The Learned Fangirl asks: Is Social Media the new Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech? I'm so far removed from the tech industry that I couldn't begin to answer that; my guess is that there's something there, but perhaps that's not quite the right way to frame the question.
Eric Goldman writes up a recent Cyber Civil Rights symposium inspired by "law professor Danielle Citron’s two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review)." No easy answers to important questions, but some interesting thinking.
Terri Senft posted excerpts from two new thoughtful essays she's writing: From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Teens and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy and Position paper: The Case of Online Micro-celebrity Gangsta Flirtation.
Lisa Nakamura in FlowTV on True Blood's Vampire Politics:
Given the program’s preoccupation with the South as a site of struggle over various types of social integrations, race is the program’s repressed thing, the thing that if we tune closely enough into we, we can faintly hear in the background. And it is repressed for a reason—race has had its day as a concern, the credit sequences depict it as part of an antique and literally crumbling or melting past. Race struggles were never sexy in the way that vampires are in this program; vampires are self-fashioning sexy subjects in ways unavailable to and indeed impossible for people of color.... [D]espite our supposedly post-racial state, True Blood lets human-vampire sex stand in for the racial affect that is promised in the credits, but cannot occur in the program itself.
An interview with Julian Breece, creator of Buppies, a new online soap opera on BET's website which looks promising so far. Breece also made a short film, The Young and Evil, which sounds intriguing.
In no particular order:
Gabriella Coleman on piracy as politics: "For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward." An interesting supplement to Alexis Lothian's "Den of Thieves" argument viz. fandom, vidding, and piracy through the lens of Lim's "Us".
MightyGodKing on current Marvel/DC superhero comics: "[I]t’s worth reflecting upon how few Big Two books are good as opposed to merely being competent. For DC there’s Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, and Secret Six. For Marvel there’s Incredible Hercules, Invincible Iron Man, the “cosmic” books, and whatever comic fills the Iron Fist slot for any given month. That is it at present. (Daredevil’s new direction is uneven, Captain America is in a boring lull period, and Amazing Spider-Man is inconsistent on a week-to-week basis.) Eight books between the Big Two that are genuinely good comics and not just placefillers.... [he ETAs:] I forgot Fantastic Four, which belongs in the “good” category. Also: Ghost Rider. But that’s it." I agree -- the only comics I truly look forward to reading each month are all on his list (the three DC titles, plus Invincible Iron Man and Fantastic Four).
danah boyd on her experience giving a talk at Web 2.0 Expo: "I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn't even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with." This is basically my public speaking nightmare, except even worse thanks to the Twitter backchannel plus magnified by 100 due to venue, audience size, and sexism. I do several presentations a year, and I've gotten pretty comfortable doing them, but I still remember viscerally the handful of truly wretched experiences. My most surreal one was this spring, when I missed my flight due to a snowstorm and did my talk over the phone with no ability to gauge the audience's response as I was speaking. It was actually worse than the disembodied experience of doing a presentation on a teleconference, because at least with the latter the audience is equally dispersed and invisible to each other.
Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops: The Networked Publics of Global Youth Culture -- a post about a recent talk by ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall: "What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of "new media" by so-called "digital natives" facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?" I haven't had a chance to listen to the audio yet, but he uses Jerking as one of his case studies! Count me in. Also, Marshall has a great blog.
I posted a vid for Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" the other day which I facetiously described as Maoist kitsch. But I was fascinated by the images in the clips, and set about tracking down the source. Turns out they're from The Red Detachment of Women, a Chinese ballet that was one of the eight model works during the Cultural Revolution. The full filmed version is available online here, or (in fifteen 6:46 minute chunks) starting here on YouTube. I've seen about a third of it so far, and it really is pretty stunning.
In the meantime, I found these two videos on YouTube -- the first billed as "Home Video involving 3 girls and revolutionary kisses" and the second vidding the song to what I can only describe as Maoist kitsch. Behold:
ETA: But wait, there's more! Because the next routine is stunning:
This truly is the best SYTYCD variant for hip hop.
( Randy Orton, You're Beautiful, Kelly Cutrone, The Office, SYTYCD NL )
The Nicholas Brothers: In her recent post on Glee,
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelk included a YouTube clip of their classic Stormy Weather dance number, which led me to the following tribute vid set to Kanye's "Stronger" -- perfect song choice, amazing dancers:They largely retain the same format as the U.S., Canada, and Australia versions, down to the dance styles and even song choices. Interestingly, the Netherlands' first season has been dominated by the hip hop dancers, and much of the best choreography has been the hip hop routines. The choreography overall is the usual mixed bag, and usually not as adventurous as the Australian show's, but they really excel at hip hop.
Unfortunately, the camerawork and lighting is the worst that I've seen on any incarnation, but they only intermittently (albeit sometimes spectacularly) mar the performances. Oh, and the show's in Dutch, which I don't speak. But I found that if I don't listen too closely, it sort of sounds like English; when I do pay attention to the words, it sounds closer to German. It's still mostly easy to follow; if you know the format of the show, you can generally guess much of what's being said. By now, I'm even starting to laugh at the jokes in Dutch. And Dan Karaty from the U.S. show is a judge, who does his judging in English; that's especially helpful during the results shows, when he's generally the one who reveals the judges' decisions and rationale.
Basically, watching this version has made SYTYCD feel fun again, which it hasn't been the last couple of go arounds. Oh, and the audiences tosses stuffed animals on the stage as gifts for their favorite dancers after their performances, which is kind of sweet.
I'm just going to highlight here this one section that touches on fan & television studies, and emphasizes the history of their critique by and within cultural studies:
( cut for length )
So, okay, but what's happened to fan studies? Sure, a lot of later work dialed back on the rhetorical excesses of "active audience" boosterism, but so much of it still seems governed by a "the fans are alright" orientation. On the one hand, you have Henry Jenkins and friends, the Convergence Culture coterie, whose collective intelligence has apparently led them to stop worrying and embrace the brand extensions, and wherever possible to embrace industry itself. On the other hand, you've got the cult of the fanwork, where transformative is the new subversive, pleasure becomes its own politics, and the material/economic domain is largely reduced to questions of copyright and creativity. Sure, that's a gross generalization of a lot of really interesting work being done -- but I look at the (excellent) fan(works) studies articles from the In Focus section of the latest Cinema Journal (pdf), and I see, albeit posed in more sophisticated and nuanced terms, yet another valorization of active audiences which, all in all, doesn't seem to have moved very far beyond the orbit traced by Jenkins' Textual Poachers, published nearly two decades ago.
Am I missing something? Has fan studies simply defected from cultural studies, rejected its presuppositions and preoccupations as inadequate or irrelevant, or shrugged off the '90s critiques of cultural populism?
I'll close with a bit of Meaghan Morris' most excellent "Banality in Cultural Studies":
If banality keeps on coming back around in our polemics, it is less because of the residual elitism of individual intellectuals, and populist reaction to it, and more because "banality" as mythic signifier is always a mask for the question of value, and of value-judgement, or "discrimination". If I find myself in the contradictory position of wanting to reject the patronising idea that "banality" is a useful framing concept to discuss mass media, and yet go on to complain myself of "banality" in cultural studies, the problem may arise because the critical vocabulary available to people wanting to theorise the discriminations that they make in relation to their own experience of popular culture -- without debating the "validity" of that experience, even less that culture as a whole -- is still, today, extraordinarily depleted. It seems to me, therefore, that the worst thing one can do in this context is to accuse people trying to develop a critique of popular culture of succumbing to "elitism" or pessimism.
The pared down structure of The City is surprisingly effective: they're telling two parallel stories about young women working their way up in the fashion industry.
Good girl Whitney works for Kelly Cutrone at her fashion/PR firm People's Revolution; she helps her old high school friend, ambitious semi-bad girl Roxy, get a job there, and drama ensues. Meanwhile spoiled rich girl Olivia Palermo gets a job at Elle Magazine thanks to Elle's creative director Joe Zee; she quickly clashes with Elle's career girl PR director Erin, with Joe Zee caught in the middle.
It's The Devil Wears Prada lite, with a dash of All About Eve for good measure. The thing about The Hills was always that, despite the workplace settings, it was hard to figure out what the jobs of the characters actually were, aside from occasional episodes that tasked them to a fashion shoot or club opening. Which maybe works for LA, but doesn't translate as well to the East Coast. This new careerist incarnation of The City gives the show its own identity, bringing it out of the shadow of The Hills, and feels much more true to New York in spirit than the first season, which focused more on the ups and downs of dating models.
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough is that on the show, Whitney's aspirations as a designer are openly acknowledged and woven into the narrative. In contrast, The Hills never acknowledged on screen Lauren Conrad's fashion line, or for that matter any of the characters' various outside ventures.
Congratulations, Whitney -- you're going to make it after all.*
* Glib allusions aside, I could totally see Kelly Cutrone saying, Lou Grant-style, "You've got spunk. I hate spunk!" In its own way, I could even argue (well, after a couple of drinks) that The City is the closest direct ancestor to the working woman motif of The Mary Tyler Moore Show currently airing on US television.
Returning to professional wrestling is making me realize how much of media fandom's interpretive lenses I've absorbed in the last few years. I can't say that I'm a slasher, but watching the Randy Orton-John Cena feud has finally made me "get" the dynamics of enemy!slash. They despise each other! They're obsessed with each other! They can't quit each other! Their matches involve handcuffs, and bondage-via-ring-ropes, and being locked in a steel cage together! Cena has a certain dorky Boy Scout air about him, kind of like Clark Kent on Smallville, and Orton -- well, he's closer in psychopathology to a Batman villain than Lex Luthor, but he does have a shaved head!
A few random links:
Notes on Going Under: A DEVO Primer (Rhizome) -- a fascinating look at the band, including their video art, and the surrounding cultural milieu in the '70s and early '80s.
Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #9 (The Hooded Utilitarian), via the DEVO article -- a look at an issue of the 1940s comic: gorilla bondage! the reversal of evolution! William Moulton Marston's fetishistic feminism! And pages and pages of gorgeous art.
Terminology page at POPSEOUL! -- the most interesting ones are those that don't have a direct English equivalent:
( examples )
Am I failing at fall TV, or is fall TV failing me? So far I'm underwhelmed by FlashForward, bored by Fringe, and -- there should be a third show here, preferably one whose name starts with an 'F', but I don't think I'm even watching anything else. Not Supernatural, not Dollhouse, not Merlin, and certainly not Heroes.
Meanwhile the ill-conceived fall season of the U.S. version of So You Think You Can Dance appears to be stuck in an endless round of auditions, while the second season of its Canadian counterpart has been somewhat lackluster so far compared to last year. Hurry back, Australian version!
One bright spot: Kristin Cavallari has taken over from Lauren Conrad as the star of The Hills. Now, I have a soft spot for Kristin -- she was great on Laguna Beach, and reminds me of someone I went to high school with -- so it's nice to see her in action again, but the show feels hopelessly contrived now. Lauren was really the emotional center that grounded everything; Kristin's clearly not interested in playing that role, and nobody else can really fill the void that Lauren left. So I'm not sure how long I'll keep watching -- and seriously, who really wants to see Kristin and Audrina spend a season feuding over Justin Bobby?
But to my surprise, the NYC-based spin-off, The City, is actually looking promising. They dumped the boring characters, leaving only Whitney and Olivia Palermo from the original cast, and brought in work-and-friendship conflicts instead of the relationship focus of the first season. I gave up halfway through season 1, but I'm cautiously optimistic that the producers are not only aware of, but aggressively fixing what wasn't working. Also, last week's episode used one of the best songs from Amanda Blank's new album, which is vaguely impressive (or maybe I'm easy to impress).
Today's quote, courtesy of Tiger Beatdown: "Dear Joss Whedon, thank you for your interest in Feminism, but we cannot make any hiring decisions at this time."
But key to the rhetorical strategy of such “reality” programming is to take you beyond surfaces by cultivating a formal literacy and technical proficiency, so you can perform as “critic”/commentator alongside those in the show.
(Matthew Ferrari, Pow! Ooomph! Skadoosh!: Combat Aesthetics and Intermediality*, FlowTV)
He's writing specifically about Mixed Martial Arts, but he might as well be talking about professional wrestling -- or, perhaps, television sports in general? And what about judged reality TV competitions, like So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol and Project Runway**? Or for that matter, The Hills....
* No, I don't know what 'intermediality' means, and couldn't work it out from context in the essay.
** I've been casually watching Project Runway and I have to confess, I have yet to absorb the "formal literacy and technical proficiency" stuff. At least, I usually have trouble distinguishing the best dresses from the worst ones. I often feel like a bad student -- sorry, Heidi Klum! Don't give up on disciplining my taste!
You know that Seal song, "Kiss from a Rose"? Someone used it for their solo last night on So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and I idly started wondering why I'd never seen it vidded (granted, it's 15 years old, so maybe it was overvidded in Highlander or Xena or X-Files fandom back in the day...), and in searching YouTube I discovered that it was on the soundtrack for one of the '90s Batman movies and they made a music video of Seal singing in front of the Bat Signal interspersed with clips from the movie. And, wow:
Now I kind of wish someone would do an updated version with Christian Bale's Batman and Heath Ledger's Joker. *facepalm*
It's called Don't Question My Heart (link to YouTube). Now, I've barely made any progress on my alleged first vid yet, but this song really speaks to my inner Lord King Bad Vidder. The only problem is that it's suitable for so many shows and characters -- how to choose just one?
So listen to the song, and tell me which vid you see in your head.
Poll #1334 Don't Question My Vid
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8
The perfect subject for a vid to this song is
View Answers
Friday Night Lights!
1 (12.5%)
Aeryn Sun!
5 (62.5%)
Derek Reese and Jesse from SCC!
1 (12.5%)
Gus from Psych!
0 (0.0%)
Kara Thrace!
2 (25.0%)
Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach!
0 (0.0%)
Reva Shayne from Guiding Light!
1 (12.5%)
I will tell you in the comments!
0 (0.0%)
Are you nuts? This song sucks!
0 (0.0%)
The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t?
Alex Juhasz: Everything on YouTube is Video Art... Nah, responding to Virginia Heffernan's NYT column Uploading the Avant-Garde ("In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde."). Says Juhasz:
In my paper, I decide that while all the people-made stuff (a sub-set distinguished from the corporate made product that dominates the site) COULD be considered art in the sense that it has been carefully crafted and then consciously distributed with the intention of the public communication of self expression, I don’t want to consider the clearly unconsidered work on YouTube to be “Art.” In its self-aware isolation (I made this in my room, or my backyard with my wrestling buddies), it doesn’t consciously connect to other bodies or theories of video, or to other artists; it doesn’t show enough care. I suppose there could be a “scene” of butt-catchers, as Heffernan suggests, but towards what project, with what beliefs? You need a shared vocabulary, agenda, history, and set of goals to make an “art scene.”
I often don't agree with Juhasz on YouTube, but it's always interesting to try to figure out how and why.
Finally, Sady from Tiger Beatdown: Beyond Good and Evil, Straight to Annoying: A Few Thoughts on Michael Moore --
...I used to wake up to Air America every morning, thanks to the dude I lived with, and what I heard was a lot of screaming about “sheeple,” a lot of self-righteousness, a lot of talking points. And not a lot of deep thought. And Moore, to me, is like the “sheeple” screaming turned up to eleven. He is so angry! And he is so angry in such a catchy, slogan-y way! He wants you to join him so we can all be angry together! Isn’t that fun? We are such good people. We are people. Not sheeple. God forbid. Hey, let’s throw the word “evil” around! Because we all know that’s not a tactic people commonly use to rile up a base and/or oversimplify issues in a really dangerous way. It’s just fun to say when you don’t like someone and want to scare people away from agreeing with them. Evil evil evil. Woo!
Still I feel confident in reccing it (along with Suzanne Scott's article that I linked to yesterday), with one caveat -- it reads even better in conjunction with today's Dinosaur Comics.
Dreamwidth now allows you to insert a link in the LJ post to its DW version, complete with number of comments posted on DW, but unfortunately it's not reciprocal. Alternately I could disable comments on one site and steer them to the other, to centralize discussion.
This isn't an issue with most of my posts, so I've put off doing anything about it, but occasionally I'll post something where a discussion emerges on one or both sites. I've found myself in replies referring people to a comment thread on the other site a few times recently.
Looking through my last few months of posts, and counting only those which have at least 10 comments on at least one site (though usually about half of them would be my replies), comments on Dreamwidth version edged out comments on LiveJournal by about a 5 to 4 margin (454 to 369). Though I'd guess that if I went through those same posts and tallied up number of commenters (anyone who's commented at least once), LiveJournal would come out ahead.
So should I do anything differently?
Poll #1274 Comment preferences
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22
Should I centralize comments on DW and disable them on LJ?
View Answers
Sure, works for me
15 (68.2%)
No, please don't - I prefer to comment on LJ
1 (4.5%)
But why? Two discussions are better than one!
2 (9.1%)
Text - such a primitive interface! I do my commenting via telepathy.
0 (0.0%)
I care more about convenient links to the crossposted entry -- can you get on that?
4 (18.2%)
If you're crossposting, what's your experience been with comments?
View Answers
I centralize on one site, and have no regrets
9 (47.4%)
I centralize on one site, and I'm paying the price in less discussions
0 (0.0%)
I cross-link the DW post in the LJ entry, and it's been a positive experience
1 (5.3%)
I cross-link, but mainly for my own convenience - I'm not sure anyone else cares
4 (21.1%)
I don't cross-link or centralize. I do however recycle and watch my cholesterol.
5 (26.3%)
- Music:N.E.R.D., You Know What
Ancillary content models, which are typically constructed around television series with cult or fannish appeal and located on the show's official (network-sponsored) Web site, offer audiences a glut of "free" narrative and behind-the-scenes content in the form of Webisodes, Web comics, blogs, video blogs, episodic podcasts, and so on (note 1). Positioned precariously between official/commercial transmedia storytelling systems (Jenkins 2006:93–130) and the unofficial/gifted exchange of texts within fandom, ancillary content models downplay their commercial infrastructure by adopting the guise of a gift economy, vocally claiming that their goal is simply to give fans more—more "free" content, more access to the show's creative team. The rhetoric of gifting that accompanies ancillary content models, and the accompanying drive to create a community founded on this "gifted" content, is arguably more concerned with creating alternative revenue streams for the failing commercial model of television than it is with fostering a fan community or encouraging fan practices. Grappling with the growing problem of time-shifting, ancillary content models create a "digital enclosure" (Andrejevic 2007:2–3) within which they can carefully cultivate and monitor an alternative, "official" fan community whose participatory value is measured by its consumption of advertisement-laced ancillary content.
Sounds grim, right? And let's face it, some of these sites are pretty grim. Last spring, I stumbled across an "official fan site" for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, hosted on Fox Television's website but outsourced to some specialized "official fan site in a box" web company whose name I've forgotten. It was all very modular -- here's your episode recaps, here's your character guide, here's your discussion boards, here's your wiki, here's where you can post your fan fiction and fan videos. The whole thing looked pretty ugly, and felt like something of a fannish ghost town. There were people there, but it didn't seem particularly thriving or vibrant, as communities go.
( return of the cultural dupe )
But outside of these "ancillary content models" there are tons of fans who seek out some kind of interaction or engagement or common space with the corporate and creative powers that be -- through cons, and the blogs of showrunners and producers and writers, and Twitter, and other proliferating means. That's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but it's not exactly false consciousness either, and it's common in types of fandom where there's less of a gulf and more of a continuum between "fan" and "pro/PTB" like comics and science fiction books.
So I'd rather complicate the "threat or menace?" approach to official fan sites and related corporate close encounters of the fannish kind, or at least restore an account of fans' myriad agency, pleasures, and investments in those spaces and interactions.
...In the 1960s, Williams and E.P. Thompson redrew the map of British labor history, and in the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies issued a series of brilliant papers on mass media and popular culture that culminated in the prediction of the rise of Thatcherism—a year before Margaret Thatcher took office. Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party's epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all....
The result is that cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."...
