The Terms In Which I Think Of The Reality Of Poetry Circa 2009

Reflecting on the Production Process:

I wanted to make a video about Allen Ginsberg because I’ve recently been on a Ginsberg and Beat Poetry kick. There is so much to know and understand about the life and works of Allen Ginsberg that I’ve recently been trapped inside of my computer screen for hours researching and researching some more. When I was about halfway through my research for a paper I had to write on Ginsberg and how he created and spoke to many communities, I hit rock bottom. I was totally Ginsberged out, so to speak, and I decided that I needed a way to get interested once more. So when we were asked to come up with a video topic, I decided I wanted to focus in on what it means to study poetry.

I used stop motion (however rudimentary it was) because I wanted to get as close as I could to capturing real life action without using outright video clips. Stop motion is just about the most exciting thing ever, because you can make socks fly or break up any kind of artistic process (here’s a stop motion video that my friend Carly Stipek made to a song I absolutely love). I also thought it would be funny to use Photobooth as a tool for my project, because I’ve never actually understood what Apple intended for us to do with the application when they made it.

There are many ways to engage with poetry, especially nowadays when there are so many online databases dedicated to storing spoken word. One site that really got me thinking about how scholars might be connecting through a digital medium with poetry is Pennsound. Pennsound is a unique project put together by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. The administrators of the site produce a weekly podcast where they play spoken word poetry and discuss it (sometimes with the author). The website is chock full of sound recordings from all kinds of poetic wizards from various times in American history. The best part about this site is that it’s free and allows anyone to have access to poetry in mp3 form. I was rather taken with their model and philosophy on why it’s okay to share poetry in such an open way. It means a lot to me as a student and a poetry lover that people in academia are taking steps to make poetry available to all types of people as opposed to allowing the elitist stigma that is attached to poetry to win out.

Another species of sources that really inspired me to take on this topic as opposed to any other are music blogs. There are so many out there. Beginning with the obvious Pitchfork.com, a hipster haven for regularly updated tour dates, albums, hit singles, and the like, there’s a whole slew of blogs (see Hype Machine, Dailybeatz, Dipdive, etc.) directed at fat-head music snobs out there that I find pretty irresistible. In designing this video I kind of sat with this thought, and tried to figure out what makes a blog like Pitchfork so appealing, and I realized that it was because it offers a counterculture vibe that’s a bit more about the music as opposed to selling something, a bit more into the grassroots, if you will. There are other “blogs” or music news websites that are full of juicy musical updates as well, but they’re a lot more commercial. For instance, take JamBase. Jabase is great. It allows me to build up my own profile by uploading all of the artists I have on my iTunes ino a database that will begin to notify me of newly posted tour dates. Jambase also has a lot of great up to date news articles,  albeit written with a lot less personality than the articles on Pitchfork. But the point is that JamBase is all about ticket sales. It definitely  could be a puppet of Ticketmaster, the G-d awful music venue monopolizer.

Now, how does this relate back to my poetry piece? I’ve always dreamed about the possibilities that could come about if poetry became a medium just as accessible and easy to relate to as music. What if we could all one day be haggling with a sixty year old crank on StubHub for the last available ticket to a Peter Gizzi reading or a slam poetry night at the Bowery Poetry Club? If poets were as savvy as musicians with tours, diversity in the content they create, and publicity poetry could totally be as crucial if not more to the development of say angsty teens on Long Island who are pulling out their hair and looking for something cool to do on a Saturday night. Allen Ginsberg is, in my mind, someone who did a great deal to bridge the gap between up tight academics who liked to discuss the uses of tetrameter or whitmanian allusions and the common American citizen who was concerned with the realities of Vietnam.

Messages in my Clip:

My goal for this film from the beginning was to illustrate how much information can fall through the cracks when we don’t relate to one another in person and in an open forum for communication, which is a pretty weighty and biased thing to do. I wanted to show a little bit about how far removed we can get from what’s actually going on while we spend time “researching” the past.

The piece related to a lot of what I’ve been studying this semester in a class called “Writing as Emerging Technology.” We talked a lot about bringing ideas to audiences in a democratic forum, and whether the Internet could work as this type of foundation for allowing democracy to develop. I certainly developed my knowledge about Allen Ginsberg a lot during the production of this video, but did I really, just by being on the Internet and partaking of blog and forum culture, contribute to any kind of Democratic movement? Is my movie informing the way people think?

I guess the answer is yes and no. I’ve affected some of my classmates, for sure, and maybe a few random Facebook stragglers (my blog is linked up to my Facebook account). But democracy?

I want to relate some of my ideas about poetry to an audience that is as diverse and free-thinking as possible, but I think what this blog project has proven to me is that I will get the same readers unless I sign up with a bunch of companies for ad space and really beef up my publicity efforts.

All of the cute bebop music, funny outfits, and subliminal messages aside, I want people to ask themselves what was more engaging to watch… Me being a human going about life with Allen Ginsberg’s works in my hands or me with glazed eyes experiencing hours of vapid misery behind a screen? Is it my own problem that I don’t like doing research?

Discussing Feedback:

I appreciated all of the feedback that I got on my video project. It felt good to have many sets of eyes on my work, calling me out on what needed change. It was nice to have some force pushing me to better my content and a demand for my form to make sense.

The responses didn’t surprise me all that much, but that was probably owing to the fact that they were all about technological blunders that it took me a year to figure out how to fix. The one thing I will tell everyone is NEVER ever put a project that needs more than a gigabyte on a thumb drive and expect it to function properly. Having a project crash multiple times feels like having a finger continuously jammed into oblivion between piano keys and the cover.

Photoshop for Democracy

The Storytelling Revolutionary

Well, gah. Isn’t learning a new program just about the most frustrating thing one can do… ever? Here’s a little digital doodle I did… Silly, yes, I know, but I must work on my Photoshop skills somehow. I combined an image of Che Guevara and Ira Glass.

Who took the metaphorical cookie from the cookie jar? Is it you?

Remixing Remixes Remixing Remixes & Sampling

Reading Remix by Lawrence Lessig

One of the first questions Lessig asks in the fourth chapter of his book Remix is “But what happens when writing with film (or music, or images,  or every other form of “professional speech” from the twentieth century) becomes as democratic as writing with text?”

What he talks about in his book is about how film-making, painting, music-making, and other media-making used to be left to “professionals” and that it wasn’t too easy to make a name for oneself as an artist. He also describes the evolution of media-making and how the process of creating a body of media such as a newspaper used to be a lot more isolated from its audience. Now we’re kind of vomiting text and video clips of our grandmothers choking on hairballs all over the Internet. And so quality control becomes a huge issue when individuals get caught up in the parts as opposed to analyzing the whole picture that a “professional” would think about.

My immediate response to this is that I’ve kept an ever-extending bucket list since age sixteen, and one of the first things I have on my list is “lick a famous painting in a museum.” Now you know… I’m nuts. But really you must be asking yourself, “what in the hell would you want to lick a painting for?” And what I’d say to that is that I’d really like to be able to experience a painting such as Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” or Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Red Hills, Lake George, 1927″ in as many ways as possible… You know, mix it up a bit… And this I think is a completely human desire… To want to use our senses and the resources available to us in order to attain the best, if not the most novel and/ or engrossing experiences in life through which we can derive the most lasting significance.

Point being: I am the perfect candidate for getting distracted by any and all things from shiny objects hovering in close proximity to amateur films of hermit crabs scuttling across the shoreline. And what I want is more resources, and the power to derive as much meaning from as many places as I can.

What remixing is about to me is the desire to shape and mold older pieces of art into a brand spanking new form that’ll grab the attention of new audiences and make them question what they’re seeing.

So essentially, my response to Lessig’s question is along the lines of “I think all kinds of artists are going to have to get a lot more comfortable with people touching their things, because now there will be more ways to access artwork.”

Experiencing Girl Talk… Musician? Disc Jockey? Sampler? Thief?

The above video is an example of the work of a “DJ” (and I use the term carefully because I’m not sure that’s what Gregg Michael Gillis would call himself) who calls himself Girl Talk. If anyone would be taunted for stealing from the cookie jar, it would be this man.

When I first heard of Girl Talk, I was definitely put off by the fact that he never actually worked with any instruments other than his computer, but then I went to a few parties and really listened (as well as one can listen whilst avoiding the staple handsy-boozer who is sub-consiously determined to get you covered in Pabst Blue Ribbon) to the samples he used to put together his songs and I realized that he used clips from english punk rock to hipster hits, present day mainstream hip-hop to the holy grail of 90’s hip-hop music, all kinds of evolutionary pop music, underground anthems, and so on. However offended I’d originally been, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that Girl Talk, real name: Gregg Michael Gillis, had a real knack for lacing everything together in a harmonious groove that got people moving at parties. I tried to look up his songs on Youtube two years ago, and there were no music videos or MP3’s embedded under a simple still shot of some random icon. No, the youtube videos were all of Gillis DJ-ing party after party after party. And when I tried to get my hands on a copy of the album, I could only find a sketchy burned copy in the radio station where I’d worked at the time, because he didn’t have an album with a major record company.

Then I saw him live and realized that Gillis stood for more than just sampling. At the show his computer was the only thing that he had in front of him. He was shirtless and wore a sweatband and the computer was covered in plastic wrap, which I didn’t understand until I looked up during his second song and saw him jumping around in time with his song, throwing glitter at the crowd, and sweating profusely. The short and anticipated commentary that Gillis made between the songs on his set list was humble and had nothing to do with the contents of his song. He was just trying to connect with the mass of stinking, writhing, pot-smoking bodies in front of him in a small room at Smith College. Someone told me later that he had a day job and that the only income he made off of his songs was through getting paid for gigs.

He also has a new album coming out where you could pay however much you want to pay for it… If you want to know what I’m talking about…

Visit Here

In Conclusion

Lessig also asks, “How can bloggers match the New York Times? What bloggers will spend the effort necessary to get their stories right?”

The facts are… I am not a reporter. I am not being paid by anyone to do this. I have no special interest in anything other than opening up a dialogue between me and you. This is a really fun way to share the things that I’ve learned lately and over time.

I try not to lose sight of any of these facts in the delivery of whatever message it is that I’m delivering in whatever post it is that I’m posting. I am human.

I believe that the collective beauty of humanity can only evolve if we hearken back to our roots and improve upon the things that we think we can improve upon.

In my opinion, when done correctly, remixing is a great way to get young whipper-snappers (I include in myself under this category) interested in the roots of the media they’re consuming. I would not have found out about David Bowie as soon as I had were it not for the VH1 critics’ bashing of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” or the collaborative work Bowie did with Butterfly Boucher on the Shrek 2 soundtrack or the inclusion of Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” in Wes Andersen’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou original motion picture soundtrack.

And man, wouldn’t it have been a tragedy for me to have missed out on the ever-trippy film Labyrinth?

Digitally Doodling Your Way To Democracy

Animating Spirit on this post: Photoshop for Democracy (Link is not the precise article, but it is related) by Henry Jenkins

Obama... On Health Care

The portrait above is an adaptation of a Rembradt painting produced by a user on FreakingNews.com. While it’s not the most wacky or inflammatory piece on the pages upon pages of galleries that this site’s made of, this digital remastery of a classic is a tasty morsel of the type of things people with photoshop and a lot more than half-a-brain are doing out there to provoke thought about America’s political landscape.

Through much precise detail and astute postulation, Henry Jenkins has again blown my puny little mind! In his article entitled “Photoshop for Democracy,” Jenkins argues many points about the powers that the Internet and digital discourse give the American public (that has access to computers) in the Democratic process.

In the middle of the article Jenkins talks about the specific influences Adobe Photoshop might have on its Users. “John Kroll, one of Photoshop’s
co-creators, told Salon that the software program had democratized media in two ways: by allowing smaller groups to have professional quality graphics at low cost, and by allowing the public to manipulate and recirculate powerful images to make political statements.”

Photoshop definitely does put a lot of power into the hands of those who own and know how to use the program, but I would like to remind everyone out there that adobe photoshop costs $699 to download and $199 to upgrade. Now, who has that kind of cash to spend on software at our age? Or even better, can you imagine the phone call I’d have to make… “Mom, Dad, I kinda wanna buy a whole lotta software so that one day… providing I find the right class to train me on the um, program specifics and that I find enough time between working a job, going to class, wishing I could jam a pencil in my hand, and doing homework to attempt to touch up Heidi Klum’s hypothetically flawed bust… I might be able to use my knowledge of adobe photoshop to get me a good job in a market that, you know, is like a bearish one. Um so yeah, can I use your credit card to like buy this program? It’s only like $700.”

I mean, come on! In addition to all of the time and money I’ll be spending on preparing for the GRE’s, researching possible career options, and sending out resumes…  How am I going to gather $700?

When CEO’s deign to talk to us simple mortals a.k.a. Bloggers  ::Go Here::

On page 208 of Jenkins’ book he says,   “The current diversification of communication channels is politically important because it expands the range of voices that can be heard: though some voices command greater prominence than others, no one voice speaks with unquestioned authority.”

Translation: “There are so many more ways for people to express their opinions (because of programs like Photoshop, blogs, community forums created on corporate and grassroots websites, video blogs, etc) and because we all have ample opportunity to post up our opinions all over public space, I think there are many different kinds of opinions being expressed. Also, some people  might be more popular than others, but no one has free range to just say whatever they want.”

Now, I like this sentiment, and think it works out that way to some degree. I agree that there is a multitude of specialized opinions being shared in countless forms. For example there is an incredible range of blogs through which I can sort through…

1. Elyse Sewell’s Journal: This is a collection of pictures and narrative documentation of a “super” model named Elyse Sewell. She was a contestant in the first ever season of a popular television series about “what it takes to be America’s next top model.” The show is hosted by Tyra Banks and is going on its thirteenth season now. If I do remember correctly Sewell was put through hell for being petit (the other ladies on the show kept insinuating that she had an eating disorder) and for having aspirations to attend medical school.

By the by Sewell is now pursuing modeling full time, and this journal provides a lot of insight into the quirky and curious products (edible and not) that exist in the regions where Sewell does photo shoots.

2. The Angry Black Woman:

3. Guerilla News Network’s Blog Hosting Section:

and finally somthing that really caught my eye (just because it’s so random, yet relevant)…

4. Jovenal “Jovie” Narcise’s Blog entitled “Bald Runner“:

There’s one particular entry that I stumbled upon when researching blogs for this post entitled “Proctor & Gamble CEO’s Response“

But something else that strikes me is who’s taking the time out of their days to police the Internet? And after stumbling upon the Bald Runner’s blog, I’m thinking that the Internet police can be anyone, but it’ll mostly be those who are incredibly invested in maintaining an image, such as James Lafferty, and

So You Want to Talk Democratic Shop?

209 “-yet these forms of popular culture also have political effects, representing hybrid spaces where we can lower the political stakes (and change the language of politics) enough so that we can master skills we need to be participants in the democratic process.” So what this means to meTo me this sounds a bit ominous, because I imagine a digital world where all kinds of rhetoric will run wild. I see how this can be a beautiful step up for democracy, but I also see how it might be toxic to have generation upon generation of seriously adept rhetoricians who understand how to manipulate target audiences with words.

The cool thing about an ideal “Democratic Internet” is the point that as citizens, we are all supposed to have a say in the democratic process, but the not so cool thing is the process of filtering through rhetoric in search of authenticity and a commitment to honesty that we have to go through as citizens in order to be proactive by any measure.

In the 2008 elections I subscribed to Obama’s popular website Organize For America and the Rock the Vote texting program that were meant to keep the young and tech-savvy informed of election news and developments. It was awesome, and I felt cool checking my phone and my inbox at all hours of the day to keep up to speed on user polls and issues being brought to the forefront of the election. I felt good, but in retrospect, I was caught up in a massive public relations campaign that was incredibly biased toward the democratic party… I think something we might overlook in our liberal-rosy-hazed-delerium is that our beloved Obama is an incredible rhetorician with years and years of debating and negotiating skills under his belt… Yes he has the smile that launched a thousand ships and yes he talks about his blackberry just as frequently as he talks about his two beautiful young girls, but I challenge you  to look beneath the quaintess.

Trippi celebrates what he sees as the “empowerment age” when average citizens challenge the power of entrenched institutions: “If information is power, then this new technology-which is the first to evenly distribute information-is really distributing power. The power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hording information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us.” What about the way we get to our information… google… yahoo… ask jeeves

And what about Wiki this, Wiki that?

Other things I’ve found on the way to this entry…

-If you’re looking for a good time, and you like wisecracks about Daniel Radcliffe ::Go here::

Technology Autobiography

Script:

Technology Autobiography
By Sharon Alvandi

So you know how there are composers like Hans Zimmer or John Williams or Phillip Glass or Danny Elfman, and so on and so forth who are paid very large sums of money to compose scores for films?

Well for me, these composers are not just musicians they are my heroes. I know, I know… It’s hard to imagine a burly old German man carrying a composer’s baton and wearing a red lycra onesy, but that’s just the image that I have of Hans Zimmer when my eyes are misty and I’ve cried intermittently for two hours during gladiator.

He and his contemporaries have mastered the art of creating empathy through sound, and it boggles my mind that composers can use technology to touch so many different lives in such subtle, yet palpable ways. They’re paid the big bucks to pull our cinematic imaginations by the ear and charm us into believing that the bright lights on the screen have an emotional life beneath them that we can reach through their musical influence. I think a good score is like makeup on a supermodel… you can barely tell its there, yet it shapes and defines what the audience perceives as beautiful.

And this is where I come in… little, blog-audio-blip, excitable, amateur disc jockey gone writer… Me.

Movie soundtracks and scores are a part of recipe that produces cohesive cinematic experiences, but me… I’m more concerned with everyday life and the sounds and conversations that make me who I am. In other words, I’m pretty intent on hearing the soundtrack to my own life.

In order to do this, I carry around a digital voice recorder to catch all the bits and pieces that I know I’d like to remember and examine at a later date. Whether it’s long, moving conversations with friends, a snippet of the plaque in front of the Alamo dome in Texas, or a street musician in Spain, I feel like I’ve gotta to have it all…

My sound collecting began about 3 years ago when I had my first radio show on UMass’ student run radio station, WMUA 91.1 FM. As a DJ I thought it was crucial to create program content that was relevant to more than just my own UMass Amherst infused lifestyle, so I decided that I’d hit the streets and make sure to always include as many voices on my show as I could. I’ve interviewed professors, indy-rockers, activists, and the everyday commuter. In my three years as a disc jockey and avid fan of National Public Radio, I’ve found that everyone has something powerful to say, it’s just a matter of finding the right combination of questions and stories and then being available to record and edit everything.

My dream is to conduct and compose interviews that are just as evocative as Hans Zimmer’s “Now We Are Free.” I have about 15 thousand songs on my computer and external hardrive combined, a small red digital voice recorder, a cell phone, a four-gig thumb drive, and my journal. I’ve also played around with many a console, switchboard and audio editing program at UMass’ radio station over the past three years, in preparation for my own radio programs, and I’m relatively sure that I’ve never made anyone cry. But one thing that I’m sure of is that we all have a soundtrack to our lives, and that it’s just a matter of waking up to it and collecting the meaning around us.

Technology Autobiography

The Technology Autobiography made with professional equipment

And just so you know what I’m talking about…

(Please try not to get too distracted by Russell Crow in a leather jerkin)

I’m Not Clever Enough To Devise This Title: “Worship At The Alter Of Convergence”

Response to this book… Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide… and this article “Introduction: Worship At The Alter Of Convergence” by Henry Jenkins

So, here’s a book that I imagine technophiles and communications majors everywhere frolic and prance around with in their (No offense Janine, you rock!!!) doubly reinforced, breslin computer bags. Henry Jenkins is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and the author of many a lodestar guide to technologically based ripple effects in our (American) culture.

When Jenkins casually uses Marshall McLuhan as a simple analogical tool on page ten in his book/ make a quick quip, I knew I was in for a real ivory tower treat. For those of you out there who don’t know about this dude (and here I will commit the same crime as Jenkins) Marshall McLuhan is to the field of Communications as Noam Chomsky is to the field of linguistics… Really important. Among some of my favorite things that McLuhan has said that he kind of has a patent on are:

1. “Invention is the mother of necessities.”

2. “Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.”

3. “All advertising advertises advertising.”

4. “Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.”

And this is just a taste of the dry genius that makes up the vast array of “McLuhanisms.” In my Media History and Communication Policy class (insert any version of me pulling at my suspenders, pushing up my horned rim glasses, and wheezing), my favorite professor often used his adages as cushy familiarisms. I imagine McLuhan to be my Communications grandfather… WHOA… can you say tangent?

Anyway, McLuhan is not a figure to be discounted, and I think I was a bit turned off when Jenkins says “Yet, history teaches us that old media never die- and they don’t even necessarily fade away” which is, I’m pretty sure, another platitude of McLuhan’s.

Grandpa McLuhan

Though, I did appreciate the fact that he would mention a probable cohort of his from MIT, a man named Ithiel De Sola Pool, who wrote Technologies of Freedom in 1983… “Once upon a time, companies that published newspapers, magazines, and books did very little else; their involvement with other media was slight.” This fairy-time  is a blurry fantasyland from before Ronald Reagan’s reign in office as “the deregulator.” During his time in office, Reagan passed a ton of policies slackening the restraints of the government on businesses and corporations in the US.

My favorite sentence by far is: “writing this book has been challenging because everything seems to be changing at once and there is no vantage point that takes me above the fray.” I don’t think many of us have the ability to be able to step back from the whir and drone of technology that’s overtaken our time…

Another thing Mr. Jenkins talks about is “the black box fallacy.”  The Black box fallacy= Jenkins” is doubtful that all media content is going to [one day] flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through a single black box we carry around with us everywhere we go)… reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels we are considering here.” And I guess I mention this just for kicks, because I like to imagine a stinking fatty-bum-bum American as a couch commando, making neanderthal noises and clicking buttons.

Reclining Fatty Bum Bum

Jenkins also says something interesting that I don’t necessarily agree with… He says “If old consumers were assumed to be passive, the new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them to stay, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.” He refers to consumers as “empowered” and yet I’m not convinced.

Maybe I’m being a tad bit too picky, feeling a bit too contrary, and getting lost in the semantics, but this book is beginning to sound a bit too comfortable and corporate for me.

Jenkins coins this cool concept of “affective economics” where consumers are active and attune to social networks and the protocols of Internet socialization. He says that for the ideal consumer of today “watching the advert or consuming the product is no longer enough; the company invites the audience inside the brand community.” From what I’ve gleaned, I think affective economics refers to a broader way of thinking about marketing where consumer dialogue about products and brand quality becomes an asset to companies who want to sell their stuff…

So as not to sound like a scholarly blockhead, I’ll say it this way… Jenkins thinks that companies are trying to market to us in a way that engages more than just our aesthetic values. They’re not only trying to make us go “ooh pretty shiny thing… me wants!!!” No, companies now want to lure us to their websites to talk about their products.

My favorite example of this (maybe it’s because my Dad works in this industry, maybe not), is women’s feminine care products. Yep, I’m going there… Enter the first few feminine  care companies that show up on Google’s search page…

1) Kotex…

-They’ve got a nice little tab you can go to called the “Ladies Room,” not the ladies’ room complete with a period planner (I guess they were trying to catch up to Google). The page has got a nice poll on it… “When do you feel most productive?” a. early morning, right after I wake up b. During the day while the kids are at school c. After dinner when everyone is winding down

How subversive… How thought provoking…

-There’s a forum and blogs (meaning there’s more than just one) you can post to. Now this is something I really recommend you take a look at. Among the recent topics there are five categories… “msturbation” (not making this up) with 8,007 views and written by sexymommy23, “I’m not comfortable!” with 192 views and written by MegAnn, “nair” with 76 views and “awkward..” amd “my girlfriends suggestion…’ all by **sexybaby**.

I guess to be fair these topics are all things we might think about as women, but what about facts and education and dignity? Is Kotex trying to get a rise out of us?

-My favorite part about this virtual community is a kind of virtual attendance taker that’s at the top of the page. Apparently tonight, I’m one of 17 guests, which makes me wonder what kinda crazies are out there and ready to talk women’s shop this late at night.

2) Seventh Generation…

Their forum is a bit more in line with what I consider useful and substantive content… But seriously, for Seventh generation to post up a topic like “Big Green Lies- What green myths would you like uncovered? Talk about greenwashing, understanding what’s really green, eco- truths and lies, or discuss what you saw on Big Green Lies, the new TV show from Seventh Generation on the Fine Living Network” (7 topics of discussion and 28 posts) or “Environment- Let’s talk about making the world a greener place” (19 topics and 105 posts) on their forum strikes me as manipulative and preposterous. Do you really think seventh generation cares?

There is absolutely no mention of sustainability (one of the most critical “buzz words”), nothing about systems and how individuals contribute to cycles in the environment, or energy conservation in daily life. It’s all about turning a profit instead of actually introducing individuals to a genuine set of sustainable life principles. Tip of the iceberg.

And the blog is kitschy to say the least. The little intro says, “The 7Gen blog is the voice of the Seventh Generation Nation, a place where we share thoughts and tips about living green, keeping our families healthy, and social responsibility. We hope to see you here often!” meaning people are writing fluff stories to make consumers feel good about their purchases and contributing to a more “green friendly society” in the easiest way… let’s fling money at a situation.

But listen to me way up there on my high horse… I actually thought this entry was cute… “Little Green Thumbs“

3) Always & Tampax

The “community” that Always and Tampax advocate are manifested in the girl friendly, barbie-girl page: BEINGGIRL

This is TBC… because if I start now with this site, I may never get to sleep.

The point can be expressed in the all-too-famous words of a dated, yet still “in” girl, Cher Horrowitz: AS IF!

Companies can’t create communities! It’s absurd to think that any good can come of people coming together and attempting to create solidarity around corporate bodies that are mostly concerned with profits.

Feeling Out Facebook

Impetus to write this post= “Facebook Exodus” by Virginia Heffernen

“According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July”

So we all moan and kvetch about our Facebook addictions, c’est la vie, right? We speculate about how the machines are going to run our lives one day, we make ourselves squinty-eyed, we prefer to politely pound our conversations into text boxes instead of charming one another with our voices, and we melt our lower backs and behinds in chairs… We’re unhappy, because we’re getting older, fatter, and we don’t want to filter our lives and our personal relationships through watts, silicon, gigabites, and the slight wait times when we’re web surfing. We hate investing our time into something that is mechanic, cold, unfeeling, and inherently unhuman… maybe I’m getting a bit too far out to generalize?

Well, if that’s true, and you’re not with me on this, then let me say that I don’t like Facebook much. I don’t like it the same way that I don’t like HBO’s True Blood or Vogue Magazine or Panera Bread’s Fuji Apple Chicken Salad. You may be asking yourself, what’s wrong with a salad? Nothing. I just don’t like excesses, and I don’t often like associating myself with anything that’s excessive.

Facebook makes everything really easy. Relationships can become a back and forth poking match, a message thread that just doesn’t flow well enough to satify me, a cryptic and unexpected message from my sixth-grade boyfriend about my new haircut. Facebook is a Nintendo-style communication tool that  has completely revolutionized human communication and has power over the future precedents for human interaction.

I feel like written letters, phone calls, and lengthy conversations are an indulgence that I use to treat myself on weekends. But that’s just me… a crazy writer with way too many credits on her micro-cosmic University plate.

“commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life”

Obviously Facebook is making money off of our lives…

“Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site”

There was an issue a while back about how Facebook was asserting ownership over all of the materials that users would put up. What this means is I sat in my “History of Media” class and heard more complaining and outrage. A student raised her hand and said that one of her friends had taken a trip to the Caribbean Islands and had posted the gorgeous pictures up on Facebook for people to drool over. Apparently, this friend had walked into Target a few months later, was ambling through an aisle, and saw her picture mounted in numerous frames. Her life had become the generic glossy picture that everyone throws away the second that they purchase the frame. Whether or not Facebook is to blame is completely dependent on you at this point. Internet copyright laws are lax unless the site, in this case Faceebook, has gone the distance to protect your content. In this situation, my fellow student’s friend had no claim over her picture and Facebook may have made a pretty penny off of it. We’ll never know.

Over the summer though, users got pretty fed up with Facebooks privacy terms, and the “powers that be” at Faceboook decided to honor a “democratic” system, so they had users vote on the privacy terms. Wired Magazine’s Scott Gilbertson had an interesting take on the issue in his article entitled “Facebook Doesn’t Get It:  Users Want Control, Not Voting Privileges“

The Solution, you ask?

In Virginia Heffernen’s article she talks about people who up and leave, in other words they completely absolve themselves of any responsibility having to do with their virtual identities. That’s one solution… a solution that I find similar to the sepuku ritual of the samurai… You plunge your sword into the Interwebs and claim your life your own. You die at your own will on a battlefield where you’re doomed to die. That’s honorable in some ways.

You’re saying no to your Facebook drug.

But really… in actuality, Facebook is not a drug. Just because we expose ourselves to Facebook and partake of Facebook does not mean it is a part of who we are as people.There has to be a soul, a life, a story, and a body to be imbued within a Facebook profile.

At the risk of sounding like a crunchy hippie… My clinical herbalism teacher (who is also an herbalist), Chris Marano, said something really interesting the other day. He told us that most of his clients who come to him seeking assistance seem to lose sight of the fact that while their lives may be the result of a ridiculous series of tragedies or comedies… they [as individuals] aren’t their stories. Every moment is a moment to be questioned, judged, and changed.

Regardless of what we do as individuals, Facebook will live on. After AOL and MySpace, Facebook is the third scourge on our abilities to interact on a true and honest one-to-one basis with people.

I can’t give you an easy solution. But I can challenge you.

If I ask you this… Would you rather continue battling the powers that be and asserting your identity OR would you have other people fight for you in an age when every issue has literally been simplified to a simple click away?

If I ask you this… Would you rather sit there mindlessly clicking through a reem of pictures that’ll never have anything to do with you and the life that you’re trying to create for yourself OR would you rather be the one capturing the scenic moments? Do you feel guilty?

If you feel guilty then get up out of your chair and jam out to a Zeppelin song for a minute. For me, it’s as simple as that.

I’m not going to be sad about the fact that I can read all about the production process of “Stairway to Heaven” and even brush up on my anagrams. It’s a privilege, and I’m going to use it as well as I can.

Why are pet owners always crazy in love?

Dog Is My Co-Pilot by Bark Magazine

I’m Not Sick or Twisted… I just have a dog

So this is a little mashup that I did using a song written by Dan Deacon and a book review on the above piece of literary genius I found on NPR’s website. The book review was incredibly silly and lent itself well to using phrases out of context to make the commentators seem loony.

My inspiration for this piece comes from a a project I decided to do a few years ago in a class called Producing Participatory Media.

I decided to design a user-generated radio show database for a group project. We developed this incredible web model where people could call a telephone number and leave a message on the web in the form of a confessional. We did this blog section about people who loved their pets, then got random people to call our “internet radio hotline,” and talk about their pets. I couldn’t believe how many bizarre things I had to filter through. People go gaga over their animals and it’s awesome.

Writing As An Emerging Technology

Response to Deborah Brandt’s Literacy In American Lives

In writing about the commoditization of literacy, Brandt was emphatic when identifying competitive economic forces that converge in our society to make us into mass professional writers. My favorite line was on page 13 when she refers to literacy as “a raw material in the mass production of information. The piece was demonstrated a very powerful mastery of literacy and was written very well. On page 5 of Brandt’s piece, entitled Literacy in American Lives, Brandt says, “As a resource, literacy has a potential payoff in gaining power or pleasure, in accruing information, civil rights, education, spirituality, status, money.” This passage caught my attention not because it was particularly subversive or seemingly controversial, but because it was well said, and prototypical of the style with which Brandt wrote the piece. The passage and the piece do a good job of opening up the reader to the study of literacy through a contextual lens, which is always a good because it makes us aware that literacy is a multi-layered issue in society that needs all kinds of information to be discerned. I admired her scientific yet humanistic approach to tracking the development of literacy, and through reading her piece, I became aware of a few of my own biases about literacy education.
When Brandt said that her study treats literacy “primarily as a resource- economic, political, intellectual, spiritual- which, like wealth or education, or trade skill or social connections, is pursued for the opportunities and protections that it potentially grants its seekers. To treat literacy in this way is to understand not only why individuals labor to attain literacy but also to appreciate why, as with any other resource of value, organized economic and political interests work so persistently to conscript and ration the powers of literacy for their own competitive advantage,” I was reminded of another class I’d taken in my Junior year about teaching English classes in secondary schools. In the class we did a series of readings on the different elements of learning literacy, and as a follow up to the unit we did a literacy collage where the entire class put together a visual depiction of how literacy played out in our lives, yet we paid barely any attention to literacy as an economic privilege or as a commodity in a capitalist agenda. The class focused on literacy from the perspective of a teacher in a classroom, and therefore didn’t acknowledge all of the socio-economic components of a student’s life society’s economic makeup that would make up a literacy experience in a school.

Response to Bertram Bruce & Maureen Hogan’s The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy

Overall, the piece was really intent on emphasizing the many different effects of obsolescence and ubiquitous technology on literacy education. It argues that we all tend to identify technology as anything that is considerably new and creates a different medium through which we can express our social values and then “we lose sight of the way they give shape to our daily lives” (page 2). The “ubiquity” of things makes them invisible, yet once you add the layers of class and privilege to the equation, you get a serious problem in assessing literacy needs in the education system, because there’s a huge gap in knowledge between policy makers, teachers, students, etc. Bruce and Hogan seem to be rallying teachers together when they say that it’s teachers’ responsibilities to figure out how to breach these gaps “as literacy educators because we have the responsibility to make the familiar strange-not only to rethink the uses of technologies, but also to know it again for the first time as we consider where our students may be starting. We must recall what it is like to be a novice or to be less privileged. We need to critically examine what has become commonplace, normalized, and even invisible. In some cases, we may need to depend on our students to navigate the voyage because they may be more expert.”
I think it’s absurd that universities find mandating computers a valid requisite for attendance at their institution… “computers now delimit the potential for academic success, even before a student considers applying to law school,” which means there may or may not be a generational gap in computer knowledge
I also thought the article sounded slightly like a scholarly prophecy of the matrix that is coming to sweep up humanity into the grips of androids and pretty fields of pods. I was just chatting with a researcher the other day, who’d had the bravado to emerge from the depths of his technological safe haven for a bit of lunch at the cafe I worked at. He was telling me all about the interactive software on statistical analysis that he’d been hired to design for middle schoolers… It seems we’re getting much closer to the scary image I have of students getting plugged in to a system of intravenous knowledge transmitting cords. Rather than ever having to experience the grating sound of a teacher misplacing his/her nail onto a chalk board, our potential pupil may be choosing out her/his musical playlist, conversations, and learning modules to turn on and plug into simultaneously. A peaceful simulation of human exchange.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/pencils.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/books/review/Powers2.t.html?_r=2

Response to Palfrey & Gasser

!:!:!:The tree frogs are too loud:!:!:!

Summer is passing by in a sneezey second once again. I’d like to catch some of my breath before it ends. So this is the recap post.

A few of my favorite things

Watch this…

Go here…

http://darkwasthenight.com/articles/13/yeasayer-on-pitchforktv

I am inspired by humanity… again.

Go here…