From an NYT blog post excerpting a new Harvard Business School study of Twitter as a social network:


Is that bolded part really true? The 'previous research' cited is a working paper that I can't find online, so it's not clear whether they're comparing Twitter to MySpace or Facebook, or to media sites like YouTube and Flickr.

Henry Wolfe is watching The Young and the Restless, just like me! Where the actor who plays Shawn's father on Psych just made a cameo as a priest. But he also talks about this -- which is a big part of why I got sucked into The Hills:Though these days even many of the vertical shows -- especially the most densely serialized -- unfold across the horizontal axis, with DVD commentaries and deleted/bonus scenes and interviews and online ARGs and character blogs.

So it's only been a few days, but I am already having misgivings about following reality show demi-celebrities on Twitter. Do I want to know that one of the choreographers/guest judges on So You Think You Can Dance is going through a very bad breakup? And that the show's executive producer called him and "may have saved [his] life"? And that one of his fellow choreographers/guest judges encourage people to Tweet their love and support for his heartbroken colleague, but I didn't, and should I feel guilty now?

In other SYTYCDverse Tweets, one of last year's contestants is falling in love, and they don't want to be falling in love, and they're angry at the person who made them not want to fall in love again, and wow I'm feeling creepily voyeuristic now.

I am also following on Twitter someone purporting to be the sister of Heidi Montag, yet I suspect an impersonator. Should I alert the authorities? Who are the relevant authorities for celebrity realness?

On the television front, following a dangerous flirtation with Jon & Kate Plus 8 and I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!, I made my triumphant return to scripted drama spectatorship last night. My rescue from the flotsam and jetsam of reality TV came in the form of Australian navy series Sea Patrol, which is just as good as it sounds. But also just as good as it needs to be, considering that the episodes feature pirates, offshore brothels, and the occasional rogue monkey. Go, Sea Patrol, go!

Read coffeeandink 's post:

I was in an anti-racism workshop a few years ago and one of the most valuable things that I got out of it was when one of the black facilitators pointed out that one of the white participant was doing the meta move -- that is, she was shifting the focus of a heated discussion away from race and racism by abstracting it into "Let's take a step back from talking about this stuff because I want to talk instead about how we're talking about this stuff, and isn't it interesting that when it sounds like people are upset and disagreeing, what I actually hear is simply people talking past each other from different cultural contexts that aren't really about race at all, and it's not even about who's right and who's wrong because everything that people are saying is valid from their own context, so maybe if we could all see things my way and listen for each others' contexts then we'd realize that we don't have anything to be upset over or disagree about because -- and I'm sure everyone can at least agree on this -- after all, deep down we're all good people trying our best, right?"

Not coincidentally, the meta-move attempt to reframe race and racism into a seemingly value-neutral issue of culture and communication in order to defuse tension and anger came exactly at the moment in the workshop when another white participant was being held accountable for his words and actions -- primarily by the people of color participating in the workshop.

I've had some mixed feelings for a while about the recent adoption by many white fans of anti-racist rhetorics, politics and identities. It often reminds me of new converts to 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, who sometimes take on radically different belief systems, lifestyles, and social networks without fully digesting the fundamental changes that they're called upon to make. So they parrot the slogans with their newfound fervor, and cast scorn at those pathetic deluded wretches who haven't found recovery or -- worse yet -- have relapsed or otherwise rejected it. It's understandable; not ready to confront their own overpowering shame over their own addiction and the harms that they've done to themselves and to others, they manage their shame by externalize it, projecting it onto the bad others who for all intents and purposes were themselves 30 or 90 days ago. All while they wrap themselves in the mantle of enlightment, even as they're still far from achieving any real insight or wisdom of their own. Fake it 'til you make it, as they say.

And they also say that it works if you work it -- so maybe, despite a certain proneness to flights of narcissism and sanctimoniousness during the newcomer phase, this too is just part of the process. But it's those temptations to externalize and project -- that racism is somewhere else, that the racist is someone else -- that go hand in hand with the meta move, and that's what bothers me about those discussions that coffeeandink  points to.

Via giandujakiss and otw_news , swanswan posts about going to a gallery show in Ireland which included "a video installation - it had its own special darkroom, and a wall-sized screen - which contained clips from the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, set to the music of the band Five for Fighting. In other words, a fanvid."

The video, "It's Not Easy" (2004) by South African artist Ed Young, doesn't appear to be online. Though admittedly my Google Fu was challenged by the discovery that he shares a name with an evangelical pastor who runs a megachurch in Texas and challenged his flock "to strengthen their unions through Seven Days of Sex" last November.

( Monday lacks a snappy cut link text )

In the case of Young's video, I doubt that what's being specifically lauded is its viddishness -- that is, his use of the music video format per se with reedited clips from a mainstream media source -- much less its technical merits relative to those of vidders. Rather, the video's place in the show reflects its relative success in using the established tools of appropriation art in the service of an established thematic interest in representations of masculinity. In other words, Young succeeded in making something that recognizably looks and works like an art video that happens to take a form extremely similar to vidding. And again, that's almost predictable to the extent that many of the core practices of vidding arguably date back much further than the '70s. This blog post from an Australian film course even explicitly makes an interesting case for Joseph Cornell's famous Rose Hobart (1936) as a proto-vid.

It seems obvious to say that the vids that do things and the vidders that say things that the art world is able to recognize as congruent with its own interests, values, histories, aesthetics, and discourses will be the ones most likely to achieve recognition from the art world. Then again, the art world is nothing if not insular, narcissistic, and tautological. It's more difficult to imagine how the art world might take up vidding as a form and community with its own interests, values, histories, aesthetics, and discourses deserving of recognition on its own terms, rather than cherrypicking specific works and creators as artworthy with at best a semi-condescending nod to their roots and traditions. One potentially instructive historical comparison might be how the art world has absorbed other forms originating outside of its orbit such as graffiti art.

Via Art Fag City: "What does an orgy require? If Christodoulos Panayiotou’s video Guysgocrazy is any indication, a fuck of a lot of condoms. Made in cooperation with a Czech porn company specializing in orgies, Panayiotou shot the set right before and right after the group sex takes place.  Not surprisingly, the party leftovers are a little messy."

Via Panayiotou's blog, Yvonne Rainer's Trio A. From her Wikipedia entry:
Check it out -- it's still pretty amazing:

After posting last night about maybe getting a fannish Twitter account, I found three new articles about Twitter posted at the media studies site FlowTV. So I'm cryptoxin on Twitter: now what?

The best of the FlowTV pieces -- and the one which speaks most immediately to my interests -- is People I Want to Know: Twitter, Celebrity and Social Connection by Liz Ellcessor, and Leigh Edwards' Twitter: Democratizing the Media Corporate Branding is also relevant (though I think there's supposed to be an 'or' in the title before 'Corporate Branding' and a question mark at the end). Still, it feels like they're only scraping the surface -- understandably, for short pieces on an emerging phenomenon.

Louisa Stein's It's Contagious: Twitter and the Palimpsest of Authorship juxtaposes Twitter with lim 's vid Us, but I honestly couldn't figure out what her argument was -- something about "the prismatic processes of individual and collective authoring." Which sounds good, but the piece itself didn't make a lot of sense to me, and reads more like shorthand notes from a talk or an overgrown abstract for a longer and more thoroughly argued essay. Or am I just being dense?

Off to 'follow' Lauren Conrad and Lil C....

 A young Nigel Lythgoe dances, and sings, and -- okay I really have no idea what's going on here:

via someone's Tweet to Nigel.

I'm on the verge of breaking down and getting a fannish Twitter account to follow the respective reality show 'verses of The Hills* and So You Think You Can Dance, which collectively adds up to at least two dozen people that I've seen on Twitter so far. Is that wrong? Or weird? Or just very 2009 of me?

* Which 'verse incidentally now includes Chris Pine, since he's been hooking up with Audrina from The Hills recently, but even if he were on Twitter I really really wouldn't want to follow actors there. Somehow following reality tv stars feels different, which probably makes me old-fashioned or puritanical or repressed or something.

Remember when Merlin was the new insta-fandom, the latest fandom that ate fandom? It didn't take over my friendslist, but it seemed like it suddenly got very big very fast, quickly attracting many very talented and highly regarded writers and vidders. Whether or not you watched the show or were interested in the fandom, all the signs seemed to point towards Merlin becoming the next big media fandom.

I was realizing today that I haven't heard much about Merlin lately. I'm sure the fandom is still chugging along during the long interval before the show returns, but I have no idea whether it's still on track to becoming a mega-fandom, or if the show lost some of its shiny luster after that initial burst of squee and fanworks and has settled into its niche as a minor-to-medium sized fandom.

So what's going to happen with the Star Trek reboot? Will it end up being a summer fling fandom or turn into a long-term commitment? Right now it almost feels like it could be a -- I want to say meta-fandom, not in the metafandom sense but rather a panfandom celebration of media fandom itself. That is, maybe it won't necessarily become a fandom on its own terms, singular and durable, where people would refer to themselves as being "in" the fandom and develop stuff like a sense of identity and community and culture as reboot fans. Maybe it'll be more of an amusement park, a carnival, a vacation spot, a rave -- but, for most, not a new fandom home. Which would work out pretty well, since it's something of a lingua franca for media fandom: it seems as though almost everyone's seen the movie or is familiar enough with the iconic original series & characters to join the conversation.

(I got the sense that slash and residual Arthurian legend fannishness were the primary drivers of the initial Merlin fandom explosion. In skimming the Trek LJ newsletter community, it was hard to tell whether there was a main driving force was based on the fan fiction listed -- shipping? fleshing out the characters? porn? worldbuilding? There's apparently nearly as much het as slash, and a sizeable amount of gen being written [though that doesn't factor in relative length of stories, number of comments & recs, etc.]. I did notice that the stories rated R and NC-17 were primarily in the slash category rather than het, but I have no idea if that's typical for other fandoms as well.)

The tradeoff in eschewing a television set and cable for online TV and torrents is that I don't get to watch most shows until the day after they air. But my fannish circadian rhythm never seems to catch on or up to my delayed circumstances. So I keep looking forward to tonight's So You Think You Can Dance until I remember that I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow night at the earliest.

And I won't be able to watch Sunday's big season finale of The Hills in real time, which somehow feels important. Then again, everybody already knows what's going to happen because it's already happened and been thoroughly dissected in tabloids and gossip websites. It's Lauren's final episode on the show, guaranteeing heartfelt goodbyes and mascaraed tears; Heidi and Spencer get married, this time for real [do I even need to insert 'sic' here?]; Lauren does go to their wedding after all; and Lauren's erstwhile Laguna Beach rival Kristin Cavallari shows up to catch the bouquet, symbolizing her debut replacing Lauren as the show's lead next season. The scripted entertainment concept of being spoiled for the ending seems all too tame and innocent for this deja vu scenario; the genius of The Hills is that it will somehow end up being riveting nonetheless.

In the meantime, I'll have to entertain myself with a delayed viewing of Monday's season premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8, which apparently isn't an instructional-aspirational lifestyle show about a couple that likes to throw dinner parties. Instead it's a suburban pseudokink psychodrama.

...I think I'm going to try to read more this summer.

With all due respect to the Washington Post, I somehow doubt that Sonia Sotomayor "calls herself a 'Newyorkrican'." I would happily believe that she describes herself as a Nuyorican, though.

Of tangential fannish interest, she was district judge for Castle Rock, an important copyright case centered on an unauthorized Sienfeld trivia book which the publisher unsuccessfully defended as fair use. This guy (former counsel for FOX and NBC) seems to think, based on her ruling, "that copyright owners should have nothing to fear from, and should probably be quite pleased with, President Obama's pick." While Sotomayor deemed the trivia book to be transformative, that factor alone was not sufficient to warrant protection as fair use: "the crux of the fair use analysis remains: the Court must proceed with a careful consideration of the remaining three factors, while merely granting defendants an advantage at the outset."

So it turns out that it's very hard to plot out an imaginary episode of a TV show. Who knew?

However, I have come across another imaginary spoiler for the premiere of the third season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This scene picks up right after the imaginary spoilers that I posted last week, following the commercial break:

In the future: Kyle's pointing a gun at a seriously freaked out John, and unlocks the safety.
( in the future, spoiling ur imaginashun )

/end scene

...and I have no idea what happens next. Okay, I actually have several different ideas, but I don't know how to choose between them! Should I make a poll? Get a whiteboard and index cards? Or -- even better -- persuade other people to play along?

Apparently the TV deities have decreed that I'll have nothing to watch in the fall except for Better Off Ted and So You Think You Can Dance. And maybe Melrose Place?

(I've only seen one season's worth of the original Melrose Place; happily, it was the season that included the scene where Kimberly took off her wig at the end of an episode. But the new show will have my favorite character, Sydney, plus Stephanie Jacobsen! So I'll at least check it out. Though this may be a case of "a little goes a long way" -- if I recall, every time they introduced a new character in the original series, they turned out to be a psychopath within 3-4 episodes. And yet, it didn't seem to occur to anyone in the core cast to move!)

I'm still in mourning for the loss of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, with the reviews that I've seen of the new Terminator movie adding insult to injury. I figure I'll camp out in the denial stage of grief for as long as possible. To that end, here's some spoilers for the opening of the first episode of season 3:

( real spoilers for S2, imaginary spoilers for S3 )

Naturally I can't reveal my source for this spoiler. But you can foster my denial -- tell me what happens next!

Twisty Faster asks, What has recognizing your male privilege done for you lately?: "But on the other hand, it’s pretty danged heartwarming when a dude finally concedes that male privilege exists. Whenever this happens, an asshole gets his wings."

At Racialicious, Latoya Peterson begins a series on cultural appropriation with an introductory post by asking How do we view global hip hop culture? She presents some Korean music videos as examples (including my favorite song by Drunken Tiger, "Do You Know Hip Hop?", which first got me interested in Korean hip hop after hearing it at a friend's house several years ago). The videos make clear that the questions of appropriation go beyond musical borrowing, extending to style and cultural signifiers; the music video for "Nobody" presents the Wonder Girls as a '60s girl group, right down to hairstyles reminiscent of The Shirelles.

Ultra-personalized art by My Gene Image (a subsidiary of Eton Bioscience Inc.): "You collect your oral cell sample non-invasively and send the sample to us. We then extract DNA from it, make probes to find your desired gene, and display its sequence elegantly in an artwork or a crystal." (via PicoCool)

Is Dollhouse really getting renewed? So much for my Whedonschadenfreude....

Totally spoiler-free Reason #83 why I'll never be on the writing team for Supernatural:

I would have pitched a mid-season reveal that Castiel and Ruby have secretly -- suprise! -- been in cahoots all along, spying on the brothers and devising nefarious schemes, as the Boris and Natasha of the apocalypse.

By which I mean -- and would illustrate through the power of flashbacks! -- that they actually use Boris and Natasha as codenames and terms of endearment for each other. And naturally they'd speak in cartoonish Russian accents during their illicit rendezvous. No doubt at different points, Ruby confuses Sam and Castiel baffles Dean when they each accidentally lapse into the Russian accents but unfortunately the brothers don't compare notes until it's too late. Nor does it help that the Winchesters somehow never see through the outrageously transparent disguises that Ruby and Castiel adopt.

Of course Castiel and Ruby would contemptuously refer to the Winchester brothers as "moose and squirrel." And when their treachery is finally revealed, Sam and Dean will fight over which one of them is Rocky to the other's Bullwinkle.

...I swear it sounded great in my head....

A challenging analysis via INCITE!: The Denver Chapter of INCITE! and Denver On Fire Respond to Verdict in Angie Zapata Case

( the radical case against hate crime laws )

The Wall Street Journal interviews Gil Kerlikowske, Obama's newly confirmed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy: White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs' (or at least that rhetoric -- still, this could get interesting)

The Angry Black Woman on Nina Simone and her version of "Pirate Jenny"

Niall Harrison on Star Trek and Dollhouse (via coffeeandink ): 2-for-1 on Unpopular Fannish Opinions

You know what the new Star Trek movie most reminds me of? Umberto Eco's essay on Casablanca. Seriously, check this out:

I'd been idly speculating about how long I could keep my journal a Star Trek XI-free zone, sort of like when you see how long you can hold your breath. And then I saw laurashapiro 's post linking to an SF Chronicle piece celebrating not the slashiness but rather the bromance of Kirk and Spock, and it got me thinking.

Here's my question:

Did the new movie's Kirk and Spock simply inherit the original series' slashiness as part of Star Trek's DNA, so that they don't even need to generate their own subtext or UST and can just live off of the legacy of the original characters' aura, like the slash pairing version of a trust fund kid?

Or did Chris Pine's Kirk and Zachary Quinto's Spock go out and earn their slashiness the old-fashioned way, refusing to ride on the slashy coattails of Shatner & Nimoy?

Maybe a little of each? Or do you see the slashiness of Pine!Kirk and Quinto!Spock as different than that of Shatner!Kirk and Nimoy!Spock -- a K/S 2.0, maybe?

I'm asking because I can't tell -- I don't actually remember whether there was any dialogue, any moments, any lingering glances or "weird about each other"-ness between Kirk and Spock that an ST:TOS-naive baby slasher or proto-slasher would pick up on if they were discovering slash for the first time.

Though hey, who knows what goes on with kids these days! Maybe slashiness itself is just different now than it was 40 years ago?

tishaturk just posted the text of her talk from the recent IP/Gender Symposium on "Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property" (see additional links at her post). The whole event sounded really interesting, with a lot of great talks and discussion.

Tisha's presentation explored how narrative theory could contribute to understanding vidding as fair use in the context of copyright law. She argues that:


I like this insight, though perversely I can't help but wonder if there are counter-examples. Are all vids automatically transformative? ( cut for -- wait for it -- tl;dr as usual )

I certainly wouldn't argue that the latter genre of vids don't warrant protetction as fair use viz. the song, yet the case here for transformation seems significantly weaker. To assert de facto transformation of the song by sheer virtue of a novel juxtaposition with video clips feels a bit torturous if not disingenuous. And making the concept of "transformative" so elastic and all-encompassing for the purposes of legal advocacy surely dilutes its critical value: if virutally everything is transformative, then tranformativity itself becomes banal and uninteresting.

So basically I wonder if the strategic embrace of transformativeness and fair use has some pitfalls or potential unintended consequences. Not that I have any better suggestions! Just -- reservations which I'm still trying to tease out.

[In the meantime, my first ever poll is currently open on my Dreamwidth journal. I'm still proud that I restrained myself from making a poll about what kind of poll to make. Though I do kind of want to use the poll feature for a Garden of Forking Paths "vote on what happens next!" story.]

Hey, I can make polls! So tell me where to find you in the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

Seen around: This can be a quick one. Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Los Bros Hernandez, Love and Rockets
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Grant Morrison/various artists, Doom Patrol
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Dennis Cooper, Try
Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing
Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

I usually don't like book memes (at least the 'check off how many of these you've read' ones), but this one felt more personal and introspective. Looking at the list, I'm struck by how many of these I read in my late teens to early/mid-20s -- basically, all of them except for Miéville and Murakami, which came later, and DeLillo, which I remember reading when I was still in high school.

And they're not necessarily my favorite books, or my "stranded on a desert island" list, though some are. They're basically the books that I was unprepared for, books that jarred or jolted me into something, some place, someone different. The process of first reading them marked a "before and after" dividing line for me, in my sense of the world, of writing, of myself. So it's somewhat bittersweet to see how often that happened when I was younger, how rarely it happens now.

I'd planned the following as the stirring conclusion to my last entry, but -- as often happens -- then forgot about it until after I'd hit post. So if you've ever wondered why my longer posts tend to trail off....

( comment say bah? )

As I said, I'm offering this as a thought experiment -- a hypothetical proposition about an alternative comment culture (or perhaps a social/technical fork of LJ's comment culture?). I'm not saying that my opt in schema is preferable, or that Dreamwidth should have gone this route, or should change course and implement this system. Frankly, I'm on the fence here myself, and you could make the case that this particular horse has long since left the barn (does that mean my stance could be called equipoise?). Maybe Dreamwidth already considered and rejected this option, for technical or philosophical or legal or business reasons ("forget the horse, that dog won't hunt"); maybe I'd agree with those reasons.

So my point -- and I do have one -- is that I do believe that people whose comments have been imported have a legitimate interest and stake here. Whether or not I personally find merit in any particular person's specific concerns or motives, and regardless of whether I share them myself, the fundamental question of how Dreamwidth balances the interests of DW users importing their journals and people (both users and non-users of DW) whose comments are being imported remains valid and, to my mind, unresolved as a cultural issue. The issue of control over one's comments is fundamental to comment ecologies. And my control over my imported comments -- even if I never choose to exercise it -- feels largely illusory, both presently for my nominal ability to individually delete and with the future "blanket screen all" planned feature. The former is too hyper-granular to be meaningful; conversely the latter sounds too all-or-nothing -- the nuclear option -- to afford more nuanced options. Surely other social and technical alternatives are possible.