'Playful Identities' research blog

Things are getting busier now: I have said yes to several opportunities of presenting a paper before a group:

• March 15: I will present a preliminary paper about mobile communication as gift culture in the P.I.G (‘Playful Identities Group’, as we have appreciatively dubbed ourselves…)
• March 20: paper about mobile communication as gift culture in the “AIO overleg” (PhD meeting).
• May ??: present second draft of this paper in the ‘Vakgroepoverleg’.
• September 18: a presentation about technology & theory (we will separate identity, play and technology as the 3 main domains to focus on in our literature studies).
• Finish this paper and hope to have it published

And besides that, I also will

• have a meet-up Februari 9 with Tim vd Hoff, who is going to create the research website at www.playful-identities.nl.
• give a little presentation later that day about some articles, during the second lesson of the course by Valerie Frissen about technology
• write a art-science proposal before March 1
• prepare a presentation for one of the final courses of Valerie in April (I think).

And I thought I had all the time in the world to just read books…

On the right hand side, you will find an increasing number of links to other research projects I’ve come across. Many of these are in the form of a weblog too. This makes it easy for me to keep track of them by adding them in a really nice RSS reader I have just found for the Mac: Vienna. And it’s open source too!

An interesting one I just found is Torill Mortensen’s blog. She has written a little piece about work vs. play:

Work vs play
Make tea not war (wonderful name) in Wellington comments on our effort to make a researcher’s guild on Wow. Mostly it is a musing at how some people make their hobbies into their job.

This is interesting, because it says something about work as opposed to play, and positions itself in a discourse where certain assumptions are accepted as truth.

1) Playing because it is work can not really be fun.

2) A hobby has to become less interesting if you learn so much about it that it starts to appear to be work.

3) Work is something we do for the sake of duty, enjoying it makes it suspect unless the pleasure is tied to ambition, duty or hard-earned skill.

4) All study of something people do at their leisure is suspect, as the researcher appears to have found an excuse to spend more time with their hobbies than other people.

Luckily, there is more to work and play than this.

Hello everybody, my name is Michiel de Lange. As from September 1, 2005, I am doing a PhD research at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam with the Faculty of Philosophy. The research is about the way new information- and communication technologies shape the construction of personal and cultural identities.

For those of you who are interested in the background of the research, here’s the link to the research programme ‘Playful Identities’. The application advertisement for PhD students can found here.

I plan to keep track of the literature at www.bijt.org/wikindx. This is a nice open source tool I’ve discovered on Sourceforge when looking for a method to manage a literature database.

So this is me: