The semester is wrapping up, which means the last few weeks have produced an insane amount of academic product. I hope that some of it will end up here, but first I have to add some spit and polish. But here is one that seems ready.

For my Gender, Sexuality and the Body seminar, I created what Dr. Coventry calls a “Digital Storytelling Project.” I call it “One of the hardest finals I have ever had.” A Storytelling Project is basically a theoretical argument made in video format. In one vein of my semester’s worth of research on anonymous online behavior, I was looking at peer-to-peer regulation across digital and real world spaces, and in particular, public responses in the Missed Connections section of craigslist (A follow up of sort to some previous research).

Video after the jump.

Readers of craigslist Missed Connections have a variety of ways in which to censor/moderate/regulate the digital space. Of course there is the flagging (posts are removed for violating CL’s terms of service), and you can always email the person directly (perhaps you were the twenty-something year-old staring back at Starbucks), but users of the space have created a different style as well: the public response.

The public response is a post back into the forum, only identifiable as a response because it shares the same subject line. If flagging/censoring a post is the equivalent of gaging someone and disposing of them quietly, then a public response is the equivalent of being drug into the town square and shot: your regulated post ends up serving as an example of what is acceptable in the space.

I could spend more time explaining this, but really, that is what the video is about. Best of all, it is on YouTube!

(Music highly recommended — read “mandatory” –, but it is on the louder side. Enjoy.)