infobong.com

target to hand

I got a blast email this morning from UT President Larry Faulkner announcing his plans to resign. I don't know if they sent it out to all students or I got it because employed by UT as a TA and instructor, but blasting an email like this seems to be an effective way to minimize gossip and rumors in offices around campus.

In the three years I've been here, I don't think I've heard anyone say anything positive about Faulkner. My personal beef with him is his master plan that all but eliminated cycling from Speedway and indicates further curtailing of cycling around campus. It seems ridiculous for an inner-city campus like UT with it's attendant parking and traffic problems to discourage the university community from using a form of transportation which can abate those problems.

I don't know if a president at a large university like UT is ever well-liked. The cult of personality around former US Senator David Boren is probably unique to OU. But hopefully, UT's next president will be "greener," pushing a vision of campus where we have a variety of transportation options and greater diversity in its vendors, dumping corporatists like Taco Bell, Starbucks, and Sodexho. In addition I hope we get a president that gives real raises to university employees, rather than the "merit raise pool" they're offering next year.

idle thoughts while washing dishes

While washing dishes, I thought about Will Rogers and Rogers State University in Claremore, OK. Isn't it odd that a university named for one of the biggest movie stars of the 1930s doesn't have a program in Film? They do offer a Radio-TV option for the B.A. in Communications, which seems to be geared toward broadcast journalism. Rogers State does have the only student radio station in the Tulsa area.

Of course, my alma mater, the state's flagship university, barely has a film program. I do have a B.A. in Film and Video Studies from OU, but it had limited production opportunities, and we never screened any Will Rogers movies. Befitting a school established by a televangelist, Oral Roberts University in Tulsa probably has the best production facilities among Oklahoma schools.

manipulate the alternative

It's been too darn long since I've blogged anything. I was going to blog the story of Nike's appropriation of classic Minor Threat cover art when Pitchfork ran the story on Friday. Carrie at Stay Free! points to a thread where users have photoshopped other album covers into ads. The quality is uneven, but some of my favorites rehash Nick Drake, Gang of Four, Funkadelic, Wire, Emerson Lake and Palmer (I'm embarrassed to identify that cover), and Slint.

With the obvious exception of ELP's Tarkus, these are all records I'm quite fond of. I picked these because I thought the were the best executed and the funniest, but I wonder if my taste in music influenced my picks, or people who share my taste in music tend to have photoshop skills.

general communication behavior

Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, is collecting data for his dissertation at M.I.T. He has a short survey online about bloggers and blogging, and you should help him do his research and take the survey. The survey is geared for people who blog and only takes about five minutes.

Although I am in no way a quantitative sort of guy, I often find taking survey interesting. In this case, it was interesting to be reminded I have family members that are truck drivers or other blue-collar workers, and really how few people I've met online.

suffer future disputes

Jon Udell has a post that succinctly describes one of the things I find so fascinating about Wikipedia. "Wikipedia's greatest innovation is arguably the framework it provides to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution," he contends. If I were a librarian or a first-year composition teacher, I'm sure Wikipedia would give me fits, but reading the site as a text continuously under construction provides interesting insights into how people form facts, beliefs, and knowledge. It's a pity Wikipedia doesn't have a "how to read Wikipedia" page, but I think that would conflict with the tacit discourse of credibility that seems to surround the project.

more than a secret sharer

The spirit has moved me, and I'm finally posting something on the ol' infobong. David Corn and Jeff Goldberg has a great story in The Nation that reveals that former g-man Mark Felt was put in charge of finding and stopping Deep Throat, while he was plying Woodward and Bernstein with information. As you might imagine, this assignment was instrumental in keeping his role a secret. I was born after Watergate, and what I know about it is largely the stuff of popular memory, but, considering the reputed paranoia of the Nixon administration, I find it surprising they didn't have people spying on the spies.

canonical explanations and justifications

Here's a Wiki created to document "The Politics of Open-Source Adoption." The project claims to create a "real-time history and analysis" of how open-source software projects are selected and deployed in various institutional contexts. Although this project is a little more oriented toward organizational studies than my research interests, the introduction makes a good point, explaining "Our project began with the observation that accounts of the F/OSS movement, to date, have been oriented mostly by the improbable fact of F/OSS’s existence." I agree that most academic work on open source software development focuses on how distributed volunteer project can mobilize and organize resources to create useful software.

In Wiki-related news, "Peanut Butter Wiki" is a new project that allows users to "Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich." I would probably explain it to another RTF student as "a Hotmail for Wikis," a hosted service for creating small-scale wikis. I can't think of anything worth Wiki-ing at the moment, but it might be interesting to create a class Wiki in one of my seminars when school starts back up.

deadest whitest malee

Barry Gewn has an interesting piece titled "Forget the Founding Fathers" in The New York Times that aims to provide an overview of approaches to American history. Despite its flaws, I found this piece kind of valuable; the only history class I took as an undergrad was "history of rock," so I've never really been exposed to the various discussions about histories of the US. However in some places, the essay seems to contradict itself. Gewen contends that multicultural approaches to American history lost favor when, "Battered by political correctness, basking in Reaganesque optimism and victory in the cold war, the country in the 1980's and 90's was ready for a reaffirmation of its fundamental values." However, he doesn't enumerate what US "fundamental values" are or point to any evidence that there are values shared by the population through the sweep of history. Presumably, the fundamental values he alludes to are the values of the white power elite, which only re-enforces the argument of the multiculturalists.

It shouldn't be surprising that a piece in the Times is sympathetic to a neoliberal point of view, however. Critiquing Richard Hofstadter, he writes, "Though the book appeared in the late 1940's, at the onset of one of the greatest economic booms in American history, Hofstadter was still complaining about ''bigness and corporate monopoly,' misguidedly declaring that ''competition and opportunity have gone into decline.'" I suppose one could make a convincing argument that the corporate capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s where more competitive and provided more social mobility than the oligopolies of today, but Gewen seems unwilling to acknowledge critiques of corporate power.

The article is ostensibly about the "Founding Fathers," and one area I hoped it would touch on was ignored. I hoped it would discuss how the framers of the US Constitution function in popular memory today. The Christian Right often deploy popular understandings of the framers in order to situate their political goals within imagined traditions. I frankly don't understand how the right can ingenuously claim that the framers intended to establish a "Christian nation" unconcerned with individual liberties, when the framers were largely deists and certainly classical liberals. The establishment clause of the First Amendment seems proof enough that the framers were suspicious of religious influence on the state.