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?
_____________________________________
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.
_____________________________________
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.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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.
~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.
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?
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.
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.
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