Lives Online: CyberCultural Studies

In Wednesday’s class we’ll be talking about iPods, mobile phones, and text messaging (or “txt mssging,” if you prefer).

Here’s a web comic from Nitrozac & Snaggy over at The Joy of Tech that’s funny and apropos:

(Click on the image to go the Joy of Tech site and see the picture biggie-sized. You can also read Nitrozac & Snaggy’s web comic archive, which really should be required reading for this course.)

And here’s a video I just came across that picks up on many of the issues around these technologies and the cultures they spawn.

(Fair warning: if you’re easily offended, this video might not be for you. It’s definitely NSFW. It contains strong language, celebrities, adult situations, industrial/punk music, The Klumps-style family humor, and profane gestures.)

Another fair warning: be prepared to answer in class this question: “y cnt u txt mssg brk up?”

Just a quick note to point out that the instructions for your Meditations have been posted to the blog. Check out the link in the bar just underneath the course banner. (Or, alternately, click here.)

Machinima is MACHIne-made aNIMAtion, in which the “machines” in question are actually game engines. That’s probably not much clearer. The code that makes a PS2 game like Okami produce pretty pictures on your TV screen, or that lets your mighty mighty Night Elf Druid kick monster butt in World of Warcraft is called a game engine. It does lots and lots and lots of math and sends the results to your computer’s processor and graphics card, which in turn send lots and lots of pixels to your screen. In other words, game engines usually are used to create game play.

But certain enterprising gamers realized that game engines are also (as part of their normal operation) producing what could be called movies on your monitor. And, either using the features included in the games or screen-capturing programs, those movies could be saved, edited, re-scored, and displayed outside of the game environment.

And presto-magico… machinima was born!

So, each week I’ll be introducing you to a thought-provoking (or sometimes just funny) piece of machinima.

This week’s machinima, an amusing trifle to ease us into this new feature, is inspired by the recent YouTube phenomenon LonelyGirl15, who asked “So what is the deal with kissing?” (For more on LonelyGirl15, read this.) Well, mixme1 does his/her/its best, using Lionhead Studios’ The Movies game to help Bree out. Check it out.

Special Added Bonus Machinima Cultural Note:

Those wild and crazy innovators at the University of Kansas are now offering a graduate film seminar that will include machinima, apparently as both a subject of study and as something the students will produce. Though similar classes exist at other major research film programs (and Harvard, not usually known as a film mecca) and at schools of design and technology across the world, I salute the Kansas film grads who will finally gain the ability to critique films. As one of the co-teachers of the course, Stacey Fox explains, “‘You can’t critique a film unless you’ve made one yourself.’” Good luck, machinimating Jayhawks!

(X-posted, in a more verbose and digressive manner, to Digital Digressions)

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)

Hi,

If you’re still having trouble accessing the WebCT page, here’s the link to Monday’s reading: click here (this link has been removed).

For Friday:

• Define “culture” (write your definition down)
• Look through your e-mails until you find an e-mail that may be considered “embarassing” to yourself or to someone else, then print that e-mail out and bring it with you to class

If you want to get a head start on next week, I’ll be posting our first reading, Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” to our WebCT page on Thursday. Everyone will have to read it for Monday.