on television, on #amazonfail

This week we’re up to Bourdieu’s On Television. In one class we talked about unveiling the logics of debate and discourse and I used the now-classic example of Jon Stewart going on CNN’s Crossfire and doing everything shy of dismantling the risers underneath the audience. I thought that his ‘I’m just a comedian, but you’re hurting America’ was weak tea, but they packed it in after the gig was up. When a Vice President of the Associated Press threatens a Nashville radio station for using their content (which is to say linking to the AP’s own YouTube Channel–that encludes the codes to embed the videos with–that they apparently didn’t know they had) only to find out that the radio station is actually an affiliate you really know that the unveiling of the mechanisms of cultural production can be a shock to the leviathans themselves. (See a video discussion of it here.)

The brouhaha this weekend was #amazonfail, in which a supposed filing glitch/algorithm led to hundreds, even thousands of titles to be labeled ‘adult’ and therefore, go unranked. Mary Hodder compares how one book (The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk) lost its sales ranking while another (A Parent’s Guide to Homosexuality) kept it. Amazon claims that it was a ‘glitch’ (see their statement here), but Hodder says that authors (like Craig Seymour) were notified months ago that they had lost their ranking for merely including positive content on LGBT themes/content, and notes that the first five books that come up in a search for ‘homosexuality’ are all anti-gay. Clay Shirky has a slightly divergent opinion. (Thanks KB!)

korean taco truck twitter

This morning I was set to show some ethnographic film for our Media, Technology & Sociology course. I was going to show DVDs of Mitch Duneier’s Sidewalk and Jim Ault’s Born Again and a VHS of David Redmon’s excellent Mardi Gras: Made in China. I don’t have a VHS player anymore, so I went to my classroom a half hour early to cue it up, but the room was locked. Flummoxed, I sat in a lounge area and pulled out my iPhone. My dad had just emailed me a note about an NPR story he heard in his car about a L.A. Korean Taco Truck, Kogi, that changes locations every day, and Twitters its whereabouts. I searched ‘taco’ in my NPR app on my phone, downloaded the three minute, 49 second report, plugged it into the technology stand (once the room was opened) and played it for the class. We listened to it together as owner-chef, Roy Choi told the correspondent,

You have all these neighborhoods now where people come out when they usually just got in their car and went to a mini-mall. Now they’re coming out to their streets, talking to their neighbors.

Kogis Korean Tacos
Kogi's Korean Tacos

Here is a little video report on it. This is just a brilliant example of social networking spilling out of the virtual realm.

As a chef, I always think it’s the food, but I think without Twitter it wouldn’t be anything, because I could have made these tacos, but I would have had no one to sell them to.

Meanwhile, the DVD player froze, and I had to revert to the older (more reliable?) technology of the VHS player to show the third film. The experience reminds me of the Radiohead song, ‘Videotape,’ which describes a man who reaches the end of his life lamenting that all of it is recorded on outdated media. (Which, in turn, reminds me of the Variety headline: ‘VHS, 30, Dies of Lonliness.’)

decay

I was invited to revisit an essay I wrote that examined two streets, one in a postmodern metropolis and another in a ghosttown, and a few things have come across my path that have made me think more about the curious intersection of human existence and human absence: James Griffieon’s Detroit, Justin Armstrong’s Midwestern Plains, and ‘Deviant Man’s’ Pripyat:

(Justin A. has sent along a nice set that includes pictures of Northampton’s old, recently torn down mental hospital: here.)

lincoln’s emoticons

A fun piece in the NYTimes on the possibility of an emoticon in a 1862 article on a President Lincoln address. Jennifer 8. Lee does a great job sniffing out the possibility, as well as pointing us to the Wikipedia page, which includes examples of them from the late 1800s. The examples below were published in the March 30 1881 issue of Puck. I found the differences between eastern and western emoticon styles to be of particular interest. Western styles ‘read’ horizontal, while eastern ones are vertical. Western smile:  : )    Eastern smile: (^_^)   Western surprise: :0   Eastern surprise: (0.o)

Of course, the ‘fun/fluff’ aspect of it gives way to the deeper ways that the media shapes the messege. One of the things I found to be particularly pursuasive about the ‘pro-proto-emotion’ arguements was that the reprinting of Lincoln’s speech required typesetting, and the setter had to make the mistake of placing a space before the semicolon as well as the semicolon itself. Two mistakes. These things go well with thinking about texting (Times has an older article called ‘Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)’) and reading (‘Online, R U Really Reading?’)

representing experiences

In preparing to talk about representations of reality, and thinking about the Dogma 95 movement in film, I came across this amazing flash animation of images and stories of life living in Jakarta, Kibera, Caracas, and Dharavi, called ‘The Places We Live.’ It’s unbelievably riveting, and I cannot wait to teach Urban again, although it’s going to be great for Media, Technology, and Sociology. (Also, check out this amazing stop-action film of a plane flying over glowing cities at night.)

first day follies

First days are difficult. Smith College has a pretty lengthy trial period, and students like to ‘shop.’ I can understand the benefits of that, but it also makes for wasted time. Do you just pass out the syllabus and reconviene on the next day? Do you teach full on? Because of this dilemma, I’ve been opting to start class off with some sort of framing story or activity, as a way to get students thinking about the course, thinking about society differently. I have used horoscopes and Mark Twain to talk about chance and opinion, I have used the story of Finn twins to talk about structure and agency, and of Damon Mootoo being lost in Queens to introduce the mash-up grid system of Queens. These have had varied degrees of success.

This semester I’m thinking of a few new things. I’m thinking that I’ll break students into groups of two to make a select who will win the Academy Award for Best Actress, a group of three to pick Best Actor, five to pick Best Director, and then ten for Best Film in order to explain Simmel’s dyad and triad piece (and then talk about roles, power, membership, mediation, participation, representation, etc.). I’m thinking about doing some Twittering for the Media and Technology class, and playing an FDR Fireside Chat and Obama’s YouTube weekly address. Goffman once wrote about a person making a ‘call’ with a toy phone that he found in a trashcan on the street (1981: 86, n. 6), engaging in a fake conversation playing off the (at the time) absurd idea of conducting work on the street. Now, technology allows for the opposite to occur.

For my culture class I was thinking about using fake culture, ‘Stupid Undergrounds’ (Mann 1995), Dog Island, Mos Def’s song Hip Hop, and von Trier’s Dogville to talk about the hyperreflexive turn of culture. I might use an early clip from the Crawford/Gable film The Possessed, wherein a common farm girl comes face-to-face with how the other half lives, by looking episodically into the windows of a slow-moving train. At the caboose, a man offers her a drink and asks: “Have a drink? Aw, don’t go away… Looking in? Wrong way. Get in and look out.” (Slavoj Zizek’s brilliant The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema uses it.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke8OIawaAE4]