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MySpace, ByeSpace, ThySpace, BuySpace

So, the WSJ article. The life and death of an idea. OK, I'm being a bit severe, but I'm listening to some fab, bippy-hoppy, electronica right now from Eric Amarillo. I'm just dancing in my chair while I write this. How does electrified happiness translate into the demise of social networking sites? It doesn't. I just wanted to include a little something from my life. Because I want you to know me. ME. I want you to rank me, file me, serial number me. I want you to judge me. Based solely on my music choices. Or how many friends I have on Friendster. Or how good my package looks in my flak suit as I suit up to fly a plane. [That's a bit of an obscure reference, I think. Did they actually let him fly it? Dumbass.] I must say this peppy amalgam of sound is extremely repetitive. Like EXTREMELY. But it's like the best eight bars of the peppiest tune. Over and over. So you keep getting excited again and again. Now, Air just came on. Totally different feel. OK, back to life and death.

Vauhini Vara is a size queen. She laments the unwieldiness of MySpace. She discusses the infection of social networking sites by greedy advertisers. (Is there anything, anything at all, that doesn't have advertising attached to it these days? Does Cheetos sponsor everything? Is everything "brought to you by" one of the zillions of Johnson & Johnson products? It is a sad, sad day.) Vara quotes Judit Nagy, VP of Consumer Insights at Fox Interactive Media as saying that MySpace is "moving from a growth spurt into a phase of maturity." Isn't it a bit to early to use the term "maturity"? We talked about this a tiny bit last night. Or at least Colin tried to get us to talk about it. Where are we going with all this? What is the future of social networking? Can we even answer that question now? Isn't it still too early for predictions? The co-option of SNS by advertisers may drive them to an early grave at this rate.

In my ponderings over the separation between one's online identity and one's real identity, I found this in Vara's article. She talks about a fella who chose to terminate his account with MySpace because of the porn spamming. This is how she phrased it:

"Last spring, Mr. Kalyn killed his MySpace profile."

KILLED? Yikes #3. This plays along with my aghastness (aghasticity?) at MonkeyPuppy's blurring of the me/my profile lines. Colin always asks, "Are we our blogs? Do we write them or do they write us?"

Our very own JoeyDee has some ideas for computer cryogenics that might answer the question.

Teenagers...Yikes!

For last night's class, we read the How Teenagers Hijacked the Internet article. Yikes. A lotta them.

Yikes #1:
"Wikipedia gets 54% of its traffic from Google search results. The majority of Wikipedia visitors then proceed to MySpace or Blogspot, both of which use Google as their search service."
[Kinda vicious cycle, no? Kinda bordering on some Big Brother action, right?]

The "intimate relationship" between these entities has affected the true, or organic, nature of their symbiosis. Even though Google's Big Daddy program "still calculates the popularity of Websites by counting incoming links," the article suggests that the results are still manipulated. Due to this behind-the-scenes backscratching, the value or popularity of a website may not actually have organically grown. We like to think that sites are popular because they have caught on, that they have an audience, that their cleverness in content and design has won them the popularity they deserve. But in truth, that doesn't really matter. Which takes us to...

Yikes #2:
"Wikipedia, the 'encyclopedia' whose 'editors' are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information." [You thought that was enough? No, the Yikes grows into the following YIKES] "In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on." YIKES. After our discussions of the value of Wikipedia, doesn't that statement undermine Google's credibility?

Crash

So, MonkeyPuppy's MySpace page crashed my Firefox program. Nice.

But I must say that yikes! That's a lot of information. And the graphic near the top of the page with the woman's face covered with suggestions like: "Forward Me," "Block Me" or "Rank Me" is a bit unnerving.

What does that say about our online identities. Has MonkeyPuppy become this identity? She says "Rank ME," not "Rank my profile." The lines are blurred between fantasy and reality, between what you write and what you are. What does that say about self-esteem? The language changes the sentiment. By melding herself with her online presentation (at least rhetorically), MonkeyPuppy seemingly asks for personal approval or disapproval. Quite interesting.

OK. Full disclosure (I love saying that): I was jumping around a bit haphazardly on her page. That may have caused the crash.

Safety Tips from Bebo

Here is a page from Bebo about Internet safety, written by Parry Aftab, the head of WiredSafety.org, "the world's largest online safety and help group." Below is something about them:

WiredSafety, Is A 501(c)(3) Program and the largest online safety, education and help group in the world. We are a cyber-neighborhood watch and operate worldwide in cyberspace through our more than 9,000 volunteers worldwide. (WiredSafety is run entirely by volunteers.)

Our work falls into four major areas:

• help for online victims of cybercrime and harassment
• assisting law enforcement worldwide on preventing and investigating cybercrimes
• education
• providing information on all aspects of online safety, privacy and security.

Together with our affiliate, www.wiredcops.org, specially-trained volunteers patrol the Internet looking for child pornography, child molesters and cyberstalkers. We also offer a wide variety of educational and help services to the internet community at large. Other volunteers find and review family-friendly Web sites, filter software products and Internet services. Along with the volunteers of our affiliated WiredKids.org, our WiredTeens and Teenangels, CyberMoms and CyberDads volunteers speak at local community groups and schools around the country teaching Internet safety. Our Cyber911 help line gives netizens access to help when they need it online. We are proud of our reputation as the one-stop-shop for all cyberspace safety, privacy, security and help needs.

WiredSafety is headed by Parry Aftab (also a volunteer), a mom, international cyberspace privacy and security lawyer and children's advocate. Parry is the author of The Parent's Guide to Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace (McGraw-Hill), which has been adapted and translated around the world. WiredPatrol volunteers range in age from 18 to 80. WiredKids range from seven to twelve, and the Teenangels from 13 to 18, and these programs are run in conjunction with WiredKids.org, also headed by Parry Aftab. WiredSafety backgrounds include everything from TV personalities, teachers, stay-at-home moms, retired persons, law enforcement officers, and students to PhD's and writers.

Bebo

My new best friend Fred Stutzman pointed us to Bebo (among other SNS in his blog). This is what I found:

Bebo is the next generation social networking site where members can stay in touch with their College friends, connect with friends, share photos, discover new interests and just hang out.

From previous experience, the people who work at Bebo have learned a lot about what makes social networks fun, and believe that with Bebo they've taken social networking to the next level. But, we're never satisfied with where we are today, so please do send in any suggestions on how we can improve our service to better meet your needs. We promise we will listen and keep improving Bebo.com!

Bebo, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California.

Now, they say they've taken it up a notch, but don't say how. I'll keep poking around.

From Fred

Fred Stutzman refuted my ramblings about community. Well, not DIRECTLY...

However, people can't and don't want to be active on too many social network sites. We simply don't have the time to spend checking messages and keeping up with all the action in all those different walled gardens. So that's why we all join Myspace and Facebook, and not your social network.

So the "build it and they will come" proposition is false.

Let's Hear It For The Boy

Let's toast Reality!

I failed to wend my way to this point in my post from two posts ago:

After all of my online dating, showing up at people's doors to find out they were too not-what-they-said-they-were or not-what-I'd-hoped-they'd-be, I realized there's nothing like a good, old fashioned date. In person. Yeah. I mean actually meeting the person, sensing their energy, seeing their face, smelling their [I don't know! Where am I going with this?]. I have concluded that the in-person, you-just-know, I'll-know-the-moment-I-meet-them energy exchange is the most important. We've all heard of the "He's perfect on paper" lament. And it's true. I've had that. Perfect. On paper. But not in person. Terrific, smart, talented, artistic, likes to cook, all of it. But the spark wasn't there. I need the feeling. The gut feeling. The deeper, this-is-something feeling.

AGAIN I've betrayed myself. I've clearly checked the DATING box on my profile. I've never even OWNED a My Little Pony.

Communitizing

Good points in Clay Shirky's musings on online communities. Community is organic. I live next door to a restaurant called Joe Allen. It is owned by Joe Allen. It is a bistro of sorts that serves the theater community here in NYC. It has become quite famous over the last 50 years with no advertising. Joe created a place for theater folk to hang out after shows and let it build quietly. It is now filled with celebrities and theater people and tourists every night. He has Joe Allen restaurants in London, Miami and Ogunquit, Maine. He opened Orso restaurant next door to Joe Allen in 1983, with the same m.o. There are Orso restaurants in London and Los Angeles. Last year, Joe opened Bar Centrale, upstairs from the New York Orso. Again, he let it build solely on word-of-mouth. We just got word this week, about one year later, that Orso and Joe Allen staff members are not allowed to mention Bar Centrale to customers anymore. The Bar has too many regulars already who expect to be seated after theater. No more new people. In one year.

That is how a community is built. Let it generate on its own. If you build it, they will come.

I Can't Be Clever All The Time

I want to respond to some of the stuff we're reading this week, but I'm too tired and uninspired to come up with a title for this post. Consider it Homework #14.

Cheers is a place where everybody knows your name. Do we all wish they'd type "SPAZEBOY!" or "COSMO JILL!" every time we logged on? Are we secretly jazzed every time our blogs are linked to or someone mentions us in their musings? Do we desperately try to keep with up with our online friends' lives via their blogs? Do we want to know each other?

I am still mystified, in a sense, by the desire for the heretofore anonymous bloggers to want to convene at, say, a convention. The beauty of anonymity, one might say, is that it affords one more liberties, more freedom of expression, for some. Didn't we read somewhere that while the Internet offers a networking opportunity, it also keeps people away from real-life social situations? Its usage is almost oxymoronic. (My spell-check flagged that one.) The digital community has come to replace the flesh-and-blood. We "meet" new people. Discuss our common interests. And no matter how honest and revealing we might be online, there is no truth-o-meter. I may not actually be a thirteen year old girl who is conflicted about what to do with her My Little Pony playset. The oxymoronity (flagged) continues. I can be completely honest about myself or I can completely hide my identity behind a manufactured persona. There is no way for the viewer to know.

This takes me to this week's subject: social networking. The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dynamic—or perhaps it is the Diana Prince/Wonder Woman dynamic that is at work here. Who do we present to our "Friends" on Friendster? The initial impulse for joining an online social network should be noted. The 13yo girl could be looking for other lamenters of lost youth on MySpace. Or I could be looking for a boyfriend on Friendster. Or our cool cat from LiveJournal could be tossing around a new IM language she shares with her boyfriend, just to entertain the small audience of her friends.

I began experimenting with social networking in AOL chat rooms back in, probably, 1993 or so. There were no pictures then. Just profiles. People would often put physical descriptions of themselves in there, along with personality stuff and likes-and-dislikes. The user perused the profiles and then contacted the person based on what they had written about themselves. Interesting that the physical appearance was completely taken out of it. Now, people quickly learned what traits in the description attracted people. So, often, many people had similar physical characteristics. The truth was revealed only when they opened the door to their apartment.

When I revisited the chat rooms a few years later, I learned that I would not even be given the time of day without a picture posted up there. (I believe we still had to scan in a photograph at that time. It still amazes me how antiquated that sounds and it was probably ten years ago.) Now, the picture helps. But it is still a chosen representation, on the part of the poster, and a mere two-dimensional, see-what-I-want-to-see image for the viewer. How do you choose your photo? Will it be cheerful or brooding? Will it be topless or more modest? Will it be an active, I-play-sports shot or a passive, I-like-piña-coladas-and-getting-caught-in-the-rain shot? All these questions are very important, as they will contribute to your projected image.

Later, these sites expanded to include photo albums. Now you were able to show yourself in many different aspects of life. You could show your friends, your dog, your surfboard. You could write about your faves, in the hopes someone else might like to watch Psycho Beach Party over and over, just like you. Or share your love of The McGuire Sisters AND The Pointer Sisters AND Scissor Sisters. Do they like zany British comedy television like Absolutely Fabulous AND political talk shows like The McLaughlin Group?

No matter how honest you are or if you claim to be Anna Nicole Smith's pharmacist, you have chosen every speck of that online presentation. Different pieces of it will resonate with different viewers. I'm afraid I have betrayed myself a bit. I realize that my point-of-view has mostly been from the dating side of things. Full disclosure: I'm not thirteen. I'm not a girl. And I'm distraught over my Strawberry Shortcake playset.

Words vs. Pictures

Was I not confident as a writer?

Look at the difference between my Viking Around blog from my time living in Sweden and this one. VA was nearly all images. I enjoyed playing with the form in Sweden, adding photos and links to David Hasselhoff videos and things. I wanted to share my experiences with friends and family back home. Did I doubt my abilities as a writer to pen an entertaining, insightful blog? Is a picture truly worth a thousand words? That sure saves time.

I look at this blog. Virtually no photos or videos. Links, though. I've learned to do links. The platform has made it easier to do some things. I changed the whole template, for crying out loud. I wonder why I don't incorporate more pictures into my posts. It's almost as if the two blogs are structural opposites.

Easy

That's me.

On Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs, the conclusion that "One pattern clearly emerging as a result of this research is that individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. This confirms one of the predictions / observations leading to this study: that "significant" customization among weblog users is in fact somewhat rare."

That, to me, is an interesting observation. As I just wrote in my last post, I had difficulty changing my initial presentation at first. A sense of permanence overtook me. However, this statistic surprised me. I would have thought that as users became more comfortable with the platform/software/technology, they would experiment more and push the envelope even further. Are the geeks still doing that? And are we just seeing a preponderance of amateur blogs out there and therefore seeing a preponderance of pre-fab templates? Just what is before ponderance?

In My Image

Alright. I have already wasted plenty of valuable cramming time fiddling with my blog. In the spirit of our focus on images and presentation, the best I could do without completely blowing off my homework was to change my self-portrait (see below). I wanted to blow the lid off it and change my entire template, customize it as much as I could, play with both form and style. But I will be utterly unprepared for class tomorrow if I do. Plus I spent so much time creating this template, I'm afraid to let it go.

Actually, that raises a question regarding permanence. I changed my blog template earlier this semester. It was a difficult thing to do, because I liked that blank, white slate template. I had always wanted a blank, white slate template. And there I went, jettisoning my dreams. There seems to be a need for great care in creating one's online identity. What will you say about yourself? If people get to know you as one presentation, how hard might it be to change that? Will people respond negatively to a new image? This may go deeper than just trying on a new outfit. It might go so far as to change people's perception of you. Gay folks often hear "I don't know you anymore" when they come out, particularly from their families. "I have to re-imagine everything about you. I have to go through our history together and reexamine everything. I have to re-think." If people got to know me as the blank, white slate, how will they relate to the new blue/green look with the customized headers and footers? If I say, "this is the real me," how will they categorize my past posts? And what if I change it again? Do I have any more or less responsibility to my casual readership than someone like Dooce or Daily Kos have to their sponsored audiences?

Convention Truth

Hey Kids!

Please check out the comment thread in this post about the history of blogging conventions. I was mistaken in my understanding of the New York Times article I had read in July. The YearlyKos Convention was not actually the first. CGG and Aldon added some interesting information.

Colin Must Have LOVED This Article

The "nutsy and boltsy" article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

This was published about 19 months ago. It does demonstrate some of the fear surrounding a new medium. It feels to me that a few memes were perpetuated about blogs early on. Remember the reports of people getting fired for writing about their jobs online? Probably true. Possibly overreactive by the employers and more than likely a less-than-smart move on the part of the employee. But these couple of cases caused a near panic in the uninitiated. "What's this blog? I don't even know what a blog is." I feel we get panicky about our privacy in this country. So, it naturally follows that in a soul-baring medium like the online journal, this is a hot topic.

Not only are the early adopters scrambling to make sense. But then you've got those who are left behind or who are running to catch up who strike fear into the rest to give themselves a better footing. Just sue the pants off 'em to start with. Put the fear of Corporate America into those scrappy bloggers. Don't let anyone know who you are! Or do let people know who you are. Or let them think they know who you are. It's complex, my friends.

WritingAsJoe

I enjoyed WritingAsJoe's interview-with-self about pseudonyms and pseudonymy (that was flagged in the spell-check: pseudonymousness? Nope. Pseudonymaticity? Nope. I give up).

His was a more flippant, breezy ponderance (again... ponderosa? Nope. Ponderation? Nope.) on the subject. As I read more of these personal essays on being personal or impersonal, I find more and more different opinions. Some are vehemently against stealth identification. Others couldn't care less.

Wise?

The Wiseass also embraces the networking aspect of blogs.

How, you might ask, could I possibly network without revealing my identity? Well, for one thing, I'm learning and benefitting a heck of a lot from reading the work--and receiving the comments of--many other bloggers, anonymous or not. And I'm also not entirely opposed to the idea of "outing" myself to other bloggers I've come to trust.

I am reminded of the first blogging convention that happened this summer. How does a gathering like this work with online personae? Now that Second Life has emerged, might this not be a better place to hold the convention, allowing more bloggers to attend, including those wanting to remain anonymous?

The Wiseass

In her Bloggers Anonymous post, the Ancrene Wiseass writes:

"...one of this blog's purposes is writing myself into the kind of person I want to be--with a little help from my friends."

How's that for an interesting thought on the subject?

This coincides with Colin's meme of "Do we write our blogs? Or do our blogs write us?"

Blimey!

Is undercover blogging like calling your mobile phone company's customer service and speaking to them in a different accent from your own?

OK, Here's One

One thought, that is.

I spent last winter in Stockholm and I did keep a blog whilst there. I wanted to experiment with this new medium and I wanted to connect with folks back home. My handle was the mysterious "ChrisA"and I'm pretty sure nobody figured out who I was.

My big identity struggle came as I worked out the differences between my home culture and my new culture. As I wrote about the difficulties of being an immigrant, of the bizarro-world ways of doing things sometimes and just the humor in it all, I chose, as my audience, Americans—folks back home who understand where I'm coming from. I chose not to share my blog with my relatives and new friends in Sweden. I was objectively viewing their culture, learning about it with respect, but getting a real kick out of the differences. I was afraid I would offend someone with my observations.

So, in my case, it wasn't the pseudonym which kept me anonymous, but my mailing list. Of course, anyone in Sweden could have stumbled across my blog, or my aunt in Jämshög could have called my uncle in Montclair, New Jersey who could have mentioned that I was writing this thing. But, in my own way, I attempted to control the readership just a little bit.

Lady of the Piles

I have been exploring Reassigned Time and enjoying her ramblings. Her postings about pseudonyms reminded me of the rules game we read about regarding linking to websites. Dr. Crazy outlined her own issues regarding anonymity and its relevance to blogging in general. She does make some good, if angry and reactive, points. Hers is one of the available guidelines to pseudonymous posting on the Internet. It's worth finding all the relevant posts on this subject. Her response is emotional because she is reacting to an actual incident that occurred with her blog. She has full reason for the outpouring of thought and we benefit from it in that she has really thought about this subject and expounded upon it.

I will continue researching before I offer my own thoughts on the subject of online pseudonyms.

Never Write a Post While Smoking Crack

OK, that was just a bid for attention.

Without even rereading that last post, I am beside myself. I'm afraid my absence from class caused me to lose momentum. I had been caught up in the McTide of Blogging On. I had gleefully continued utilizing this new medium, exploring it, learning both about it and from it. Then, my new job took me away from it. I traveled. I saw the country. (It's big.) I stayed with friends. Saw some from childhood. It was awesome. Staying with friends doesn't leave you with much time to yourself. To blog. I'd had fantasies of myself alone on the road in hotel rooms at the end of the day's journey. Well, not really alone. I had my blog. But those high school friends, the neighbor-across-the-street whom I met when I was four, my mom's best friend's eldest son who has an eight-week old baby with his partner, all with spare rooms, left me with no time to spend with my blog. My poor, neglected, blue-and-green blog. Perhaps my blog is just blue now.

OK, enough emotional confessions which keep me from doing my real homework.

Chris and Information, sitting in a tree...

You guessed it: K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

I love information. I have oft been quoted as saying, "It's all about learning!" while rifling through a dictionary at a particularly trying moment during a game of Scrabble. Information is gained through education. They go hand in hand, don't they? As a big proponent of education, I enjoy imbibing information (can one actually imbibe information?). How we take it in, process it, store it and use it fascinates me. How do two people look at the same piece of information but interpret it differently? How do they use that same piece of information for different ends? (Look at the divided political groups. Look at the distortion factor.) When we are told, "Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts," are we able to truly give just the facts? Is all information subjective? Scientists might credit evolution with who we are today, based on what they call "scientific evidence," or facts. Many religious people believe otherwise. They don't take "facts" and digest them in the same way. I might view a crime scene and give the detective "just the facts," but my facts will differ from the facts of another witness. We will each pick up on different things based on our psychologies, life experiences, upbringings, professions, faith systems, perhaps. So, how can we truly pare down the facts to "just the"? Of course, if the car was blue, you'd say, the car was blue. There's no refuting that. Sure, the basic color was blue. But if you ask me to further define the hue, that's where the gray area begins (pun intended).

How can one even write about one's relationship to information? OK, I'll drop the distancing pronoun and simply ask how can I do it? Opting out of the assignment on weak philosophical grounds is not really an option. So, stop whining, you say, and just answer the damned question. (That's a question: Is it damned or damn question?)

I import information into my personal hard drive, otherwise known as my brain. I process that information through the use of thoughts and sometimes even thought processes. Wait, I unintentionally went redundant. "What's your thought process behind that?" leads to an understanding of the interpretation of the information, I suppose. These complex muscular conglomerates we call "mouths" are terrific tools for information spreading. And I use that thing all the time. You are just lucky enough to read what I'm saying, only I'm writing and not speaking, and, at the same time, trying not to edit myself, so as not to get in trouble with the teacher.

How do you, the viewing public, even let me ramble on for this long? Why haven't you switched the channel? In fact, you probably have, unless you're my teacher and you're being paid to stick around. Hey, Colin. Thanks for reading to the end. It is the end. Really.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G would be a great word for Scrabble. Not a whole lot of high-scoring letters, but it uses all seven tiles which is an automatic 50 points.

Thank You

This is a letter to my class. Thank you for your post-class posts post the class with the myriad guests from the blogosphere. I can only imagine it resembled the cantina in Star Wars.

I thank you all because I was unable to attend (being trapped in the Springs of Colorado) and it gave me a good insight into what went on, who said what, who got in trouble and who kissed whom out in the hallway.

Deal or No Deal

More news in the world of corporate expansion on the Internet. This time it's about News Corporation and its wunderkind who brokered the deal on MySpace.

The Cons of Piracy

I want to point to a post on My Left Nutmeg that may support my crazy conspiracy theories about John Kerry, fed by new information about Joe Lieberman.

To backtrack, I won an award for my paranoid delusions two year ago during the 2004 presidential election. One of my more out-there theories was that John Kerry's membership in the über-exclusive Skull & Bones Society at Yale (Dubya is also a member) trumped his membership in the Democratic Party. I could formulate a hypothesis that Kerry finagled his way into the Democratic nomination, only to throw the election at the end. I felt, you see, that he conceded way too easily, and that after the 2000 debacle, the fact that he wouldn't even entertain a recount seemed fishy to me. I thought that he might have been working for the Republicans all along.

And let me just mention Kerry's bizarre "botched joke" episode at a very sensitive time in the campaign. Kerry could have made it all go away much more quickly than he did. Was this another attempt by Kerry to taint the public's view of the Democratic Party--by making misleading statements, as a Democratic representative, and also by reminding us of all the negative imaging surrounding his own 2004 campaign, by bringing attention to himself?

NOW, we have the suspect Democrat, Joe Lieberman. Read about his turnabout here on My Left Nutmeg. This article sheds some light on some very conservative congressmen who were elected as Democrats only to abandon the party shortly thereafter. It seems awfully underhanded to pull this sort of sleight-of-hand.

I'm only here to put out ideas to chew on, my friends. It is the responsibility of the crown.

From Today's Reading

Here's an example of how the media work together:

Despite the high percentage of traffic that goes to the top handful of websites, the internet is still a medium of niches rather than a mass medium. If you want to persuade a mass audience, particularly a geographically concentrated one, television is your tool of choice, supplemented by radio, press outreach, direct mail and robo-calls.

Media Ecology

My colleague here at Colorado College mentioned an interesting conference she attended recently with the Media Ecology Association. She explained media as an ecosystem in which the parts support each other, instead of replace each other. Television, for instance, does not replace radio, but rather can work in conjunction with it. This may give us a way to look at blogging and online communication and how it fits with more traditional media. Are we moving towards an electronic world of communication that leaves print behind? Or will online media integrate with already existing media? How will that happen? Is the adoption of online production of television shows an example of this? NBC's announcement of reallocating financial resources from traditional, script-driven televised content to explore online possibilities may point to an answer.

Media Ecology as defined by three scholars on the MEA website (I took excerpts from longer definitions):

It is the study of media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs.

—Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.

One such perspective, or emerging metadiscipline, is media ecology—broadly defined as the study of complex communication systems as environments.

As a perspective, metadiscipline, or even a field of inquiry, media ecology is very much in its infancy.

Media ecology is, in short, a preparadigmatic science.

—Christine Nystrom, Towards a Science of Media Ecology: The Formulation of Integrated Conceptual Paradigms for the Study of Human Communication Systems, Doctoral Dissertation, New York University (1973).

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.

The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.

An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

• It structures what we can see and say and, therefore, do.
• It assigns roles to us and insists on our playing them.
• It specifies what we are permitted to do and what we are not. Sometimes, as in the case of a courtroom, or classroom, or business office, the specifications are explicit and formal.

In the case of media environments (e.g., books, radio, film, television, etc.), the specifications are more often implicit and informal, half concealed by our assumption that what we are dealing with is not an environment but merely a machine.

Media ecology tries to make these specifications explicit.

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

—Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970).

Toilet Paper

So, I was just standing at the urinal in the Colorado College Library and there, in front of my face, was a newsletter put out by the Career Center entitled "Toilet Paper." Great for short bursts of reading whilst producing short bursts of—OK, I'll stop there.

The interesting and relevant fact I learned during that trip to the loo is that the number one language used by bloggers is Japanese, followed by English at number two and Chinese at number three.

I'll report back if I learn anything else worthwhile next time I have to take a leak.

Forgive Me

I have been absent from the online community of TrinBlogWarriors. I have been on a recruiting trip along the West Coast for the last two weeks. I will return to New York tomorrow, flying in from Colorado. As I stayed almost exclusively with friends along the way, the alone-time I usually get in hotels has been scant. My sit-and-absorb-jewels-from-the-Web time has been limited. I have been following along as best I can, but have been conspicuously absent from discussions. I am very disappointed to miss tonight's class. It sounds like it will be a blast. At least there'll be an extra chair, so the boys from the L-L campaigns can sit next to each other again.

From the Harvard Boy

This article from The Harvard Crimson, a contribution to our class edification, came my way from my brother.

It is entitled:

Panel Discusses Blog Effects

Experts predict coexistence of blogs and traditional media possible


I'm in Seattle now, by the way.

Grey Gardens

PLEASE find the documentary "Grey Gardens" and WATCH IT.

I finally saw it last week in anticipation of seeing the new musical based on it, now playing on Broadway. My friends were aghast that I, of all people, had not seen this film.

It is about Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter "Little" Edie Beale. It is FASCINATING. They are cousins of Jackie O. and went from glamour and the heights of the society pages to becoming recluses in their dilapidated mansion in Southampton. It is FASCINATING.



I just saw the musical last night. Christine Ebersole was just incredible.

Here she is playing Edie (with Mary Louise Wilson as Edith):


It's amazing what you can get done sitting in yet another airport.

That's Blog-Out-Loud Funny!

Yeah, Teach, good question. What type of humor do we go to the Internet for? Perhaps it is personal story-type humor. Funny blogs. The out-of-nowhere zingers from Dooce, for example. Sure, you can get that from real people, but these are people/writers we don't have in our midst. Perhaps they offer us a different type of humor than our friends do. Friends in real life and friends on TV. We may pee from a good dose of Amy Sedaris on David Letterman or South Park, but we're not friends with Cartman. And we can't see him anytime we want. With blogs and such, we can visit and laugh (or pee) whenever we feel like it. It's an instantaneous good time.

Perhaps it's no longer: "For a good time, call..." but "For a good time, visit www...."

Wonkette's Cocktober

Damn she's funny. Please read.

And that's my analysis ofWonkette.

The Dangers of Blogging

That wad Senator George Allen (R)-Virginia is apparently just a thug.

Was he just acting in accordance with the Administration's policy against free speech? (I should clarify that the Bush Administration doesn't have an outright policy outlawing free speech, but they sure don't like people asking them tough questions or expressing contrary opinions.)

Yikes via NewsCloud

This post was on NewsCloud. A NYC journalist was killed in Oaxaca City, Mexico.

I guess this is the difference between NewsCloud and BoingBoing (A Directory of Wonderful Things).

BoingBoing

Read BoingBoing's linking policy. It's terrific.

And following the links offers a further understanding of the do-we-call-it-paranoia, or just plain fear of this "new" medium? We discussed in class the value of Wikipedia and subsequently the value or weight or legitimacy of Internet research. We are clearly headed into the electronic age, no? So, when will the information contained (what a funny word to use in the context of the vast and unregulated, unfettered world of the Internet) online become legitimized? Will it?

I remember when we first started using the Internet and most people believed the information found online to be untrustworthy. We still believed that print was where it's at. People could be quoted as saying, "Well, I found it on the Internet. So, who knows?" The idea that anybody could put anything up on the World Wide Web somehow cheapened the information. Now, I believe, the sentiment is still prevalent but we have begun to accept the direction our information spreadin' is headin'. People get their news from the Internet. They book vacations that actually materialize (in real life!) on the Internet. They realize they have access to zillions of pieces of unnecessary information. No matter who put it there, the fact that we can hear the real voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks makes us feel more powerful. Immediacy of information.

I believe it promotes learning. Now, we can walk to the gigantic electronic library in our living room to answer any question (big or small) in an instant. We no longer let learning opportunities pass us by. Heard 1.65 billion (dollars to buy YouTube) times a day: "We'll google it." [Funny that "google" flags the spell-checker on the Google-owned Blogger.]

Back to the paranoia of unregulated systems, though. Is that it? Is it the new frontier with no rules, or rules made up by whoever makes them? When the government was toppled in Iraq and the warlords took over—making rules, commandeering people's cars at gunpoint because they could, killing citizens, who just sold their properties so they could leave the country, in order to steal the sale money—this was frontierland. It is scary. When you need to be constantly vigilant about your listing on Wikipedia because anybody could just poke in there and change it or even delete you from the annals of Wikihistory, this is not a peaceful world. While the lack of regulations might allow for freewheeling outlaws, it still allows our own personal freedoms—of speech, for example. And we see now that certain protocols are falling into place, or are at least being played with. I mentioned the next step in the evolution of wiki software (found in Urban Dictionary) as a rating system for entries, which moved the most "agreed upon" entries to rise to the surface. This doesn't necessarily guarantee accuracy. I mean, look at my pet peeve surrounding the phrase "Could care less." If we went with the most "agreed upon" usage, it would be wrong.

Where have I landed? I have no idea, but to say that this medium is exciting, ever-changing, evolving. We are learning-by-doing here, my friends.

And the winner is...

As winner of the "Most Paranoid" Award in the 2004 Educational Extravaganza entitled, "Media and the Presidential Election," I faithfully serve my crown, uphold my mantle, carry my torch and point you all toward a New Yorker article that not only fulfills my outlook but examines meme theory at the same time:

The Wayward Press
Paranoid Style: How Conspiracy Theories Become News
by Nicholas Lemann
The New Yorker, 16 October 2006

Online confession: I haven't actually read it yet.

It's sitting here staring me in the face as I kill time in my cousins' apartment in Washington D.C. (of all places), which means I can't actually take it with me. I will do my best to read and retain its contents before my departure. I could not find it online at newyorker.com.

P.S. In my description above, I sound less like an award recipient and more like the Statue of Liberty.

It Should Happen To You

An article in last week's New Yorker about "The anxieties of YouTube fame."

(Look at me! I'm posting little ones!)

Rebecca's Blood Runs Thick

My title plays on my discoveries in an article I mentioned in a previous post. Rebecca here gives us a history of the weblog. I am sure most of you encountered this in the MetaFilter About page.

Today in CamWorld (sort of)

Here is the "latest" from Cam. Seven years later.

CamWorld via About MetaFilter

I wanted to include a passage from an entry from CamWorld in his search for signs of intelligent life in the universe (thank you, Ms. Tomlin and Ms. Wagner) and his pursuit of the meaning of blog. He is declaring a slow-down of his blog, which is indicative of the evolution of the online journal:

In the long run, I believe that this is what you all want. Less senseless hype. Less gratuitous linking. Less focus on the sensationalistic journalism that's crowding our brains and turning them into mush. More focus on the truly exceptional content out there on the web that only a few of us manage to dig up. More personal essays. More professional essays. And yes, even the occasional rant.

You see, CamWorld is about me. It's about who I am, what I know, and what I think. And it's about my place in the New Media society. CamWorld is a peek into the subconsciousness that makes me tick. It's not about finding the most links the fastest, automated archiving, or searchable personal web sites. It's about educating those who have come to know me about what I feel is important in the increasingly complex world we live in, both online and off.

CamWorld is an experiment in self-expression. And that experiment is not over. Over the next year (or two or three), CamWorld will evolve into something more.

This was written in 1999.

Here he writes about the future (our present):

I hope the weblog "craze" continues as more and more people discover the power of a regularly updated site that reflects their own unique personality. In a few years, it'd be neat to see the weblog format overtake the standard home page format with monster GIFs of people's cats, dogs, babies, and cars. But I doubt it will happen. It's taken us almost six years to get people to understand that home pages don't need to have every funny little GIF animation they've ever seen, or silly javascript rollovers, or even that crash-happy Java-based pong game. Focus more on the content and less on the glitz. As the Internet community and Geocities members realize that the reasons they've had only 102 hits on their page(s) in a year (100 of them from their own IP address), the quality of their online initiatives will go up as they begin to understand what is required to keep a regular audience happy and well-fed.

How far we've come. Here's a monster GIF of my baby.

MetaFilter Finds

So (I often seem to start a post with "so..."), I was poking around MetaFilter and I chose this link to follow. Enlightening article about the use of performance enhancing drugs. Does our teacher love MF because of its randomness? From counting the number of times your own name appears in online databases to slowing down the voices of Alvin & The Chipmunks to free hugs in New York City, apparently one can find anything, and I mean ANYTHING, on MetaFilter.

Please tell me you'll listen to the Chipmunks song. It's hysterical.

True Colors

O.M.G. MetaFilter has my color scheme.

Wikilearnia

That's a ridiculous title. I know. When I was in Sweden and taking the free Swedish classes the country grants to immigrants (to help them quickly become a valuable member of employed society), my learning center was called Lernia. Perhaps that is why I thought that title made even the tiniest bit of sense.

We are about to move on to MetaFilter, but I had some stuff to say about Wikipedia. I was struck by the home page and appreciated its support of learning. It could just be an "enter search word here" starter page, but it is not. On it, one can find a featured article, news items, some randomly selected bits of interest, a history of today's date and, among a few other items, a list of the other reference tools Wikimedia churns out. Pretty cool. It feeds that hungry knowledge-seeker, possibly derailing her from her initial search, but providing her with new and exciting facts—sometimes just new facts.

Caitlin's WWWorld

This was funny, yo.

Paragraph four.

"...the wiki-wiki-world (yes: please do read that with full-on DJ turntable sounds)"

A Student Once Again

So, I spent a night last week on my brother's couch in his dorm at Harvard.

Ah, college life. Some of you in this class remember it like it was...today. Some of us, I'm afraid to say... I won't say it. David and I spent the evening watching a debate over gay marriage in a jam-packed classroom, scarfing down some cheap late-nite burritos, and hanging out in the dorm room, all avoiding work. We kibbitzed while his roommate defied distraction and managed to navigate his email inbox throughout all our procrastinations. The boys graciously vacated the living room with laptops in tow to allow me to crash well before midnight. (I talk like I'm 90. I was just tired from all this traveling.) I was startled into consciousness sometime later when two of their friends burst into the room, setting the lights ablaze and filling the room with tipsy giggles. I narrowly avoided a pounce-upon, when one of the girls crept close enough to me to realize I was not David and quickly hushed the other. David hurriedly ushered them into the bedroom where they all, riddled with glee, rode out the night. They left in the darkness leaving behind them the slam of the door. Ah, college.

I write because I discovered that Ned Lamont's daughter is in David's class at Harvard.

I write because David pointed me towards urbandictionary.com, a slang dictionary that utilizes wiki-wiki software to compile information but asks readers to rate the entries, thereby sending the most popular definitions to the top of the list. Interesting one step further from Wikipedia. As I said on our class blog, try entering "dork" for some amusing and quite shocking results.

I write because David excitedly told me about "Notebook Layout" in the View menu of Word. It allows you to take notes on your computer while simultaneously recording the teacher's lecture. Then, each bullet point is linked to the moment in the audio recording when it was made. So, you can easily refer back to your teacher's lecture to inform your sketchy notes. Damn cool.

It was fun being a student again. Wait, isn't that what I am now?

I'm on crack.

Second Skin

As I was driving through upstate New York today on my way from Ithaca College to Hamilton College, I was listening to Neal Conan on Talk of the Nation on NPR. He had an entire report on Second Life. It allowed for a better understanding of its construct, for those of us who are entirely unfamiliar with it.

Responsibility

With the blog comes responsibility. To update. All the time. It's hanging over your head constantly. Not only because we're being graded. That's almost immaterial at this point. But because of the mantle of "blogger." I've taken it on. I'm wearing it. At least for now. And while I do, I feel it would be disrespectful of its inherent nature to not uphold its demands.

Etymologically, the root of the word comes from the Latin respondere (courtesy of the Wiktionary—part of the Wikimedia Galactic Realm that we've been studying). This births the English respond, a basic feature of the blog medium. Not only do we respond to the world, as the primary generator of our blogs. But we allow responses from readers. We must then respond to those responses. It is a never-ending cycle of responsibility.

Wiki-WOW

So, we're checking out Wikipedia right now. Our assignment is to study it, NOT use it. I found that quite challenging, I must say. So much information is hidden behind embedded links.

That makes me question the style or structure of writing on the Internet. Relating to my earlier ponderance (ponderation, ponderosa) of how we surf, I want to examine how we write on the web. We learned in high school English class to construct the Five-Paragraph Essay. Quite a feat. I found it formulaic and unexciting and therefore didn't do quite as well as I should have in high school English. It wasn't until later that I realized it is like modern dance to ballet. You must know the basics before you can deviate from them.

Now, do web writers exclude supporting details in their online essays in favor of links? Does this add or detract from the essay-at-hand? Sending us down a linkpath may give us more information than we need. Is this laziness on the part of the author, who could narrow down all the supporting information to include only the most relevant? Or is it generosity on the writer's part to have researched valuable online resources to give the interested reader even greater information? Links may have replaced footnotes in the essay. The destinations of those links may be considered immediate bibliographies. Gone are the days when we flip to the end of an article to learn what source material was used and head on out to the library to find those books. With one click, we can now gain immediate access to those resources. Yes, you may still have to head to the library to read the actual books (online libraries notwithstanding) but you can achieve the satisfaction (and pleasure) of instant access to supplementary information.

Links within an article also compromise the author's viewpoint. Once we go outside the confines of the article, we are subject to any number of other opinions and definitions, even within specifically chosen support documents. So, is it possible, in an article with embedded links, to fully grasp an author's intentions?

I pimped my ride.

I switched to Beta.

I'll live with it for a while and see how I like my new outfit. (I haven't taken the tags off yet.)

Time

Y'know, even with technology being where it is, this video study we are doing takes a lot of time. Especially when you are trying to cram it in before class... Ugh. Even with high-speed (and thank GOODNESS my living situation changed unexpectedly over the weekend and I'm back in my own little apartment in New York City, complete with cable modem. I slept in my own bed on Friday night for the first time in over a year.) it still takes time to load all this stuff. I anxiously await the future...

Dutch

So, I headed over to Chasing Windmills vlog. I am anxious to spend a little time there. It seems to almost mimic the format of early links-only blogs: no commentary, just videos. If you consider each video to be an editorial entry, however, then it might mimic the later journal-type blog format. Either way, the presentation is stark, but artsy. Black-and-white, simple, no frills. Attractive, intriguing.

One Thousand Dreams of Coffee?

Is this profound reflection on life and blog direction contagious? Did you watch Escorial's vlog explanation/temporary sign-off? Crazy! I am looking forward to reading more of his vlog to understand where he is coming from.

Is this thing on?

So, it came out in class last week that I may not be embracing the true nature of blogging. I admitted to certain amounts of review before posting. This goes against the impromptu-ity of blogging. I'm learning to post-on-impulse more. A post can be a throw-up of sorts. Toss out an idea, a thought. It doesn't have to be a well-thought out essay. My original idea for this post (and perhaps even having an original idea is its first flaw) was to type without correction. No going back. That didn't happen. I have corrected many a typo already.

This gets into the realm of the psychological. I, as a person, spend a bit of effort on my own presentation. I wouldn't say I'm fastidious, by any stretch, but I like to put out a good product. I have been known to think (or even say) that I pride myself on my attention to detail and my crack proofreading skills. Putting up a hurried post without proper review is akin to running out the door without looking at my hair. (And just for the record, I have certainly done that. On several occasions.) I guess I'll have to post without regret a bit more, too.

How do our own psyches or personalities influence the presentation of our blogs?

Colin mentioned that my writing did sound a bit fussed over and not as casual as the blogosphere dictates it should be. Or should it? Are there rules of writing a blog? I know we are trying to classify, define, understand blogs. But with the youth of the medium, can we even have hard and fast regulations? I say this not to be defensive, but purely to question. I happily admit my own limitations. And, so, I'll try to not think so much. And, I'll try to post more. Who reads this thing anyway?

www.Aldon'sBrain.com

OK, I've got some serious ketchup to do, folks.

We had a great class last week with Aldon Hynes, noted "blogging visionary." And might I make an observation that I found fascinating. Aldon's mind seemed to work very much like the web. He would "link" to another idea from something Colin said, for example. We moved around from topic to topic in this manner through the entire class. (I did mention this to Aldon afterwards.) He seems to have adapted his thinking patterns to the online world in which he is immersed. Really neat.

And this got me thinking. (Colin said it would.) We surf as we think. Or, as may be in Aldon's case, we think as we surf. Is that right? Are you one who reads the entire article before clicking on any links for further information? Or do you zip off at each opportunity? And when you do zip off, do you retain a connection with the point-of-origin? Or do you fly off with wild abandon, willy-nilly out into cyberspace?

Blushing Bride

The Lady Lamont in the New York Times this morning.

Social Networking

Mornin'. The New York Times website had a video entitled "The Fall of Friendster." It raises a couple of points about the short history of "social networking" and the creation of a genre.

OK, OK, I get it now...

When does one post? Late at night. On the fly. Whenever struck.

In a previous post, I talked about affecting change. I believe my gramm-a-meter was suppressed by my state of mind. I believe we have all learned to say that we effect change—that weird instance where we use effect as a verb.

My apologies to the Coffees of the world, who post to live and live to post, sharing their thoughts and lives with us at the precise moment of inspiration, whatever wee hour that might be.

And away we go!

I'm beginning my assigned "poke-around" while I still have access to high-speed Internet access out at the beach, of all places. When I get back to "civilization," or "the city," I will downgrade to using a plain old telephone wire to enter the Information Superhighway. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to board the Autobahn from the woods on the side of the road. While using a skateboard.

So, I started where pointed: Raincoaster. I looked at a few posts and decided to click on small, Kiwi mercies. That lead me to The Bastards Have Landed! The Official Peter Jackson Fan Club, where I found out that The Hobbit is in the queue for production at MGM. I clicked on a link that brought me to Ain't It Cool News. From their contact page, I read this:

If you have information on anything cool, we'd love to hear it. Contact the big man or one of his cool-ass companeros today!

Sounds a little vague and somewhat subjective, but, hey. When exploring their site, I read an obituary of Tamara Dobson, the actress who played Cleopatra Jones in blaxploitation movies of the '70s. Any obit that contains Redd Foxx and "the evil drug lord Shelley Winters" is worth a read.

OK, I got a little stuck in this forum site. It ain't cool. Not really any external links, except for ads. So, I'm-a gonna click on one of them just to get out of it. I'll let you know what happens...

Rock the Vote

The voting process is another good example of emergence. While it may seem like one vote will not make a difference, it is, as we know, the collective effort of a population that can affect change. (That is if you don't live in the United States of America.)

Sorry. Couldn't help it.

Emerging On

Emergence. That's what I feel about our homework. A simple, innocent little "reading" assignment quickly explodes exponentially as one explores the suggested blog.

Are you with me, people?

Stuck.

In the Columbus airport. On the floor. Plugged into wall. Flight delayed probably four hours. It's Friday night. What are YOU doing?

There is a mysterious problem with JFK airport. My friend is also stuck. In Rochester. The glamour never stops with my crowd.

I continued reading the L-L timeline furnished by Genghis Conn at CT Local Politics. (Helpful for the out-of-stater.) I find some of the rhetoric of the Lieberman campaign interesting—reminiscent of past races: Hillary Clinton v. that idiot from Long Island for senator (or really Hillary v. anybody Republican), Kerry v. that idiot from Texas for president.

Lieberman says Lamont would be too polarizing if elected. (HRC was often labeled "too polarizing" by the right.)

Lieberman's campaign accuses Lamont of flip-flopping on Iraq. (I shouldn't have to remind you of the Republican refrain against Kerry.)

It is recycled Republican rhetoric. And this is coming from a Democrat against a Democrat. Does that indicate Lieberman's leaning?

I'm never going to get home.

What a week!

Did you catch the interview with Noam Chomsky on NPR?

Did you catch Larry King Live on CNN with five talking heads, including James Carville, Candy Crowley and Wolf Blitzer discussing the Foley scandal, Woodward book's claim "Bush in Denial", Clinton v. Wallace? King even brings up Lieberman and the CT race. The mumbled responses seemed to indicate that he was doing OK. For some reason, the subject moved immediately onto that racist senator from Oklahoma. Then to Oprah's deflection of the rumor that there's a campaign to convince her to run for president. She says to Larry King (on tape) that she would say to those people to put their energy behind Barak Obama.

Is Hillary the front runner? Affirmative consensus. Who's the GOP front runner? Blitzer says McCain and Giuliani. He says Rudy would do well in the general election, but how would he do in the primary? (As a New Yorker, I feel it is my duty to blow the lid off that condescending asshole, RG. He treated New Yorkers like they were two-year-olds and felt the need to corral and discipline us. It was awful. Then, he got lucky. 9/11 squeaked in just before he left office. And THAT is what he'll be remembered for. The SPIN that he "handled that crisis very well" and should be considered a national hero? Are you kidding me. The man is Hitlerish (forgive me). But a colleague pointed out the parallels when Giuliani had the "undesirables" (read homeless people) rounded up and shipped out of the city. He "cleaned up" the city. Ick. Dick.

Larry King ends with the late night comics on Foley. David Letterman, for example, says that Foley has said that when he gets out of rehab, he wants to make a fresh start, you know, turn over a new page...

Do bodily fluids count?

So, I just want to explain my online drop-the-ball-edness lately. I've just begun some heavy traveling for my new job as recruiter for the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT.

Here is my experience at JFK airport this morning at 7:15 AM, en route to Columbus, OH, as written in an email earlier today:

Yeah, so in my sleepy stupor at the airport, not only did I have to chuck bottles of water and brand new shampoo and shaving cream because of this stupid new "no liquids" rule (which I think is a scam for the airport shops and the travel-size toiletries industry, and telling the guard that I had urine samples in my expensive shampoo bottle didn't work. Out it went.), but while I made it to the airport with PLENTY of time, I still managed to wander about, looking for Jet Blue's promised wireless access (which turned out to be faulty at best). When I finally got to my gate and sat down, THEY PAGED ME. I plunked my ass down and I heard, "WOULD CHRIS A. PLEASE COME TO GATE 22 IMMEDIATELY." I was at the desk before he finished the sentence and he tells me I'm THE LAST ONE to board. What a walk of shame that was down the aisle to the back of the plane. Zoiks.

Back 2 Dial-Up

Hello, lovelies. (I brazenly use the plural form here. I hope, or, more accurately, wonder if, there are more than one of you—namely my teacher—reading this.)

I'm plugging through the tiny amount of reading+references that our teacher assigned in preparation for what sounds like a cool class tomorrow. My online sense of time changes when I enter my aunt's apt just outside the city—where I'm staying temporarily whilst sublettors wreak havoc in my midtown apt—with only a dial-up connection. I am on a never-ending quest for free WiFi around the city, but it all goes to, shall we say, pot when I get back up here.

I'm reading that most helpful (to a former CT resident and current New Yorker) timeline generated by Genghis Conn over at Connecticut Local Politics. My mind started free-associating, as it is often wont to do, and I remembered "the kiss"—not Rodin's sculpture, although a bronze rendering immortalizing this bizarre piece of politics would be entertaining and probably ultimately just as bizarre—that greeting given Senator Lieberman by W. on his blushing cheek.

I am sure that my thoughts on this are far from original, but the action clearly evoked The Godfather. A kiss meant death in that film. "The kiss of death." Was this a calculated kiss of death to Lieberman? Did Bush (or the Party) figure that a greeting like that might indicate a political closeness between the Democratic senator and the Bush administration (or the Republican party), thereby offending or putting off his Democratic support base? Does the Bush administration secretly want Lieberman out? Demonstrating he is in the pocket of the Republican power structure on national television might drive voters to support a potential challenger to Lieberman's seat.

Dudes, I could be way off here. It will also betray a certain level of ignorance of what is currently happening on the Hill. I doing my best to learn to ride again.

Kill Bin, Pt. 1

Did anyone else find the rather bald reference to "killing bin Laden" in the Clinton-Wallace "interview" to be a bit coarse? Bush has talked about killing him, too. I mean, I suppose, that is certainly a goal. But wouldn't a softer sell, like "dismantling Al Qaeda to prevent future terrorist activities" not only be easier on the ears, but also, perhaps, less symbolic and more effective?

Broken Back

Clinton v. Wallace

Was this the straw?

Has the Dam of Silence been breached? Did that silence prevail because the Democrats refused to stoop to the brazen, mudslinging level of the Republicans? Did Clinton's outburst allow the now ensuing commentaries—like Keith Olbermann's—to come out from behind the trees?

Again, I don't mean this to sound naïve. I'm just getting back on the political horse again after some time away (in a foreign country with its own recent political upheaval—and by "upheaval" I don't mean to trivialize a true upheaval like Thailand's, but I refer to the change in Party control in Sweden). I realize, of course, that journalists like Olbermann have been speaking against the Bush administration before now. I just wonder if such a high profile voice like Clinton's might be just the political machete the Democratic Party needs.

That poor, long-suffering camel.

Spanking the Alumnus

This from Daily Kos about Terry MacAuliffe tearing into Trinity alum Tucker Carlson about the Chris Wallace-Bill Clinton showdown. Might this be a growing trend? Have the Dems finally decided to take a stand? Can a trend or wave like this be translated (or simplified) into a meme? Read further down to Al Franken's "smackdown" on Tony Blankley of the Washington Times.

Has Coffee Run Cold?

We discussed the self-awareness aspect of blogging. Also asking, "Who's my audience?" Does my blog write me? Check out what our Coffee has to say about it:

I realize that, I haven’t really been blogging anything substantive or personal, as of late. A lot of my entries have been little more than YouTube video clips and “My Favorite Things” lists. I’ve written to appease the reading masses, which I said I’d never do… just for the sake of staying current with posts, which is wrong, wrong, wrong and so against why I do this.

Hillary Rodmeme Clinton

Interesting that the E-Wire (or Election Wire 2008) on MyDD.com has a link about Hillary's reaction to Bill's counterattack from a website calling itself "The Intersection of Faith and Life." Note the "News & Culture" links at left. Oy.

Memular Culture

Isn't pop culture just one big breeding ground for memes?

I'm reading about them on Susan Blackmore's website and she refers, like many, to Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene. He suggests “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” as examples of memes.

Look at the television show VH1's I Love The '80s. It's like a popularity contest (or memularity contest) for memes. Which ones survived? Do our references to Jim Nabors and Ruth Buzzi on Krofft Superstars' The Lost Saucer induce a case of the recognition-giggles? Should Hal Sparks be on the list of memetic geniuses because of his vast knowledge of trivia from things past? Where does one draw the line between trivia and memes? While there is a certain glee (and corresponding sickness) that goes along with the ability to remember the secrets of the Rubik's Cube (let alone its myriad permutations—remember that pyramid version?) but it is the concept and phrase of Rubik's Cube that actually survived. There is certainly an element of shared experience in meme development. Just mention Superelasticbubbleplastic to anyone over 30.

And does memory have anything to do with memes? Well, I mean, it does, of course. But the ability to memorize trivia or song lyrics is a bit different from the whittled down form of the meme. I found myself a few years ago at a Tony Awards party where Debbie—excuse me—Deborah Gibson performed right after she finished her performance as Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. Now, she did not sing anything from that early Disney foothold on the Great White Way, but instead sang what the crowd was jonesing for: Only in My Dreams. I sang along with every word. We all did. Where those lyrics were being stored in my brain, I'll never know. However, it was amusing nonetheless. But knowing the lyrics of a song from your school days when, perhaps, you were hyper-focused on popular music does not really elevate the song to meme status. Remembering the battle with Tiffany for number one pop mall diva might.

And what does all this have to say about the manipulative nature of pop culture? We might like to believe that artists just magically have success and that those Top 100 charts are a genuine reflection of the public's interest. But they aren't. They are manipulations made to generate sales—to make money, my friends. Therefore, many of these pop culture memes aren't organically generated or disseminated, because it's the ones with the financial backing to hit the widest audience (translate: advertising) who succeed.

Like the awards shows, for example. Leslie Jordan, who won an Emmy this year for his role as Beverly Leslie on Will & Grace, confessed that he (like many, many others) had taken out ads in Variety and doggedly petitioned for Emmy nominations in prior years and was actually surprised when he finally won. The viewing public would like to believe that these awards are generated to reward artistic merit. But as we saw from Shakespeare In Love's win over Saving Private Ryan years ago, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein just spent more money licking the asses of the Academy Voters.

I have spent so much time adding those links on my aunt's dial-up account that I have completely lost track of where I was going. So, to wind it up, I want to explore/discuss the inherent nature of memes. Is there a distinction between organic memes and monied memes? Would we call them poor vs. rich memes? Or free vs. expensive memes?

OK, I'm outta here.

No President Left Behind?

Do y'all think that this trend by Republican Congresspeople to turn their backs on Bush and distance themselves from his decisions is all part of a strategy to keep the Republicans in power? That this disassociation is actually disingenuous on their parts and purely in place to ride the wave of anti-Bush sentiment into the upcoming elections? That their positions are actually sanctioned by the Party itself, if not even initially suggested by it? That Bush is a lame duck, so the Party doesn't mind hanging him out to dry—all for the sake of the Party's future?

Forgive me if this sounds naïve.

My Own Meme Machine

Now, in response to The Meme Development Project, I have my own little story. A couple of months ago, I was part of a purposeful creation of a meme. We hope it will take off, especially in the upcoming elections.

In May 2006, a friend approached me to contribute to a project wherein he wanted to record the Star Spangled Banner in several different languages. This was in response to the recent uproar surrounding a Spanish-language version of the American national anthem. To quote our producer's mission statement:

We created this multi-lingual version of the Star-Spangled Banner to raise awareness of Senate Resolution 458 and House Resolution 793, which state that English is the only language in which our National Anthem should be sung or recited. This resolution was unanimously passed by the Senate and is currently before the House Judiciary Committee.

If you listen to the recording (click on the title of this post), it starts off with one line in Italian, one line in Spanish, then two lines ("whose broad stripes and brights stars," etc.) sung by yours truly in Swedish, continuing on in Bulgarian...

(in Italian)
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
(in Spanish)
What so proudly we hail by the twilight’s last gleaming?
(in Swedish)
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming.

Do listen to the entire track. (Lyrics are posted on the website, so you can follow along. I hope you read Tagalog.) While it was done rather quickly, so as to be put up on the Internet while these resolutions were being discussed, we had hoped it would have a future life, if immigration issues become a major theme in the November elections.

Perhaps we, as a class, will see the development of this meme in political spheres. (Wouldn't that be wild?) Perhaps not. But I did think it was an interesting attempt to spread a meme.

Memelicious

OK, so I'm reading the Wiki-memia. Wow, it's long. I just wanted to mention points of interest along the way.

Meme as Unit: The idea that a word or phrase from a speech might have a longer life in the cultural consciousness than the original speech itself. "Play it again, Sam." And, how interesting that the original phrase is actually "Play it, Sam." This might correspond to my previous post about colloquializing the not-exactly-right phrase (not intended to sound angry but ponderous, although a re-read betrayed my underlying frustration, I think). The Lady Coffee set me straight about the free-flowing hand of the blogger. Find the comment here and give it a read. She makes good points. (The capitalized "She" may even be reading right now...)

I am so easily diverted. I have come to realize that having a blog is like having what one thinks in one's own mind is a captive audience. One can write about ANYTHING for as long as one likes and not be concerned with the yawns or the diverted gaze or the pretend-emergency-phone-call. The blog can easily become a receptacle for verbal diarrhea. (Is that gross? I have images of kissing the porcelain god there. Perhaps written diarrhea is more appropriate and less corporeal. Or is it simply the unnecessary comparison of a blog with a toilet that is distasteful? Have I crossed a line with the blogging community? Is this disrespectful of the art form or medium? Or is it just a mildly entertaining metaphor?)

MAN, it is easy to go off topic. Back to "Memes as Unit": I am interested in the survival of incorrectly adopted phrases. How is it, when it is so easily verified by viewing the film, that we still quote Casablanca incorrectly, a mere 64 years later? It doesn't take much to look up Four score and seven years ago... Are we sure he didn't originally begin with "Four score and nine years ago"? What happens to these memes when the original context is forgotten? We all can quote Lincoln's Gettysburg Address but how many can go further than those "keywords"? Will there be generations quoting forgotten speeches, films, books, giving them completely new, extra-contextual meanings? Just as "could care less" has been adopted by American society at large and afforded a grammatically different meaning which matches the original phrase, I marvel at the evolution of these linguistic mutants.

OK, so after plodding through the Wikipedia article, I thought I should summarize it before I completely lose my eyesight and the ability to type. Basically, as I understand it, it goes like this: Memes that meme for the meme of meming might not meme, but those memes which are memically memerated might memally meme. Or: I meme therefore I meme. Or: Just meme it.

Yikes.

What Can Happen

From Wall Street Journal via Kottke.org 12 September 2006.

Mucho Video

Here's a NYT article about the explosion of video as a business for several of our major purveyors of Internet content. Good to read just to keep up with the changing times and mull over the future of this Internet thing.

One of "the people who were most successful last year"

So, I went, as instructed, to Brett's blog. (He's our star blogger from last year's class, I'm told.) It's definitely worth a read. But I'm not here to review his work. I am here to point your attention to an article he wrote about on 21 September 2005:

Jack Shafer's "Weasel-Words Rip My Flesh!".

Check it out. It's about vagueness in writing. Good for our work.

But ya could...

In the midst of my exploration of the blogosphere (I won't even put it in quotes, as it must be a widely accepted part of our national lexicon by now), I came across a commonly misused phrase that bites the ear that hears it.

To quote our "local blogging icon" (and please don't take this to be overly critical. I enjoyed reading her blog. This is just a common mistake),

"While the media’s fascination with Ms. Hilton shares some of the blame, those of us who could care less, are having her shoved down our throats."

Please understand that the colloquialization of "couldn't care less" into "could care less" completely destroys the logic behind the pronouncement. It changes the sentiment entirely. Or perhaps not the sentiment, per se, but most certainly the meaning.

And in so doing, we are not clearly presenting our cases. Some might claim that "everybody says that," as a weak attempt to justify the mistake. I understand the metamorphosis of language as it is regionally affected and that contributes to the vibrancy of language as a medium. It is an indicator of a living culture of English, in this case. How cool it must be to have been the inventor of English and to see that it is still in good use after all these years and that its users have taken its development into their own hands, constantly creating new words and phrases as the culture itself develops. English is far from being a dead language. (What's Latin for "blogosphere"?)

As we of the "pajama brigade" (I will use quotes here, as I did not invent the term) clutter the Information Superhighway with our deepest and darkest, might we not, at the very least, strive to employ good grammar? Might we not attempt to raise our readers by setting a good written example? Putting something down on paper, having something published, even giving a speech used to require an expertise in language. A writer would not want to print it if the piece were not perfect. Her reputation would be at stake. The phrases "put it in writing" and "written in stone" evoke a weight, a heavy weight, given to the art or act of writing. Are bloggers as concerned with these aspects of a printed piece, when the material may be thrown up on the Web in an instant, only to be replaced by a new entry the following day? Do we think before we blog?

This acceptance and continued use of linguistic mistakes fuels the notion that education is not necessarily valuable. Now, I made a leap here. I'll link it with one word: nucular. If the (claimed) President of the United States continually mispronounces a common political term, with no apologies or an explanation that "everyone in Texas says 'nucular,'" then how can we, the people, be expected to correct those wayward colloquialisms? Bush continually jokes about the way he "mangles the English language," as if this were excusable because he's the "guy you'd wanna have a beer with." Bush comes across as weak (I'll refrain from saying "dumb" or "illiterate") when he fails to use his intellect. He's not stupid. He can't be. He is just on the Dumbing Down of America train, as some rationale for the poor record on education we have in this country. By acting "like one of us," he releases Americans from the drive to become educated.

I won't go on about how I don't believe education will ever truly be addressed in this country, but will remain an election issue. By keeping us uneducated, the government can maintain power over us. If we don't know what's going on in the world, we won't know there are other ways of doing things. Fast food, beer and football keep us complacent. Oops, I said I wouldn't go on about this.

I wish we could use the incorrect form of the phrase when we say, "President Bush could care less about education in America." That would be a nice truth.

Angry Fruit

Regarding what appears to be Doug Englebart's assertion within Larry Press' article on Marshall McLuhan:

"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

In researching a paper about THE GRAPES OF WRATH this summer, I stumbled upon a number of references to the challenges of bringing socially conscious film work to mass audiences. Previously the sole territory of the documentary, socio-political content in filmmaking had only just begun creeping into what used be "pure entertainment" with such vehicles as GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940). This change in what was being presented to the viewing audience was much discussed in the media. The question was "who's shaping whom"? [The questions IS "Who's Zoomin' Who?" if you're Aretha—–or Katie Couric earlier in the week.] Was the changing tide in American society/consciousness influencing movie producers in their choice of subject matter? Or was the film industry affecting national sentiment? Some writers concluded at the time that the film industry was REFLECTING BACK what they perceived was on the population's collective mind. I propose that this mirror allowed the public to understand that their feelings were justified, thereby paving the way for further evolution. And perhaps TOGETHER we all moved forward.

Christopher for President!

I have begun, my friends. I have thrown my hat into the ring.