Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#ff @MiddnightOnMain @InnatMiddletown @jenfromkidcity @MattJPugliese @Oddfellowsplay @SteveSongs @slambovia @JohnWhelanMusic
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/30/2011 - 20:59This week's Follow Friday List is focused on Middnight On Main, a New Year's Eve celebration in Middletown, CT. I've been working a lot with Middnight on Main and want to highlight some of the other folks involved.
The @InnatMiddletown is where many people that are coming a long distance for Middnight on Main will be staying. @JenfromKidCity is one of the people who helped organize Middnight on Main and has been on various radio and television shows talking about the events.
Joining Jen on some of these broadcasts has been @MattJPugliese who heads up @Oddfellowplay Both KidsCity and Oddfellows Playhouse are important venues in Middnight on Main.
One of the performers that will appeal greatly to the younger set is @SteveStongs. Steve performs on PBS as has quite a following. Gandalf Murphy (@slambovia) is another group with a large following. I've often heard them at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival.
Rounding out the list is @JohnWhelanMusic who performs Irish music and Catie Talarski (@scuttlebuttt) from WNPR who will be hosting the Radio Adventure Theatre.
A lot of great things to listen to and do at Middnight on Main, and I didn't even mention the food….
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/28/2011 - 19:06
#ff @jcnork @giuliag @cshhc @chpartnership @ricster101 @3favors @99_100thmonkeys @morphwithus @64rdb64
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/23/2011 - 21:38Well, it has been a very long hard week, so I'm using Follow Friday Helper to come up with the list of people I'm following. Starting off the list, is my friend @jcnork. He lives the next town over and we have many shared interests. One of our mutual friends is @giuliag. I've known both of them for a while. Recently, @giuliag attended a #hcsmct twitter breakfast along with a person from @cshhc, whom I've been getting to know over the past few months.
@cshhc is a #fqhc. @chpartnership is a partnership of different #fqhcs. I met the typist behind this organization through #hcsmct and I look forward to another year of people working on health care issues in Connecticut working more closely together.
Switching gears, now. I was part of a tweet chat about Empire Avenue. @ricster1010 who is COO of Empire was there, as was @3favors which is the Twitter account for favo.rs, another emerging social media site. A couple other participants in the tweet chat were @99_100thmonkeys @morphwithus and @64rdb64.
I'm just starting to get to know them.
With that, I'll end this post and wish everyone a happy holiday.
Playing with Spotify
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/20/2011 - 20:10Recently, I've been doing more and more with Spotify, and I'm really liking it. It shares to Facebook and last.fm. If you go to my timeline on Facebook, you can see a nice overview of what I've been listening to and get more details if you click on the Music tab. Yet some of the statistics are questionable.
Last.fm has some similar statistics. I don't have a strong opinion about one verses the other. However, Spotify also has a Last.fm app, which provides some nice recommendations based on what I've been listening to. The recommendations seem pretty good, so I'm playing some recommendations.
There are other Spotify Apps, such as for connecting to Tunewiki, so you can sing along to the lyrics, or a mood radio to select music based on your mood. Now, mashing up last.fm and mood radio might be good, so I can have recommendations based on what I've liked when I've been in different moods.
The other thing I've been doing a lot is experimenting with playlists. For example, I've been helping promote Middnight on Main, a New Year's Eve Festival that will be happening in Middletown, CT on the 31st. So, I created a Middnight on Main Spotify Playlist of various performers that will be there.
I also created a playlist of the Falcon Ridge Most Wanted 2012 performers.
You can also check out what other friends on Facebook have been listening to or have put in their playlists. So far, I haven't found much of interest there yet. So, are you doing anything interesting with Spotify?
Tracing a Musical Linguistic Virus in the Internet Age
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 21:37The other day, I was listening to the radio and I heard something that has set me off in the search of a Musical Linguistic Virus. The idea comes from Neal Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash. In Snow Crash there is a bio linguistic virus which ends up getting spread via virtual worlds. It seems to be a pretty virulent science fiction virus, but it seems like the idea isn't really all that far from reality.
Ideas, snippets of music, and memes have been spread from one person to another for ages. Perhaps a good example is an ear worm. Even without the Internet, ear worms can spread quickly. For people my age, I could simply mention, "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton, and many of my friends would not be able to get the tune out of the head.
Yet perhaps musical linguistic viruses in the Internet Age are more complicated. It wasn't a simple ear worm that I heard on the radio that I haven't been able to get out of my head. Instead, the host of the radio show was talking with guests from a band. They talked about key musical influences, bands from the eighties, and reusing samples. Perhaps they are taking musical DNA from the eighties and mutating it into new ear worms or musical linguistic viruses.
They mentioned Brian Eno, so I started to listen to some of his ambient music series on Spotify. This is a new avenue where musical linguistic viruses can spread. A thought came to me listening to a radio show. I pursued the thought on Spotify by listening to the music. Spotify posted to my Facebook Timeline that I had listened to Brian Eno and friends commented on it.
Steven L Johnson said, "That's what I listen to when I want to nap. :-)".
I responded, "Well, I've had a LONG week, and I'm actually going to crash soon." In fact, I did head off to bed soon after that, but my mind continued to turn about this. How does music affect what we think? How much does it reflect the current culture? Can we culture jam spreading different musical linguistic viruses via the Internet?
Perhaps an interesting project would be to create word clouds of the lyrics to the 25 songs of each year and tracking how it has changed.
So, what are you listening to? Why are you listening to it? How is it changing you? Perhaps most importantly, can we change what we listen to and how we talk about it to change our country and our world?
