Yesterday, I was looking for an example of a "found footage" film to use as an example in class for the students' final After Effects project. Lee, our invaluable custodian of the department video library, pointed me to Craig Baldwin's found footage masterpiece, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. I think I will only show the first few minutes in class - I'll also screen Bruce Conner's A Movie - but, dang, this movie is crazy stupid awesome. Unfortunately, it's unavailable on DVD, which is a total bummer, since I don't have a TV to play VHS tapes on.
Tribulation 99 led me to do some digging around on Baldwin, and I realized he directed Sonic Outlaws, a flick about Negativland's tussle with U2. I found it for fee download at Transmission Films. Transmission Films seems like a great idea, providing an alternative distribution system for experimental and independent films, but it strikes me as rather ironic the site would offer a movie about contesting copyright law in a DRM'ed Windows Media format.
My mom, who teaches 8th grade U.S. History, just pointed me to this gem of a Web site, "Teach With Movies."
Mom described it as a site for teachers that indicates how accurate movies are to history and how appropriate a movie is for students. Looking at their sample for Gettysburg, it seems that their level of analysis isn't tremendously deep. While I hardly expect a site like this to perform a full-on historiographic analysis of a period film - overworked teachers would hardly have the patience to plow through it - they could be a little more critical of issues of representation and accuracy than "some of the beards look fake."
It's a subscription service, and at $11.99 for a year subscription, I suspect it's geared for the homeschool market. I used to copyedit math books for a publisher that did a brisk business with the homeschool market, and it seemed pretty clear that conservative ideology meshes with the desires of homeschool parents. Saxon Publishers, whom I worked for, made their name publishing straightforward algebra books that eschewed graphics and conceptual "new math" for repetition and memorization. Teachwithmovies.org seems to share a conservative approach to pedagogy. For example, here are some discussion questions from the lesson plan for Gettysburg:
While I don't doubt that movies can be a valuable instructional tool, I sort of cringe at this lightweight approach to analyzing film historiography. I'm certain that historians, history buffs, and media studies folks could find more problems with Gettysburg than just the beards. It would be kind of cool to build a free Wiki for teachers to serve a similar purpose. Informed folks could submit descriptions of representational problems of a text such as inaccurate costumes or anachronistic representations of race like Morgan Freeman's character in Amistad. It would provide teachers with a resource for teaching history and media literacy, while giving frustrated viewers an outlet for voicing their objections to media representations of history.
Maybe David or Prentiss can help me out with this little dispute in my "Interactive Multimedia Research" class. We're discussing ""Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up'" by S.C. Herring, et al. The paper (and the student presenting on the paper) uses political blogs such as Instapundit as examples of "A-List" blogs. I objected to this use of "A-List," since I associate it with first-generation tech bloggers like Kottke, Doc Searls, or BoingBoing. I am wrong in my understanding of how "A-List" is used colloquially?
The paper cites Rebecca Blood for the use of the term "A-list" but hedges it's bets in a footnote, saying, "In this paper, we use 'A-list' as an operational shorthand to refer to the most popular blogs as determined by number of inbound links," which would apply to the Instapundits, but would probably ignore a lot of bloggers I would consider "A-List Bloggers." If highly-linked blogs are the focus of the paper, she could have used another, less loaded term like "supernodal blog."
To make this a true "blogblogbloggyblog" post, I believe this is the first time I've actually posted to my blog while sitting in class.
I'm in the end-of-semester crunch, so it has taken me a few days to blog this CNet News feature about fan films. The article describes how digital editing and Internet distribution have spurred fan films in recent years. I have no reason to doubt the overall gist of the piece, but I had to take issue with one passage, "Indeed, this community of fan creators is increasingly the subject of study by academics--not to mention marketing departments--seeking clues to tomorrow's trends," which links to this Henry Jenkins piece. Perhaps it's simply glib reporter phrasing, but studying fan culture is hardly a new trend - Jenkins published Textual Poachers over a decade ago - and I don't get the sense that fan studies are exploding in the academy. Maybe there's an uptick in the amount of research done on fan films and fan fiction, but I don't get the sense that it's exploding in the way that blog studies has exploded since I began grad school in 2002. I do think this is a case of an overly-enthusiastic reporter who doesn't know his material.
The piece also quotes Patricia Zimmerman, which piqued my interest since we read selections from her Reel Families in (you guessed it) "Media/History/Collective Memory" a few weeks back. While I certainly think home movies and consumer media technology, I thought she ignored substantial technological theory like Brian Winston's notion of the "suppression of radical potential" that would have helped her argument that social work took place that limited consumer media-making to topics of the domestic sphere, rather than political discourse. In the selections we read, she also did little to acknowledge alternative media outside of art contexts, which I found frustrating.
The CNet piece paraphrases her, saying "But unlike the products of some underground film communities, fan films (barring plots based on gender and sexual-role switching) are rarely socially or even commercially subversive, she noted." It seems that excluding fan fiction that contests the heteronormativity of media ignores a particularly broad swath of fan art. The profile of Slash Fiction both in the academy and online would suggest that fan fiction often contests social norms represented in the media. In addition, movie studios often regard fan art as a threat to their copyrights and perhaps their control over authorship. In the past, studios have threatened fan Web sites with cease-and-desist orders. Most recently, the MPAA harrassed fan fiction Web sites over their use of MPAA ratings symbols like, "G", "PG", and "R". In light of these actions, I would contend that Hollywood regards fan art as "commercially subversive."
It's about time I sounded off on the Adobe-Macromedia merger, considering the impact it may have on my work. Jason Kottke has done a wonderful job rounding up what influential bloggers have to say about the merger, but he doesn't include Dan Gillmor's post, which pretty much echoes my initial reaction.
Another thing I thought of when I first learned of the merger was Adobe's intellectual property lawsuit against Macromedia in 2000 over a tabbed-palette interface design. After the settlement, Macromedia had to drastically redesign the interface for most of their product line, which, for people who don't use digital production tools, may sound inconsequential, but has created a variety a of headaches for me. Even between Studio MX and Studio MX 2004 the interfaces are different enough to cause confusion for me and my TA. For example, the Actions palette in Flash, which was once rather intuitive, is very difficult for new users to understand. Scripting is hard enough for lower-division RTF students to understand, and a wonky interface doesn't help much. At least this merger may bring improved interfaces to Flash and Dreamweaver.
I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere - perhaps its the perspective of a budding historian of technology - but in class yesterday I compared this to the Adobe-Aldus "Aldobe" merger in 1994, which certainly shook up the desktop-publishing world, but times change, as well, and the demands of users change; note how that story doesn't even mention Photoshop, which is certainly Adobe's most well-known product today.
As a sort of counterpoint to the previous post, I thought I would point readers to Phillip Agre's "Networking on the Network," which is a guide for graduate students for using social networks on- and off-line to advance their scholarly careers. As a relatively green grad student, I found this piece to be quite helpful in understanding the power dynamics of the academy and the basic mechanics of research.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story titled "Knowing When to Log Off" addressing the impacts of email and the Web on scholars and students. It contends that the shift from a book-based to a 'net-based academy has had negative effects on the socialization of students, particularly between students and instructors, and has led to an information-processing quagmire for many professors. Although it doesn't suggest we should abandon the 'net, some of the source advise readers to be more conscious of how they use the 'net and pace themselves accordingly. I should probably take this to heart, considering my current inability to manage email.
Oh sweet, Manitoba Caribou is going on tour and will be playing Austin on May 13. Would any of you out in blogland want to go? Up In Flames was probably my favorite record of 2003.
It has been a while since I've posted anything about music, so I will add that I really like the new Fischerspooner record, Odyssey. I won't say that it sound different than their first record, but it's different; it's much more pop-oriented, and it doesn't seem to be as thick with irony as #1. My two favorite songs are "A Kick in the Teeth" and "Cloud."
Perhaps fortunately, I listened to the latest New Order record, Waiting for the Siren's Call, a few days before I got Odyssey. My initial reaction was disappointment, partly because I'd hoped that it would sound more like Fischerspooner. When I refined my opinion of the album, I thought that New Order could be a little more like Primal Scream, radically updating their sound, as they did on Xtrminator. As Pitchfork notes, its a solid record, "from a group that doesn't need to prove a damn thing to anyone," but I have a hard time getting excited about it.
I'm on a tear of low-commentary blog posts, but Krugman's column today really drives home how broken our political system is. Talking about the arguments against nationalizing US health care he notes:
So, in essence, our private health care system costs taxpayers as much or more than privatized countries, while it costs private individual users substantially more to get medical treatment. This also ignores the fact that substantial swaths of the American public are entirely without health coverage. What will it take for Americans to realize that groups like the AMA and the pharmaceutical lobby don't have our best interests at heart, and much of their political rhetoric is completely self-serving?
It's rare that I wish I were still in Philadelphia, but, boy howdy, I wish I could check out this exhibit currently on display in Philadelphia. "D.I.Y. Revolution: Zines and Other Underground Publications" is, as you might expect, a show of 'zines from their heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It's curated by Scott Huffines and old borg Gareth Branwyn. Maybe it will travel and come to the Austin Museum of Art.
I'm a little curious about the venue. I never went out to the East Falls section, where Philadelphia University is located. It was way off the beaten path for me, particularly when I didn't have a car. Also, Philadelphia University seemed to specialize in the "practical arts" like textiles, which was not an interest of mine. It seems that there's a big federated design festival going on now in Philly, so maybe this was the best venue the show could get.
Update: Oh yeah, here's Branwyn's post on the show, and pictures from the show.
This is probably better material for bOINGbOING, but a LiveJournal user has presumably found satellite photos of the famed Area 51 using Google Maps. Area 51 is, of course, where the US Government allegedly keeps its top-secret UFO labs. Some of the comments have suggested that the user is on the wrong trail, but his images largely mirror the ones on this site purporting to be of Area 51.
Chutry points to an older Henry Jenkins piece that relates to my favorite class to blog about this semester, "Media/History/Collective Memory." In the piece, Jenkins relates how the the movie Contact depicts a spacecraft picking up broadcast signals from historical moments, stretching back to FDR's "Fireside Chats" of the 1930s, yet ignores the historical moment when radio's radical potential was most fulfilled, the amateur era from the turn of the century to the 1920s. Jenkins suggests this is ironic, saying " this erasure of broadcast history is perplexing when you consider how often Contact returns to the image of ham radio, although its operators are more interested in communicating with the dead or with space aliens than with each other."
Flexing my fledgling theoretical muscles, I'd suggest that this demonstrates how popular memory and history can often come into conflict. Popular memory - the memory of ordinary folks formed through personal memories and media representations of the past - often ignores significant historical moments and events. From Jenkin's description, it sounds like the historical events Contact recalls - the Beatles, "All in the Family," the Iran hostage crisis - are moments significant to the lives of Baby Boomers. Yes, the Fireside Chats and World War II predate the Baby Boomers, but they would be significant to their parents and likely reside in their understanding of the past, much as Watergate and Vietnam preceded my generation, but strongly influence our understanding of our nation's past. Earlier events from the teens and twenties might be too far back for personal memories. In this case, Contact's version of history would be in line with the popular memory of its audience.
I do agree with Jenkins' argument that understanding the past of technological policy and development is critical for understanding contemporary debates about technology. Jenkins says,
Of course, he's thinking of the Internet and other peer-to-peer digital communication technologies, and I wholeheartedly agree that many of the policy debates we see today echo debates from the early days of broadcasting or even earlier.
I should have blogged this article when I first saw it last night, but I wasn't sure what to say about it. The New York Times reports on how video shot by both activists and the police themselves are leading to the dismissal of charges against protestors at the Republican National Convention. Many news outlets suggested that the NYPD indiscriminately rounded up activists during anti-RNC marches in order to intimidate protestors or simply get them off the streets. Video now shows the extent to which this occurred and the false charges leveled by the police. I frankly hope that after the disgusting restraint of speech that happened during the 2000 RNC in Philly, the FTAA meeting in Miami, and the 2004 in New York, that groups will finally be able to effectively sue for civil-rights violations, ending this era of stormtrooper police tactics.
Mediageek has a good post reminding readers of the role that citizen video can play. I haven't posted anything about the Online Journalism Symposium I attended over the weekend - I do have some thoughts about it I should share - but one thing I took away was a re-realization of what an amazing tool for distribution of media the Internet really is, and the extent to which it encourages would-be media-makers to go ahead and produce media projects.
Bicycling magazine is offering Austin folks the opportunity to win a new bicycle as part of its BikeTown USA project to promote urban cycling. I could use a new bicycle, and I'm certainly a proponent of bike commuting, but I wouldn't want to be the subject of a future feature in the magazine. To qualify for one of the fifty bikes, you need to write a fifty word blurb about how cycling could improve your life and submit to a legal release.
In other Austin news, I just saw a great Texas Travesty item lampooning the Young Conservatives of Texas. It's a flow chart to help you determine "What's Your YCT Attention-Whoring Event".
We're discussing intellectual property and appropriation next week in RTF 319. I would post this NYTimes story about the "Who Owns Culture" event with Larry Lessig and Jeff Tweedy to the class blog, but I've already posted a few articles about copyright. There's so much about this issue in the news media right now with the Grokster case that iit would be foolish to post everything I see about the issues. Also, my students are supposed to be posting articles that relate to the issues we discuss to their own blogs.
I read Chris Atton's An Alternative Internet a few weeks back, and his chapter "Radical Creativity and Distribution: Sampling, Copyright and P2P" excited me in a way that a piece of academic work hasn't excited me in a long time. He ties the idea of copyright to the issues of authenticity Benjamin lays out in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which led me to assign in for class, and then deploys the notion of "usufruct" to resolve the needs of content producers and the broader cultural need for fair use and appropriation. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "usufruct" as "The right to use and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another as long as the property is not damaged or altered in any way," which seems obviously applicable to intellectual property issues. Atton treats usufruct a little more generally, using the idea to describe a reqime where property is loosely shared by a community in order to advance the interests of a community over the interests of individuals.
Granted, Atton is writing from an anarchist perspective, citing Proudhon's famous "property is theft," but it seems like usufruct is a very useful idea for conceptualizing debates over intellectual property - and useful for technology companies and users who want to position themselves as something other than pirates - yet I haven't seen this idea deployed in the copyright debates.
Recalling more pleasant kinds of memory in Wired, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore relates his experiences with mix-tapes. Somehow, I had assumed that the mix-tape was as old as the consumer cassette deck, but Moore contends that the mix-tape only really came into being with the advent of portable cassette players like the Walkman. Although the piece is nostalgic, Moore doesn't really argue that the mix CD is that different than the mix-tape, saying, "CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post."
This weekend as I was compiling a mix CD for a friend who's moving away, I became circumspect about my more perfectionist tendencies, and asked myself, "Why do you feel like you have to fill up all 80 minutes of the CD?" I realized it was an atavistic impulse from my mix-tape days. If you don't fill a side of a cassette, you leave your listener with an annoying amount of dead air. I had a repertoire of songs I used to fill a side up, using a short Guided by Voices song as a short interlude to trim off a bit of blankness, or simply allowing Neu's "Lieber Honig" to cut off short once the head hit the leader. Of course, mix CDs simply end when the music ends, so I don't need to worry about kicking my pals into minutes of silence.
Moore's piece is part of an anthology he's editing, called Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I probably would have snapped this book up as soon as I had the spare cash. Not all of my reading was light, but back then I loved to read about other people's experiences, particularly subcultural experiences; I suspect that this led me to be an English major. I don't read much material like this any more, perhaps because of my grad school workload and perhaps because I've had my own experiences, but I suspect a lot of my attraction to this kind of reading had to do with being a rebellious kid trapped in Oklahoma, thirsting for something different.
Here's yet another item that relates to my class about the construction of popular memory, this time from Bruce Sterling. According to a Reuters story, the Cambodian government has turned over adminstration of the"killing fields to a private company."
I suppose it might seem appropriate to have private enterprise manage a place that marks the genocidal brutality of a communist dictator, but if I was a family member of one of the 1.7 million people who died under Pol Pot, I would probably have strong feelings about the memorial turned into a tourist attraction.
I probably should have posted this sooner, since the registration deadline for the School of Journalism's International Symposium on Online Journalism is tomorrow. Dan Gillmor will be speaking at the keynote session Friday, which may draw a mess of blog types to the conference. I'm planning to check out a few of the panels in addtion to the keynote.
And to further clear out my backlog (backblog?) of items to post, here's a thought-provoking article from The San Antonio Current published in anticipation of the conference. On one hand, I'm posting it for sheer ego-stroking; the article asks "with an endowed Knight Chair in Journalism, and a renowned Radio, Television, and Film department, as well, it seems like a good place to look for the answer to the question, Can this profession be saved?"
Its always nice to hear that your program is "renowned," but the article's discussion of "alternative media" or what Clemencia Rodriguez calls "citizen media" gave me some surprises. The article has a pullquote from Bob Jensen, an outspoken activist professor in the J-School, that I didn't expect to see, "A lot of what's called indie media is not journalism. Journalism is an attempt by people who are independent of other institutions to understand and explain the world to people." Since Jensen is such an advocate of radical/progressive movements, this seemed uncharacteristically dismissive of grassroots media projects. One one hand, I would agree with him that "citizen's media" is not journalism, but I would contend that the institutional legitimization of a news organization largely makes journalism journalism. Since most news organizations (at least in the US) are supported by advertising dollars and are influenced by this industrial reality, I'm suspicious of how independent any media-maker can be.
I might conceptualize journalism in the context of the infogeek concept of the "reputation economy," where an earned or instutional reputation can give an individual's voice a degree of credibility in the culture. For example, I.F. Stone is regarded as a hero to many journalists and, today, most would regard him as a journalist. Yet, he self-published his newspaper worked from a particular subjectivity, so he wouldn't have cultural force of a newspaper to make his news "news." It was the reputation he earned (admittedly partially through some reporting for major newspapers) that gave him the credibility to reach an audience and affect their understanding of the world.
To return to Jensen's quote, I do wonder to what extent, the reporter used quotes that reassert the role of conventional journalism in our culture. As Barbie Zelizer points out in Covering the Body, much of the meaning-making journalists engage in is reasserting the cultural role of the journalist as objective expert.
I've started using CiteULike, a social bookmarks manager for academic research, to keep track of articles I find when I'm away from a printer and want to read later on. It has a really nice interface to ACM journals and some other, but, with most articles, you have to enter the bibliographic data by hand. If you're an EndNote user, it has an interface for dumping bibliographic data into the application.
You can see my own list of bookmarks here, but, as you'll notice, I haven't posted too many articles yet. What I've using for a few months is its folksonomic tags like "blog" and "Wikis," which you can subscribe to as an RSS feed.
With this post, I've finally created a "research" category for my blog for school-related posts that don't clearly fit into "meta-media" or "tech." I probably should have created the category a long time ago, and I may go back and recategorize some old entries.
I'm still not sure what to say about this Washingtom Post story about a new series of children's book that situates Barbie in historical moments of the late twentieth century. In one "Barbie Diary of the Decade" book about the 1960s, Barbie comes to grips with the civil rights struggle through her African-American friend Christie. However, racial difference is constructed in an interesting way in these books, on "one of the pages on which they appear together, hair equally long and straight, skins an identical shade of pink."
In my "Media/History/Collective Memory" class this semester, we're examining how media texts construct "collective memory," popular understanding of the past, and how differs from official history or academic history. It might be easy to dismiss a Barbie history of civil rights as an ephemeral children's book, but texts like these have as much influence as school history, further asserting progress narratives ("racism is over") or eliding racial difference ("we're all the same").
One of the scholarly pieces we read recently was Herman Gray's classic "Remembering Civil Rights," which examines representation of African-Americans in TV and other popular culture. Gray asserts that there is a "Civil Rights Subject," an idealized racial character like the ones in "The Cosby Show" or "Julia" who overcome social forces to lead normalized, middle class lives. The civil rights subject legitimates certain kinds of experiences - overcoming overt racism - while delegitimating other experiences or other social complaints.
I think we see the civil right subject play out in an interesting way in this piece, "Postmodern Protests" by Christina Larson, from The Washington Monthly. The author contends that with blogs and other forms of grassroots media, street protest today is obsolete and self-indulgent, and contrasts the anti-war and anti-Bush protests this year with Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, contending that the Civil Rights protests were legitimate actions, while the protests today are not. (she has little to say about Vietnam War protests, but, if I'm reading her right, she doesn't approve. I think this taps into what Gray says about how the Civil Rights subject constructs legitimate "subaltern" identitiies, de-legitimating others' experience of struggle.
I apparently need Bloggy, the blogging robot, because I have a whole backlog of things to blog.
I think I'll put the other items in separate entries, but, first I'll remark on the Boy Scout leader who pleaded guilt on child pornography charges. One of the tacit reasons the Boy Scouts of America used to justify its ban on queer Scout leaders is the presumed threat of pedophilia. When this was a national debate, I didn't think the ban would do a damn bit of difference, and this is apparent proof. The ban is about homophobia, pure and simple, not child porn or moral values. If it was about values, how did this creep get to be a national director of the scout's Youth Protection Program? I'm not angry enough to send my Eagle Scout badge back to headquarters in protest, but I'm certainly angry enough to write them a letter about this hypocrisy.
Oh, and Googleloop is a blogging 'bot of a different sort.
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