infobong.com

non-commercial translator game

MediaGeek has a great post on how right-wing Christian groups are abusing non-profit translator policy by hoarding translator licenses and using FM bandwidth that could otherwise be used for low-power community stations to broadcast conservative content distributed via satellite. It really chaps my hide how the FCC can engage in their rhetoric of "localism," yet allow politically conservative groups to use bandwidth set aside for local broadcasting for nationally-generated content. My own research into LPFM demonstrated that, although it was positioned as a concession to progressive media activists, it is largely conservative groups that benefit from LPFM licenses because of the way the process is structured.

voltage and amperage

Glenn Fleishman has a piece intending to parody attempts by telecommunications interests to outlaw municipal wireless projects by comparing broadband to eletricity.

Sadly, Fleishman's thought experiment is quite close to the historical reality. In the early 20th century, Industry groups did make efforts to bar municipalities and governments from generating electricity and, in some cases muscled their way into markets where public and non-profit utilities already existed. When I read Scott Rosenberg's pointer to the entry, I immediately thought of Patrick McGuire and Mark Granovetter's "Business and Bias in Public Policy Formation: The National Civic Federation and Social Construction of Electric Utility Regulation, 1905-1907." Its not the most quotable piece, but here's a sample.

Despite the academic writing style, I think you'll agree that this is pretty much the scenario Fleishman imagines. One of the reasons I'm motivated to pursuse the history of technology as a scholar is the frustration I often feel when technologists and reporters treat a technology as completely new or "apart from history," but as this case shows, this situation has occurred before.

pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics

I knew I had been co-opted when one of my stories appeared on Microsoft's PressPass site, so its fair to say l33t speak has hit the mainstream now that the software giant has a page devoted to decoding "teh lingo." I guess our friends in Redmond are one step ahead of the FBI.

more interesting than CNN

A student pointed me to this "Daily Show" segment on bloggers. You've probably seen it posted on a number of blogs already, but watch it if you haven't already. It's hilarious, and its pretty insightful, suggesting people who care about the news now may be more drawn to blogs than the cable news channels.

I think I may show this clip in class tomorrow; I'm planning to show the opening sequence of The Triumph of the Will to talk about fascist media use, and it seems like Colbert's admission that his name is really "Ted Hitler" might make for a lightweight seque. Its funny how easy it can be to shock my lower-division students. I was explaining Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" to looks of disbelief. When I showed them an image of the piece, they burst out in laughter. I later got on a tangent about "Guernica," so I showed this image of Colin Powell after his address to the UN on the eve of our invasion of Iraq. Again, I had my pupils surprised. Does anyone know where I can find a larger version of that image?

batted around several

I haven't been blogging while I've been working at the IndyConference this weekend, but Steev has a good post about the conference, particularly the blog roundtable I wound up facilitating. One of the keynoters, Douglas Kellner, sat in on the session and offered some interesting views.

BTW, here is the Wiki kept of the conference proceedings.

makes the grass grow

Since David is crash-blogging, I thought I would add this to the mix.

As I was speeding down Manor Road, on my morning jog, my right foot hit the side of a buckled sidwalk seam. I felt myself falling and caught myself with my left foot. Thinking I was staying upright, I relaxed, but my center of gravity went over my left knee, and I hit the pavement hard. I broke my fall with my right hand and my forehead, and I was in a bit of a daze afterward.

Apart from a little, invisible bruise, my head feels fine, but my hand hurts like the dickens. Tonight, I went to a reception at my chair's house for this weekend's IndyConference, and it was hard to live up to social expectations, since shaking hands hurts like hell.

certain timeless aspect

One of the issues we're exploring in my "Media/History/Collective Memory" class is nostalgia. We're looking at how it can be invoked for political purposes (generally on the right) or as a marketing tool. The New York Times has a story today about how many eighties bands are retooling, but having a hard time marketing themselves. Apparently, my generation doesn't idealize the 1980s the way that Baby Boomers romanticized the 1960s.

Certainly the cultural conditions of the 1980s were different from those of the 1960s, making it more difficult for folks my age to feel nostalgic about the Reagan era, but I also wonder if there were institutional conditions within the music industry that also generated products with a short shelf-life. For example, in the 1960s FM radio was still a frontier for commercial broadcasting - for much of the decade FM transmitters were largely used to simulcast AM programming. In the late 60s, FM radio was accessible to low-paid DJs who could introduce the public to favorite records and enjoyed a great deal of latitude over their broadcast. In contrast, FM listeners overtook AM listeners in the early 80s, and by then had become an important outlet for record labels to promote bands. It had become another arm of an increasingly corporatized music industry.

I'm on the tail of Generation X, and I enjoyed a lot of eighties music in high school: bands like Talking Heads and New Order were old bands from a different era. Still, I'd have a hard time enjoying more commericial bands from the early eighties. I sometimes listen to a retro hour on a local radio station, and I'm dismayed when they'll play a song that was released when I was in high school or - even worse - in college. I'll think, "Pavement isn't retro... yet." But I suppose, for the purposes of radio programming, anything that is off the rotation and the listeners want to hear is "retro.

seeing comes before words

I've assigned my class the first chapter of John Berger's Ways of Seeing for next Wednesday, and I'm currently in the process of scanning a .pdf of the chapter to put on eRes. While looking around for information about the book, I found a nice little page that has all of the images from the book. They're even in color, so it's even better than the grayscale images in my copy! This is nice, since now I don't have to worry about doing high-quality scans: my students will just need the text.

seven strangers

Last Thursday as I was headed into the RTF grad student "lounge," I had to step around some folks staring into to tiny, wireless video monitors. I wondered what was going on. When I got inside the office, another student immediately said, "Did you see the Real World people next door?"
"Oh, is that's what's going on?"
Indeed, the cast of "The Real World Austin" were watching Dig!, a documentary about The Brian Jonestown Massacre, in preparation for their mission, to make a documentary about a SXSW band of their choice. As left the office, a middle-aged man was directing, saying "get a reaction shot" into his headset, while a woman logged the footage in real time. I worried that the RTF department would be represented by an establishing shot of UA9, an old motel that has been converted into office space for the College of Communications.

Apparently, the cast has a weekly meeting each Thursday afternoon in UA9, cause the director and crew were again blocking my path into the office. I surreptitiously shot a picture of them through the door of our office. It's backlight, but I was reluctant to use a flash, in case they didn't want me taking a picture.

political applications of technology

This year's South By Southwest Interactive conference is having a mini-track devoted to "Activist Technology,". Although the emphasis may be geared more toward party politics than I might like, the titles of the panels sound interesting.

On a related note, the IndyConference at UT later this month is really coming together. We expecting about 80 IMC activists to come from out of town, and the conference is open to everyone if Austin folks want to come by and check it out. I'll be giving a presentation on "Web-publishing for non-Geeks," which readers of this blog probably won't find useful, and I've agreed to moderate a discussion on trolls, hackers, and spam. We still need volunteers to help out at the conference, so, if you're interested, drop me a line.

jibe with its values

Via TalkLeft, here's a NYTimes story that relates how the U.S. House has approved a resolution critical of the Third Circuit Court's decision allowing divisions within universities to bar millitary recruiting without the threat of losing funding in other departments. The right has an increasingly antagonistic attitude toward the judicial branch of our government - using loaded language like "activist judges" - but it seems like legislative projects like this and anti-marriage proposals which attempt to circumvent the court seem to be a more radical attitude toward our legal system. The Third Circuit's decision, mind you, was based on a Supreme Court decision allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gays, so its clear that the supporters of this resolution have little regard for our courts or internal consistency.

interactive light installation

This is perhaps ubiquitous computing at its best. An art installation allows users to text a phone number and play video games on the windows of the French national library. I can't imagine something like this happening in the states.

no disassemble

I wrote a blog entry on Friday, but apparently I never hit "post." Or maybe MT just didn't like it. On Thursday night, my laptop - my only computer these days - started smoking near the DC-in jack. I called a few places, and the only place that would give me an estimate on replacing the DC-in on the machine said it would be $150-200. Does this sound like a fair price?

When I took it in yesterday, the guy said, "Its smoking? You should just call support and have them service it." He thought that because it was a fire hazard, they would just replace it, to avoid liability issues. Maybe he didn't want to work on it, but he wouldn't take it until I called support. I haven't called support yet because I'm frustrated with this problem.

I checked out an iBook from the College of Communications, but it is so annoying not to have your own computer. It won't connect to my cable modem, and, of course, I don't have my bookmarks or stored files. The school's computer also has only 128MB of RAM, which has reintroduced me to the joys of a grinding hard drive when the RAM maxes out.

song with number signs

Matt Haughey has a really nice post that discusses a way to create and - more importantly - remember high-security passwords. I'm sure this would be useful to many readers who are under requirements to use dictionary-proof passwords. I've seen similar techniques before, when I administered a server here at UT, I was given a password based on a W.C. Fields quote. Another technique I've used with some success is Native American First Nations words and place-names.

content analysis in online communication

I'm taking a methods class, Journalism 395 "Interactive Multimedia Research." I was reluctant to take it because, in my experience working for the campus paper as an undergrad, J-School students are boring. I do need methods classes, and very few are offered for Web research, so I bit the bullet and signed up for this one. Here's the best thing I got out of the class today:

Next week, I'm presenting on our online ethnography readings, so I hope I am more engaged in the class discussion.

serious not symbolic

I feel a little derelict in my duties as a grad-school new-media blogger because I didn't blog about Michael "Mercedes Divide" Powell's departure from the FCC. I guess I couldn't decide if this was a good thing, since I definitely disagreed with his deregulatory agenda or if was a bad thing, since now the Bush adminstration could install someone even more odious to the post of FCC chairman. Regardless, today's "Boondocks" strip gave me a good chuckle.