In 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
While 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?
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:
“Taking Ritalin to study is very dangerous. If you let your focus drift, you’ll spend the night scrubbing your telephone.”
Danielle Carlson
Novelist
As 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.
When 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…
I 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:
1) Safari – Open all in tabs with > 35 tabs
2) Terminal ssh to SIMS, open pine. Copy/paste > 1 page worth of text from local to pine [Using pine since Mail is still fubared]
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.
For those who hadn’t heard, other social communication tools are usurping email’s supremacy in Korea, or at least so says Chosun
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.
[Per Metamanda’s random shuffle]