For my classmates,
below are some links for a few of the “Mommy” blogs highlighted in my project. All of the listed blogs have posts on the #MotrinMoms event and can be found by searching within the blog on “Motrin” or by going into the November, 2008 archives.
Also, the following blogs (with various foci in economics, new media, science, advertising and business management) participated in the blogosphere discussions of #MotrinMoms. Their posts on the subject are linked directly.
I had thought that reporting on a three page essay from a personally beloved artist would be simple fun. I was half right.
David Byrne was born Scotland on May 14, 1952, but moved to Ontario, CA and then Maryland by his ninth birthday. Notably, he attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, RI for one year before dropping out to form the Talking Heads with classmates Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth and friend Jerry Harrison in 1975. The Talking Heads are best known for being a part of the “new wave” punk scene, performing regularly in the early days at NYC’s famous CBGBs. New wave is different from early punk (think of the raw edge of the Sex Pistols) in that it attempts to mock the commerciality of pop music by subverting it through carefully crafted and refined lyrics and melodies. The Talking Heads occupy a cult level of status in what might be called “high brow” pop culture. New wave music, and specifically the Talking Heads, are considered to have directly influenced later experimental music such as Kate Bush, Radiohead, Nirvana and Phish.
Even if you don’t know David Bryne or the Talking Heads… you probably know them:
The Talking Heads broke up in 1991, and was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Byrne currently lives in New York City.
David Byrne is a prolific musician, visual, and performing artist. Below is a list of a few notable creations:
“We interrupt this magazine for a PowerPoint presentation:
This article is interconnected with other Byrne projects, his book and DVD project, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (2003), and a series of talks called “I [heart] Powerpoint,” given twelve times from 2003- 2006, and art installations at the Conde Nast building, NYC, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC and the Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC. Byrne started using PowerPoint while giving talks to promote his book “The New Sins” (a book cleverly produced to look like the Bible and was initially distributed by placing them in hotel bedside drawers). He initially intended to use it in a strictly ironic sense to support his inclusion of marketers and other capitalistic venturers into a new catalog of sinners– after all “what could be better than using PowerPoint and a projector, the same tools that every sales and marketing person relies on?”
Some bullet quotes from an interview with Byrne in Wired, 2004 (my bold):
The title of Byrne’s book, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, is a direct parody of Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and deliberately sends up the “self-importance and pretentious impenetrability of the language” of Tufte’s book (Lippens, 2005). Byrne’s aim seems to be questioning the aim and use of weighty academic theories to fully explore and critique the production of rhetoric in the realm of PowerPoint.
Jenkins exclaims (twice) in Convergence Culture, “[w]elcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (my italics). This statement neatly encapsulates the book’s argument- convergence culture reflects the myriad of ways that peoples and corporations are producing, receiving, interpreting and acting upon & within mediated culture. This convergence of power over production and consumption creates unpredictable situations for media theorists which defy easy categorization and resist singular interpretations.
The Twitter storm over the past weekend regarding the AmazonFail campaign is a perfect example of converging forces regarding the distribution and interpretation of mediated goods (books listed on Amazon.com) and mediated news (tweets, blogs, newspapers, radio, television covering the campaign and Amazon response).
The storm started because authors of books categorized as having GLBT, feminist, and human sexuality related content suddenly dropped in the search rankings. Early email responses from Amazon were short and indicated that this reflected a new policy to essentially hide “adult” (ie content that is offensive to some) content from initial, broad searches– and the first storm forces converged. Book sales, especially of smaller, niche publications, rely on Internet (and mainly Amazon) search rankings to generate market presence. De-listing these books meant they would be viewed (and therefore found) by far fewer people.
The Internet keeps niche book publications afloat, and Amazon controls the lion’s share of that power. But, further developments showed a shift in power when the story hit blogs and, more importantly, Twitter. Over the course of Easter weekend and yesterday thousands upon thousands of people posted under the hashtag #AmazonFail and spin off tags such as #Glitchmyass and #SorryAmazon as the story unfolded all over the Internet. The campaign became the RG (reality game) of the moment– in many ways mimicing the way people now play ARGs (alternate reality games) that are produced in popular culture. Stories were found, analyzed, discussed, and weighed for truthiness– new Amazon policy designed to marginalize the GLBT and Feminist communities? –a hacker dude playing it out for the lulz? –a glitch by some hapless French employee?
Everyone involved has different motivations and the noise both pertpetuates and exposes the story while also making it virtually impossible to ever know what happened. Jenkins, I believe, would argue that the important thing to examine here is not why it happened, but what is happening as a result? Who gains and who loses– or better yet, what are the gains and losses of each particpant/ producer?
Below is a roundup of some of the best posts I found that discuss the possible ramifactions of #AmazonFail (ok, and one that I think is funny):
Mark R. Probst: Ramblings from a Literature Lover and Sometimes Writer
One of the original blog posts that started the storm:
“On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed.”
After Ellen in conjunction with After Elton
GLBT bloggers discuss the personal effects of the de-rankings:
“. . . but entertainment is our common cultural currency. It’s where we see ourselves reflected, and it’s one of the primary ways we learn about people who are different from us.
When we are reduced to our sexuality, we are seen as other — something less than full human beings, and therefore less deserving of equal rights. “
Richard Eoin Nash
A blog by a (self-identified) straight, male, former publisher with his take on why this happened to GLBT and Feminist books specifically:
“The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.”
Humans At Work
A blog about project and people mangement, discussing how the management of Amazon mishandled the situation:
“Amazon has handled this communications crisis in the worst possible way, which is to ignore the outrage and throw corporate-speak at the issue.”
Dear Author
A blog about genre fiction which explores how this “glitch” happened to some books and not others by reviewing the metadata:
“Thus, as a “glitch” it was a remarkably targeted one that seems to support the emails that Mark Probst and Craig Seymour received from Amazon which was gay and lesbian works were deemed “adult” content regardless of actual content.”
Adventures in Science and Ethics
A blog on the philosophy of science discusses the ethical implications of the situation:
“This means that honesty and transparency will do more to restore customer confidence than ass-covering… Either the algorithm that generates search results behaved as it was intended to, or it didn’t. Getting clear on the facts — even if they are accompanied by the admission , “We blew it!” — is probably better for business than getting caught in lies.
The Daily Beast
A large blog, with a post questioning the importance of the #AmazonFail campaign:
“Moving certain books out of contention for bestseller lists doesn’t seem a whole lot different from moving them out of the display window or even, leaving them in cartons in the stockroom—all of which are legitimate sales techniques, assuming a bookseller hasn’t taken co-op dollars from a publisher and promised certain placement.”
Amazon FAIL: Twilight Made Me Gay
ETA: Great flowchart of the event
As always, “The Panopticon” reminds me of my old high school campus– an “open styled” campus, designed and built in the 70s, that prominently featured “the round building” at the center– unsurprisingly this building housed the principals. (sadly I cannot find a picture)
This is my second (or possibly third) time reading “The Panopticon”- and I am again struck by the idea that a crowd is a scary thing– both for the individual lost in the crowd and for those in charge of controlling the crowd. It’s understandable that discipline, as described by Foucault, becomes a necessary technology for minimizing the damaging effects of the crowd to the collective good. I quickly learned that facing 20- 30 teenagers a day was going to require me to be some sort of a “disciplinarian” not only to ensure that students learned, but simply ensure all students’ safety and well being for five 45 minute periods a day. And chaining them up was not an option. –I was also famous for some creative threats if students failed to act as if I was always present in my classroom (when there was a sub, etc) that were certainly reminiscent of the all-seeing notions described– Unfortunately, the idea that the observers can be observed and punished is also the daily reality of the public school teacher and one begins to realize that maximum control and production under the state is not always the most effective way to teach critical literacy. I like the idea that discipline is only one kind of “technology”– it leaves an opening for determining other ways of achieving safety and (yes) control over unsafe masses.
Of course, we can take the idea of the unruly and unsafe masses too far and forget the humanity- both individual and collective- of the people who make up the masses. In Calvert’s piece, I found the discussion of reality shows devolved to the lowest common denominator (especially when reviewing Bork’s “contributions”).
I take issue with the idea that humans are watching reality shows in order to replace lived experience and that reality shows because we do not regularly “face the type of challenges that give meaning to one’s life” (66). This is entirely too simplistic– while I may voyeuristically surveill a rich, privileged woman on “The Real Housewives of X” it is not because my own life lacks real experiences but there is an appeal to the neat, pre-packaged, easily narrativized (and therefore questionably “real”) experiences with clearly drawn “morals” that my own messy and continuously occurring life cannot provide. “The Real Housewives” and other similar programs do not highlight the “freak” as poor aberrations but as rich ones. This does not erase Calvert’s argument regarding class and reality TV, but it does complicate it. These women have entered into the voyeurism willingly and often come back season after season, despite claims of Bravo “manipulating” footage. I also struggle with the idea that engaging in television watching is both communal (gives you something to discuss, 57) and yet the more we do it, “the less we experience in the real world through interaction with others” (89). All in all, I think we are entering into a complicated and Faustian deal by engaging as both the voyeur and voyuee and there are few simple solutions to “opt in” or “opt out.”
And now, for any fellow Losties, I submit the blast map door– look familiar?
Author:
danah boyd is a self described blogger, activist and scholar. She has received her degrees from several elite institutions in the US: undergraduate degree from Brown University in Computer Science, Master’s from MIT’s Sociable Media Group (where she studied with Henry Jenkins) and a PhD from the School of Information from UC Berkeley.
Her article, “Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” grows out of her research for her dissertation, “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics.” Her website describes her academic focus as, “interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life.” Her research methods are deeply connected to ethnographic and auto-ethnographic practices, and as a result is both a member of and an adviser to many social networking sites in addition to being a relatively prolific blogger. In her life as an activist, she has created and continues to maintain V-Day, a charity dedicated to putting on performances, benefits, and campaigns to educate and inspire the public to end violence against women.
On a personal note, boyd has maintained an ani difranco lyrics that I have been following for years and I only made the connection this evening that the scholar and archivist were one and the same.
Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life:
Teenagers have entered into social online media (or networked publics) in order to participate in formative social activities which negotiate both identity and community. These activities are often misinterpreted by adults outside the teenage cultural context and therefore the impetus behind and the logic within these social networking sites (such as MySpace), often causing mixed to hostile reactions. boyd argues that these activities are re-mediated forms of socialization that replace older forms of teenage socializing such as soda shops, bowling alleys and shopping malls and asks that we (as teh grown ups) consider how we can help engage teenagers critically in socialization practices.
The first few sections of boyd’s piece define key concepts and terms for her research (pages 120- 126).
boyd also outlines the key aspects of participation in networked publics such as MySpace (pages 126- 131). Teenagers generally report joining MySpace to socialize with “preexisting” friends and continue participating as means of entertainment and social knowledge building. They create profiles by looking at friends’ and the role models’ profiles to determine what is socially appropriate. These profiles are performances of the identity teenagers want their peers to see– boyd likens it to unmediated forms of expression such as dress and hair style. Also articulated is the the idea that teens’ conscious and self-reflexive practice of creating online identity may aid in identity formation, while simultaneously submitting that identity to a Foucaultian surveillance. boyd claims that the practice of creating this identity within a teenage public discourse is done through the imagining of an audience, and this act requires a careful negotiation of the potential for real life consequences as a result of online choices– as exemplified in the teen angst of “Top Friend” dramas.
boyd concludes her piece by problematizing popular teenager and adult perceptions of the public/ private debate by considering why a public life that is private from adult view is so important to teenagers (pages 131- 138). boyd points out that attempts by adults to infiltrate or control teenage content on MySpace is often successfully thwarted (see mirror networks, page 132). Teenage rebellion, through these and similar acts, is indicative of the teenage desire to claim “my space.” They believe that others should stay out because it is a space for teenagers to interact and participate in identity play and community development. boyd argues that teenagers participate in these sites publicly because so many other aspects of public life, life that exists cross generationally in the “real world,” are barred to them. The creation of teenager as a sub-category halfway between childhood and adulthood has left them characterized in the wider publics as either “angels or demons.” A “my space” allows them to duck out from beneath such limiting roles. Teenagers are obviously naive about how networked publics can affect their current and future lives, and therefore need to be (at a minimum) mentored into public life through a variety of unmediated, mediated and networked ways to ensure the greatest opportunity for maturing.
Discussion:
Overall, I enjoyed the readings this week immensely– all three authors treat the culturally linked masses (i.e. human beings) with a certain level of dignity and respect while still engaging in socially critical academic discourse (hurrah!).
These discussions all seemed to be hunting and stripping away the totality myth (ala Barthes) of the mindless and easily manipulated masses who require surveillance for their protection.Unlike Barthes’s lonely and sarcastic mythologist, however, is all the authors acceptance of the oddities of humanity, and the self-reflexive and (often problematic) love of indulging in myth through online and fan culture and how this brings them up against “the state.” boyd has the toughest job of all, in my opinion, because she is asking us to redefine how we view “teenagers” and the sanctity of their self-definition within our greater society–> potentially even asking us to accept the young ‘uns into our super elite grown ups club.
” . . . if you leave your desk and bravely open yourself and your [pedagogical] design ideas to influence by potential [students] and [literacy] contexts, you will produce [pedagogical coursework] that more successfully reflects the needs and desires of a diverse set of [learners]” (modified from Moggridge, pg. 681)
While reading Moggridge, et al, I was struck by his ideas regarding the universality of design and I began to see very close connections between interaction design and pedagogical design– because, obviously, pedagogical design is interaction design. Thinking about people and how they live and think should also be a prime concern to instructors of literacy– because literacy can be learned best when it is relevant and meaningful to the learner.
The developments highlighted throughout our readings seem to mirror similar developments in composition/ writing pedagogy theory regarding group work, tactile explorations, primary research by students, multi-modal composition and multiple intelligence approaches to learning. The IDEO cards seem to be lovely pomo approach to play in the workplace and have significant potential for the classroom– the titles (Look, Learn, Ask, Try) of the suites directly relate to literacy based tasks and could provide students with the engaging yet “real world” like writing experiences instructors are trying to create.
I have been struggling for days on how to succinctly place Walter Benjamin’s (1935) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Susan Sontag’s (1977) “Image World” from On Photography in conversation. Ultimately, I believe that reading these pieces in tandem reveals the evolving but ever present tension felt by politically minded theorists in regards to the vaunted status of mechanically produced images in Western societies. Both create polemical arguments by contrasting the possibilities and dangers of this technology in differing political environments– for Benjamin, Communism (of the pure Marxist variety) and Fascism (extreme nationalism and social control) and for Sontag, Capitalism/ Consumerism (The West) and Communism (as specifically seen in mid-twentieth century China). Both essays reveal the deeply importance of culture and cultural norms in the act of creating, receiving and evaluating mechanically produced images.
For myself, I eventually came to see both essays (somewhat ironically) as cost/ benefit analyses of what photography & film have to offer in terms of emancipation and culture. Both consider the unique power of the concepts of “aura” and “the real” as marks of originality as compared to the unoriginality of produced images. Both seem to feel that this breaking down of aura/ the real results in the people’s greater (and ever increasing) accessibility to information/ culture and work to spread knowledge and understanding. Yet both caution that with this greater spread of information/ culture, comes greater opportunity for mass control and manipulation. Both call for radical action in guarding against this– Benjamin asks us to politically critique and evaluate image and art as politically normative, while Sontag asks us to evaluate (and even reduce) the glut of images that create a political normativity.
Sitting here, seventy years after Benjamin’s piece, and thirty after Sontag’s, I wonder where we are at– critiquing and evaluating image/art for it’s political nature still remains mainly among the academics and ideologues and Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube are certainly the opposite of image conservation and consideration. Likely, this tension between the benefits and costs of mass image production will continue to provide academics with material for debate……..
I have never been much into games (which probably accounts for some of my huffiness in our discussion of the D&D map a few weeks back– I found my way into geekdom by various but connected alternate means). Despite a deep love of sci/fi fantasy mythos and adventure tales, I cannot relate to the obvious excitement Davidson describes in his involvement, immersion and investment in playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (“Well Played: Interpreting Prince of Persia: Sands of Time” Games & Culture 3.3/4). While my position as feminist scholar could make it easy for me to write off my disconnect with Davidson due to the fact that many of these games are written for male protagonists and use gendered stereotypes to quickly build simple plots, I have a confession to make. There is one game I love, one game I can play for hours at a time without noticing.
Civilization IV
Despite the game’s obvious penchant for violence and colonialism, there is something about slowly and methododically building an empire that can stamp out all others. The game adapts to PC norms by allowing all skin colors and genders to rule the world, but always relies on Western civ notions of culture, power and economy. The game does not demonstrate the levels of interactivity in gaming as described in Davidson’s article. All cinematics are strictly for show and do nothing to move story or game action further. There is no straight narrative element as you select civilizations, technologies, improvements, units and other figures from drop down menus. Yet the same levels are still followed as the game passes through each technological age and the possibilities in the menus expand. Involvement and immersion are managed well in this way.
Interestingly, I find that Davidson’s concept of investment is both the game’s downfall and the secret to my own obsession. Civ IV, if not run on a very fast computer, slows down considerably as the units, technologies, etc. expand through time. Becuase it is a turn based game, this can mean long drags between turns while the AI processes all the other “opponents’” moves. This significantly disrupts investment in finishing out a game to one of the five possible victory scenarios. However, because there is an appearance of limitless choices throughout the games progression, the slowing down also gives the gamer time to re-think even long past moves. The auto-save feature allows easy do-overs, resetting the gamer to an earlier stage and producing an investment to play every premutation of the game rather than a an investment to finish the particular game course. I identify this as a downfall because frustration and confusion can set it, causing me to alternatively obsess or boycott the game for weeks at a time.
For my field map, I approached it, metaphorically, through my dual role as a teacher and student. Initially I created a Venn Diagram, much like I have assigned to many students in the past, to identify the overarching structure and identified major research projects I have undertaken within this model.
This, however, is insufficient as a model to demonstrate the depth and (immense) complexity of how these fields of study entwine for me. I have created three “field detail maps” which are broken out by three major intersections: Feminist Theory and English Studies, Feminist Theory and Digital/ Popular Culture, and a Blended Study of all three. These maps were created using the “postmodern mapping” technique, adapted from Porter and Sullivan’s Electronic Literacies in the Workplace: Technologies of Writing. This is a technique I frequently use to orient myself within my research and reflects the “student” side of my dual role.
A link to the maps at SlideShare. They should be much more readable!
In Hanno H.J. Ehses’s essay, “Representing Macbeth: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric,” he clearly identifies ten rhetorical figures as tools made available through style (elocutio) and demonstrates visual manifestation of these figures through a series of Macbeth posters. He delineates the connections between the task (design a poster for the play Macbeth) and the product (the poster itself) as twin forces—content and expression. Both function on a material level (the denotations of the text and graphics) and a theoretical level (the connotations of the play Macbeth and the larger graphic culture).
The presentation of the Macbeth posters at the end of this essay function well to illustrate the defined rhetorical figures but the lead up discussion in Figures 1-4 reminded me a little bit of Dead Poet’s Society: How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!” It’s largely an unfair comparison, as Ehses is complicating the situation significantly by discussing the importance of connotation.
Recent multi-Academy Award winner, Slumdog Millionaire, displays a collage synecdochial figures; the most interesting is how the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire style question stands in for the reality of the game show that frames the narrative while the content of the question poses the central theme (free will vs. fate) of the film.
