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« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 » December 31, 2004music genres and moodsOne of the reasons that i loved Napster was that you could see how people labeled their music, particularly the genre. In music, i use genre like i use tagging in Gmail, del.icio.us and Flickr, only i'm a bit more obsessive about keeping them organized. My playlists are all automatically created based on my idiosyncratic genre labels. The labels are not for you, but for me and i don't care if PsyChill doesn't really exist - it's the label that ties together things like bluetech and Shpongle. Due to 1) my new iPod, 2) the barfing of my Mac, 3) the scanning of CDs and 4) my obsession with last.FM, i am diving deeply into my music collection to re-genrify things. It is this attribute of last.FM that is given me the greatest curiosity. Last.FM is full of people with - shall we say - "interesting" tastes. I'm sorry but there is no playlist in the world that should have Gwar and Nina Simone together. Wrong wrong wrong. And why is Elliott Smith on the top artists page of the genre Breaks? No no no. Of course, i'm part of fucking this up. I love Elliott Smith and i love breaks. Since i am in the breaks group, my listening to Elliott Smith is affecting that genre page. This is a problem. I know better when i manually genrify my music. Elliott Smith is is the MaleNeuvoFolk genre (which is effectively equivalent to Sadcore except can also be listened to when not depressed). I would never recommend Elliott Smith to a breaks aficionado. I'm worried that this diverse listening pattern is messing up all the data. After three days of listening to non-stop chillout, goa and breaks, i should not be getting recommendations for Rancid and Ludacris. The problem is that there's a big gap between Beth Orton and Son Kite and i fear that trying to resolve those two listening patterns will result in abysmal results. The system should know that i'm listening with two different faceted patterns - the chill danah and the dancey danah. When i ask a friend for music advice, i don't simply say "give me anything you listen to." I know better. But i would ask "could you make me a dub mix?" or "what would complement Dr Toast?" Or think about the Back to Mine series (collections based on what musicians chill out to). I want my last.FM to understand that there are moods. All of my playlists get this. All of my genrification gets this. Now it's time for last.FM. I should be able to play everything that userx thinks makes for "coding music" or for "chill out" or for "getting ready to go out." I want to be able to cluster my music. I want to be able to inform Audioscrobbler to only tell the genre group "PsyTrance" about things that i've marked Full-On, Melodic, Scando or PsyChill. Or tell them about a playlist or two. Tag the genres so that i don't blush when i see my love of Johnny Cash appear as appropriate for other Trip-Hop fiends. Category: audio
Posted by zephoria at 5:17 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (9) we are a stingy nation: on tsunami cluelessnessI watched six hours of tsunami news the first night, dousing myself in CNN reports. I was rubber necking, only i'm not sure if i was trying to see the tsunami wreck or the CNN wreck. I was in complete awe by the coverage, utterly angry in fact. Although there were loads of interviews with survivors, not a single survivor's voice shown on CNN was brown. In other words, all we saw were the rich white American tourists. Reports babbled on about what would happen if America was hit with a tsunami, complete with little simulations. As the death toll rose, a special report was given from Alaska where the US last experienced a tsunami. Comparisons were made about the magnitude, the harm, the horror. Less than a dozen people were killed in that one. Reports were given about how to protect yourself from a tsunami if it were to hit New York. Dear fucking god we are a selfish nation. So, our country was guilted into supplying more money for the relief and Bush gets on TV to defensively resist accusations that we are a stingy nation. Of course we are a stingy nation - we always have been. ::sigh:: Then i woke to the following email in a thread on a mailing list: what i'm looking for is an organization who will take my volunteer efforts in SE asia. i'll fly out there, no problem. i'll perform hard labour for 2 weeks straight. but i can't afford to get my own lodging and food. no one wants my help. anyone know of any organization that would? First, this man's intentions are really good - he really wants to help, but his help is constructed in a typically American way. He's willing to give up time - one precious American commodity - but not money. But let's think about this. He wants to go to a devastated region that is devoid of food, shelter and water. He wants to put in hard labor to help a starving, dehydrated, homeless population and he's demanding these amenities!?!?!? You have got to be kidding me. Now, i am guessing that most of the villagers in these regions are putting in hard labor to repair their communities. And they're doing it without food water or housing. What kind of selfish, clueless request is this? But of course, in America, we want to help with any commodity other than money. We don't like giving money. That's fucking ridiculous when almost every NGO and NPO needs money more than anything. They need to buy things in the local regions, help the people there. This is not just true for the tsunami relief situation, but in general. Consider the clothing drives that are currently going on in the States. You want to ship off your $30 white branded T-Shirt. This was most likely created in an Asian country for maybe ? ten cents ?, sold to a manufacturer for maybe a quarter. You want to package this up, spend a bazillion dollars on shipping and send it back to Asia!?!? If you sent $10, at least 40 of your beloved T-Shirts could be bought. More importantly, the organizing NGOs could buy the most economical T-Shirts, support the local region's economy and make certain that people got what they needed. So when you think of donating blood or donating clothing, what are you really saying? You're saying you're too damn cheap to donate money. Money is what is needed, money is how these organizations can make certain to buy the maximum amount of needed materials and distribute them in the best way possible. Considering that time equals money, if you've read this far, you've probably spent $.50 assuming minimum wage only. Consider how much time you spend reading blogs or about the tsunami - donate that time multiplied by your hourly wage. Or, given that it's New Year's Eve, why not donate the amount of money that you spent today on champagne, food and party tickets. We are a stingy nation. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 11:01 AM | Comments (39) | TrackBack (2) December 29, 2004music networks (last.FM and Audioscrobbler)One of my favorite parts of the academic interim period is that i can catch up on all of the things that i have put on the queue as unacceptable procrastination devices. I sent my computer in to be fixed (damn optical drive), bought a new iPod and have been organizing my music. Amidst this, i finally dove into Last.FM and Audioscrobbler (even later than Liz). Aside from the fact that it's fascinating to see what all i listen to, it's absolutely intriguing to see what others are listening to and to be able to listen to their music as "radio." I've already found two new DJs that i *love*. Music is a social tool. Most people get their music through their friends and social networks say more about music than anything else. Of course, many of my older friends are still listening to what they loved when they were in college because they no longer have access the diverse networks that introduce them to new music. And we're not even going to begin discussing the weaknesses of radio. When Napster collapsed, my music explorations collapsed. The only thing that fixed that was a server my friends have that allows you to stream music. Folks in our crew upload music and we can all stream it. That is a fantastic way of connecting to interesting music that my friends have found. This is effectively what Last.FM is doing on a larger scale Of course, i found songs that i liked, tried to buy them at the iTunes store, realized that they didn't exist (because they aren't so mainstream) and then re-downloaded LimeWire to find them. It's frustrating because many of the CDs i listen to go out of stock relatively quickly or only have a few runs. It's sooo important for me to find other people that have them and i'm still cranky with the RIAA for making it hard for me to find rare songs that they don't even cover anyhow. I'm very curious what will happen once more folks get on it (particularly youth and alternative cultures). I'm already pleased to find out that there are more than 100 psychonauts out there. This certainly looks like the type of sharing-driven social networking tools that i love. Category: audio
Posted by zephoria at 3:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (4) damn AIM capsAs i've mentioned before, i think that it's *ludicrous* that services cap the number of people that you can and should know. I've hit the AIM cap - 200 buddies. I keep removing people but there are not enough people to remove anymore - there are only 10 addresses that i can't associate with someone. I tried to remove anyone who hasn't logged in in a while or who i don't actually talk to, but the reality is that AIM is my primary form of communication for work colleagues, for social connections, for geeking out. I never login without there being at least 30 people that i know online (even now at midnight in the interim period). Although i talk to only a fraction every day, i rely on the presence bits to be in contact with people regularly and have the ability to reach out when appropriate. As more people get on AIM, work interactions switch to AIM and folks like my brother start maintaining one IM address per device, the caps are going to get more and more problematic. I honestly don't know what to do. How are other people handling conversation caps like the AIM cap? I cannot even imagine having a cap on my addressbook, but that's what this feels like. Category: instant messaging
Posted by zephoria at 12:04 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (2) December 28, 2004the performance of the public intellectualIn my performance studies class this fall, folks presented papers on a variety of topics. I was utterly floored by the caliber of them, even those that i was not topically invested in. One of my classmates - Rudy Ramirez - presented a paper that really made me think about what it means to perform being a public intellectual. I found this discussion especially intriguing considering the role of the blogger as a pseudo public intellectual. (Yes, i know that there are huge problems with this statement that i'm just not going to take up right now.) Ramirez' paper - Authorizing Activism: Arundhati Roy and the Performance of the Public Intellectual - discusses the topic through the life of Arundhati Roy (who is a most amazing public intellectual). It's a fun read if you enjoy this kind of thing. Of particular interest is the lit review discussion about the collapse of the public intellectual and the rise of the pundit, whereby professional standards are at issue as well as a concern that narrow expertise does not necessarily imply moral authority. All of this is highly relevant to the blogging community. [I will take some of these issues up more later when i can think more straightly. Still, i wanted to offer the paper to those who are bored at work waiting for New Year's.] Category: academia
Posted by zephoria at 4:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2) i'm homeTwo felines sat at my door with a foul expression, clearly upset that i was gone for so long. Or perhaps i'm projecting my guilt. The holidays have been wonderful - time with friends and family, gluttonous food and culture. But i'm really glad to be home and now it's time to get back into high gear. I will be blogging some of the backlog even though my need to understand the tsunami's effects are trumping all other activities. Information on how to help is being posted at Tsunami Help. Category: reflections & rants
Posted by zephoria at 4:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) December 20, 2004CFP: Weblogging EcosystemCFP: WWW 2005 2nd Annual Workshop on Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics. Great papers last year, in Japan this year. Deadline: March 4. Category: blogging
Posted by zephoria at 1:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) December 18, 2004on being shunned by librariesOn the MEA mailing list, there was a discussion about this article: Students shun search for information offline. Generally, the article takes the stance that students are lazy and assume everything online is true. I'm not going to deny those claims, but i want to offer an alternative story. I was first kicked out of a library in the 2nd grade (for reading inappropriate material for my age... "Flowers in the Attic" was not an appropriate "chapter book"). By middle school, i despised the library, having been kicked out many more times for talking, chewing gum, more inappropriate reading and what-have-you. There were rigid hours, limitations on what you could read and access. The library to me was a controlled space with authoritarian dictators. I was shunned by the library and i shunned it in return. I'm in graduate school in a former librarian school. My advisor was a head librarian. I'm still afraid of the library. I visited the Brown library twice - to give out donuts naked. I never visited an MIT library and i have never been inside a Berkeley one either. I'm still afraid of the library. I visit the NYC Public Library to sit on its beautiful steps. I believe in the value of libraries, support efforts to rejuvenate them and make them public space. I'm still afraid of the library. Combined with my book fetish, my fear of libraries has resulted in both a severe half.com addiction and a very acute ability to navigate material online to determine its validity. I order articles when i need them and ping professors for digital copies of their papers. Doing research online away from the controlling eye of a librarian makes me feel far safer, far more willing to explore new areas. Being always online, i've learned to figure out what makes something valuable and how to trace it to a source (and i lurve lurve lurve things like Google Scholar and Amazon Book Search). I have no doubt that students are not equipped to do research. Then again, i think that our schools are pretty fubared, but that's a tangent. I am not convinced that it is as simple as getting folks to get offline though. For starters, this invalidates the security of information exploration that these folks know. Instead, how can students be taught to value lots of different perspectives that come in lots of different mediums and how can they be given the skills to understand the different mediums? How can the value of offline sources be coupled with online tools? In this way, i'm definitely of the ilk that believes in cultural studies, media students and a deep understanding of the relationship between information. Category: academia
Posted by zephoria at 8:13 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (1) December 17, 2004Computer-Human Interaction WorkshopsThe workshops at CHI this year are fantastic. The conference appears to be expanding its notion of what constitutions interactions between technology and people/society (away from the 1-1 computer/human paradigm that was often emphasized). I'm debating between applying to: [It should be noted that there are lots of other workshops that might be applicable to various readers of this blog so do check it out if you're so inclined. The deadline for workshop applications is January 3 which is a complete bitch.] Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Extremities: a play about rapeI went to see a terrifying play last night - Extremities: Set in present-day, Extremities is every woman’s worst nightmare come true… with a twist. During an attempted rape, a woman captures her attacker and proceeds to torture him. Her roommates return home and struggle to determine who is guilty of a crime, the woman or her would-be rapist. It's a benefit for SFWAR - San Francisco Women Against Rape and it runs through this weekend. It's the kind of play that makes you really uncomfortable but you're super glad you saw it. Category: gender & sexuality
Posted by zephoria at 12:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) December 16, 2004judicial theatreI went to court to support a friend. I've been to court before, but only for easy things like changing my name, dealing with parking tickets, etc. In this case, there were two sides with adamantly opposing views about the world. And i was on one side. The entire event was high drama, but not in that made-for-TV style. It was far more painful than that. For starters, everyone mumbled, stumbled, etc. It wasn't scripted. People didn't know how to project their voices and the inane repetitive questions were clearly for a forgetting mind, not to drive the witnesses bonkers. While the federal lawyer signaled to the witness using baseball codes (1-2-3 on his chest), few other body motions were scripted and the sides played out their cultural training. As an ethnographer, it was brutally painful to watch the body performance of each side show their values more deeply than anything that came out of their mouths. The judge gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling. He clearly sympathized with Barlow, but he was also dealing with conflicted feelings about the recent laws that have come down - his sarcastic tone signaled that he felt very burdened by what was happening, but his judicial manner also made it clear that he felt it was his responsibility to follow the letter of the law, even those to which he was opposed. The attorneys were caricatures of themselves. The federal attorneys had a hard-edged, no-smile Yale/Harvard rigidity that was stunningly performed. Kafka would have been proud. Milgram at its best. Barlow's attorney was most distinctly an ACLU type with long hair, funky glasses, curved shoulders and a revolutionary demeanor that signaled that he believed in the cause. The Cause. It was about The Cause. And The Cause was to be fought out in jargon in front of the press by two sides with opposing views. Was God on both their sides? But believing in The Cause was not enough... it was clearly a battle of performances. The judge was clearly rattled by the situation at hand. He walked in, talked about having received phone calls from CNN, got the papers about the case two hours prior and was like what the hell is going on in my courtroom today. He was clearly not prepared to be dealing with The Cause. The federal folks were good, really really good. Their snotty-nosed attitude made the much more laid-back judge resent them, but they played the rules to perfection, fought it out like they had been taught on debate team. It was a hard thing to watch, but they were good really good. The defense attorney annoyed the judge - not through arrogance but though a clear lack of sculpted performance. The judge pitied the defense attorney, but he still grated on him. One question comes to mind: are the master's tools needed to tear down the master's house? Or is the fantasy of a destroyed house purely impossible? Because clearly, the moral highground is not the appropriate approach. This is a battle that values performance, wit, speed and memory... and performance is more key than anything. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 11:06 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (2) December 12, 2004Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal PracticeFor my performance studies class, i wrote a paper on blogging that i have morphed into a submission for the Media Ecology Conference. It is a draft paper, but i figured it would be fruitful to put it up here for anyone who wishes to tear it apart. Be warned that this is definitely an academic paper meant for an academic audience and may contain scary academic words. There's a lot that i'm missing here, but i still think that this paper has some value and i would love feedback from anyone who wishes to spend the time reading it. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 8:10 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0) google suggest and traces"What's the value of Google Suggest?" This is a question that keeps coming up. The title certainly implies that the service is to help suggest queries based on other people's queries. Frankly, this is not why i find the service compelling. When we walk around physical space, we leave traces of our activities, marks on the floor that let others know people have been here. As much as we may despise graffiti, we all get a little bit of pleasure out of reading the markings in the stalls. We may not follow footprints in the snow and sand, but we love seeing the path they take. There are no visible markings in digi-space, even though we know people have been there before. What i see as the most valuable aspect of Google Suggest is the tracings - the reminder that thousands of other people are searching Google, looking for things of interest to them. There is an appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies, a visibility to our actions that we feel are normally so isolated. There's a sociable quality to our searches, a feeling of participation in society. This is why Google Suggest is fascinating to me. Please note: i know nothing of Google's purpose wrt this application. This is all my own personal opinion on the matter. Category: digitalness
Posted by zephoria at 1:51 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (2) December 11, 2004irritation with audible.comI have been an avid audible.com supporter for well over a year. I've been patient with the horrendous website. I bought numerous subscriptions for others last holiday season. But i'm bloody fed up and frustrated with them. It's impossible to navigate the system. When i was traveling, i found that i couldn't get audible to download. Now that time has passed, my subscription doesn't roll over and so i lost a month worth of downloads. This has happened plenty before and i'm just tired of it. I have patience for wacky interfaces at the beginning, but not over time and not when i feel like i'm getting screwed out of money while they fuck around. Frustration. Category: techno doom
Posted by zephoria at 1:19 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0) December 10, 2004happy hanukkahLast night, False Profit celebrated Hanukkah in hysterical form. Maer read us two sermons: one from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and one from Jews for Jesus. I highly recommend reading Brasco - The Liberty Bear Coloring Book. OMG. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 1:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) December 9, 2004my queer identityA few days ago, an anonymous reader reached out to me to kindly inform me that i could be saved, offering me prayers in my path to finding Jesus. I decided to take this opportunity to be upfront about my sexuality and my views for those who don't know me so well and for those of you who are struggling with attacks or pressure or guilt because of your sexuality. I believe that no one has the right to make you feel badly for your sexuality and i believe that the struggle we all face is how to find peace and comfort in who we are and how we interact with others. It is with a grounded sense of self that is very rooted in my own religious values that i offer you my views on sexuality. They don't have to be your views, but you can only respect me if you respect that this is who i am and what i believe. When i meet people who spark something in me - intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, i often fall in love. That feeling of love is not framed in a sexual sense. I fell in love with my closest friends in this world - that's how they became my dear friends. Their psychological position in my life is very deep. Love, for me, is a very strong and passionate emotion that extends from utmost respect and appreciation, awe. With love, there is a sense of warmth and joy, vulnerability, compassion, trust. Through mutual honor, love is an emotion that binds people together. Not all relationships of love have a sexual component. Yet, sexual interaction takes that love deeper, allowing an even greater connection, passion and vulnerability. Sex is an act that stems from love and allows it to grow deeper. I believe that sex is a very meaningful act and a valuable component to different relationships of love. I do not believe that sex is an act that is only reserved for one person in this lifetime. Sex has another axis to it - that of desire. Only particular connections for me have a sexual resonance, a "chemistry." I wish i knew the formula for that chemistry, but i don't. There are people that i have loved deeply with whom i have no sexual chemistry and that's simply the way it is. For me, that chemistry does not have gendered limitations. Let me step back a moment. We have a cultural assumption that there is a binary in sex (culturally called gender) - male, female. Anyone who has worked with intersexed or transgendered people know that this cultural binary obfuscates reality and causes harm. There are people whose genitalia does not match society's dichotomous expectations, hormonal and chromosomal structures that aren't written about in textbooks and identities that make bodies seem very foreign. Of course, God created these people too. I understood this foolish dichotomy in my gut at a young age, always upset that the world was divided into female and male. It is via working in gender clinics that i was able to see what happens when it breaks down. My sexuality is rooted in my dismissal of that dichotomy and a recognition of a gender range that reflects both sex and performance. I identify as queer, not gay, not lesbian and certainly not bisexual (which reinforces the binary in its term). I have fallen in love with people with all different sorts of sexual and gender identities. I do believe that i have a choice about who i have sex with, but i don't believe that i have a choice over who i have chemistry with. Some people's chemistry fits neatly into privileged heternormativity (i.e. they're 'straight'). Some people's chemistry is between people of similarly sexed bodies. For me, my chemistry doesn't fit neatly into a binary of sexuality either, but it certainly doesn't mean i have chemistry with everyone nor does it mean that i have chemistry with a larger percentage of the population. It simply means that it does not fall along neat lines of either gender or sexuality. Thus, the term 'queer'. Given this, i could, as society has pressured me to do, make a choice to only engage in sexual relations with those whom society has deemed socially appropriate. In other words, if i like boys and girls, why not make it easier on myself and just date boys? First, i think that is rubbish and indicative of a moral system to which i do not subscribe. Second, why should i let cultural pressures obscure my actual feelings? I have strong religious values and beliefs, but they do not believe that guilt, sin, self or projected torture, hate, intolerance, self, or enemies are in any way productive or valuable. My beliefs are rooted strongly in love, respect, honor and kindness. I do not believe that there is ever anything wrong about rooting love in consensual sex. I believe that social efforts to construct something as 'wrong' are simply mechanisms to assert power and control, an attempt to play God, not to honor God. In my view, honoring God means honoring yourself and others, working to release yourself of hatred and judgment, finding ways of respecting all forms of life. God's work means finding peace beyond suffering in order to release ourselves from the cycle of birth/death. No part of God's work means increasing suffering for anyone in any form. My sexuality is rooted in a combination of love and desire that has no gendered boundaries. Sex is a consensual act that emerges from and glorifies both love and desire. There is nothing and i do mean -nothing- wrong with loving someone else and expressing it sexually. This is not a sick addiction or a sin - it is a pure emotion rooted in everything good. [Please note that my definition of God may not reflect yours. And my definition of religion does not include a literal reading of any scripture.] Category: gender & sexuality
Posted by zephoria at 4:53 PM | Comments (27) | TrackBack (2) December 8, 2004add - another dissertation distractionThe title of Lori Bradley's blog - ADD - another dissertation distraction has me cracking up and i felt the need to share for all y'all enmeshed in finals, writing, attention deficit and procrastination vices of all sorts. It's a fantastic complement to PhD - Piled Higher and Deeper. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 2:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) finals productivity packMindtangle has a brilliant way of battling his fingers' efforts to procrastinate: I just added the following to my HOSTS file:# The "law school finals productivity pack" Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) December 7, 2004Cobot and Data that Matters[From OM] In Implicit or creepy?, David is dead-on and i would like to expound on this. First, if you aren't familiar with the lessons of Cobot, you should be. Cobot was a nice friendly little bot that sat in LambdaMOO, collecting data for its masters. Members of the MOO were bothered by this and felt that Cobot should give back to the community it was observing, like any good social scientist. So it did. You could ask Cobot anything about the social patterns going on and the data it was collecting. People started asking ego-centric questions: "Who do i talk to the most?" and such. And then, people started asking who other people talked to the most. Trouble emerged from there. All of a sudden, human jealousy reared its head. People were irate that those who they spoke to the most did not speak to them the most. What did this say about reciprocal value? Gah! Cobot's willingness to provide social data created a social rupture because it was evaluating data, not its meaning. Yet, people who were accessing the data were deriving meaning. They were using coarse data about social relationships to imply something much deeper. Sound familiar? I talk to Phil from the corner deli more frequently than my best friend or my mother simply because of proximity. Yet, they play a much more central emotional role in my life than Phil. Quantity and quality are often not correlated. Yet, if some system were to rank my relations and Phil came out above my mom, damn straight she'd be pissed. The way that systems and users of systems interpret our data often affects how we interact with them. When Viegas and i were visualizing email data, we often joked that our systems motivated you to write more messages to the friends who had strong emotional connection but apparently not frequent email connection simply so that they played a more visible role. In the case of David's metadata, this is particularly true. How many of us can truly list our favorite books? We know that this will be publicly displayed. What we list is a performance where we try to select titles that convey something meaningful about us for the viewer. We count on that audience, on that interpretation in selecting our titles. We are performing for that human audience to interpret, not the system. Yet, if the system starts interpreting our data, we may shift our scope of audience. But then what is it that either the system or the humans are interpreting? Are they capturing essence? What happens when the system re-projects its interpretations back to a human audience? How do we then deal with this doubly-mediated projection of self to a human audience? It is not simply creepy, it's outright destabilizing. Category: digitalness
Posted by zephoria at 6:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3) a question for you...I don't often respond to comments even though i actually really appreciate them. I have to admit that i'm still overwhelmed that so many folks read this. How does my failure to respond affect whether or not you comment and what you do say when you comment? Category:
Posted by zephoria at 1:01 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0) December 6, 2004objections from native bloggersIn both of the presentations I did this week, a woman raised her hand and said basically word for word the same thing: "When I told my daughter that I was going to a presentation on blogs, she said 'NO! You can't do blogs in schools! Blogs are OURS!'" From Barriers to Entry Category: blogging
Posted by zephoria at 1:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) jesusland - on bug-smashing faggotsWhile i love the Internet for many things, my deepest appreciation concerns how it has helped queer youth come into their own without killing themselves. This is only possible because of the possibility of community and support, people from different geographical regions with good hearts working to help each other make sense of the world. When i returned to queer youth spaces during my first year of graduate school, i was horrified to find that what was once a safe space for queer youth had become a place where the fundamentalist Christians could attack them. I spent many nights on boards with these kids, hearing how they were attacked by people offline and online, not sure who to trust, not sure where to go. The niche communities that had helped me find grounding were terrifying. I was truly saddened by this. Max Gordon has just composed an essay called Jesusland where he talks about queer youth, Christian fundamentalism, political anti-queer rhetoric and the responsibilities of a society to take care of its people. We hear about the Gay/Straight alliances but we don't hear about SAFE - students against faggots everywhere. We don't hear about what the anti-same-sex marriage is doing to youth. I can't help but wonder, is there a safe refuge for queers kids now or will the suicide rate just rise? Category: gender & sexuality
Posted by zephoria at 11:14 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) finals time...Oh, it is most definitely finals time. And paper submission time. Leaving my couch happens on rarer and rarer occasions, food comes from cans and human contact is succinct and always mediated. Thankfully, i have The Onion to remind me of what happens when hyper-focus goes wrong:
Category: reflections & rants
Posted by zephoria at 12:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) December 5, 2004Friendster's fictional personasAs we all know, social software is finding unique ways of selling advertising (and this recent article discusses some of it). In the YASNS world, MySpace has let you listen to R.E.M.'s upcoming album and Friendster has created fake profiles for companies and Hollywood, including celebrity profiles that sell brands through the celebrity. [I have to wonder if there are real people getting advertising money for branding themselves on Friendster.] My first instinct is to roll my eyes and groan at the absurdity of this. My second is to laugh hysterically. Think about it. In a culture of continuous branding, corporations and Hollywood are actively moving to blur any understanding of "real." Everything is performed, articulated, mediated, constructed. Including and especially you. We want to brand people and use people to sell brands. We want to mesh the fictional with the personal so that you feel a deep connection with brands. Think about the psychology at play here. Sure, it's effective... damn effective... and fucking manipulative as holy hell. It makes me shudder to think that this is the culture that we've created. I totally get that people really buy into their brands and today's youth in particular are not only brand-savvy but they've personalized branding in the most effective way... for corporations. It's kinda complicated. On one hand, i don't want to stop them from constructing their identity inside of brands because this lets them make meaning, but it's also quite disturbing. I mean, i glorify fan fiction which is all about identity construction through literary and media branded icons, but i am bothered by the product-driven equivalent. In fan fiction, i am stoked when youth figure out how to identify with fictional characters and develop a meaningful relationship to them, yet i hate having the equivalent in Friendster. Why? I don't honestly know. But it's definitely something to think about. In any case, i would like to point out that people thought that postmodern ideas had no value outside the academy. If this collapsing of the "real" is anything other than postmodernism coming to fruition, please let me know. Category: friendster
Posted by zephoria at 10:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) December 4, 2004blink pt. 1 - why blogging winsWhen i first heard about "The Tipping Point" i have to admit that i was wary. I love pop-(social)science when it covers material that i'm not familiar with, but not when it's work in my area, work that i know intimately. I didn't connected Gladwell's name with two of my favorite articles until much later. Still, i felt that i needed to read "The Tipping Point" in order to have conversations about my research with folks outside of the academy. So, i did. And i was really pleasantly surprised. Gladwell captured the essence of qualitative social networks, weaving together research and narrative to construct a truly compelling book. He unpacked research complexities with relative success and made social networks publicly accessible (although i'm not sure that i'm thrilled with this result, but still). It wasn't a perfect book, but it was damn good and it let me engage with technologists, media and non-researchers in an entirely different way. A few weeks ago, i started hearing about Gladwell's upcoming book - "Blink." I surfed to his site to find out that the book wont' be released until January. Fine, i'll wait. Two hours later, i received a lovely email from his press folks asking if i wanted to review "Blink" on my blog. ::bounce:: Of course! I wanted to reach out and hug my blog for giving me this opportunity. Yesterday, i received a review copy and i'm trying really hard not to read it until finals are over. Now, for anyone who has heard me obsess over my books, review copies have particular significance. First, i *despise* hardcover books with a passion. I often don't read really interesting books when they come out because i hate reading hardcovers. I genuinely hate hate hate hate hardcovers. I will happily pay hardcover price for a paperback of a really interesting book, but i just hate reading things that are so structurally rigid. Review copies, on the other hand, are like a treasure find. I often scour half.com looking for review copies that people (illegally) sell. Review copies are not only paperbacks from before the hardcover, *but* they have mistakes in them! Can i tell you how much i love errors in books??? It makes me feel like the book is real, like i'm seeing the process, that authors are imperfect. I admit - i've already scanned "Blink" - and i'm stoked to see things like "TK" which seems to indicate things that are to come later. It's like me writing CITATION in my papers as markers for later insertion. Review copies make me think that one day, i'll write a book and people will edit it. Review copies feel like they are part of the process, not some artificially and remotely constructed artifact of knowledge. Review copies are the antithesis of hardcover books... they make me drool. Anyhow, i will review "Blink" properly shortly but in the meantime, i just wanted to share my utter joy in having a review copy in hand and my deep appreciation that blogging has let this happen without requiring me to scour half.com. And isn't it damn cool that Gladwell's press folks are reaching out to bloggers for reviews, not just mainstream media? Of course, i can't help but wonder if i should take this opportunity to do a proper review that could be used elsewhere. Hmmm... Category:
Posted by zephoria at 12:40 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) bringing down the networkI know that i'm good at breaking technology, but this is absolutely ridiculous and i would love some insight if anyone knows how i'm pulling this off. My cable modem is connected to a 4-port hub which is connected to two Netgear wireless routers. I can consistently bring down the Netgear router doing the following things: Task 1 is a request for a large quantity of packets simultaneously. Task 2 is sending a large quantity of packets simultaneously. Resetting the Netgear brings it right back up, but this is just weird. Is it a problem with my Netgear? With my Mac? Why on earth is this happening? This so reminds me of when i used to bring down Brown's primary server using print from Photoshop. I was banned from printing. I don't like the idea of being banned from copy/pasting and open in tabs in my own household. Category: techno doom
Posted by zephoria at 11:06 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) December 1, 2004end of email era in KoreaFor those who hadn't heard, other social communication tools are usurping email's supremacy in Korea, or at least so says Chosun Category: youth culture
Posted by zephoria at 10:54 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) please forward this...I was thinking about the last two entries that i posted and about the common practice by some bloggers and LJ/Xanga folks to post personality tests. Remember when we all used to get forwards from friends with questions your friends answered and questions that you should pass on to all of your friends? It was part of the forwarding blitz. The goal was to get to know your friends better through funny meme-spreading questions. Y'know... the things that resulted in the post-AOL phrase "the September that never ended"? Remember those? These practices play an interesting and similar social role. In both cases, you share something that you find fun and interesting while simultaneously sharing something about yourself. You create mini-memes and hope your friends will follow in suit because you want to hear their answers. Of course, the suits don't play along because they think that these mediums are far more professional than that. But when your friends do engage in the pyramid scheme, you smile at the minutia that they offer that tells so much about them. Also, of course, both are ways of shouting out at your friends when you have no real content to share, just something that will make them think about you and smile. It's a digital presence indicator, a way of remotely ::nuzzling:: It's sooo not the professional web, but so critical to the way that social ties are maintained. Category:
Posted by zephoria at 10:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) random shuffle[Per Metamanda's random shuffle]
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Posted by zephoria at 1:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) |
"Taking Ritalin to study is very dangerous. If you let your focus drift, you'll spend the night scrubbing your telephone."