about how parents are using Facebook and other social networking websites to track their childrens' activities, how children respond to that form of surveillance and even create a term "helicopter parents."

As a social informaticist I find the article interesting as an example of how the use of technology is socially shaped, and how all technologies come with unintended consequences.

As a parent I'm a little creeped out.