Here is a broad topic I’m increasingly interested in: Does the search operation, which is more and more a primary mode of engagement with digital media content (on the web, on our PCs, in our music libraries, etc.), condition our ways of knowing about the world? In other words, does search, as a mode of apprehending information contain what Postman calls “epistemological biases?”

Problem: Industrial corporate involvement in the health of the community they are situated in is deemed to be minimal (health: industry-community relations, environmental health and natural beauty, effects of pollutants on health of community members, effects on infrastructure like roads, etc. that industry shares with the community, etc.). How might that involvement be gauged?

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True story: when I was a young lass, I went through a period of time when I was active in several online forums. I made a friend via one of those forums, whom I continued to converse with through IM throughout high school. When one of my high school friends decided to go to a college next door to hers (and on the other side of the country from our hometown), I asked her to meet with him in his first week of school and help him get adjusted -- never having met her in real life. Fast forward several years -- they're now married and living in Champaign as my high school friend works on his PhD.

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In previous posts I have both described my interest in video game
research, as well as my research interests in sexual minority group
politics.  Believe it or not, there is actually a space where these two
research interests come together.  Eventually, I would like to examine
how traditional gender and sex roles are replicated in virtual
environments and how individuals resist, or adopt, these roles in
relationship to queer sexualities.  One way to research how the social
worlds created in online video games shape and are shaped by

While it is certainly problematic to categorize Youtube users as a "community" or even a "social group," Youtube is a platform where diverse groups of people gather either to distribute or to receive media content with diverse nature. As in Guimaraes Jr.'s discussion about the social environment in Palace, rules, norms, and meanings are similarly created on Youtube through users' ongoing negotiation with website's regulations and among users themselves. Through computer-mediated interactions, a "local culture" of Youtube is generated.

Looking over this week's reading, I was not sure exactly how
ethnography might be useful in understanding the culture in newspaper
newsroom's across the country.  While it may not be the main method a
researcher should employ for understanding journalism, ethnography
might have some benefits to it.

In the United States newsrooms have been facing budget cuts leading to
less staff and less resources to cover news stories.  Advertising and
public relation's influence on newspaper content is bad enough, but

“To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality” (1). Monmonier calls this the “cartographic paradox,” but it seems applicable to the entire project of research. Economists Baran & Sweezy say that exaggeration is the true task of social science, with the caveat that whatever is exaggerated must be true.

I just realized that my Theme River post didn't upload last week.  The actual writing is saved on a computer that I am not near right now.  I will up load that this evening when I get home.  Sorry for the inconvenience.