Author Archives: zephoria

the performance of the public intellectual

In 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.]

i’m home

Two 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.

on being shunned by libraries

On 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.

Computer-Human Interaction Workshops

The 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:
– W1. Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
– W18. Designing Technology for Community Appropriation

[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.]

Extremities: a play about rape

I 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.

judicial theatre

I 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.

Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice

For 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.

Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice

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.

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.

irritation with audible.com

I 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.