Terri Senft

04:06 pm - Now you show me yours.

So here is a new blog I am reading and really liking

http://intersections.wordpress.com/

It's on migration and race issues.

Now please give me the name of a site I might not know of that you are reading.

Don't say Daily Kos, m'kay?

TIA

10:05 am - I am mad that my students didn't do this one.

Thousands of Advanced Placement English students write "This is Sparta!" on their exams.

04:29 pm - Podcasts, media and messages

So I'm in the nascent stages of putting my lectures into video podcast format and it's a bit overwhelming. I don't necessarily mean the technological stuff; more like the looking at yourself in a mirror stuff. As we all know the medium of a classroom lecture is the live body talking at the lectern. Regardless of the coolness of PowerPoint slides, a lecture without an interesting/entertaining/commanding lecturer is lame. I feel confident in my lecturing abilities, and wanted to transfer that to a more permananet format (like video) so students could return to it to review and so forth. The answer would seem to be turn the camera on and go, yes?

Not so much. Turns out (and uh duh) the medium of the podcast isn't my live body--it's the film itself. I keep looking at this footage and saying not, "Oh good point captured on video," but rather, "Whoa this is a boring piece of film." At this point, the urge to learn documentary filmmaking NOW gets really strong.

The question I'm stuck with is, how deep should I get myself in, here? I know the point-the-camera-at-the-lectern stuff is the stuff of a million institutional podcasts, but does that mean I should have the bar that low? On the other hand, do I ask students to wait until I get ten minutes of video *just right* before they get their study aids?

Then I realize: I'm not pointing the camera at the lectern. I'm pointing at myself, seated, and talking into it like I would talk to a student during office hours. I've watched zillions of hours of people's video blogs shot this way and not been bored. Maybe I should approach this from that aesthetic--just talk into the camera and edit in the occasional slide and be done with it?

It also occured to me I could have done all this musing on camera and put it up. I really need to get more comfortable doing that, but does anyone even respond to posts made with the help of YouTube? I still think LJ is much more about writing than  video.

I suppose I'm thinking out loud here. Thanks for listening.

11:57 am - Behold my punditry kung fu.

Okay, so I am behind on this stuff. But it's up now, in conjunction with coming book promotion.

Click my head to hear five minutes of me from Aerlyn Weismann's excellent documentary Webcam Girls. This doc. is from a few years back, and many thanks to grass for the footage. I am warning you in advance that my hair is too big by half.

Click this link to hear me talking on Canadian radio a month or so ago. The topic is micro-celebrities, and the show is called Spark. I'm on with Merlin Mann (Merlin Mann!!) from 43 Folders and Sarah from Pop17. They were great, as was the show's host. I'm warning you that I sound lousy here. I was patched in by phone in the UK and for some reason I think this means I should say "ummm" about fifteen thousand times.


Excelsior!

02:27 pm

03:07 pm - 98 degrees in NYC?

Homies, what are you doing to stay cool today?
(You probably don't want to hear that it is sunny and crisp here)

02:26 pm

Sweet Christ am I ever procrastinating today.

10:55 am - Interested in sound?

For folks interested in sound, an essay I wrote a few years back is coming out in an new anthology from MIT entitled The Grain of the Voice in Digital Media and Media Art, edited by Norie Neumark and others. I've put it after the cut, for those with time on their hands today! Thanks to scopo, who first asked to publish this in the Australian journal Antithesis. Norie literally found a copy of my essay on the photocopier at her university and contacted me asking to put it in the book. How's that for providence?

( Read more... )

01:12 pm - Due in 4 weeks!!

cover design courtesy of the mutli-talented delphizyx

12:22 pm - All bound for Puroland!!

Guess where I am right now?

03:23 pm - Hi Pals!

I'm about to get back to posting again. Excitement!

07:07 pm - It's the kawaii, stupid!

Gawker is confused over the popularity of this girl on YouTube, who does little beside stare into the camera and wave for her fans. They call her the world's laziest camgirl. I say she's the first generation of Japanese net idols to discover YouTube. Readers of this journal will remember we covered this material in 2001.

06:46 pm - They're coming!

Actual science fiction book. Click image for juicy details.

09:46 pm

This is a response to a recent Guardian article called With Friends Like Facebook...


Tom Hodgkinson hates Facebook. That much I believe, though I have trouble understanding exactly why, or more importantly, what he really proposes his readers ought to do about its nascent dangers to civilization.

Hodgkinson begins his piece with the 'gloomy image' of a friend who recently spent a Saturday night with Facebook, drinking at his desk. It’s not the drinking that bothers Hodgkinson (who advocates the pub over the computer), but what he perceives as the loneliness of the situation. This raises the question: would Hodgkinson object if his friend were to throw back a few pints while making phone calls? That’s another behavior that seems as if it is being done alone, when viewed from the outside.

One thing that makes Facebook different from the telephone is that it permits users to post flattering pictures, some of which permit an "artificial representation" designed to get sex or approval, argues Hodgkinson. Leaving aside that this sounds like a good description of Guardian personal ads, one wonders how Hodgkinson reconciles the 'loneliness' of Facebook with the fact that his friend used it to find someone for a shag (I’m assuming it was an offline one.)

Moving from the personal to the political, Hodgkinson follows the money behind Facebook, demonstrating how this purportedly democratic medium is actually dominated by libertarian wack jobs. Here, he is late to the show. As the military was to Arpanet, so have conservatives been to the Web, almost from its inception. Am I the only one old enough to remember how early issues of Wired featured economic advisors to Ronald Reagan in their pages?


Seemingly unaware that writers have been discussing VC’s 'California Ideology' for more than twenty years, Hodgkinson tells us what his real problem is: "On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands."

Really?

Does anyone under the age of forty believe you can be 'anything you want to be' on the Web? Does anyone of any age believe any social spaces exist free of ads? Has Hodgkinson ever used Google, which also matches his preferences to advertised products, and doesn’t have a 'community' to even voice opposition to its practices?

"Clearly," writes Hodgkinson, "Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them?"

Here I am baffled. I thought Hodgkinson's point all along was that Facebook users weren’t friends (like those down at the pub friends whom you drink with and remember so well the next day) but rather consumers. If this is the case, why should Facebook's uber-capitalism operate differently than that of any other commercial entity?

In the same vein, I don't understand the upset over globalized communications. After all, the same nation-free Web that runs Facebook is the one that allows me to see Hodgkinson's article in rural Florida. Isn't that okay? When he warns that Facebook presents an “ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's,” I begin worrying over this reporter’s mental state.

Virtual.totalitarian.regime.

“Facebook is profoundly uncreative,” argues Hodgkinson. “It makes nothing at all.” While one might take issue with the idea that Facebook users don’t make anything (what are all those ancillary applications I keep getting notices about?) I understand the sentiment. Facebook is all connection. There's no there there.

Yet is the commercialized commaraderie of Facebook really all that different from Hodgkinson’s beloved local? The next time you walk into what seems to be a time-worn yet slightly hip pub in London, check to see if all the silverware is gathered in a bucket on the table with a rolled up bar menu inside. If it is, you've wandered into one of the deliberately 'unbranded' establishments of restaurant and bar giant Mitchell’s and Butler. While you have a pint and bemoan the state of the internet (or locally owned pubs), go ahead and excuse yourself to use the bathroom. Inside of five minutes, you’ll be staring at advertising in what used to be the most non-commercial of spaces: the toilets.

I suppose my point in all this is that the invasion of global capital into formerly private domains is hardly specific to virtual systems like Facebook. Like Hodgkinson, I worry about Facebook’s data mining and its proprietary structure, but to be honest, I worry more about Google’s helpful offer to control all the digital copies of books in the world. The main difference between Hodgkinson’s position and mine is that I don’t think a trip off the grid is the way out.

Near the end of his article, Hodgkinson mentions philosopher René Girard. One of Girard’s specialties is mimesis: the theory of imitation. Hodgkinson chooses to understand mimesis as 'herd mentality.' I prefer to remember Aristotle’s treatment of mimesis.

In the Poetics, Aristotle takes on Plato’s desire to toss all performers out of the Republic for being dangerous dissemblers. Too virtual, we’d say today. To temper Plato, Aristotle distinguishes between two forms of imitation. The first--mimicry--constitutes a poor form of imitation; the kind Plato felt harmed the Republic, and the kind Hodgkinson links to locales like Facebook. The other form of imitation--mimesis--Aristotle saw as an often unexpected act in which the imitator stumbles on something larger than him or herself, and notices “art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth,” as Hodgkinson would put it.

As someone who studies social networks, I can attest that one needn’t run to Keats’s Endymion to find the mimetic impulse. Like a flower growing from a dung heap, it flourishes in the strangest locales. The trick Internet ethnographers have learned (and I wish a few reporters could pick up) is to remember that one wants to find a rose in shit, it's best to stop focusing on smell and start looking for color, wherever one is.

01:03 pm - all hail my haircolorist!

She's not my haircolorist; she's my gorgeous friend Mattie (and it's my friend Kim's hat) but I like the way my hair color looks in this picture, so I am posting it in camgirl stylee.

02:33 pm - Medium as Message: Video Games

Marshall McLuhan once famously announced that 'the medium is the message.' By this he meant that when trying to figure out what media means, we are better served by studying how users interact with a given medium, rather than by evaluating content. I find that vdeo game play is a really interesting case study in medium as message. This post on the things kids master while playing Grand Theft Auto (from Barry Joseph at the Global Kids Initiative) helps explain why.

10:35 am - I might be forming a new group

Just wanted to let people in the old July Group (remember that one?) know that I am very close to forming a new group designed particularly to work on limiting beliefs and fears. It's sort of in honor of the new year, which I am determined is going to go better than the last. This will be a private group (no lurkers) made up of like-minded folks. The idea is that we check in with each other every day for a month. There is a fair bit of writing involved in this one, and I'll post examples of what I mean in a friends only post. I would rather be doing this work with two other committed individuals than ten people who kinda sorta maybe but not so much want change in their lives. Anyway, if you are interested, give a shout here or in email: tsenft at gmail.com

06:33 pm - ah, the bad old days

A friend is writing a very intersting dissertation on the history of student activism, focusing on the National Student Association. This is from the requistie  'student activism doesn't start in the 1960's' chapter. I like it because it reminds me what a hallucination it is to talk about the halcyon days of higher learning, when students were docile and faculty were altruists:

When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819 he envisioned a university governed jointly by its various constituencies, with disciplinary infractions adjudicated by an autonomous student court.  But student riots erupted almost immediately after the school opened, and after two faculty members were assaulted by a masked gang midway through the first semester, the self-government plan was largely abandoned.  By the mid-1830s the students of the university had gone so far as to organize and arm a militia to resist the school’s “tyrannical” faculty.  

10:38 am - I haven't done this in a while...

If there is anyone reading who would like to be on my Friends List (and you aren't a current student), give a holler and I will put you on.

03:42 pm - iMovie or Garageband for podcasts?

Which are people using?

I was using iMovie, but I like the way GB handles spoken/soundtrack stuff better. The problem is that GB didn't handle video clips, but I heard that changed in iLife '08?

Who can give me real info, here?

I'm getting into a podcasty mood.