Today I was getting some lunch at Wheatsville Co-op, and a woman I know was working at the deli.
"I guess there's a big party at your house tonight."
"Yeah, are you coming by?" she asked.
"Yeah, I should stop by for a while."
We chatted a bit more, and then she reminded me her roommate was graduating from Texas State. "Hooray for Lindsey!" she said.
Reflexively, I blurted, "Well, hooray for the bulldog," quoting Citizen Kane. I realized that my audience may not be as familiar with the Orson Welles classic and assume that I was comparing Lindsey - whom I hard know - to a bulldog. I need to be more careful with my movie references.
It is funny what movies people have seen and what they haven't. In a class I TA, the professor mentioned Kiss Me Deadly. When she asked how many people had seen it, one person out a class of 30 raised their hand. I was shocked: what do they teach these kids these days? "That's a good movie," I said emphatically, "You'll like it!" After we explained how moments from Pulp Fiction and Repo Man are references to the flick, the students seemed more interested.
Today's "Cat and Girl" cartoon titled "Lone Star" seems particularly appropriate for this blog. It's probably good that one of holiday lessons cited is not "Good lookin' women, every time you stumble, will never catch you when you fall." Gosh durnit, how is it that the media studies program at The University of Texas at Austin never offers any classes on country music?
While I'm wasting time blogging, I'll comment on the "Pranks: Culture Jamming" course noted on bOINGbOING the other day. My first reaction to reading the story in the Contra Costa Times, was "I wish I could take a class like that!" One of my grad school profs has written about pranks, and another has certainly conducted her own. I suppose I wouldn't need this class, since I played pranks as an undergrad with no instruction, and I've helped students do pranks as a class project when I TA'ed for Sandy Stone. Perhaps students at Saint Mary's College of California need the germ of an idea or the prodding to play pranks.
Last fall, in the required "Supervised Teaching in Communication" course, the instructor assigned us to design and write a syllabus for our "dream class." "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism" seems like Ray Beldner's dream class, but I couldn't find the syllabus online. My dream class was "Making Alternative Media," which would be a class for activists and media producers combining no-budget production with studies of the history of alternative media. We'd start by making a class 'zine and end by doing guerilla documentary production. When I taught the department's "Intro to Digital Media" course last semester, I spent a good amount of time on alternative media online, but it would be nice to someday teach a class solely about alternative media.
The Talent Show has a great post ridiculing the newly-launched right-leaning media business Open Source Media or OSM™, which collections contributions from bloggers, primarily from the conservative/authoritarian side of the political spectrum. I understand why people might want to use the "open source" metaphor to describe certain modes of media production, but The Talent Show makes a great point about OSM™'s name, saying "Yes, the trademark symbol is part of the abbreviation to remind people that they're not that 'open source'."
A few weeks back, I presented a paper at a grad student conference explaining for communication/humanities types why the open-source label isn't quite appropriate for talking about media projects. I explained the difference between human-readable and machine-readable code, asserting that "I hope media and politics are all human-readable." I do think "open source" is a useful metaphor, but I hear far too many people use the term without a firm understanding of what it signifies.
It must be the online equivalent of "sweeps week" because two prominent news sites are running weeklong feature. Slate.com is celebrating "college week" this week. One article asks semi-famous folks "What was the most influential book you read in college?" Neal Pollack has a particularly interesting response. While it's tempting to brown-nose one of my current professors and say The Classical Hollywood Cinema, I think I'll go with Don DeLillo's White Noise, which will probably make Chuck happy. Runners-up would include Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which is disqualified since I was assigned it as many as five times in high school and college, and the other film book I can name off the top of my head, Spike, Mike, Slackers, and Dykes by John Pierson, who teaches producing in my department.
CNet's news.com.com is also running a weeklong feature called "Taking Back the Web," which discusses the growing popularity of tools that allow ordinary folks to publish on the Web. Today's installment is on Wikis, and, of course, it emphasizes Wikipedia, the Wiki with the highest profile.
This semester, I'm TAing a class on the history of HBO, so when I saw the news that David Cronenberg has inked a deal to direct an HBO series adaptation of Dead Ringers, I emailed the news to the instructor. She asked, "who in their right mind would want to see a creepy Cronenberg Dead Ringers show? " adding, "That sounds like the worst idea for a series ever—maybe like if the Fisher brothers were into necrophilia on 'Six Feet Under'." I haven't watched "Six Feet Under," but I otherwise agree. Part of my objection is that Dead Ringers is hardly my favorite Cronenberg flick. In response, I thought of adaptations Cronenberg should do for the network.
Jon Lebkowsky quotes a post from David Kline discussing the emerging relationship between participatory online media, citizens, and global capital.
My first thought reading this is "Great," and my second thought is "That's really great!" Finally it occurred to me that the authors aren't celebrating resistance to corporate power, but are thinking of ways that businesses can adapt to a changing information world.
I believe that corporate America is the fundamental organizing power in the Western world today, exerting more power than government or religion. It's strange that people who might identify as libertarian are often more concerned with governmental power than business power. Perhaps this is what distinguishes libertarians from anarchists. Much of my research focuses on how participatory media creates opportunities for citizens to resist corporate power, so it's a little strange to see folks looking for ways for business to reassert its power in the culture.
Last night I watched the premiere of "The Boondocks" animated series on The Cartoon Network. (A BitTorrent link is here.) I'm sure its very difficult to adapt a beloved comic strip to television. As the "Dilbert" show proved, simply adapting a three-panel narrative to a 20 minute TV show has to be a challenge, but I think a greater difficulty is expanding characters with sound and motion without jarring readers' senses of the characters.
Most of my observations about the show probably relate to this challenge of adding context to the characters. Reading the comic strip, I imagine Huey with a more mature-sounding than the Michael Jackson-sounding voice of the TV show, and Riley sounding more overtly angry. It also seems like it would be Riley, not Huey, stalking a banker with a laser sight, and I do think this is deviating from the characters in the comic strip.
Reading the comic strip, I also imagine Woodcrest as a working class suburb (like Sand Springs outside Tulsa or Delaware County, Pa), and I imagine the Freemans living in a slightly dilapidated ranch, rather than a McMansion with granite countertops. Perhaps this is my own work as a reader filling in the gaps, but, if I were going to write a paper about the series, I'd go back to the comic to look for cues about Woodcrest and the house.
I was taking notes while watching the show last night, but I unfortunately didn't take notes of the bumpers, which are edited out of the file available through BitTorrent. The bumpers were silent and featured white text on a black screen, which I think is a marker for the "Adult Swim" programming. The text suggested that Cartoon Network offered programming that was more political and confrontational than other TV outlets. The "Boondocks" pilot didn't strike me as particularly political but I wondered if this was Viacom's effort to attract young left-leaning viewers from Comedy Central, which it once co-owned with Time-Warner.
I was a little disappointed with the first episode, but there were some funny moments in the show. In an early scene, Robert suggests that white people are particularly enamored with gourmet cheese, but Huey retorts, "Granddad, you can’t tame the whole white supremacist power structure with cheese!" In the next scene, Riley says, "I know about white people, too. Like when they talk, they say the whole word," drawing out "whole word." These are the kinds of observations of racial difference viewers expect from Aaron McGruder, and the second joke wouldn't work in the funny papers. Like many TV series, "The Boondocks" needs time to hit its stride. Hopefully, Cartoon Network will give it the chance to hit that stride.
Watching the news I saw the latest commercial for Mucinex, a guaifenesin pill for loosening up phlegm. In the commercial, a newlywed Mr. Mucus and his bride make house in the lungs of an unsuspecting man. I'm recovering from the flu, and occasionally hacking up lung butter is disgusting enough without being presented with images of anthropomorphized, animated mucus.
A few years ago, Rob Walker wrote a column for Slate.com complaining about "Digger the Dermatophyte" in Lamisil commercials. In the commercials, Digger lifts up the toenail of a victim and proceeds to tear up the underlying tissue. Walker's reaction is understandably negative and visceral, but I never found the Lamisil commercials particularly offensive. In contrast, the Mucinex commercials with their bouncing blobs is appalling. Thank goodness for the Internets, where I can get my news without being ambushed with CGI phlegm.
The other day bOINGbOING posted a link to this TV clip of The Boxtops lip-synching their 1967 hit "The Letter." Alex Chilton and the rest of the band are clearly unexcited about the promotional appearance and do a lousy job of matching their motions to the record. To throw out some B.S. theorizing, the creators of a media text have become trapped in their own creation - they are pnly on TV to complement the record, rather than perform as musicians. They seem aware of their subservient status to the fixed text.
Watching this nearly 40 years later, it's hard to ignore the textiness of this clip. I watch it on the Web in a low-res video file, which was captured from an analog tape. The clip includes a substantial flaw in the tape - the video breaks up and the audio slows down then returns to "good" video - calling attention to the analog medium. (I presume this is an nth-generation dub from an master tape that had been trading among a fan community.) Finally, in the source material itself, the band is only there to act out the music on the single - the TV show is replaying another text.
In addition to all of these layers of mediation, Chilton's status as a cult figure adds another layer of meaning that would have been unavailable to a viewer in 1967. My mom would recognize "The Letter" on the radio, but she would have no knowledge of Alex Chilton or of Big Star. (She might recognize "In the Street" as the theme song of "That 70s Show.") Regardless, Chilton's cult status is certainly responsible for the presence of this clip on the Web - for this tape to circulate, it requires dedicated fans to care to make dubs of the tape and keep them. Treating the Web-video as a text in itself, it's as fan-generated as it is a product of the entertainment business.
It seems like everybody and their dog is blogging about the Internet Movie Database's top 15 movies of the past 15 years. I turned 30 this month, so the past 15 years represent half of my life and nearly all of my experience as a movie-goer. Yet this project doesn't appeal to me for some reason. I think a lot of the picks are boring or pretentious (Eyes Wide Shut? Give me a break.) And what is up with people listing movies by director? Auteurism was totally over long before I was born. It seems like people are just buying into the entertainment-industrial complex' middlebrow marketing strategy.
Despite my reservations about this project, I think I'll go all bloggy on you and list 15 movies off the top of my head that I dug from the past 15 years.
Out of Sight
Lost Highway
Cecil B. Demented
Kicking and Screaming
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Three Kings
Velvet Goldmine
eXistenZ
Jesus' Son
To Die For
Songs for Cassavettes
L.A. Confidential
Barton Fink
Short Cuts
And, OK... Pulp Fiction
bOINGbOING points to an "Archie" comic, "She's Goth to Have It." In the comic, Betty is tired of being ignored by her friends, goes to a coffeeshop, and falls in with a group of goths. Considering this is a "native" text, it might even be better than this detournement of a Chick Tract. I wonder if the "Archie" writers knew of Austin sludge-rockers Black Lipstick.
Nigel points to Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present. Nigel says he's read half of the books on the list, so I feel I've come up short having read only 33 of "All-Time 100 Novels." (A list of the books I've read is below.) Somewhat surprisingly, only about half I did read were books I read as an English undergrad. But many of the books like The Big Sleep, Neuromancer, and Snow Crash are wonderful popular works that my profs probably overlooked. The list also includes a fair number of works like Infinite Jest and The Recognitions that I found so tedious that I never finished them. Finally, there are a few choices that I would substitute another book by the same author. For example, I'd pick My Antonia over Death Comes for the Archbishop, and everyone probably has a different favorite Hemmingway. Regardless, these lists are for nitpicking and arguing over, so I guess I'm playing right into the Time-Warner media empire's hands.
Books I've read from Time's100 Best English Language Novels:
All the King's Men
Beloved
The Big Sleep
Blood Meridian
The Catcher in the Rye
The Crying of Lot 49
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Deliverance
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity's Rainbow
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Invisible Man
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
Mrs. Dalloway
Naked Lunch
Neuromancer
1984
On the Road
Pale Fire
A Passage to India
Portnoy's Complaint
The Sheltering Sky
Slaughterhouse-Five
Snow Crash
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse
Tropic of Cancer
White Noise
Wide Sargasso Sea
We screened Sadie Benning's short video "Girl Power" tonight in the film screen theory class I TA this semester. We're doing a week on TV, comparing ideas about the television form to film. For the screening, Janet put together a slate of experimental and art videos, including "Girl Power."
Before the screening, Janet warned the class that Benning's video would look strange because of the low-res PXL-2000 camera used to shoot the film. She was unsure about the technology, and I suddenly geeked out on the camera's technology. In 1987 when Fisher-Price released the camera, I was 12, going on 13, which was probably the sweet spot for the PXL-2000's market. I desperately wanted one, even though I knew my parents would never shell out $100 for something like a video camera.
When we watched the movie, it didn't seem strange at all. It reminded me of watching video off the Web, except I think I prefer the clarity of the pixels to the anti-aliased schmutz layered on to most lo-res video. I wondered if Janet's disclaimer was necessary, although it did have the effect of making me wonder if the dropouts on some of the videos was intentional or merely evidence of an old videotape. It seems like undergrads would also be accustomed to watching lo-res pixelated videos on the net, and the effect wouldn't seem so shocking.
After the screening, I checked a few RSS feeds on my laptop, and noticed that Chuck posted an entry on Benning and the PXL-2000 today In particular, he points to a Web page that outlines some of technical specs of the camera in detail. I think it's totally fascinating, The camera has a frame rate is only 15 frames per second, half of the NTSC television frame rate. (I suspect that the frame rate is actually half of 29.97, rather than a true 15fps) Like the pixelation, this was an engineering choice that allows the camera to record on a standard audio cassette. Other choices were presumably to keep the cost down, but interestingly nonetheless. The camera has a pinhole lens, which give the camera "amazing depth of field," according to the author. I'm not sure how important deep focus is for a camera that "represents the real" with giant pixels, but I imagine this is another quirk its fans enjoy.
The technology of the camera is also interesting in a way that relates to the class. Much of the work we read this week dealt with how television is different from film technically and how it might produce a different aesthetic. Since Pixelvision has half the frame rate - 15fps is nearly the minimum required to create the effect of motion - is Pixelvision distinct enough technologically that it doesn't belong in the category of television or "video"? Does watching something on a TV screen make it television? We watched "Girl Power" on a large screen with a fancy digital projection system. Does the PSL-2000 suggest the same intimacy as Super 8 home movies or does the unfamiliarity of the retro-tech distance the viewer?
I'm going to be leading the class discussion on Friday, and the students are a little reluctant to talk. If things get slow, I think I might do a little presentation on the PXL-2000's technology to explain the video a little more and perhaps the students will want to talk about the issues that I raise. Next week is our week on "new media," and, if nothing else, this will provide a lead-in for talking about an even more diverse range of technologies and practices.
In an earlier post I said, "It's a pity Wikipedia doesn't have a 'how to read Wikipedia' page." A recent discussion on the AOIR list revealed that the open-content encyclopedia does have a page giving students guidance on "Researching with Wikipedia." According to the page's history, this entry was around long before my post, but I don't think this page is featured prominently enough on the site. Students should run across this page without have to dig through FAQs or "About" pages.
Wikipedia has an amusing entry on a high school competition called "Public Forum Debate," which is sometimes known as "Ted Turner Debate." In the contest, teams of two role-play a TV debate show like the now-cancelled "Crossfire." Apparently the format is more informal than Cross-Examination debate contests. Between each round of speeches, there is a "Crossfire" round where debaters have three minutes to ask the opposing team questions. The article does not mention if judges interrupt to tell them, "You're hurting America."
At first I thought it was interesting how media has influenced a stodgy institution like high-school debate, but I remembered that another debate format, Lincoln-Douglas, was inspired by the famous debates published in newspapers. Although it might not be the first debate contest inspired by media, it's interesting that it is known through media referents and, presumably, it began while "Crossfire" was still on the air.
Reporters Without Borders just released a "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," which looks like a wonderful primer for people interested in blog culture and starting a blog. I like the title; I'd rather be a "cyberdissident," than a "blogger." The pamphlet offers advice on starting a blog, strategies for issues like maintaining anonymity and avoiding censorship, and personal profiles of bloggers from around the world. Reporters Without Borders says the books is available in bookstores for €10, but you can download the whole thing as a .pdf.
Occasionally people ask me about starting a blog or general questions about blogging, and I might start pointing people to this publication. I think you need to understand the operational issues of blogging before you can understand how blogs function socially, so this will be useful for potential blog researchers and bloggers. A fellow grad student asked today if I could guest lecture on blogs in a media literacy class for non-majors, and I think I'll hand out the "Language of Blogging" on pages 8 and nine. It has a nice overview of blog jargon, which can sound repetitive and self-referential to people new to blogs.
The New York Times has a story today about the reception of the nature documentary March of the Penquins among the Christian Right. Some conservatives point to the penguins' commitment to child-rearing as exemplary of American "family values." One commentator even provides viewers with a worksheet to take to the theater.Of course, many commentators are deploying the movie in the effort to promote the Intelligent Design hoax as an alternative to evolution, suggesting penguin mating habits are too complex to have arisen through adaptation. The article notes that conservative columnist George Will asked, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?"
It's interesting to contrast this with the reception the ANWR photography show at the Smithsonian a few years back. Conservatives pressured the curators to remove all the captions since some advocated preserving the refuge. In this case, conservatives have appropriated a text that could easily be used to advance a green position, but using it as a platform for doubting science.
I'm not sure what to add to Siva's post criticizing Jonah Goldberg's mocking remarks about the flooding in New Orleans, except chime in and say that they're appalling.
I can understand wanting a little levity at this time, but Goldberg should have spent some time at catsinsinks.com rather than parody the Malthusian tragedy we're seeing right now. I agree with Siva that Goldberg certainly doesn't belong as a commentator on NPR, so I'm drafting a letter to the network right now. Although Fox News' business success has had some influence, the main reason the corporate media has drifted toward the right is the ability of organized letter-writing campaigns to get the attention of media producers. If liberals, leftists, and progressives want to counter this phenomenon, we need to start writing our own letters.
The whole Cindy Sheehan story is really fascinating, but I've resisting the urge to blog about it here. What Sheehan is saying must really hit a nerve with conservatives and Republicans. It's as if there's only one legitimate response to losing a child to war, and Sheehan's protests over the war run counter to the behavior expected of her. It's really disgusting the way that commentators are defaming her. A local blogger made a point to calling her Unamerican. Of course I agree with Siva's assertions that "To quash dissent by sliming and lying about those who dissent is unAmerican. True patriots stand up to power when they see it abused."
It's horrifying to read about the angry conservative who ran down crosses bearing names of dead soldiers. It really does make me wonder if the right really supports the troops or if it just supports the war. I'm not as disgusted by the driver in Crawford as I am by media professionals like Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin who attack Sheehan's character. This isn't framing a story; this is intimidation. To discredit Sheehan, Malkin published divorce papers filed by Sheehan's husband. Rather than acknowledging the social problems war introduces at the home front, these folks argue that Sheehan grief is trivial and has no right to speak.
The use of decontextualized pullquotes is nothing new in movie marketing, but comparing the pullquote to the actual review can often offer minutes of entertainment. Here's a column online called "Blurb Racket" that documents these pullquotes and compares them to their sources. As Stay Free! suggests, Mr. Bialik should pare down his picks a little, but there's still some choice material to be found:
When the quotes are put into context like this, one wonders why Sony ever needed to concoct the phony reviewer David Manning.
The humor of today's "Pearls Before Swine" comic turns on the recontextualization of older texts into newer media forms. I don't want to spoil the comic, but Beethoven is stressing over the longevity of a piece he is writing, and, by the last frame, the narrative flashes forward to how Beethoven is heard today. The comic raises some familiar questions about reception and "remediation."
I wondered if Beethoven would have really wanted "the working classes - the commoners - to hear my music and know my name" or even worried about how his music would be received. From my grade school music classes, I remembered that Beethoven is used an exemplar of Romanticism. While this Wikipedia section argues that his music is not necessarily Romantic music as such, he would have been working in a Romantic intellectual environment, so it seems possible that he would have been concerned about longevity.
It's interesting to contrast the use of "Für Elise" as a ring tone and Brian Eno's equally familiar Windows 95 startup tone, which was specifically commissioned by Microsoft. The startup tone was deliberately created to integrate into a social space outside art venues, while Beethoven could have hardly anticipated the pervasiveness of recorded music we have today. The Beethoven piece certainly gained popularity as a ring tone because it's familiar and, more importantly, it's in the public domain. Despite the differences in intended audiences, it is interesting to note how both compositions have integrated into our aural environment today.
Steev points to Broadcast Machine, a content management system for distributing video. It provides a front-end for uploading videos and creates Bittorrent seeds of the video. It's also buzz-word compliant with RSS syndication and folksonomic tagging features.
I would say this would be nice to have on the ACTLab server if Sandy & Co. weren't already developing ACTLabTV. I do think that the amount of new software users need to install - a downloading client and a media player - may limit the use of ACTLabTV.
Here's a good piece critical of Indymedia by professional writerr Jennifer Whitney. Whitney has a strong grasp of Indymedia's goals and practices and seems to genuinely want Indymedia to succeed. I agree with many of her criticisms, like too many stories are appropriated from other media outlets and that the flame wars on the site may alienate many progressives. In particular, I agree with her criticism of the quality of original work:
Whitney does a good job of explaining why developing technique should be regarded as an asset by Indymedia activists, while not falling into the trap of defending professionalism. Because one of Indymedia's primary goals is to make media-making accessible to anyone, it privileges participation over skills. I applaud the efforts to resist elitism, but too many pieces could use better story-telling and organization. These seem to be similar issues to the ones Larry Sanger raises about Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia and Indymedia work from a different set of principles and have different editorial goals, the tension between quality and open participation seems to be a source of both projects' problems.
Although Whitney doesn't try to assert the legitimacy of professional journalism, it does seem that Indymedia and Wikipedia make an easy case for professional writers who do want to assert that their work is more legitimate than the work of amateurs. I'm not sure it's entirely wise to valorize open participation as an alternative to professionalism. Instead we need to rethink the categories of "amateur" and "professional" and concentrate on making fair and engaging media.
I don't know how I missed this when I was blogging about Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed, but here's another kid's book from the greener side of the political spectrum. I am a little concerned, however, that kids might lose interest in Hey Kidz! Buy This Book A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People before finishing the title. The description of the book sounds like the authors are making an effort to reach older kids by combining media literacy and communications strategy with real-world advice like "easy-to-follow directions for performing basic activist functions, such as holding meetings, making salsa, designing flyers and posters, hooking up a PA, and working effectively with others." I suspect that media literacy programs in Texas won't be adopting this text any time soon, but this seems like a book I would have loved as a young geek. I remember reading about the green futures presented in The Kids Whole Future Catalog and dreamed of growing vegetables in windows and riding public transportation.
A few days ago, Nigel pointed to a children's book "Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed," which ostensibly teaches children about the evils of liberalism. Comparing it to the other side of the spectrum, I'm not sure if it's like the George W. Bush Coloring Book , which I suspect is mostly read by adults, or a book parents might actually use to teach their values to their children like Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls.
Looking at this pdf of sample pages from Help!, it does seem like the author is trying to get kids excited about free-market ideology. The primary antagonists in the story are "churlish" liberals who try to mandate vegetable consumption. When two children open a lemonade stand, the liberals first require the kids to serve broccoli with each glass and finally take over the lemonade stand. I'm struck by the negativity of this book. While Girls encourages children to act on their freedom, Help! only promotes free market ideology by naturalizing it. Girls"pokes fun at the tired constraints of gender normativity," while Help! vilifies persons with another point of view.
I'm not sure what to make of this site, "The Big Fun Glossary." I found it through a discussion about the risks and advantages of blogging for folks on the academic job market. It purports to be an account of a party house in Charlottesville, Virginia, but I can't tell to what extent it's documentary and what it's fictional. I assume that's there's some level of neo-realism either way.
I rolled with laughter reading glossary entry on Tussin DM and related slang terms. By far, the most popular entry on this blog is a never-ending discussion about DXM abuse, so perhaps I'm particularly inclined to find this funny. Regarless, I think there's a little humor for everyone. For example, here is the entry for "Tussin City":
The site also includes photographic documentation of a tussin party, including an animated gif showing a young woman freaking out on tussin. Regardless of the level of fiction in this project, it's certainly seems intended as a creative project. Browsing this site made me nostalgic for when I regarded making a Web site as a creative endeavor. I don't know if a larger slice of people have Web-publishing skills since, say, 1998, but certainly the tools have changed. On one hand Web-based software like MySpace or LiveJournal make it trivial to create a presence on the Web, and, on the other hand, sophisticated tools like Flash and After Effects have become more accessible, so geekier creative folks have more powerful authoring tools at their disposal, making Web publishing routine and unsexy.
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats offers a wonderful, if contrarian, insight into Podcasting on his blog, Last Plane to Jakarta:
Although this may be a little too harsh, I tend to agree. Another problem I often see with Podcasts is people who don't set their audio levels properly, and the sound is too low to easily here or painfully clipped.
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.
I'm intrigued by two new ventures that use podcasting in commercial radio. For readers unfamiliar with podcasting, it's the practice of uploading audio files containing a radio show or segment. The software iPodder enables end users to automatically download new shows from a given source to their iPods. Some folks online have hailed podcasting as an alternative to corporatized radio, but, of course, you have to be relatively affluent to have the equipment and skills needed to enjoy podcasts. I have spent little time listening to podcasts, but I suspect that they're much like blogs, where much of the content reflects the corporate media. For example, this how-to video about podcasting features a rant against universal health care.
Although podcasting is seen as an alternative to commercial radio, its interest is already piqued. Today's New York Times has a story about how former MTV DJ Adam Curry has inked a deal with Sirius satellite radio to assemble a daily four hour show based on podcast content. Curry is one of the first podcasters on the 'net, so I can see the project as the payoff for hard work, but I wonder what range of voices his show will feature.
On the other hand, I find KYOU radio a little more troubling. KYOU will actually broadcast podcasts over the AM airwaves. However, the San Francisco station is owned by Infinity, whose parent company is Viacom. Rather than a project in independent media or "open source radio," this seems to be more a project in giving free content to the second-largest radio company in the country. Moreover, if you look at the design of the KYOU site, its clear that they're appropriating the visual rhetoric of progressive social movements such as graffiti, a fist which is often used as a symbol of resistance, and concentric curves that look suspiciously like the IndyMedia logo. I suppose in an age when Che appears on Vuitton handbags, it should be no surprise radical imagery is appropriated by corporate media, but I hope no one mistakes KYOU for grassroots media.
I watched Bob Roberts last weekend, and I found an interesting user comment related to the previous post. One commenter responds to the suggestion that George Bush resembles Tim Robbins' character with an interesting excavation of popular memory:
I am not a Bill Clinton fan, and I will give her the point that Clinton is a charmer, but her assertion that Bush is hated by the press and Clinton got a free ride is demonstrably out of step with history. Contrast press treatment of Whitewater or the Lewinsky scandal with Bush's assertions about weapons of mass destruction or his National Guard service. Regardless, what is more interesting is how the user presented these claims as fact. I would be reluctant to call this popular memory, if I hadn't heard enough people contend that the press went easier on Clinton. I wonder how this memory is propagated - is this an assertion Rush Limbaugh repeats? Bush's unilaterally antagonistic relationship with the press fosters the idea that the media is out to get him, but how do people remember Monica Lewinsky without remembering the endless press coverage of the affair?
Excavating my own popular memory of the Clinton administration, I couldn't remember Osama Bin Laden's 1998 bombings of American embassies in Africa when they were cited in news coverage after 9/11. I thought back to that summer, and, although I was in college and working nearly full time, I read the news routinely, so I should have remembered the terrorist attacks. But all I remembered was the Lewinsky scandal and, to a lesser extent, the market collapses in Asia. The Lewinsky scandal so utterly dominated the media that terrorist attacks in the global south were merely a footnote in the news.
The New York TImes just posted a story about public efforts by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to "correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias" at PBS. Not surprisingly, chairman Tomlinson points to "NOW With Bill Moyers" as evidence of the network's leftward leaning. I'd certainly agree that "NOW" is one of the most politically left shows on TV anywhere, but it only airs once a week, while the conservative "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" airs each night, which isn't even to mention "Wall Street Week" or the Tucker Carlson vehicle "Unfiltered."
The article says Tomlinson secretly hired a consultant to perform review the content of "NOW" and political learnings of "NOW" guests. After the review, Tomlinson concluded the network is too pink. I'm guessing he didn't do an ideological analysis of "Wall Street Week."
Using "NOW" to claim that PBS as a network tilts to left seems disingenuous. Although Bill Moyers may have been hated by conservative, he's left the show, and his replacement David Brancaccio came from the PRI business show "Marketwatch." In addition, PBS added Carlson's "Unfiltered" during Moyers tenure specifically to balance out the perceived liberalism of "NOW."
The article says that Tomlinson does not intend to eliminate public affairs programming, but it seems difficult to divorce investigative reporting or pieces critical of domestic affairs without the perception of a "liberal" or anti-institutional bias. The story quotes a former CPB president saying Tomlinson wants to "help the people in public broadcasting understand why some people in the conservative movement think PBS is hostile to them." I frankly want to understand why many people in the conservative movement are hostile to PBS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
The New York Times has a story that asks, "Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?" While I doubt many employers will have an immediate recognition of the value of a Film degree, I tell production students that they learn a lot of skills - teamwork, time management, and basic equipment competence - that are critical in nearly every job setting. Similarly, a degree in Media Studes, gets students writing, thinking critically about sources of information, and interrogating social power. I do wish that the article had distinguished between production programs and Media Studies, since it seems like production students are often less critical about issues of of social power and the like, while most Media Studies folks don't come out with a repertoire of technical skills.
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.
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.
