Sunday, December 12, 2010

I think we should have a tumescent tumor band/ribbon

While I don’t remember much of high school some half a decade later, I do vividly recall the spread of Livestrong bracelets throughout my school – especially the days when people began reselling the bracelets for $5-10 a piece. It all disgusted me because at that same time I was visiting my father in the cancer ward at the hospital in our town daily and every time I went the halls would be completely empty and so many of the patients would voice how lonely they were. People were willing to spend $10 on bracelets to make it look like they contributed $1 to cancer research when people in our town were hurting, my own father was hurting, and I never saw a single person from my school contribute a minute of their free time to make a real impact on the daily life of someone experiencing cancer

Looking back I get livid. And not just because some students were selling the bracelets for non-cancer fund profits or because people were buying them but because those bracelets just make me angry. Maybe some of what follows is just me rationalizing my gut reaction to “consumer activism,” but I don’t think that changes how problematic it is to justify anything simply because it makes some marginal amount of money for cancer research.

Like most logos, Livestrong bracelets and the pink ribbons of the breast cancer movement project underlying values – the yellow bracelet is the same shade as the leader jersey from the Tour de France and the pink ribbon hints at a resilient femininity despite threat (though its history is not so simple). But the logos are so much more than that – they’re dissociations. They gloss over if not almost entirely supplant the horrific elements of cancer. There is nothing that reminds consumers particularly of a cancer cell, a breast, or a testicle - much less the metaphorical invasion and colonization of organs by cancerous cells, or actual images of growths, tumors or lesions.

It has been so effective that for most people, when they hear the words "breast cancer" their first thought is not of a tumor, a bunch of rogue cells, a bald head, or a post-mastectomy woman. It is of the pink ribbon, or a Race for the Cure event.



And it’s not like this has come in favor of some elegy as is the case with locking a ghost bike (an all white bike) at the site of an accident that killed a cyclist.


It’s just absurd. The meaning in the ribbon and wristband are constructed by continuous juxtaposition to events and causes that turn the whole thing into a money game, ironically sterilizing cancer – a disease whose treatment is largely defined by sterilization - like sequestering patients in a separate wing that is sterilized to ensure that bodies with weakened immune systems due to chemotherapy do not get infected, or by visual sterilization as these wings are frequently entirely white, or the cultural sterilization where people would rather wear wristbands than visit the patients. Actually, maybe absurd is a bit kind.

I think Sarah Jain puts all this pretty poignantly: "After all, what would it mean to really acknowledge—really acknowledge—the fact that 41,000 people each year die of a disease from which one literally rots from the inside out with no cure while so many known causes continue to be pumped into the environment?"

I guess it’s not surprising if the most important thing for cancer activism is making money. It is pretty impossible to imagine a company like BMW sponsoring an event that foregrounds the carcinogens both producing and driving a car pumps into the environment. It is equally hard to imagine an aisle in a supermarket being full of products that bear tumescent images rather than the comforting pink ribbon (I mean, given people often buy food based on how appetizing it looks, who would market a package covered in tumors and lesions?). As ribbons and wristbands, then, cancer is “safe” to partner with because it doesn’t actually resemble cancer.

And no, “but it raises money” is not a defense of these practices because it means that the corporations in control of these donations can set the agenda for what cancer activism works on. That means focusing on things that are proactive so that partnered companies can look like they’re doing things – they’re helping people find out earlier and they’re helping people get cured. Sure, that’s great, but that means care for current patients falls by the wayside – especially for people lacking health care, so for many this focus just means finding out about the cancer earlier and knowing you have it for longer without being enabled to do anything about it.

What a farce. As if money drives the world. More than that, as if continuing to tell people the best way to help out is to buy some saltines with a ribbon or use a bank with a pink ribbon card (I’m actually considering closing my Bank of America account because I’m sick of having that advertised to me every time I use the ATM) or pick up a pink bucket from KFC is going to actually help create a society of people who actively care about solving problems.


This cause related marketing just lets us pat ourselves on the back for doing absolutely nothing, because let’s be honest: we were going to buy whatever it is anyway. The ribbon just makes us feel good about destroying lives and the planet, as if it’s somehow okay to consume so much now (and this is without even scratching at how the monetary schemes hidden by the fine print).

What’s worse is that these problems that could be somewhat prevented, too. But that’s not positive, that’s not “doing something” that companies can use to leverage advertising – focusing on making money means advertising the best way possible and so prevention falls mostly by the wayside in favor of "proactive" measures such as early detection and treatment options. Looking into prevention means cutting back on things and "un-consuming," particularly emissions, carcinogens, and the like, which are central to the operation of the businesses that fund research, resulting in a cycle where products are bought to donate to stopping cancer, while simultaneously contributing to its prevalence.

Maybe it’s what I should expect from corporations. The idea that pairing ‘doing good’ with agents solely invested in making money not raising red flags in our minds is ridiculous.

I guess now I at least understand what corporations mean when they say they’re dedicated to "giving back." It subtly implies that something was taken in the first place, and these corporations are "giving back" by giving money to finding out how to retroactively cure the ills they help cause.

The revolution will not be tweeted – HA! As if technology was the corrupting element in social movements. The revolution will not be bought. Viva la non-profit industrial complex!

Monday, November 22, 2010

Crowd Sourcing Journalism

I’ve never been so disappointed. I am going to miss Joseph Gordon-Levitt talk at USC about hitRECord - which I noted in my very first blog post is an inspiration for my study of civic media tools.

The worst part is, though, I’m not just missing him speak – I’m missing the chance to ask him a question. I’ve always been one of those anonymous members of the crowd at various talks. I go, I listen, I sometimes think of questions, but I never actually ask them (probably in part because I tend to mentally ridicule the people who ask dumb questions and I fear others doing the same to me. In thinking about it, I should probably stop doing that). This time, however, I actually have a question before even going that I know I want to ask and have thought about so much I even developed crazy pipe dreams about how he might respond that involve getting coffee or exchanging e-mail addresses.

Before diving into that question, however, I feel like I should probably briefly explain hitRECord. But since JGL explains it far better than I do in a form that actually typifies his project, you should really just watch this video.

I’ve always thought it seemed like one of the coolest things any actor has done to leverage his or her influential position to actually make something amazing related to filmmaking. I see lots of actors and musicians playing benefits concerts, but to me those are really just philanthropic and fundraising ventures that graph connections between causes and the celebrity’s occupation. Bono’s music only has anything to do with AIDS in Africa because he plays a concert or writes a song, not because of connections between the music industry and AIDS in Africa. I’m not saying that’s bad at all – I’m glad people leverage their position in support of meaningful causes and Bono has done some amazing things – it’s just that I’m way more interested in how people use their position granted by an industry to actually break away from the form of dialogue that industry perpetuates.

But I digress.

In my study of civic media tools, I’ve come to the conclusion that a model like hitRECord could be leveraged to create an amazing community media device that goes beyond most other forms of citizen journalism. Right now, it seems like the primary way for ordinary people to get involved with news outlets is through two main options. Certainly there’s a lot of text based stuff that runs the gamut between these things, but I’m focusing on video and audio work (similar to hitRECord).

1. Community media outlets – people can actually produce content or help other produce content. This may be through networks like Paper Tiger Television.

2. Participate in traditional media outlets – this may be through things like CNN’s iReport or responding to questions on the Public Insight Network.

I have a serious preference for the first, but I think there’s a lot of room between the two ideas for some really nifty stuff. That’s where my idea comes from. It synthesizes a number of existing tools to make something that I don’t think has been done before – a citizen-based, distributed reporting system.

The basis is this: on something like iReport, CNN is really just soliciting raw video footage that they can integrate into their reporting. But what if instead of giving that over to CNN, you passed that footage into a network of people who together could create their own news stories? So that you upload a video, make note of location/place/time/etc, and that opens up a “case” where registered users could form a task force with a variety of rolls (I’m thinking background research, causal explanation, fact checking, script writing voice recording, and editing – this aspect is inspired by the book Wiki Government and the website Help Me Investigate) that would ultimately wind up creating a short news story that could be tagged onto a map so that the stories could be searched based on a variety of different criteria – time/location of event, type of incident, who contributed, etc.

I think it could really push people to grab on to the media they produce and may actually help people reconsider how they relate to dominant outlets. Granted, there are issues with motivation and questions of why people would actually do this, but I figure there are probably enough journalists being fired/retiring, enough people wanting to develop skills in one of those areas, and so on to develop a decent core group, and if a rewards system could be set up, I definitely think the project could take off. It may not be revolutionary, but I think it has the potential to get more people involved than are doing anything to create news stories now.

Thus, my question for JGL that I don’t get to ask is this: Have you ever considered creating a version of hitRECord that focuses on community media rather than narrative film? Encouraging people to make short featurettes about issues they wish had been covered in the news or think should have been covered differently? Too bad since I won’t be there my dreams of starting this project over a cup of coffee seem to be more or less dashed…

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Social Bookmarking Is Actually Amazing

Despite having been a compulsive blog reader and RSS addict for years, I only recently came to appreciate the power of social bookmarking. I understood that such sites let me access my bookmarks from any computer, but since I’ve always been a laptop user and most of my bookmarks are tracked in my Google Reader, I never really saw the need.

Discovering Howard Rheingold’s public library on Diigo changed that.

I mean, Google Reader’s suggestions are nice and stumbleupon has been a good friend for boredom-alleviation since I entered college, but neither one offers me the ability to dive through tags that only bring up articles other people have found interesting. I wouldn’t go so far as to deem Howard my social bookmarking soulmate, but he’s definitely going to become a source me to find out what’s happening in new media – more of a teacher than compatriot (but maybe I’m biased by his profile picture).

His bookmarks seem to almost exclusively relate to new applications of media technology (granted that’s not a very exclusive category given the breadth of the internet). His most common topics, though, seem to relate to educational uses of media and cooperation and to smartmobs and Twitter in particular. This is fascinating to me because not only does it suggest a focus on the possibility for learning that comes with new technology, but also how it can be applied to create change. His frequency of using a “smartmobs” tag in particular suggests this– though he uses the tag very liberally, largely in place of a the general tag, “activism” (and probably because he literally wrote the book on smartmobs and wants to increase the circulation of said term). Though generally his tagging is pretty descriptive, involving one or two themes (such as education), tactics (such as smartmobs), and platforms (Twitter, mobile_devices, etc).

Even though he rarely comments on the posts he tags, his description is almost always useful because it tends to be the most salient aspect of the article, which not only hints that he actually read what he’s bookmarking, but it also makes his library useful in itself because I can really easily tell if I want to read the article based on both style and substance in a way that may actually be more useful than any description he could write (and given that he tends to bookmark multiple pages a day, this practice also seems intelligent as a form of time management – he’s bookmarked 7334 pages since February 19, 2009, meaning he’s bookmarked an average of more than 11 pages per day, which is damn impressive).

Given how much he bookmarks and how much his tags overlap with my own, it’s really anything but shocking that I found Howard’s Diigo profile. In particular, though, my recent thoughts about mapping led me to find his profile. After all, hundreds of people tag things with “media” or “activism,” but how many people are going to have a bunch of tags for “mapping”? And that tag led me to something I doubt I would have found otherwise: Mapnik.

Mapnik was recently profiled on MediaShift Idea Lab as “The Coolest Mapping Software You’ve Never Heard Of,” which immediately caught my attention amongst Howard’s bookmarks. As you can see in my most recent post, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about mapping and alternative ways to map areas, so seeing a tool that “provides the framework for styling map data and then rendering new maps based on those styles” is incredible – especially since the article talks about how another program, TileMill, is making it easier to use. It’s such a nifty little mapping tool set that I’m even putting it onto one of my coveted sticky notes on my desktop to check up on from time to time and to explore more fully out once I have free time to flex my creative tools again – so I think Howard may have not done this tool service in his tagging given it only got one for “mapping.”

Diving into Howard’s library after my initial contact with his profile, I found a wealth of other gems that I may never have noticed otherwise. Despite my love for keeping up with developments in mobile media, for example, I had never heard of a website called textually.org – which is “all about texting, SMS and MMS.” But seeing an article about cellphone usage revealing disease outbreaks tagged not only intrigued me and led me to the site. Even if the article itself is ultimately a bit expected (Well obviously “Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning” – though a daily check identifying victims correctly 90% of the time is impressive), the site itself has a wealth of fascinating articles and has since been added to my RSS feed.

One thing I found that was far more hidden in Howard’s library is Truthy, which is a system launched by Indiana University to “analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter” – meaning meme tracking, astroturf detection, and general misinformation monitoring. Even though the site is a bit on the weak side in terms of accessibility and organization, a lot of digging on the site yields some interesting information. If I were to start exploring again, I’d go to the About page, then the Gallery to familiarize yourself with the meme visualization techniques they use, and then consider exploring the Memes section. Even though the applications of such a tool are somewhat limited, it’s definitely something to think about.

As I’ve said in probably every post so far, I love reading. And so for anyone reading this (which must mean you love reading, since this blog is pretty well hidden and only contains fairly lengthy posts that almost entirely lack truly novel content), Howard’s bookmarks are a wealth of information. He seems to keep his fingers on the pulse of a view strains of new media uses, many of which involve media for creating better civic engagement – whether that means for education, organizing, analysis, or any number of other things. I’ll certainly be keeping up with what he posts, and I’d advise anyone interested in new media to do the same since he draws from such a wealth of sources and tags so consistently (though in reflection I am less sure he actually does all of his own posting or if some of it is done by people who write for the blog the smartmops blog).

Update: Diigo frustrates me because when I get to a webpage via someone else’s bookmark it becomes difficult to actually find the link to give other people to show them the page. Poor functionality, Diigo. Poor functionality.

Waves of Change

In talking to one of my former classmates a few weeks ago, I was introduced to a project that Deep Dish TV launched a few years back called Waves of Change. The idea, according to Deep Dish co-founder DeeDee Halleck, was “to showcase some of the [community media] projects I thought were really good, so people could share the knowledge and the experiences that they had, but also to highlight some of the problems that seem kind of endemic to community media.”

Originally, Waves of Change was going to be a video series on Deep Dish, but, “There was so much good work that we didn’t want to wait for getting enough money to do a really big, produced series. We decided that we should do something now, that there was information we had to share with people, and we weren’t quite ready to do the series.” Since that original idea, Waves of Change has expanded to include a map – which is the segment I find most interesting.

Generally, maps have worked to constitute the things they visualize. In the context of the state, this meant providing rigid boundaries that previously didn’t exist, creating a sort of shape-as-logo that is now emblematic of many states. More, by linking states to a pre-existing territory, the historical contingency of borders are effaced, giving way to the notion of sacrosanct borders that merit defense, reinforcing that there is a mappable shape that deserves mapping while erasing that the map originally defined said shape. Thus, any map contains at least a dual articulation. The positional idea that “x is there: always contains a primary ontological notion nestled inside it that “x is” at all.

This ontological proposition is particularly essential for community media, as they are often overlooked and marginalized, if not somewhat ephemeral given their frequently underground status, since, according to Halleck, “in many countries the danger that independent producers and anyone who’s trying to get different kinds of information out in societies that are repressive can be a very dangerous occupation.”

Thus, by locating a particular story on the map, Waves of Change articulates not only that said story occurred but also that a specific source relayed it – proving not only the event’s existence, but the media outlet’s as well. More, by highlighting a particular outlet, it also means that its absence would become all the more visible, providing some level of accountability and awareness to the plight of community media in oppressive situations.

At the same time, locating particular places and things on the map points to a third proposition: defining not only what is, but what is important and worth mapping. Certainly nation maps do this by subtly positing that the state is worth seeing, but Waves of Change is in many ways more akin to a guide map that lists landmarks and other points of interest. Such maps not only lay out territories, but mark what within those spaces is worth doing (or, as Mark Monmonier points out in No Dig, No Fly, No Go, what cannot be done).

This idea is part and parcel to Deep Dish TV’s and Paper Tiger Television’s critique of traditional media, which posits community as an “alternative source of news that is more based on what’s important to people, what’s missing from mainstream news, and what voices are silenced by dominant media” (Hummel 1). Waves of Change visually represents this by mapping community media and their stories, thus arguing that these outlets are the “landmarks” that are worth seeing.

This purpose is doubly served as the map not only shows where such media is, but also where it is not. This highlights the gaps where such media either a. does not exist or b. is not yet mapped but may exist as a hitherto fore untapped resource for news and tactical discussion – in a form far easier to notice than a master list of outlets where geographical absence is harder to detect (especially when there are hundreds of entries, as on Waves of Changes’ blog).

Thankfully, Waves of Change is moving off of Google Maps. The push-pin aesthetic doesn’t do the idea justice and really constrains what they can do. Only a few things can actually be mapped (200 tops), and the descriptions weren’t designed to hold the rich amount of information that Waves of Change has.

Beyond making it more useable – co-producer Nicole Hummel argues that one of the most central of these ideas is adding filters to the map so that it is “searchable and viewable by different subtopics and subthemes, with some sort of index that’s tagged so you could look up media about ecology and the environment or gender issues or media literacy, or by outlet, like performance, theatre, TV, or radio.” – I really hope they also move towards more radical cartographies, which is, according to Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, “the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change.”

Right off the bat, I can think of a few really cool directions they could take:

1. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine Waves of Change adding a functionality that flips the map in a variety of directions, subtly adding a criticism of the current “global” perspective to the project’s questioning of mass media’s focus on particular stories that do not represent the interests of many people around the world. Similarly, they could map the points to multiple projections of the world – including both the Mercator and Peters projections (pretty well explained by the West Wing).

2. To underline the critique of mass media’s skew, Waves of Change could include maps of criticism that visually prove the need for alternative media sources. One such possibility is a cartogram – a map that rescales territories according to particular features rather than attempting to reflect the physical existence of the world. This has often been used in the United States to show the population skews between various areas.

Cartogram of populations voting in 2004

Applied to media representation, such a mapping would reveal the overabundance of representation in some areas and virtual non-existence of others, articulating a dual need for community media: one to aid in the amount of news produced within certain areas and another to emphasize the geo-centrism of many mass media outlets.

3. More abstractly, Waves of Change could use flow chart-esque maps to show the ideological factors for over- and non-representation. Ashley Hunt’s “A World Map: In Which We See…” that charts the flow of global capitalism provides an insightful model that articulates the complex, multimodal functionality of modern capitalism as a system of repression. (You can view download the whole map here, and I’d really recommend exploring the map at length. Since Blogger won't display any more text after it, a small version is at the bottom of the post)

Using such an alternative strategy could not only further discussion about how and why corporate control leads to certain stories being left out of the mainstream but also encourage a dialogue about what aspects of the current system could be played with to get more representation of alternative perspectives.

Of course, even if they don’t move beyond plotting media outlets, Waves of Change is definitely something to watch because it is already such a rich resource for information about different ways that media is being used worldwide. But it’d be really effective and interesting if they buttressed their implicit critique that operates through highlighting what is absent with an explicit presentation of what is shown and how that is determined.

A World Map: In Which We See…/>
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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Rethinking the Power of Maps Annotation

To make an annotation more fun, I think I'll introduce it with a video.



Wood, Denis. Rethinking the Power of Maps. Guilford Press: New York, 2010.

Rethinking the Power of Maps is a follow up to Denis Wood’s 1992 book, The Power of Maps. It takes a historical/theoretical approach to interrogating both the way maps have been used to constitute and reify the nation state, as well as the map-based responses to those map-based expressions of traditional power. Each point Wood raises is backed up by a couple of historical examples, which he proceeds to unpack to reveal the theoretical underpinnings that allowed maps to have such a pervasive influence.

Despite engaging with many heavily theoretical texts and dealing with topics, such as power, traditionally steeped in opaquely academic language, Wood’s writing is highly accessible if not informal. There are numerous ellipses throughout the book, and he frequently makes his point through a series of rhetorical questions rather than argumentation, limiting his usefulness for direct quotation, though not for citation.

Though much of the book illuminates the historical function of maps, the most salient and unique arguments come from part two, when Wood moves past state-based mapping arguments and explores contemporary mapping practices such as protest maps, critical cartography, counter-mapping, counter-counter-mapping. Many of these topics have limited theoretical discussion because of their recent development, but Wood not only explains the impact of the examples, but also effectively situates them in relation to past mapping practices.

Ultimately, Wood’s analysis of maps is an excellent primer for thinking about how maps re-entrench dominant ideologies by passing off subjective perception as objective fact. Though the analysis in the first half of the book is not entirely unique, it does provide an essential background for understanding the contemporary role of maps and mapping generally. So not only is the book useful for understanding the power of maps generally, it also extends the discourse of cartographic power into present practices. It critically examines both the effect of modern mapping systems like Geographic Information Systems and the technophilic discourses surrounding them – even if it is sometimes closer to a rant than a well-structured and thorough critique.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Comments

Two quick notes:
1. I don’t know how I feel about having to post things like these comments on my blog if I’m supposed to also put it out there – makes me feel like I’m putting out a class assignment rather than my own actual blog.
2. On the first blog my comment is queued, so we’ll see if they ever wind up posted.

Regardlss, here are the comments and links to the original articles:

AU Center for Social Media – Universal Broadband

When I first saw this post, I was really excited at the issues I thought it might address given that I felt like the call for universal broadband access was one of the most central, but least developed portions of the Knight Commission’s previous white paper. Ultimately, however, I’m not sure I feel significantly better after reading this proposal than I did after reading the initial one.

One thing I do find important is pointing out digital literacy and relevance as being factors in addition to cost of why people don’t already have access, which I think correctly hints that access is not the only important factor in preventing the existence of a second class citizenry. At the same time, however, I think there are a lot of issues this still skirts over. Primarily, it re-entrenches the privileging of certain uses of technology over others (in this case, broadband versus phone) which seems to re-entrench the prejudice that the speaking/analyzing groups are the tool-users while the others lag behind, even though it may be more a different set of tools being used (I think this is clearest in the discussion of television).

I still feel like the lack of attention to how technical access relates to other issues is problematic, but I don’t feel like that criticism applies as much to this article given its much narrower focus, but I’m definitely still worried about what emphasizing access may lead to a celebration when/if universal access comes to be. Access doesn’t strike me as actually an issue of alleviating hierarchical forces so much as not instituting new segregated spaces of privilege, and I worry that working primarily against the latter will divert attention from the former. In short, focusing on access will ensure that unequal access won’t be the cause of a second class citizenry, but it doesn’t do anything to correct the already disadvantaged situation of people with less time, smaller vocabularies, etc and if anything just covers up that situation and may present it as solved for the digital age.




The second post is... Perhaps a Revolution is Not What We Need

I think the point about Twitter’s flexibility and that its “norms emerge, mutate, collide, and fade away” fluidly is a really important point and adds another layer in which Gladwell’s false distinction between online and traditional activism seems cracked. By using the example of SNCC at Woolworth’s, Gladwell is isolating an effective sit-in some 50 years after its occurrence when its impact can be fairly well understood (though I think Ron Burnett makes a good point about other sit-ins not lasting in our cultural memories). In this context, of course Twitter and other social media platforms aren’t going to compare – they’re in their nascent stages and are surrounded by rapidly shifting norms (to say nothing of the lack of parallel between sit-ins and Twitter – a better comparison would be the conversations that made people beyond those in Greensboro aware of the sit-ins and Twitter).

More than anything else, this serves to make the parallel between “Frown Power” and “It Gets Better” more interesting because it draws a parallel between two different network-based solutions – but I think it ultimately runs into a similar problem as what I mentioned with Twitter. Savage’s YouTube campaign could create social change and make teens feel like it gets better, but it may not ultimately have a large impact (though certainly there has been a lot of buzz around it, I think most of that is due to its timeliness and potential, not effectiveness).

I guess this leads to me to my ultimate question and reason for posting this – how do we focus on outcomes when the development of these tools and campaigns is still occurring? I feel like emphasizing outcomes sometimes begets sometimes premature historicizing where we write about technology as if it has created the sort of change we dream it will.

More, I wonder about the focus on outcomes in non-hierarchical, grassroots change because I feel like it encourages inappropriate application of metrics, and I wonder if that’s part of where Gladwell’s problem lies. He seems to value concrete progress above anything else, and while we can see laws change, it’s almost impossible to see perspectives change except retroactively. So I guess while I agree about the importance of outcomes, I wonder how we can actually employ that in contemporary analyses of social media.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Quick Thoughts on Small Change

Originally this was just going to be a link, but I had a few quick thoughts I figured I may as well share.

After hearing high school debaters talk about whether or not economic sanctions ought to be used to achieve foreign policy objects for five months, I can honestly say thank god for Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker this month. Not because I endorse the entirety of what he argues, but because I can finally get high school debaters to understand that their argument that uses Twitter in Iran as proof that technology solves for tyrannical control is absolutely absurd.

Even so, I have a real love/hate relationship with the article. He gets so much right, but at the same time, he gets so much wrong. The points about twitter and social media really are astute and critical observations that expose the techno-utopian desires for exactly what they are. Twitter doesn’t support Farsi – so why would it be a huge site for organizing? A quote that Gladwell picked out from Golnaz Esfandiari I think situates the discourse really effectively: “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection.”

But at the same time, I really dislike how he sets up traditional and online activism as two different poles, or as in opposition to each other. Perhaps there is reason to think that offline activism is being supplanted, but I don't see that sort of analysis in the article and I think that, ultimately, Gladwell's argumentation really breaks down once he starts discussing activism and different sorts of ties because it was treated more as a vehicle for the major point he was making, rather than a fully fleshed out analysis of activism in the digital age.

Maybe I’ll write about this in more detail later, but since I was just reading the article again I thought I’d post something quickly about it.

Righthaven and The Copyright-Quo

Over the last decade and a half it’s become abundantly clear that something about the current institution of news distribution has to change. The internet has pretty well shot print journalism’s reader base by offering not only more up to the moment news but also a wider variety of sources and often without a direct monetary expenditure. That’s not to say that no one reads newspapers anymore, but to say its readership has declined is a bit of an understatement.

Most newspaper companies have tried to adapt by hosting content online, and in the early days they tried various monetization techniques – they partnered with subscription services like AOL, employed micropayments for articles, tried to make their content less shareable, and various other tactics.

Few, if any of these practices have been sustainable – largely because they all hold strongly to traditional monologist notions of information dissemination. But, as Gordy Thompson put it to Clay Shirky. “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you,” it’s clear that more radical shifts in business practices are necessary. Of course, given that the current moguls rose to power under the current structures, it’s not surprising that more complete overhauls have been largely resisted.

But that does not even remotely explain (much less make acceptable) some of the developments of the last 6 months.

Taking a page from the recording companies’ ongoing though lessening lawsuits against peer-to-peer music sharers and the more recent BitTorrent cases targeting seeders and leechers of films such as The Hurt Locker, a Nevada based lawfirm, Righthaven LLC (which represents a few papers, most notably the Las Vegas Review-Journal) is trying to monetize news on the backend by suing bloggers, non-profits, and individuals whose sites contain reproductions of their articles in part or in full.

I have so many problems with this it’s hard to even know where to begin. On a very basic level, I think it has the potential to cause a really serious chilling effect on internet discussion since the reposting of facts garnered from news articles could become a hazard if Righthaven is successful. And that is an assault on the way most internet discussion goes. You read something, do research, and bring the fruit of your research back to the original discussion – often copy/pasting tidbits of information and linking back/quoting for longer statements.

“The basis of the lawsuit was what was scary,” said Erik Altieri, an employee of NORML, one of the first organizations to be sued by Righthaven. “That someone could just sell the rights to their material to a law firm who patrols the internet for use infringement, even if it was years ago, even if it was sourced out. Even if you cited them and linked back to their original articles.”

Now, Righthaven says their goal is deterring copyright theft, but to me, the interview Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson did with Wired speaks pretty directly against that (of course this is slightly slanted since the quotes are from an article and not me taking them from the full text of what he said, so I may be cherry picking from a cherry picker, but still). I’d imagine the argument for their strategy as optimizing the level of deterrence might go something like this:

We only buy rights when we know we can sue, and we don’t send take down notices because few websites comply explicitly with the DMCA so the “infringers” are not even protected. More, since they are largely individuals, even if they would deserve a take down notice, it’s probably cheaper for them to settle, so it still serves the same purpose of scaring people. On top of that, though, the same Wired article “Righthaven has other media clients that he [Gibson] won’t name until the lawsuits start rolling out,” so you shouldn’t post anything from any article from any newspaper because they may be working with us.

The portion that speaks towards this sue-first style as a short-term business model that intends to capitalize on changing norms of content sharing rather than be a lasting solution comes from the very end of the Wired article - “Frankly, I think we’re having tremendous success at a number of levels,” Gibson says. “We file new complaints every day.” That success includes rolling out suits hints that their goal is not to stop people from what they see as infringement, but to profit off of what they know is going to continue to be the norm – people will quote and link to them, and then they can continue to sue and settle. They’ve already filed over 130 claims, and settled at least 29 of them for roughly $116,000, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. Really, if deterrence were really Righthaven’s goal, the only success would be when there are no more suits that could be filed.

Granted, I think the business model is a little bit more complex than that. I think part of the motivation is also to create a short-term buzz around the LVRJ so that they get more traffic. I, for one, had never heard of the LVRJ much less visited their site before the Righthaven cases – now I’ve read a grand total of 3 articles (all on their views of suing infringers). Of course, this seems like a terribly silly long-term practice because at the same time they are causing fewer other people to link to their site, which hurts their rank on search engines like Google, but for now, I bet their advertising revenue is up because controversy means clicks and eyes.

But their success as a business is not what troubles me about these suits, obviously. Honestly, I really hope I’m seriously overstating the quality of their business model (sorry if the length of that tangent was a bit much). What bothers me most about it is that it works to prop up a breaking if not broken status quo. As I said at the beginning of this post, clearly something has radically changed if the people your business has to fear are your fans and not your foes. Righthaven is doing its best to avoid letting its fans actually celebrate the work the newspaper does and trying to preserve an outdated model where the newspaper is the only place that can supply news.

What’s worse is that it’s using governmental policy and federal structures to prop up the system. Law is meant to be a shield against immorality, something that protects people and businesses from abuse – not stand in the way of change (honestly, these practices seem oddly reminiscient of pre-Civil Rights era law abuses that tried to prevent the enfranchisement of African Americans). Righthaven is treating the law like a sword to cut out the legs of what is clearly a new way of viewing content that clearly the majority of people feel. And unless judges rule on it, it’s really unlikely to change given that law moves glacially compared to practices surrounding technology.

I think Righthaven knows all of this – especially the last part, about how nothing will change until rulings come in. Which is why I think Righthaven has primarily targeted individuals and groups who are largely trying to work towards some sort of change from the status quo. They do not have the time nor the money to fight against Righthaven suits, so they settle out of court – at least partially legitimizing Righthaven’s suits.

Righthaven’s suits are nothing but a desperate attempt to hold on to a status quo that has long since ceased to be what people see as the norm. The RIAA dealt with this years ago and has tried to change content models to make online distribution possible, and most newspapers are trying to work with, rather than against their readers. The Las Vegas Sun, which has been covering its competitor’s suits, for example, has been trying to turn “infringers into allies” by not suing, but asking “that they take down our material and replace it with a link and at most a paragraph or two from the story. Such links drive traffic to our site, which is a good thing, especially for our advertisers.”

But the perpetuation is more than just of the copyright-quo. Since the suits are targeting those small groups who are frequently trying to change some current policy, it also saps the already limited resources of groups like NORML, and makes their fight that much more difficult.

“In the end we probably could’ve fought it and won,” said Altieri. “But it would’ve consumed a crazy amount of our time money and resources and not have advanced the fight for marijuana legalization. Most of us involved agreed it was something we wish we had the resources to fight on principle, but it really would’ve consumed us.”

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Trio

Firehoses make great water fountains

Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make: I love to read. A lot. And for a burgeoning academic, it's maybe the best trait to have.

Unless, of course, you're in your final semester of college taking 19 credits, among which is a class whose professor's pedagogy involves a philosophy of assigning reading along the lines of, "I want you to drink from a fire hose."

It's not that he expects us to imbibe so much our throats resemble a frog's, but rather that he's going to spray us with information, from which we should drink what we can.

I suppose really, the problem is that I don't like skimming. I just can't do it. I have a compulsion to read any article as closely as I can to pull out all the information, all the quotes, all the stylistic flair I want to borrow that I can. You'd think that as a fairly successful national circuit debater who's been arguably more successful as a coach, that I would have learned to skim. Or at least triage really effectively. But I haven't - I've really just fed my literary and theoretical obsession.

I mean, it’s why I came to school here in the first place. I went to American University for two years, studied cinema, and absolutely loved it. At AU, though, cinema studies is only a minor and by the end of my sophomore year I had already completed it. So I transferred so I could keep reading about film but with better professors, actually get credit for it, and not have to worry about so much about other fields of study. Granted, once I got here I realized that the world was changing and theatrical cinema wasn’t evolving in step, or really much at all (which Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts pretty nicely in his project hitRECord, or more specifically, in the hitRECord Accord – more on that in a later post). But that just means I had to be more discriminatory in my course selection so I could learn about emerging media outside of the film industry.

Of course, the bureaucratic structure of my new school has made that a bit harder than I initially imagined, which may be why in my final semester I’m taking two general education classes (which I have ebulliently railed against because, let’s face it, for a debate coach little is more satisfying than arguing about your own education), which, though interesting, are ultimately turning my healthy obsession into a frightful addiction. I simply do not have time to read the blogs I follow (and it’s not just a few, but a few dozen – and it was around a hundred before I hacked away at my reader list two days ago) and do my coursework.

I suppose that's why I'm writing this blog. Or, more specifically, I suppose that's why I'm writing about civic media on this blog. This way, not only will I stay on top of my reading, but I'll have to spend the time to analyze what I'm reading - and it will meet my requirements for another class, to boot! Of course, this does mean that I'll probably update more than once a week, and that I'll probably pull a lot of videos and images since otherwise I'd probably just understand the concepts as theory rather than how they relate to praxis, but hey, if I have a problem with loving to read, why not turn that into a problem with loving (or at least trying to love) to write?


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Profiling Blackspot

When cruising the blogosphere in search of people talking about the possibilities and problems with civic uses of new media technology, especially for disseminating information, it’s really not hard to find posts. There’s no dearth in blogs about contemporary media, which is really no surprise since blogs are themselves a contemporary media development, so it would almost seem disingenuous for media theorists to resist sharing their perspectives through such a media outlet when they make their livelihoods pontificating about it.

And yet, there are very few blogs that focus on the civic side of media. They tend to focus on entertainment and legal developments – which is no surprise, since the history of media development has tended to stem largely from entertainment, and recently legal issues have been central in understanding what (re)uses are and are not allowed in our recombinatory culture. As a result, discussions about how emerging media impacts information gathering or is used for new collaborative projects tends to be rare and occur around isolated posts.

So when I was referred to Adbusters, and more specifically the related blog Blackspot, I was pretty thrilled. I had heard about them before, but solely from the perspective of criticism, and I had never directly engaged with their work. Micah White, a fairly well known actvist who is pursuing a PhD from the European Graduate School writes the posts which appear roughly biweekly (though sometimes there are longer droughts between posts).

While Blackspot tends to make arguments, they are invariably polemic ones filled with virulent language; its argumentative depth tends to be sacrificed for powerful rhetoric, and sometimes he just criticizes through pathos instead of mixing in logos or ethos. (see his Augmented Reality post for a good example).

That’s not to say there isn’t anything academic or scholarly about it. There is definitely an investigative bent that informs all of the writing, especially the ones that are critiques of more specific parts of society, rather than general calls to action. His post on rejecting clictivism is a good example, where facts and statistics are used to buttress an overall explanation of the problems posed to activism in a digital age.

Even though his work comes from a much more antagonistic perspective than I allow myself to hold (I’m an adherent to the idea of agonistic discourse – antagonism polarizes people, pushing them further into your camp or into what you have constructed as your opponents, rather than working together to move in a direction that actually closer meets everyone’s needs), Blackspot is a really useful site, as it raises lots of issues with where media is going in relation to activism. Perhaps most usefully, the blog is not read exclusively by people who already agree with what Micah has to say. The comment arguments are somewhat frequently responses, and even when they are agreements they almost always include additional links or arguments. So while the readership isn’t terribly high, it seems like those who do read it have something to say (though the troll engagement is a little too frequent for my tastes).

Regardless of the quality of all his arguments, media-centric blogs frequently focus on calls for experimentation and possibility, highlighting only the major successes like World Without Oil, and saying things like “nothing will work but everything might.” But Blackspot looks at the things being done and attacks what won’t work, rejecting techno-topic possibility in favor of pragmatic, if extremely impassioned and sometimes flawed, approach.


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I love it when people are stabby

After returning to my google reader account for the first time in a few days (I spent the weekend gallivanting about the increasingly gentrified North East section of DC), I realized that whether or not I actually catch back up on a blog is pretty much exclusively determined by how they write.

That’s not to say I don’t continue reading blogs after an absence, but let’s just say I’m more tempted to click “mark all read” on the legal blogs I follow than on something as thoroughly entertaining as Molly Schneider’s blog Things That Make Me Stabby (Of course, that does assume that she actually updates more than once every few months, but hey, everything up until this was really just an anecdote that only serves to introduce Molly’s blog anyway).

Now, Molly’s posts are really only tangentially related to what I’m writing about (she complains about random things in her life – primarily those that, shockingly, make her stabby), but since she’s a PhD student in film studies at Northwestern, she tends to write about or at least reference the changes in media culture in her posts. And I think that’s what makes her blog a lot more interesting to me than the various blogs that primarily serve to make arguments (like Blackspot, which I referenced last week) – she displays how her academic training influences the other spheres of her life, rather than constantly focusing on her academia.

Take her most recent post, “Bally Total Fitness, aka the Corporate Panopticon,” for example. Molly immediately establishes the absurdity of Bally Total Fitness by (re?)reading it as a “technodystopian cult.” But her analysis goes no where near the straight forward, logical structure of “here are the characteristics of a cult, and this is how Bally meets them.” Instead, she offers a couple consecutive sentences that not only reference Greek mythology, but also World War One politics and Michel Foucault – with pictures.

Really, this analysis is self-consciously academic. She knows the words she is using establish her as brilliant and Bally as an absurd, corporate structure that is part of a “fitness industrial complex,” or perhaps more closely resembling Nazi Germany – and the pictures she uses certainly help her case.

The best part about the blog, however, is not this super close reading of something that has become awkwardly normalized, but what comes next. After Molly has effectively established not only her intellectual superiority through high-level word choice and both name and concept dropping (I mean, come on, the title of the post has the word “panopticon” in it – which she assumes the reader knows and only alludes to in a middle paragraph), she goes on not to critique the idea of fitness clubs, but just rant about how awful their customer service is and the difficulty of canceling a membership.

And throughout the rest of the post, the academic word choice that is pretty much ubiquitous through the first chunk dissipates. The patronizing, condescending tone, however, gets much, much stronger. She relays, in extreme(ly biased) detail exactly what happened throughout the entire contract and contract canceling process. And her previously cool, somewhat detached tone becomes an angry rant because this, not the general panoptic structure, is what makes Molly stabby.

She relays at various points IN ALL CAPS THINGS THAT BALLY AND ITS EMPLOYEES DO THAT ARE ABSURD. Like saying there is no contract but then handing you a contract and contract ID number. Or generally just saying BULLSHIT to the fact that there’s only a 2 week window to cancel without going into a third month. Or that the manager of the gym belongs to a different gym (she actually says that in all caps twice).

And in case her relaying a few events wasn’t enough to prove Bally’s absolute incompetence, she then relays her conversation where she tries to cancel over the phone – obviously to no avail, or she’d probably be less upset. And all throughout it are the hints (overtones) of condescension and the “inside knowledge” that she has – like after saying her favorite “super passive aggressive shaming techniques” ("I'm sorry that you work for a company that doesn't give you the tools to do your job effectively.”), that she knows higher ups listen to angry phone calls.

All in all, Molly’s writing is fascinating because it tries to present an academic relationship to the world at large, and not just to traditionally analyzed topics. More than that, though, it uses academic training to establish a clear dominance over whatever she is complaining about so when she relays her side of the story, it’s hard to think it or imagine that the other side, the zombie-constructing, corporate fetish club filled with heiling Sisyphus-es could be anything other than incompetent.

And if you’re like me and think that fitness clubs are more or less the bane of contemporary society, it’s all a pleasure to read.

Monday, September 13, 2010

New Media Solutions to Old Problems?

“The stage is being set for a communications revolution.... In addition to the telephone and to the radio and television programs now available, there can come into homes and into business places audio, video and facsimile transmissions that will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. In short, every home and office will contain a communications center of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.”
~Ralph Lee Smith


Anyone who’s met me in the physical realm knows that I’m a perennial optimist. I’m all about innovative (and preferably slightly off the wall) developments in contemporary society, especially when they relate to constructing sites of meaningful discourse. There are dozens of examples out there already involving digital media - many of the best of which are chronicled in Jessica Clark’s Public Media 2.0, including my personal favorite, World Without Oil.

And yet in moving towards the sort of participatory culture that is essential to the functioning of a democratic society I feel like this sort of approach is pretty impoverished. This isn’t to say I don’t like optimistic white papers about how to create a participatory future grounded in equality (Hell, I more or less dream about it), but sometimes (oftentimes) when reading them I get this sense of a techno-topian futurescape where we, as humans with Heads Up Displays will be able to create some imagined ideal Habermasian public sphere.

Certainly it’s fair to believe the future is full of the potential, but the language we use in describing it often obscures the structural barriers to a democra-topia free of second-class citizens. It’s like we’re marching behind a parade leader who’s convinced us to look up at the infinite possibility of the blue sky so we don’t ever see the potholes along the way – unless we’re in the unlikely margin who “just happens” to fall in.

Granted, unbridled optimism surrounding technology is anything but new – that quote that opened this whole post isn’t even about the internet (yeah, that’s how people talked about cable television in 1970). But if anything that just speaks to why it’s a problem. We seem to keep thinking the way to solve society’s problems is to invent some new platform or program, rather than to actually address the root cause.

Fairly intuitively, the initial stumbling block to discourse-enabling digital programs is access – particularly at home. Ellen Seiter makes this point pretty saliently with the simple parallel that no child who is only able to practice the piano in the corner of a school gym after school for a few hours until the janitor kicks him or her out is going to be a grand pianist – that is reserved for students with the privilege to have their own piano so they can not only practice but play and experiment as well (of course, there’s a lot more nuance in her full presentation of the argument). And many white papers take this point to heart and, like the Knight Commission, argue that broadband access should be made widely available so people can practice using technology at home.

But in presenting wider internet access as the solution, it washes over the cause of the problem in favor of focusing on the solution. Whether it’s purely class or race based isn’t terribly important to this point (of course it’s some intersection, and I personally lean on the side of a possessive investment in whiteness) – what is common, though, is that the structural reasons why some people cannot afford this access is scarcely, if at all, interrogated. So planned obsolescence would still mean lower classes are more likely to have out of date hardware that may be (or become) unable to perform critical functions – an effect redoubled by the inability to have multiple computers which would allow multiple family members to participate.

And the worst of these problems continue outside of technology generally. As a example illustrative of myriad others, children from lower socio-economic strata, primarily non-white and immigrant children, would still have a vocabulary that is 30 million words smaller than their more privileged peers by the age of 3, meaning the discourse they enter into is always already constrained. And that’s before even entering the extremely unequal school system.

Really, there are dozens of reasons why equal broadband access doesn’t mean equal access to participation – but the rhetoric used within these white papers certainly makes it seem as if everything will be equal with a few small changes that ensure access. Of course, to get policies passed this sort of language is understandable – on a very basic level, if it seems like THE solution, it will get more support.

But the more utopian/blue skies reforms that get passed, the harder is becomes to challenge the underlying inequality because those policies are used as excuses to say that disadvantages are not structural - making future struggles for parity of any sort that much more difficult, since they not only appear solved, but resources and time are misdirected to treating symptoms, all the while exacerbating the real issue and pacifying those who may otherwise help solve it.

I get not wanting to admit racism and classism are more than overt, individual acts of hate. It’s hard to see ourselves as perpetuating a racist/classist system (much less engage others in discourse about it). But maybe we should because otherwise we seem doomed to re-inscribe inequalities into every new “fix.” I want and can envision a democratic society based in rough equality, and I definitely think that new media literacies hold a lot of the keys to making that happen, but there’s no way it can happen if the focus is on hot new solutions rather than the problems needing solving.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Profiling Blackspot

When cruising the blogosphere in search of people talking about the possibilities and problems with civic uses of new media technology, especially for disseminating information, it’s really not hard to find posts. There’s no dearth in blogs about contemporary media, which is really no surprise since blogs are themselves a contemporary media development, so it would almost seem disingenuous for media theorists to resist sharing their perspectives through such a media outlet when they make their livelihoods pontificating about it.

And yet, there are very few blogs that focus on the civic side of media. They tend to focus on entertainment and legal developments – which is no surprise, since the history of media development has tended to stem largely from entertainment, and recently legal issues have been central in understanding what (re)uses are and are not allowed in recombinatory culture. As a result, discussions about how emerging media impacts information gathering or is used for new collaborative projects tends to be rare and occur around isolated posts.

So when I was referred to Adbusters, and more specifically the related blog Blackspot, I was pretty thrilled. I had heard about them before, but more frequently from the perspective of criticism, and I had never directly engaged with their work. Micah White, a fairly well known actvist who is pursuing a PhD from the European Graduate School writes the posts which appear roughly biweekly (though sometimes there are longer droughts between posts).

While Blackspot tends to make arguments, they are invariably polemic ones filled with virulent language; its argumentative depth tends to be sacrificed for powerful rhetoric, and sometimes he just criticizes through ethos instead of mixing in logos or pathos. (see his Augmented Reality post for a good example).

That’s not to say there isn’t anything academic or scholarly about it. There is definitely an investigative bent that informs all of the writing, especially the ones that are critiques of more specific parts of society, rather than general calls to action. His post on rejecting clictivism is a good example, where facts and statistics are used to buttress an overall explanation of the problems posed to activism in a digital age.

Even though his work comes from a much more antagonistic perspective than I allow myself to hold (I’m an adherent to the idea of agonistic discourse – antagonism polarizes people, pushing them further into your camp or into what you have constructed as your opponents, rather than working together to move in a direction that actually closer meets everyone’s needs), Blackspot is a really useful site, as it raises lots of issues with where media is going in relation to activism. Perhaps most usefully, the blog is not read exclusively by people who already agree with what Micah has to say. The comment arguments are somewhat frequently responses, and even when they are agreements they almost always include additional links or arguments. So while the readership isn’t terribly high, it seems like those who do read it have something to say (though the troll engagement is a little too frequent for my tastes).

Regardless of the quality of all his arguments, media-centric blogs frequently focus on calls for experimentation and possibility, highlighting only the major successes like World Without Oil, and saying things like “nothing will work but everything might.” But Blackspot looks at the things being done and attacks what won’t work, rejecting techno-topic possibility in favor of pragmatic, if extremely impassioned and sometimes flawed, approach.

Firehoses make great water fountains

Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make: I love to read. A lot. And for a burgeoning academic, it's maybe the best trait to have.

Unless, of course, you're in your final semester of college taking 19 credits, among which is a class whose professor's pedagogy centers around a philosophy of assigning reading that goes along the lines of, "I want you to drink from a fire hose."

It's not that he expects us to imbibe so much our throats resemble a frog's, but rather that he's going to spray us with information, from which we should drink what we can.

But I love reading. I suppose really, the problem is that I don't like skimming. I just can't do it. I have a compulsion to read any article as closely as I can to pull out all the information, all the quotes, all the stylistic flair I want to borrow that I can. You'd think that as a fairly successful national circuit debater who's been arguably more successful as a coach, that I would have learned to skim. Or at least triage really effectively. But I haven't - I've really just fed my literary and theoretical obsession.

I mean, it’s why I came to school here in the first place. I went to American University for two years, studied cinema, and absolutely loved it. At AU, though, cinema studies is only a minor and by the end of my sophomore year I had already completed it. So I transferred so I could keep reading about film but with better professors, actually get credit for it, and not have to worry about so much about other fields of study. Granted, once I got here I realized that the world was changing and theatrical cinema wasn’t evolving in step, or really much at all (which Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts pretty nicely in his project hitRECord, or more specifically, in the hitRECord Accord – more on that in a later post). But that just means I had to be more discriminatory in my course selection so I could learn about emerging media outside of the film industry.

Of course, the bureaucratic structure of my new school has made that a bit harder than I initially imagined, which may be why in my final semester I’m taking two general education classes (which I have ebulliently railed against because, let’s face it, for a debate coach little is more satisfying than arguing about your own education), which, though interesting, are ultimately turning my healthy obsession into a frightful addiction. I simply do not have time to read the blogs I follow (and it’s not just a few, but a few dozen – and it was around a hundred before I hacked away at my reader list two days ago) and do my coursework.

I suppose that's why I'm writing this blog. Or, more specifically, I suppose that's why I'm writing about civic media on this blog. This way, not only will I stay on top of my reading, but I'll have to spend the time to analyze what I'm reading - and it will meet my requirements for another class, to boot! Of course, this does mean that I'll probably update more than once a week, and that I'll probably pull a lot of videos and images since otherwise I'd probably just understand the concepts as theory rather than how they relate to praxis, but hey, if I have a problem with loving to read, why not turn that into a problem with loving (or at least trying to love) to write?

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

I love it when people are stabby

After returning to my google reader account for the first time in a few days (I spent the weekend gallivanting about the increasingly gentrified North East section of DC), I realized that whether or not I actually catch back up on a blog is pretty much exclusively determined by how they write.

That’s not to say I don’t continue reading blogs after an absence, but let’s just say I’m more tempted to click “mark all read” on the legal blogs I follow than on something as thoroughly entertaining as Molly Schneider’s blog Things That Make Me Stabby (Of course, that does assume that she actually updates more than once every few months, but hey, everything up until this was really just an anecdote that only serves to introduce Molly’s blog anyway).

Now, Molly’s posts are really only tangentially related to what I’m writing about (she complains about random things in her life – primarily those that, shockingly, make her stabby), but since she’s a PhD student in film studies at Northwestern, she tends to write about or at least reference the changes in media culture in her posts. And I think that’s what makes her blog a lot more interesting to me than the various blogs that primarily serve to make arguments (like Blackspot, which I referenced last week) – she displays how her academic training influences the other spheres of her life, rather than constantly focusing on her academia.

Take her most recent post, “Bally Total Fitness, aka the Corporate Panopticon,” for example. Molly immediately establishes the absurdity of Bally Total Fitness by (re?)reading it as a “technodystopian cult.” But her analysis goes no where near the straight forward, logical structure of “here are the characteristics of a cult, and this is how Bally meets them.” Instead, she offers a couple consecutive sentences that not only reference Greek mythology, but also World War One politics and Michel Foucault – with pictures.

Really, this analysis is self-consciously academic. She knows the words she is using establish her as brilliant and Bally as an absurd, corporate structure that is part of a “fitness industrial complex,” or perhaps more closely resembling Nazi Germany – and the pictures she uses certainly help her case.

The best part about the blog, however, is not this super close reading of something that has become awkwardly normalized, but what comes next. After Molly has effectively established not only her intellectual superiority through high-level word choice and both name and concept dropping (I mean, come on, the title of the post has the word “panopticon” in it – which she assumes the reader knows and only alludes to in a middle paragraph), she goes on not to critique the idea of fitness clubs, but just rant about how awful their customer service is and the difficulty of canceling a membership.

And throughout the rest of the post, the academic word choice that is pretty much ubiquitous through the first chunk dissipates. The patronizing, condescending tone, however, gets much, much stronger. She relays, in extreme(ly biased) detail exactly what happened throughout the entire contract and contract canceling process. And her previously cool, somewhat detached tone becomes an angry rant because this, not the general panoptic structure, is what makes Molly stabby.

She relays at various points IN ALL CAPS THINGS THAT BALLY AND ITS EMPLOYEES DO THAT ARE ABSURD. Like saying there is no contract but then handing you a contract and contract ID number. Or generally just saying BULLSHIT to the fact that there’s only a 2 week window to cancel without going into a third month. Or that the manager of the gym belongs to a different gym (she actually says that in all caps twice).

And in case her relaying a few events wasn’t enough to prove Bally’s absolute incompetence, she then relays her conversation where she tries to cancel over the phone – obviously to no avail, or she’d probably be less upset. And all throughout it are the hints (overtones) of condescension and the “inside knowledge” that she has – like after saying her favorite “super passive aggressive shaming techniques” ("I'm sorry that you work for a company that doesn't give you the tools to do your job effectively.”), that she knows higher ups listen to angry phone calls.

All in all, Molly’s writing is fascinating because it tries to present an academic relationship to the world at large, and not just to traditionally analyzed topics. More than that, though, it uses academic training to establish a clear dominance over whatever she is complaining about so when she relays her side of the story, it’s hard to think it or imagine that the other side, the zombie-constructing, corporate fetish club filled with heiling Sisyphus-es could be anything other than incompetent.

And if you’re like me and think that fitness clubs are more or less the bane of contemporary society, it’s all a pleasure to read.