Lives Online: CyberCultural Studies

You may have heard about the recent resignation of Monica Goodling, the former top aide to US Attorney General Alberto Gonazales, who quit amid continuing questions about the US Department of Justice’s firings of a group of US Attorneys.

When MSNBC reported on Goodling’s resignation, they used this photo:

But they might have chosen to use this photo instead:

The second photo comes from Goodling’s law school web page. Come with me (and Wonkette) now to that long-ago age of 1999.

As TBogg notes: “I used to have a much higher opinion of people who went to law school before I started reading the internets.”

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine initiative, web pages that went up and then came down can live forever.

And ever. And ever. And ever.

And you thought it was creepy that the nerdy manager at The Gap had seen your Facebook page when you interviewed for a summer position. Imagine what that page will mean to prospective employers in another 8 years.

Personally, while I do hope that Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy can use the Sneate Judiciary Committee to find out what really happened with these firings, I’m much more interested in getting to the bottom of the mysterious “Ron” (if that is his real name) and the “several kidnapping experiences that are best forgotten.”

(X-posted to Digital Digressions)

Spring is just around the corner, and something (besides pollen, mold, and dust) is in the air. It seems that everywhere you look, sites are getting EXTREME MAKEOVERS!

Click the link to read all about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has reached an agreement with YouTube to create 3 new “channels” on YouTube that will feature BBC content.

This, of course, after another mass media giant, Viacom, issued cease-and-decist letters to YouTube forcing YouTube to remove over 100,000 videos Viacom claims are its copyrighted property.

Now here’s an interesting question: if you’ve briefly heard about the BBC deal and want to learn more, which of the following news stories would you feel most comfortable with:

• The BBC News article
• Yahoo! News’ reprinting of an Associated Press release
• MacWorld Magazine’s news article

And why?

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | 0..9

Howdy,

I got this e-mail yesterday from a former student, so I’m passing it along now to you. And to sweeten the deal, if you upload a movie to YouTube as part of the project, I’ll give you extra credit.

In less than a year, YouTube has saturated our culture and interested an entire world in online digital media. It has opened doors to communication between different cultures and countries, allowing a free flow of content across borders.

Some of the significant impacts of YouTube have even yet to be realized.

The following is a link to an International Collaboration Challenge. In an effort to test the boundaries of online video, this project has been planned to test the immediacy of digital video, online video, and rapid communication.

Please pass this email on to interested parties in digital communication, media, or video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1kEuFsWbUc

PLEASE HELP! This video collaboration needs to be completed ASAP!

Here’s the way it works… A very simple first video has been posted. There’s a main character the camera follows and that character changes either when the camera cuts or any creative way you can think of. The starting video finishes with a guy in an elevator and the doors closing…

From here, anyone anywhere can add on. You start your movie from the inside of an elevator with the doors opening and take it from there.

Your movie should be anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds in length and can include as many character changes as possible. Post video responses to the most recent video, ideally so all that will need to be done is to put the pieces together.

The goal for this project is to reach as many countries as possible in a limited amount of time.

Be as creative as you want, but remember, time is of the essential. The deadline for submissions will be Sunday Feb. 25th. Make sure you start your movie from the latest movie posted; the best addition will be chosen and added on to the original. End your movie at the beginning of a transition, ie. on one side of a door, so anyone anywhere can pick up where you leave off!

Please message me on YouTube if you’re planning on making a movie, remember, if you take too long making a movie, the connection point may change before you have time to upload!

Leave audio out! I will be adding music at the very end and may be editing your video to fit the music!

I just pre-ordered the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for our niecelings. And for ourselves, of course. The deluxe edition. I wonder who’s going to die in this one? Which brings me to today’s topic.

In class on Friday, we discussed Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist manifesto The Second Sex, and Laura Mulvey’s foundational work of feminist film theory, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. While the first is certainly exciting, it’s the second that I want to think about a little bit here.

In class I mentioned a few examples from classic Star Trek of men looking & women being looked at, every time Kirk (it’s usually, but not always, Kirk) finds a new space-girlfriend, the camera zooms in on her in a soft-focus choker shot. Compare these two shots from the classic Trek episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The first time we see Joan Collins’ character, Edith Keeler, we get this:

The very next shot is of Kirk trying to explain his presence in her basement:

Notice the grittiness of the frame with Kirk, and the haziness surrounding Keeler? This is almost always a visual tip that Kirk has just fallen in “love.”

Kirk, being the active captain-type guy that he is, is active. His female love-interest, on the other hand, becomes not merely passive, but is actually reduced to the status of a painting, a thing.

Mulvey, writing in 1975, argues that “An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen.”

This, of course, was before Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and the rise of the Calvin Klein -esque beefcake model. These guys have made a living being beautiful and being objectified even while they’re being active male “bearers of the look” that objectifies their female love interests. (When, that is, there is a female love interest. One could make a fascinating counter-example of the dueling objectifications at play in movies like Top Gun - in which Val Kilmer has no female love interest — or Fight Club — in which Edward Norton’s character seems even more enchanted by Brad Pitt’s chiseled physique than by Helena Bonham Carter’s lady-parts.)

Which brings me back to today’s topic. Not quite Harry Potter, but instead young Daniel Radcliffe, the (currently) 17-year-old actor portraying Potter in the films of the books. Mulvey talks about cinema, and it’s important to think about the ways in which cinema creates voyeuristic spaces for us all, but what about the Internet? Without a director or cinematographer to choose the shots, close-ups, pans, and dissolves, who is responsible for where we look online, and at what we look? Does the power dynamic of the objectifying gaze still apply?

Radcliffe, you may be aware, is about to make his debut in London’s West End (it’s the British equivalent of playing on Broadway) in a revival of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. If you’re not familiar with the play, it’s about a messed-up teenager who has a … erm, very special … relationship with the horses he cares for. The action of the play mostly follows his relationship with his psychotherapist, Martin Dysart, who tries to understand and help the boy, while simultaneously reflecting on his own dysfunctional life. It’s a powerful play, but, as you might guess, not the most uplifting one.

At this point I think it may be important to introduce the concept of the “unicorn chaser.” I’ve blogged about unicorn chasers before, and I’m about to give you another one to help wash any unpleasantness from your mind. Here you go:

This image was brought to us courtesy of Bill in Portland Maine. Ain’t it cute?!?! If you find yourself disturbed by what follows, just click the “Back” button on your browser and bask in the amazing cuteness of this picture.

Because, did I mention that the teenager in Equus spends most of the play naked? And there are already promo pictures from the Radcliffe revival. Brace yourself and then click the link below to continue.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the afternoon section we discussed, briefly, the radio station format known in the industry as “Jack” Radio. I promised them that I’d repost here something I’d written a while back (November 2005) on my personal blog. You can read this here or on the other blog, Digital Digressions. Enjoy.

Jack, or Robot Radio

I live in Burlington, Vermont. That means that I get network television from Burlington and from New York (the nearest WB station is from New York), and cable from Montreal (some stations in English, some in Quebecois).

TV is easy to send to far-away places, especially when you pay through the nose for digital cable, as I do.

Radio, on the other hand, is not so easy to get across the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, or the White Mountains. Which means that if we don’t want to listen to music from Quebec, we’re pretty much stuck with the local stations. Of which there just aren’t that many.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings and salutations.

Here’s an ad I saw yesterday as I was reading through the most recent issue of Wired magazine:

(The scan comes from the Stay Free! Daily blog, “Media criticism, consumer culture, & Brooklyn curiosities from Stay Free! magazine.” So, if you’re into any or all of these things, check them out. They’re pretty cool.)

Anyway, you may recall that in class on Monday we discussed Clifford Geertz’s seminal essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in which Geertz argues that close “reading” of cockfighting (which was a cultural phenomenon in Bali while Geertz and his wife were there), can lead to valid, productive understandings of the culture as a whole.

I’ll let Geertz explain himself:

“[The cockfight] is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves. [. . . .] Drawing on almost every level of Balinese experience, it brings together themes — animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice — whose main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of rage, and, binding them into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and over again, the reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt. If, to quote Northrop Frye again, we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, the Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.”

Thinking through these issues, both sections of the course debated whether they thought this dynamic could also be observed in our own cultural interest (obsession?) with sports. Whether our identification with certain teams, and our senses of individual powerfulness, pride, and our place in the world is also mediated through our spectatorship in sporting events. And finally, whether we, like the Balinese, use these events (among others) to bring the “assorted experiences of everyday life to focus.”

Which, finally, brings us back to the Acura ad. The Acura TL Type-S, we are told, is “a civilized way to handle your aggression.” In smaller print the good folks at Acura inform us that “the civilized way to handle aggression is to embrace it.”

Say what?

Luckily for us, “Aggression has been refined.” Presumably by the aggression-enablers at Acura labs.

Now, I think that reasonable people could easily come to different conclusions when debating whether cheering for a sports team is a “civilized” way to vicariously experience and “handle” one’s aggression. Likewise whether playing violent video games either increases (by habituating players to violence) or lowers (by mediating and providing an acceptable outlet for possible impulses) aggression in players.

But is there anyone on the roads today who feels the need for more, and more widely distributed, road rage? And is there any other way to interpret a car ad that encourages drivers to embrace their aggression while driving?

As Geertz might say, the story this ad is telling ourselves about ourselves isn’t a pretty one. The moderately wealthy (Acura’s suggested retail price for the TL S-Type starts at $38,125, more than half of the median yearly income for 4-person families in the US) feel aggression, and need vehicular means for expressing that aggression. From this we can extrapolate that even those not in the expansive category of the “moderately wealthy,” (that would be the vast majority of people in this county, and the vast, vast, unimaginably vast majority of people in the world) might also feel aggression that they’d like (aspire to) to being able to embrace on the road. Further, as the smaller type tells us “While enjoying sophisticated technology like voice-activated navigation and real-time traffic monitoring, Aggression [sic] has been refined,” we must conclude (from the “while” and list of driving-dependant features) that the way to handle/embrace your aggression necessitates taking it out for a spin. Is it still civilized to embrace your aggression if you drive a 1987 Civic?

I’ll try to remember this the next time some moderately wealthy person cuts me off or swerves into my lane — they’re not jerks or bad drivers.

They’re civilized.

What do you make of this?

(X-posted to my blog, Digital Digressions)