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After the cut, you can find the assessment questions for my third-year undergrad Digital Media Cultures class.
OPTION 1: MAKE AND ANALYZE YOUR OWN REMIX
OPTION 2: Discuss the legal and ethical implications of TurnitIn
OPTION 3: PROVIDE A SCHOLARLY ANALYSIS OF YOUR FRIENDS LISTS
OPTION 4: COMPARE TWO FORMS OF ‘SUPER PUBLIC’ LIVING
OPTION 5: EVALUATE A PUBLIC OR COUNTER-PUBLIC SPHERE ONLINE
OPTION 6: COMPARE AND CONTRAST TWO EXAMPLES
OF SURVEILLANCE CULTURE
OPTION 7: WRITE A SCHOLARLY REVIEW OF THE V & A ‘DECODE’ EXHIBIT
OPTION 8: ANALYZE SOCIAL CAPITAL FORMATION IN A YOUTUBE EXPERIMENT
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--PLEASE PASS ON TO INTERESTED PARTIES--
Hello, friends in London!
I wanted to invite folks to join me next Tuesday at the University of East London Public Lecture Series, where I am giving a talk about--among other thing-- half-naked young girls on the internet.
Because it's the sort of conversation that's best had in the presence of people under the age of 45, I hope students especially come for the lecture and join in the dialogue afterwards. (I could probably also visit a class or two briefly to talk, if that’s of interest to anyone; this is a topic I never seem to lose interest in...)
Here are some details about the lecture:
PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES TITLE: “From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Youth, Gender, and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy.” SPEAKER: Dr. Theresa Senft, Senior Lecturer, Media Studies, UEL Date: Tuesday 9 March 2010 Time: 17:30 Venue: West Building G.02 (next to Oscars) University of East London, Docklands Campus Transport: Cyprus DLR Here is a quick summary: “From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Youth, Gender, and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy.”This talk engages with the politics of female sexual self-display over the Internet, especially focusing on teens in America and the U.K. I begin by discussing a recent U.S. law suit filed by two Indiana teens against their high school principal after he punished them for posting risqué photos in a private section of their MySpace accounts. Echoing current wisdom that there is never a guarantee of privacy on the Internet, the American Civil Liberties Union (representing the girls) has chosen to frame their activities as free-speech acts, arguing that these teens were expressing themselves to themselves in two sorts of bedrooms: their real-life one, and their online one. In this talk, I frame the case in terms of my recent work on a phenomenon I call “micro-celebrity”: a new way to perform the self that combines the visual techniques of corporate branding with the distribution technologies of the Internet. I am particularly interested in how sexism and ageism converge within micro-celebrity’s overwhelming investment in the so-called ‘attention economies of the Web.’ This speech returns to a question I raised in my book Camgirls: “Why are women continually encouraged to express themselves in media through confession, celebrity and sexual display, yet punished with conservative censure and backlash when their representation becomes ‘too much’ to handle?” Dr. Theresa Senft is interested in how the Internet has been changing our notions of the public, the private and the pornographic in contemporary society. For her most recent book, Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, Terri ran a webcam out of her own home for a year and charted her experiences. Other books by Terri include History of the Internet, 1843-Present (co-author) and a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality & cyberspace (co-editor.) Terri's work has been published in The New York Times, she has appeared on National Public Radio (U.S.), and in the documentary Webcam Girls. ---------------- Note: this lecture will be an updated and revised-for-the-UK version of something I did earlier at Harvard last year. It will also tangentially addresses teen “sexting,” a practice that is providing the foundation for a moral panic in the U.S. right now. The URL for that talk (if you want to read, or assign to students, or whatever), is: http://tsenft.livejournal.com/405387.htm l#cutid1 Feel free to contact me with any questions about the lecture, thoughts on the topic, or (especially) links to other work being done in this area, by you or anyone else you know. I'm at t.senft@uel.ac.uk Many thanks!
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Here's my newest paper proposal for the Association of Internet Researchers Conference (this October in Sweden!)
This paper is part of a larger (and awesome) panel I’ve proposed with the title, “Brand Me Online: Sustaining Personal Identity through Strategies of the Corporate.”
PROPOSED PAPER:
Micro-celebrity, charity, democracy? Decoding the Logic of Udorse
Theresa M. Senft, Senior Lecturer Media Studies,
University of East London, UK In early October of 2009, I received a piece of email from Geoffrey Lewis, the co-founder and CEO of a new startup company in New York City called Udorse (www.udorse.com). Lewis, a former brand manager at Proctor & Gamble, thought I would be interested in his company’s philosophy and corporate mission. “We are building a social game around democratizing endorsement deals for the mid-long tail of people living a micro-celebrity lifestyle,” he wrote. Curious as to what that might mean, I logged on to Udorse, and watched as all my Facebook pictures (as well as those shared by friends) were extracted to the site. I was then encouraged to tag my uploaded images with brands I wanted to endorse: clicking anywhere on a photo, I could note the jacket bought at Armani; the hair fluffed with Loreal; the book purchased from Amazon. After filling in a short form (to see if the brands I specified were partnered with Udorse), there was nothing more for me to do but wait for my friends to click on my images, hopefully interacting with the brands in a way that made Udorse’s partners happy. At this point I would receive a micropayment from the participating brand as thanks. All monies—which I could keep for myself, but were also encouraged to donate to affiliated charities like Amnesty International—were routed through my PayPal account. This paper represents an attempt to consider what users lose and gain (personally, financially, politically) by participating in Udorse, a Web company not alone in their earnest belief that one might simultaneously use social media for playing games, furthering democracy, and redistributing wealth along the ‘long tail’ of Web 2.0 consumption. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Udorse seamlessly moves from discourses of monetization to those of advocacy and/or charity, as in the statement (taken from a company press release), “Udorse encourages people to use its services to support a cause, an indie artist or the friend that wants to be the next Diane von Furstenberg.” Methodologically, my approach to this project is four-fold. First, I examine the impact on heavy social media users recent business titles like Brand Me; Me 2.0; and World Famous. Next, I look to ethnographic work on micro-celebrity (Senft: 2008, boyd: 2009) to understand why a heavy social media user might consider his/her online presence as an endorsement mechanism. I then employ theories of ‘immaterial labor’ (Sholz: 2008; Terranova 2000) to ask questions regarding base, superstructure, work and compensation within Udorse’s economic model. Combining recent work on talk show television and the ‘emotional public sphere’ (Lunt and Spenner: 2005) with recent political analyses of celebrity charity affiliations (Littler: 2008; Magubane: 2008), I deconstruct Udorse’s logic of democracy via micro-celebrity charity endorsement. Throughout, I detail my personal experiences in three realms: as a user of the system, as someone engaged in conversations with the company’s management, and as a social critic leery of (but not entirely opposed to) Udorse’s neo-liberalist logic of democracy through endorsement. Works Cited in this Proposal boyd, d., 2009. Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics. Ph.D. dissertation, available online at http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfCo ntext.pdf (viewed 25 February 2010) Hardt, M. & Negri, A., 2005. Multitude, Penguin Books. Lunt, P. & Stenner, P., 2005. The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere. Media Culture Society, 27(1), 59-81. Magubane, Z., 2008. The (Product) Red Man’s Burden: Charity, Celebrity, and the Contradictions of Coevalness. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2(6), 102–1. Scholz, T., 2008. Market ideology and the myths of Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3). Senft, T.M., 2008. Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. Peter Lang. Terranova, T., 2000. Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text, 63(18), 33–58.
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Writing an Abstract: From Terri Senft: t.senft@uel.ac.uk
Many students working on abstracts find themselves panicked with "blank page syndrome." To help, I have developed a tool for you. This has been designed for students in Media/Cultural Studies, but could probably be adopted for a range of programs.
Enjoy!
Elements of a strong abstract
1. Your Topic, Broadly Defined
2. Resonance for Media/Cultural Studies
3. History of your Interest /Experience in this Topic
4. Your Topic, narrowed down
5. Your observations of Experts in the Field
6. Your thoughts about experts’ suitability for your topic
7. Your hypothesis for this project
8. Testing your hypothesis (i.e. exactly what you will DO in your dissertation)
9. Explain your methodology
10. . What questions will you be asking as you examine your materials?
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I'm trying to get some writing done on these cases in general, but can I just stop and say: What is the *deal* with Pennsylvania these days? First, there was the case of the female students who sued their Penn high school for threatening to level criminal charges if they didn't consent to mandatory 're-education' classes after the school learned the girls had distributed photos of themselves via cameraphone the school deemed 'sexually inappropriate. The charge threatened by the school was 'sexual harm to minors' (themselves, presumably) which could have potentially landed these girls on sex offender registries around the country. Now, there's a new case: Students in Pennsylvania sue after it comes to light that their schools were spying on them, using donated webcams on laptops. And it gets better: they only found out after the school tried to discipline one of the students for something that went on in the privacy of his own home. Interestingly, the school forbade students to download games and other 'unethical' materials onthe donated laptops, but unnotified in-home surveillance by school official of children in various states of undress is A-OK. From the Guardian, yesterday. Daniel Nasaw in Washington Friday 19 February 2010 13.54 GMT Daniel Nasaw in Washington A school district in Pennsylvania spied on students through web cameras installed on laptops provided by the district, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week. Lower Merion school district, in a well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia, provided 2,300 high-school students with Mac laptops last autumn in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile, 21st-century learning environment". The scheme was funded with $720,000 (£468,000) in state grants and other sources. The students were not allowed to install video games and other software, and were barred from "commercial, illegal, unethical and inappropriate" use. The district retained remote control of the built-in webcams installed on the computers – and used them to capture images of the students, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week. The ruse was revealed when Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton high school, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behaviour". According to Robbins, Matsko said the school had retained the ability to activate the laptop webcams remotely, at any time. Backed by his parents, Robbins filed a lawsuit on behalf of all students provided with laptops by the school. The suit claims a violation of the privacy and civil rights of the students and their families and accuses officials of violating electronic communications laws by spying on them through "indiscriminate use of an ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop". It claims that since the laptops were used by students and their friends and family at home, images of "compromising or embarrassing positions, including ... in various states of undress" have been captured. A school district spokesman, Douglas Young, did not return a call seeking comment, but told the Philadelphia Inquirer the district was investigating. "We're taking it very seriously," he said. In a letter posted on the school district's website, McGinley said the district had installed on the laptops a security feature that allowed the webcam to photograph the computer operator in the event the laptop is lost or stolen. He said that following the suit's filing, the district disabled the feature amidst a review of technology and privacy policies. He said the feature was activated only to help locate a lost or stolen laptop. "The district never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," he wrote. "We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families."
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Teachers reading here: Have you ever given a YouTube-based class assignment?
Students reading here: Have you ever received one?
I'm thinking of doing one in my Digital Media Cultures class this Spring. In this class, students will be reading old chesnuts (Baudrillard, Virillio), some stuff on the public and counter-public spheres (Habermas, Warner) as well as new material on social capital, networked individualism, and online subjectivity (Wellman, boyd, Shirky). I also throw in a bit of my stuff on micro-celebrity. For one of their essay options, I've been thinking about designing YouTube Competition that asks students to do the following: 1. First, students are asked to make a 1-2 minute YouTube video on a subject of their choosing. The video can either be posted as public, or friends only. Students who feel awkward with a video camera can animate some PowerPoint slides, or even upload a still image with audio over it. I don't really care. 2. Next, students submit their YouTube link to me, telling me whether or not I have permission to screen their material in class. 3. Throughout the semester, I award in-class prizes to students for their videos in the following categories: --Speed of release (i.e. Who from class is the first to get their material up on YouTube --Production value (i.e. Whose material looks the most professional. This business of 'professional' is absolutely subjective on my part, and I will harbor no debate from students, hopefully for reasons that are clear by the end of this email) --Entertainment value (i.e. Whose stuff is most interesting, funny--again, subjective!) --Most UNIQUE USERS TO POST on each student's page (of course this could include comments from sock-poppet versions of students themselves, just as it does on YouTube) --Highest NUMBER OF COMMENTS generated on each student's page (not the same at all as unique users--it's not uncommon to see a comment thead of 100 posts of more dominated by 5 users.) --Most 'linked to' videos (These could be videos from other YouTube videos, but if the student wanted to create multiple videos and link to his/original just to rack up points in this category, it's certainly do-able) 4. In class, we talk about the prizes as they are awarded, discussing what one gains and loses by focusing on speed over content, or unique users over sustained conversations, etc. Case studies from Web 2.0 are used to show students how these issues play out in the 'real world' (e.g. The criticality of speed on gossip sites; the allure of of unique users on social activism sites; the importance of being linked to by someone 'connected' on business sites, etc.) 5. For their final essay, students have an option of writing a piece in which they valuate their participation in the YouTube exercise. Of course, I'm particularly interested in hearing whether or not they think the exercise is worth doing again next year, but really are free to talk about anything they wish in their essays. There is only one hard and fast rule, which is that as they write, they employ at least two theoretical ideas from our class readings to discuss their experiences. IMPORTANT: I think it's important to give students the choice of making their YouTube videos public or 'friends only' (of course, I'd have to be on the friends list to evaluate it.) In addition to respecting students' privacy anxieties, it's also an interesting way to provoke finer-grained thinking about social capital, connectedness and self-branding. For instance: Common sense says a video posted 'friends-only' wouldn't do particularly well in categories like "most unique commentors," but common sense isn't always right. Someone with thirty keen people on their friends list could create a fair amount of traffic on a locked posting, where an video ostensibly open to the world might get no traffic at all, if the creator of said video doesn't get some buzz around it. And of course, the class and social politics of 'buzz' is worthy of an entire class discussion... Okay, that's enough from me. Interested in what other people are thinking and doing!
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I’m writing this quickly, and may come back to edit later, but wanted to get my thoughts down:
Recently, Clay Shirky asked why the women he teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Department at NYU don’t seem able to self-promote their capabilities in the technology sector as well as the men he teaches. I’ve had occasion to work with Clay at ITP in the past, and I know he is an incredibly decent and deeply fair person. Maybe that’s why I was surprised to be so frustrated by what he wrote.
Clay is probably right to suggest that to if you are a young professional who wants to get ahead in the areas like social media, you are probably going to need to be able to self-promote. Where he’s wrong is in his answer that women need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop being ‘nice.’ This advice isn’t just condescending as hell, it also exhibits a pretty massive blind spot to the historical lack of women role models in the tech sector.
Yes, I know there were always women in computing. I also know that once computing became associated with programming and the ENIAC was developed, you could count on two hands the amount of women employed in computer programming. There’s an old saying that the children of cops want to be lawyers, the children of lawyers want to be judges, and the children of judges want to be on the Supreme Court. Until the last generation, the daughters of female tech sector workers at best hoped to move up from the typing pool. There were almost NO women we could watch laboring in boardrooms, backrooms, locker rooms, pool rooms—all the places corporate culture power plays take place.
But rather than staying stuck in history, let’s imagine a future in which things for women in the tech sector move forward, rather than staying the same (or moving backward.) Let’s go one step further and imagine what a strong, secure, female role model in a computer-related industry might be like.
In the Victorian Age, people became obsessed with the idea that technological history might yield a "New Woman"--independent, autonomous (and to be fair, often the site of derision.) Let's imagine what a sort of "New Woman" might emerge from a tech sector with female leadership for more than a generation or two. What sort of statements would she be able to make about herself? What would be her ethical code?
In the spirit of hippy-dippy hopefulness, and with a tip of the hat to Peggy Macintosh, I provide ten statements coming from such an imaginary ‘new woman’ of the future. Truthfully, I have yet to meet a woman (myself included) who has been fortunate to claim even three of the statements. I’d be interested in how other people react to this thought exercise, which I blame on New Year optimism as much as anything else.
TEN STATEMENTS FROM A ‘NEW WOMAN’ OF THE TECH SECTOR
1. As a child, I had regular contact with a female role model--a grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, or older friend—who worked the industry in which I now find myself working (in a position other than support staff).
2. As I grew older these women professionals became unofficial mentors to me. They offered me opportunities to observe their worlds at a safe distance or even officially through mechanisms like internships, demonstrating how one exhibits professional codes of conduct and effectively networks with those outside one’s own family.
3. As a student, I routinely noticed that there were large numbers of female teachers and professors teaching subjects that interested me and were considered to be valuable and ‘job worthy.’
4. As a student, I was fortunate enough to be counseled by a teacher, advisor, or internship coordinator who facilitated regular group activities involving myself and other young women training in my field. Rather than competing with one another, we began thinking of ourselves as an ‘old girls club.’
5. As a graduate, I feel comfortable asking some of these women from my past to recommend me in at least two categories: as a rising ‘star’, and as a decent colleague capable of acting in a group’s best interest.
6. As an employee, I’m pleased to say that the place I work employs fairly equal amounts of men and women in technical, ‘creative’, managerial AND service roles.
7. As a work colleague, I believe I am where I am today as a result of others’ concerted acts of care and education on my behalf. I don’t think it’s a sacrifice to work for and with other people: I think it’s a gift given back in honor of those who got me where I am.
8. As a spokesperson for my industry, I question moments when I seem the token women on a panel, or (even stranger) why so many discussions about ‘what women want’ seem dominated by men. No, it’s not something I like. Yes, I worry I won’t be asked back. I do it anyway, because it’s my responsibility. Let someone call me ‘that bitch’; I can take it. I was raised right.
9. As a teacher, I understand that my students’ perceptions of their abilities often maps to larger questions regarding gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and age (among others.) These aren’t topics reserved for classes called ‘identity politics’ and ignored in ones with titles like ‘information society’, ‘digital media’ or even (God help me) ‘universal design.’ If you really want to get to why someone undersells their technical prowess, you are going to have to engage with some basic facts of peoples’ histories; these personal facts are almost always the stuff of political discourse.
10. As a grandmother/mother/aunt/sister/friend, teacher/mentor, I believe in holding out my hand to other women BEFORE it’s asked for, and keeping it out past the point it is self-effacingly rejected, or bitchily refused. I know that for most women, the only thing harder than asking for help is staying around to offer it after it’s been rebuffed.
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About six months ago, I did some question and answer stuff about micro-celebrity with students from the Columbia Journalism Review. I would change some of this now, but I still think it's a good primer for thinking about micro-celebrity, so I'm putting it up for those who want to talk/write more about this. I did have this up in out-of-sequence pieces earlier; I've gone ahead and cleaned it up here.
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Anyone know a journalist who wants to do some freelance work for Berkman Center's Youth & Media Policy project? Drop me an email at t.senft@uel.ac.uk and I'll pass on your name to the great people who run the show there.
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This is a piece I am working on for the Harvard University's Berkman Center. It will probably go through one more round of edits. All thoughts welcome!
From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects:
Teens and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy
Theresa M. Senft
Senior Lecturer, Media Studies
University of East London, UK
t.senft@uel.ac.uk
If you are an American female born after 1960, you probably have a memory of slumber parties: those Heathers-esque affairs in which best friends join girls who barely know one another for a night of ‘fun’. Although I did a enjoy a slumber party from time to time, I cannot recall one from which I woke up refreshed, but then, the point of such things was never sleep. What slumber parties were about—their real purpose in American girlhood—was the provision of a liminal time away from family and school, a zone of imagination in which (theoretically, at least) nobody but the chosen were permitted. Slumber parties are my first memory of a time in which I was asked to prove loyalty to a family of choice, rather than one origin, by enduring in a series of tests designed to push the limits of my personal and emotional boundaries. All while wearing pajamas.
Last year during summer holidays, two fifteen year-olds from Indiana were goofing off at a slumber party by taking pictures, which they then uploaded to a 'friends only' section of their MySpace accounts. Among the photos were some in which the girls posed licking and kissing multi-colored 'phallic' lollipop. There were others in which the girls stuffed in their underwear. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (we’ll get to that later) “They intended this to be humorous and all the participants considered it to be so.” 1 The joke might have ended there, except that the photos were later copied and given to the school principal. Arguing that the images constituted a “disruptive influence on the discipline, good order, moral, or educational environment” at the school, the principal banned the girls from fall semester extracurricular activities. He also required they attend counseling sessions and apologize to the all-male Athletics Board for 'discrediting' the image of the school with their behavior.
For feminists who have been following the recent panics surrounding teen ‘sexting’, none of this story comes as a particular shock. Teenaged girls have always acted out sexually, and authorities have always scapegoated those they perceive as transgressive in this way. Around the time the girls in Indiana were receiving their punishments from school, thirteen year-old Hope Witsell committed suicide in order to escape the constant bullying and shaming she received as a result of an indiscreet phone photo that made its way into public circulation. 2 The more cynical among us would say that the wholesale endorsement of ‘tough love for sluts’ allows authorities to side-step actual give-and-take conversations with teens about responsible sexual behavior, but that's an argument for another time.
What makes the story of the MySpace teens in Indiana unique is that in late October, the girls enlisted the help of the ACLU to file a class-action suit against their principal, high school and the school district. In its complaint, the ACLU alleged that by curbing the girls’ extra-curricular activity, forcing them apologize to the Athletics board, and ordering counseling, the principal violated the girls' First Amendment rights to free expression. What’s more, they argued, these prohibitions had a knock-on effect: they have ceased posting photos to friends online, primarily because they fear additional punishment.
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Here's the beginning of a very short piece I did for the Oxford Internet Institute's Forum on Relationships and the Internet.
Position paper: The Case of Online Micro-celebrity Gangsta Flirtation
Theresa M. Senft, Senior Lecturer Media Studies, University of East London UK
I'd like to spend my time here telling a specific story about a specific type of flirting among a specific group of students occurring over the Internet today. I tell it because I think it's important to begin studying this demographic (Black U.K. working class users between the ages of 18-25.) I also tell it because I think it shows why we need to supplement existing psychological and sociological literature on Internet relationships with an approach to representation derived from areas like performance and cultural studies.
Earlier this year, a student approached me to talk about a trend he noticed on Facebook: many of his friends were posting pictures of themselves as so-called 'gangstas' –displaying gang signs, pointing to images of guns, or flashing cash. When I asked him what he found unusual about this, he nearly shouted: "These guys aren't rough. Half of them sing in the church choir!” I asked why he thought this sort of thing was transpiring. His answer was simple: it was for the girls.
Fascinated, I canvassed young women at the University of East London to see what they thought of this dynamic. Many of them confessed that they found the idea of dating a "soldja” somewhat sexy and interesting, provided that the guy in question was playing at this role, rather than actually involved in crime himself. I began talking with the girls about their own photo performances online, discussing the various sexy outfits they wore, the friends with whom they posed, asking whom they wanted to attract through such performances. Through it all, they peppered their conversation with references to hip hop performers like Rhianna and Lil Wayne.
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A few years ago, I decided to help out a few friends and students who were struggling with applications to graduate schools in the humanities. They were especially baffled by the request for a Letter of Intent. to. If you find yourself in this position now (or know someone who is) feel free to check my advice for writing a Letter of Intent, here.
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I am in the middle of writing something about the global reception of the "Neda" video last June. Building on the theory of 'paranoid reading' (where you see in something what you want to see), I've constructed five different positions from which people have made the statement "I am Neda" after viewing the video of her murder. These scenarios are fictional but based on reading blogs and watching YouTube.
I'm posting them here because I am interested in whether anyone can think of critical ones to add beyond what I've come up with. I'm trying to display a range of positions related to gender, age, nation, diaspora, political leanings.
I AM NEDA: THE RESPONDENTS
• Like all protesters in Iran, I am Neda. Like her, I took to the streets of Tehran and faced state-sponsored violence. True, she was killed for her actions and I haven’t been, but the fight is long from over. For all I know, I may find myself joining her. Neda is a martyr for resistance in Iran, and though the images of her death are shocking, we need them to circulate as widely and graphically as possible, to counter the Iranian government’s white-washing, denial and lies about the incident.
• Like all Iranian citizens who hope for an end to this unrest, I am Neda. This video represents an orchestrated sacrifice by the West of an ordinary Iranian girl in order to turn international sentiment against the current government.. Neda is a martyr to the West’s murderous need to enforcement of its own geopolitical aims, and to circulate these images is to co-conspire with the murders themselves.
• Like all members of the Iranian diaspora, I am Neda. I’ve been following what’s been going on in Iran over the news and via Twitter, so I knew there was violence. But watching the video was a very different experience, very galvanizing. There is something so heartbreaking about Neda’s face as she looks into the camera for the last time. If my parents hadn’t left Iran, Neda would have perhaps been me. I think this material needs to circulate as a wake up call to the world that something important is going on in Iran and can’t be ignored.
• Like all feminists worldwide, I am Neda. Neda stands for every woman in the world who has been targeted by masculine rage in times of political unrest. Here, what we see is a women gunned down for walking in a relatively quiet section of a street, outside of the main protests. The only threat she could have possibly posed to anyone was her symbolic presence as a young female who didn’t choose to wear hijab as she walked towards the protests. Neda was martyred for her nascent feminism, a far bigger threat to Iran than the Green Party could be.
• Like all decent people who believe in democracy, I am Neda. I don’t follow politics very much, but I linked to the video on my blog because I think it’s important people know about it. I guess I sometimes forget that there are countries where people gun down one of their own in cold blood! I don’t think anyone should watch the video more than once, though. We need to circulate this footage with sensitivity.
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Love in the time of Snuff: Social Media, Intimacy, & the Death of Neda Agha-Soltan Theresa Senft, Programme Leader & Senior Lecturer, Media Studies, University of East London, UK
On a hot June day of protests in Tehran, a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan is murdered while walking towards her car in broad daylight. A doctor rushes to save her, while a friend of the doctor’s videos the event. After she dies, the doctor uploads the video YouTube. The forty-second video sweeps across the net, galvanizing both activists and casual viewers of Iranian politics. There is something about this video--a beautiful woman, staring into the camera as blood pours from her orifices, legs splayed open--that impossible to forget. In this presentation, I plan look deeply at the production, consumption and internet-based recirculation of the Neda video. I am particularly interested in interrogating a claim that at least part of the Neda video’s impact on its viewers has to do with the fact that it is constructed like a perfect ‘snuff’ film. Using Susanna Passonnen’s writing on affect and pornography, Judith Butler’s work on the politics of photography at Abu Graib and Jacques Ranciere’s thoughs on ethics in the age of the ‘emancipated spectator’, this talk will consider my own love of social media as a tool of political change against the ‘snuff aesthetics’ of the Neda phenomenon. I argue that in order to produce an ethically robust theory of digital intimacy, we must first account for the fact that online or off it, intimacy is composed of a range of constituent localized parts including (but not limited to) affect, arousal and abjection.
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People, it is the PERFECT fall (people here say autumn) day! It's crisp enough for a sweater (people here say jumper) but not so cold you want to go indoors. I'm sitting outside on a picnic bench typing away with free wifi. There is a coffee the size of my head next to me. If Denzel Washington showed up to offer me a date and a bag of money, that would make the day better. Otherwise, it's perfect as it is.
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Hi Pals,
I'm in the middle of thinking about three separate, though often overlapping, groups of people:
1. People who read (or sneak peaks in the supermarket) at celebrity-based magazines like People, Us, or in Heat (in the U.K.)
2. People who look at celebrity-oriented websites like PerezHilton.com
3. People who participate in making fan fiction (writing or film-based)
I'm wondering where people fit into these categorizations?
Personally, I get a kick out of celebrity magazines and websites, but don't really engage in fanfiction much.
I'm really interested in hearing from fan fiction folks on this one. I have this belief that the fanfic people are radically different from 'regular' celebrity followers, but I could be very wrong on this.
People who want to weigh in to tell us they never, EVER would do something like read celebrity stuff are welcome to chime in, but nobody is going to believe you (kidding, okay?)
Thanks in advance for responses!
T
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