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coffee and cities
It’s hard to argue against the relationship between coffee and gentrification. Sharon Zukin, for example, writes about ‘pacification by cappuccino‘ and my new neighbor Andrew Papachristos writes about the interrelationship between crime and coffee. I’ll just say this for now: The Blue Bottle’s Kyoto style cold-brewed chemistry set of a machine made me come back five times in four days. I groveled to get my last cup before I headed out of town.
Finding delicious coffee should be added to either Kieran‘s or Andrew‘s ASA Bingo cards. Although I’m doing my best to reserve judgment on Atlanta’s coffee scene.
Tangentially (although coffeeshop-related), there is something to be said for catching a good museum exhibit. In my case, coming early to the ASA, I made it to a Robert Frank exhibit at the SfMoMA. Four rooms were dedicated to the four sections of The Americans. (Read Anthony Lane’s writeup here.) It was an incredible experience, and the narrative became overwhelming, if a little forced by the placards. I use RF via Howard Becker’s Telling About Society for my Media and Technology class, as his work is clearly sociological. He writes:
Robert Frank’s (…) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville‘s analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants—eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.
Fellow museum compatriot, Patrick Inglis, reminded me of Walker Evans‘ style of taking surreptitious photographs of his subjects, and it got me thinking about technique a little more.
Update: A nice review of the 50 year anniversary of The Americans is here.
twitter research
At the same time, there is some research being conducted by twittering, which can be seen here, and Richard Wiseman’s take on it can be read here. Also, from the data visualization file, here’s a nice image (although I’m not sure who the gray people are, and the ‘5 with more than 100 followers’ should probably ‘5 with more than 10 followers’ if this were at the scale the author makes it):
Update: More pretty data visualization about Twitter here.
you tube, money, and domestic violence
The ‘JK Wedding Dance’ bounced around the internet a few weeks ago… When I clicked on it, I didn’t recognize the people or the song, nor did I catch the interest in it. But I started snooping around about it when thinking about the Media, Technology and Society class. It turns out that a few people have thought about it. If I told you that it was a brilliant money generating video, you might think that it was viral marketing a la these Levi’s commercials. But it’s not. The song is Chris Brown’s ‘Forever,’ and it’s popularity has skyrocketed one year after the release, the iTunes downloads hit #4, and #3 on Amazon’s MP3 list (Amazon sells MP3s?).
YouTube’s business blog notes:
This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
Part two of this story is that Chris Brown has been in the press more for his domestic abuse. (Click here for a sobering statistic that over half of Boston teenagers think that Rhianna was to blame for the incident). When I found the JK Wedding website, this issue was not lost on them. They write:
We hope to direct this positivity to a good cause. Due to the circumstances surrounding the song in our wedding video, we have chosen the Sheila Wellstone Institute. Sheila Wellstone was an advocate, organizer, and national champion in the effort to end domestic violence in our communities.
Even if the bride didn’t get into the dance too much, I do give them both credit for this. The Sheila Wellstone Institute is here.
twitter revolution
On Iran, we have two uses of technology at work. The first is brought to us via the Iranian Government and Photoshop:
This was dispersed via traditional media sources. (You might remember the Photoshopped missile launch too.) At the same time, we have a great deal of news coming out of Tehran via twitter, when Western Media has been otherwise exiled or confined to their hotels. Andrew Sullivan is hosting ‘LiveTweeting the Revolution‘ and has a nice discussion about Foucauldian ‘soft power.’ The Obama Administration asked Twitter to postpone their upgrades as to not interfere with the Twit-o-lution. (There was also an instance of Nigerians using texting to monitor their vote in 2007.) In a minor sidenote, Republicans are not only attempting to make waves by twittering, but Rep Pete Hoekstra twittered that what was going on in Iran was ‘similar’ to what they did last year in their shutdown of the House. (He’s being teased via twitter, in return.)
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Clay Shirky points out that this is not technological capital, but social capital traveling from Nigeria to the Western World. This is a nice, clear example of how the producer-consumer relationship on news has changed drastically.
Updated (06/20/09):
Boing Boing has forwarded a request to help Iranian activists: By changing one’s Twitter location (in settings) to Tehran, GMT +3:30, to make it more difficult for Iranian authorities to hunt down Iranian activist bloggers and Twitterers. See the Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners. (I did it, but that’s the most that I’ve done with my account in weeks.)
Late Update (11/3/09):
The U.S.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force doesn’t really care for Twitter activists either. Read about an anarchist activist whose house was raided for using Twitter to disseminate information about police activity (gleaned from police scanners) to G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh here. (The charges were eventually dropped.)
Late Late Update (12/27/09):
Shirky vs. Evgeny Morozov here. (Also: A different kind of Twitter revolution, here.)
geotagging & geomapping
I am, in a fashion, grateful that I didn’t get a chance to learn about geotagging until after I have completed my research on guides. I feel that, as a graduate student, this would have taken me in another direction.
Geocaching, and geotagging has been the purview of a kind of technological ‘upperclass.’ Some of these devices are fantastic, and pricey. New, friendlier technologies have made these activities available to a new, burgeoning ‘middle class.’ My iPhone is fully equipped for geotagging thanks to a very simple, free application (Geotag) and one for $2.99 (MotionX-GPS) that uses the iPhone’s GPS chip. These applications allow the user to find their latitude and longitude, flag a position (what is called a ‘waypoint’), and take a picture (your iPhone automatically geotags your photos by the way!). The first one is a little crashy, but it has the added benefits of being able to record two minutes of audio and link an email address or webpage to every waypoint. MotionX just as a photo. You can then create a path of a series of these points, a database of information to share or analyze, then export it to your computer over a wireless network, which pops onto your desktop as a kml file (for Geotag) or email it or share it with your Facebook friends (on MotionX). Double click on those files, and open them Google Earth. Google Earth can be crucial for the presentation of spatial data, and the way that Google Earth and Google Maps are synced further grow this ‘GIS middle class.’ It also allows for an opportunity to create a path in an urban space with your iPhone, export it, tweak it in Google Earth, and then use the Street View and 3D buildings (clicked on in ‘layers’) function, you can record a tour of one, or several spaces that you are going to talk about in a presentation. (The way that people can add 3D buildings through Google Sketchup is amazing as well. Look at this video about how this program is used by Autistic children.)
The Geotag application is clearly in its early stages (see the community section on their website), and I am pretty disappointed that there is a 2 minute time limit on the audio, however, I see that there are some powerful uses for conducting research in the field. (On top of that, urban geocaching is a great example of our urban alchemy.)
Now, when you pair this with gCensus, which is Stanford’s free program that allows you to export Census data into Google Earth, the iPhone can be a way to mashup quantitative data with qualitative, ethnographic, street level interviews and photos. Imagine doing a presentation of some ethnographic research on a community, where you geotag the who, what, when, and where of an interview and give your audience a full image of the social context of that material. (IRB issues of anonymity notwithstanding!) As soon as Google Earth’s iPhone app allows you to download kml files onto it… it will all come full circle.
Here’s a map mashup (‘Mashups: How and Why?’ here) on rising sea levels, an article on predicting swine flu, a way to track the movements of a dollar bill, the World Bank. Check out Penn State’s Geospatial Revolution page, and Kevin Kelly’s ‘Cool Tools’ post on it.
visual sociology, annotated
For the last two courses, I’ve used images from Douglas Gayeton‘s book ‘Slow: Life in Tuscany‘ as a way to describe how to analyze an image. For some reason, I asked students to take a picture and analyze it, but I didn’t press them to do ape this method as an exercise. I should have. Next time. I also did not make the connection that he is the same artist I use later in the semester, when talking about the fictional (?), second life videoblog of ‘Molotov Alva‘ (which is airing on HBO). I find his work to be very, very effective. I think that this, plus a podcast exercise that students completed this week, will really make the next class better.
For anyone reading this who doesn’t know it–I teach a Media, Technology and Sociology course, which takes the idea of using M&T seriously as a set of sociological tools. For anyone who believes that such ‘alternative media’ for sociological purposes should take a look at what Mark C. Taylor (one of my all-time favorite books) wrote in a recent Op-Ed on ‘The End of the University as We Know it’ (and a critical response from the Chronicle: ‘No More Drivel from the New York Times‘), wherein his fourth recommendation for higher ed is:
Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
facebook, blogs, studies of note
A few studies that fall in the ‘research that confirms what everyone expects and doesn’t push us to think about it all a little differently’ bin: One on how blog traffic increases on the basis of reciprocation (no real surprise there to anyone who blogs, but also rendering Google’s new ‘Friend Connect‘ of note. Thanks Hepaestus. See how it works?), another on how high Facebook usage is correlated with low college grades, and another on how Facebook affects brain activity. The results of the latter? Here’s what they say: “As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity.” Hmmm.
In the ‘oh, that’s actually interesting’ file, the Wall Street Journal now claims that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers’ in the U.S.. That sounds crazy to me, but gathering their data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics they claim that there are 452,000 people who are paid to blog on their own sites, or someone else’s. (As compared to 555,770 lawyers and 394,710 computer programmers.) More from the WSJ:
Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As
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.
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.’)