infobong.com

shockingly lumpen and macabre

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is RTF 386C "Media/History/Collective Memory" which deals, in part, with the ways that historical events are memorialized through media texts. For the term paper, I'm planning to write about the Oklahoma City National Memorial as a mediated and discursive practice. Apart from the fact I was a freshman at OU when the bombing occurred, I find it interesting how it uses a bombing by ultra-nationalist right-wingers as a launchpad for ultra-nationalist right-wing propaganda. Come on people, didn't they teach you the concept of irony in high school? You're just making Oklahomans look ignorant.

Anyway, The Guardian has a story about Joseph Beuys that deals largely with how he used his art to memorialize the past. The author says, "Beuys showed Germany and Europe a way to live without forgetting, and to remember without false piety." We're not reading about his work in class, but it would certainly relate to the issues we're discussing.

play number muncher

Using Bloglines, I've aggregated my students' blogs into a single public magic blog thingy, so I can keep track of 40 student blogs, and so the students can check out what their peers have to say about the readings and the class discussion. I think my favorite blog title has to be "Super Happy RTF 319 Blogging FunShine!"

turn into a verb

Although it has its fans in my department, I don't really watch "The O.C.", so I missed a product-placement moment last night. Apparently one character said, "So, I A9.com'ed him last night," instead of "Googled him." Apparently Amazon is attempting to gain exposure for its search engine by having it written into the script of "The O.C." I wasn't able to find this line using Google video search, but who knows how a captioner would spell "I A-nine-dot-commed him," so, for now, I assumed this really happened.

If sharing TV shows via BitTorrent ever gains the critical mass to scare advertisers, I wonder if we'll see increasing uses of product placement, particularly for geeky products like search engines and operating systems. There have been plenty of Slashdot threads about what operating system a series uses on screen, will we start to see banks of purple Sun Microsystems servers on "24" or monologues about the wonders of DB2 on "Alias" once enough geeks watch their TV with the commercials edited out?

regions and region behavior

Yesterday, I showed my students Justin Hall's "Dark Night" video in class. We were discussing how homepages and blogs engage in self-presentation. I made an effort to explain Erving Goffman's notion of "front region" and "backstage," since the students had already pointed out how people put their best face forward on homepages, Friendster and the like. I used Justin's video as an example of perhaps presenting a little too much of the backstage.

The students paid attention through the whole video, and, after they realized it he was performing, but performing in earnest, they were a little shocked that he would share so much of his personal life - including medical conditions - online.

I think this was a pretty useful exercise, even if they didn't quite get Goffman. After class, one student came up to me and asked, "What does Goffman say about instant messenger?"
"Oh!" I said, "He died before people really started using the Internet. His work is from the 1950s."
The student gave me a look of disbelief. I guess I should have foregrounded that discussion a little better.

infinitely malleable format

For today, I'm having my students read Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective," which I like quite a bit, if you haven't read it. It touches on some facets of blogging that I find interesting, namely the 'zine-y aspects of blogging and its potential for dialog with corporate media. One of these days, I'll get back to blogging myself.

genuine fear

UCLA studio art professors Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have quit in protest over the university's inaction over a grad student performance that employed a gun, reports the LA Times. I'm sure there's more to the story, since their action seems a little drastic, particularly when you consider an action that brought Burden fame in the 1970s.

Burden says that the element of surprise is what distinguishes his work from the piece that frightened audiences. I've worked with a professor that encourages surprise performances intended to shock and frighten audiences, so this makes me wonder about the implications of work like this.

make a good boss

Hooded Puppet
Originally uploaded by m4dd4wg.

Today was a lovely day for an anti-inaugural rally and march. We gathered at the State Capitol and marched down Congress with a few stops along the way. The sun was shining, a cool breeze was blowing. I had a good time, and snapped a few pictures, which I've posted on Flickr.

I left a little early, around 6pm and caught the 20 bus back to my house. Traffic was gridlocked and a few of my fellow bus riders looked at the cops blocking traffic on the South Congress bridge with bewilderment. One guy said, "I don't understand why they get so angry about Bush; he'd make a good boss."
Another rider agreed, saying, "Yeah, he'd make a good boss."

Um, that's exactly the point. I don't want the president to be my boss; I want him to represent me.

pointers to interesting

I've put up a blog for the class I'm teaching this semester. This will be quite an experiment; I'm asking the students to keep individual blogs instead of using the Blackboard courseware, and I'll be keeping a blog for the class as well. I hope the students enjoy the project, and I won't turn them off from blogs forever.

methamphetamine-addicted marine beat

Allright, I'm awaking from my blog-slumber (blogernation?) for a relatively content-free post. I love Neal Pollack's response to all the attention given to celebrity responses to the tsunami. He writes, "You know, I’d like to see someone throw a telethon to benefit the women and children we haven’t killed yet in Iraq."

I also agree with his criticism of "not one damn dime day" protesting the younger Bush's re-inaugaration. I don't think a general boycott will accomplish much, but I do think marches do succeed in making dissent visible and re-enforcing community ties. In Austin, there will be an anti-Bush march forming at 4pm Thursday at the state capitol building. I'll be there.

differences and come together

Folks, I've been too distraught over The Unicorns' breakup to blog much. Maybe I'll have more to say in a while. In the meantime, listen to the title cut of their farewell EP, "Unicorns 2014."

Dealey Plaza

dealey
Originally uploaded by m4dd4wg.

Today I went up to Dallas for a friend's birthday and stopped by Dealey Plaza this afternoon. My Historiography class this semester focused on media representations of the JFK asassination, so I've been wanting to stroll around the public space. There were more tourists than I expected, but no real surprises. I put up a few more snapshots on Flickr.

migrating you or anything

I guess its true that Six Apart is buying Live Journal. I was wrong when I suggested that Six Apart would move LJ's user base over to TypePad or begin charging subscriptions, since creator Brad Fitzpatrick's LJ entry explicitly says, "LiveJournal won't become paid-user-only or anything crazy like that," and insists that users will not have to move to TypePad. I wonder how long that will last. What often seems to happen with mergers like this is that the acquirer releases one more rev of the acquired product (LiveJournal) and continues to offer it, but eventually lets it wither on the vine, encouraging users to move to a more profitable product (TypePad). I'm just speculating.

I was right on one account, Brad admits much of LiveJournal was eyeball-frying ugly, saying, "because we weren't the prettiest and didn't give good quote, we were often overlooked." He says he's looking forward to applying the expertise of Six Apart's design and marketing teams to the project.

but sometime later

Here are a few links I feel obligated to post on the blog. First, Danah Boyd and Clay Shirky have written pieces addressing Larry Sanger's critique of Wikipedia, which I commented on yesterday. Clay's rebuttal is particularly interesting because it's argument that Wikipedia is just a different kind of reference tool echoes Liz Lawley's stated issue with his application of "power laws" to blogs. Ain't it fun when stuff gets all diablogic?

And this tasteless, yet amusing, animated video was such a hit on New Year's Eve, its my duty to link to it here. When you have lyrics like "You're very phallic/ You're big, black, and metallic" and a wonky electroclash backing track, you've got an instant classic on your hands.

other possible acquirers

The blog "Om Malik on Broadband" has a entry that says Six Apart, the company formed around the blog engine Movable Type, has plans to buy Live Journal which hosts a community with blog-like user pages. I can certainly understand why Live Journal would want to sell out - it began as a hobby, quickly exploded, and has often suffered scalability issues - but I'm not sure what Six Apart would get out of a merger, apart from LJ's vast user base, which it could bring over to its hosted TypePad service, particularly when you consider that the Live Journal backend is open source.

I'd long been dismissive of Live Journal as a source of content. Perhaps I was turned off by the ugly design of the sites or the fact that it attracts a non-technical audience. But, in recent months, I get it. Live Journal is a community of users sharing their experiences in journals, rather than media projects made by individuals. This is a crass generalization, but blogs seem to be more aspirational than Live Journals. Blogs are a tool for authors to share viewpoints and links, while Live Journal is an environment for interacting online. I've become something of a fan of the site for the supportive networks of users it has fostered and the culture of experimentation. Live Journals often look ugly, but there also seems to be less pressure to seem polished or authoritative compared to even Blogger-based blogs.

If Six Apart's aim in acquiring Live Journal is to grab its user base, I doubt it will be able to convert many users into paid TypePad subscribers. Even current paid Live Journal users would miss the non-paying members in their networks, and probably opt out of subscribing, since the primary attractor would be gone. Moreover, an effort to force Live Journal users into TypePad accounts would be a PR blunder on the magnitude of Six Apart's decision to begin charging users of Movable Type, which greatly diminished Six Apart's goodwill in the blog community and led to a mass migration to the WordPress platform.

single root problem

Larry Sanger has an interesting post on Kuro5hin.org about how some cultural and architectual issues keep Wikipedia from attracting subject-area experts. He contends that Wikipedia's radical openness impedes efforts to eliminate trolls and often leads to watered-down articles, particularly on controversial subjects.

Although I find Wikipedia to be much better than I would have ever imagined, I can certainly see some of the phenomena he describes reflected in Wikipedia content. He describes how a solid article by an expert can be appended or cut by less-informed contributors, leaving an uninformative mess. I'll use the Wikipedia entry on "Communication Studies," which says "Marshall McLuhan was one of the early pioneers [of the field]." Um, hardly. McLuhan was working twenty years after universities began to establish communications programs and the article fails to acknowledge McLuhan's teacher Harold Innis, who's vastly more influential than Wired magazine's patron saint. Although McLuhan might be a joke among the communications scholars I come in contact with as a doctoral student in communications, his technological determinist viewpoint jibes with techies, so he gets credited in a technocentric encyclopedia.

Sanger's point about Wikipedia's lack of respect for expertise echoes my criticism of IndyMedia, where openness marginalizes participants with greater levels of experience or professional knowledege. Sanger doesn't provide any clear solutions for this issue, but I agree that participatory projects that want to gain a level of general credibility will need to find ways to resolve this tension.

privileged front-row seat

Dan Gilmor's final column for the San Jose Mercury-News appears today, and he has launched a new blog on TypePad called "Dan Gilmor on Grassroots Journalism."