geez, NPR, calm the eff down!

you're going to make us think the world is a dark, unfortunate and violent place.

Facebook and the future of electronic media history

hot dog! every since my post about quitting facebook, i've been checking QuitFacebookDay.org every morning to see if they've made progress on their commitment numbers. i've been amazed to watch its trending in the last week or so, this morning at 10 am up to 20,123 and now suddenly up to 22,284 as of 1 pm PST today! every other morning the site has seen a growth of only 1 or 2K people, but 5K wow! word is spreading!

that's because Facebook is losing a grip on its PR. just this morning On the Media ran a little story on Facebook. here's an excerpt:

RYAN SINGEL [a writer for Wired.com]: [Mark Zuckerberg’s] a really interesting character. There’s a book about to come out, by David Kirkpatrick, I believe, from Fortune magazine. The excerpts that have come out have been fascinating. For instance, Microsoft came along and told Facebook they'd be happy to buy it for 15 billion dollars, and Mark Zuckerberg said no. And then they came back and they said, we'll buy it over a period of five years, so we'll let you stay in control. He said no again.

This isn't about the money. And he really wants to sort of change the world, and he really wants that Facebook page to be the place that people define themselves to everyone else online.

On Tuesday, Facebook’s public policy director, Tim Sparapani, said something that was, I think, a bit of a slip, when he said that the personalization that Facebook has offered to all the websites on the Internet [...] he called that an “extraordinary gift to the public.” I think they really think that they're doing this amazing thing for the public and we're not thankful enough.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the gift to the public is the fact that their information can be shared with so many vendors out there.

electronic media history is about to repeat itself. Facebook is to our web experience what the conglomeration of TV (ABC, NBC, CBS) was to television programming. with consolidation into one large corporation, rather than the diversified, differentiated offerings of multiple sites for different purposes (i.e. Flickr, blogger, Last.FM, LinkedIn, etc.) the public loses out on richness of experience. we self-impose our lack of choice. ironic, in a state where consumer choice becomes our most frequent and salient experience of democracy, we still choose convenience over variety of choice. Brooke Gladstone points out in the same piece that the average Facebook user "will choose convenience over privacy every time." the bad press, the QuitFacebook movement, and the premature buzz over alternatives such as Diaspora gives me hope that maybe we won't see history repeat itself, that we will avoid corporate control of the internet, we will reclaim net neutrality, preserve our right to privacy, and utilize the internet for its fabled purpose, of making voice and choice more readily available and exercisable by the masses.

all together now!
-stef

living in the digital age

fyi, anyone born post-1977 is a "digital native" and anyone pre-1977 is a "digital immigrant."

this video is terrifying.



this makes me rethink the "digital divide": my students may not have access to computers at home, but at least someone in their home has a smart phone with internet access. the digital world at their fingertips, and not a clue how to use it. frightening.

sweet justice

sea world: 2. humans: 0. this has not been a good week in the battle between man vs. nature.
an aquarium in the Dubai mall containing 2 million gallons of water and some 33,000 marine animals is beginning to crack. shark attack!

also, last week a 12,000 pound orca whale named Telly "dragged a trainer into the pool by her ponytail" and effectively killed her. in 1999, a man, who snuck past Seaworld security, and "either jumped, fell, or was pulled into the water" also died, possibly from hypothermia, though his body was found "draped" over Telly's head. the Seaworld PR people are now trying to keep blame away from Telly:

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Chuck Tompkins, Sea World’s head of animal training, insisted that the orca was getting a bad rap, saying, “those two incidents really don’t have anything to do with this and to mark him as a killer is very unfair.” [via]

damn right it's unfair! look, we're talking about a giant swimming KILLING MACHINE. have we forgotten that orca whales, in nature (where they NATURALLY BELONG) are huge, swift, powerful, blood-thirsty BEASTS who hunt BABY SEALS and EAT them? i'm guessing these deaths are due to a number of things (like, THEIR MOTHER FUCKING NATURE TO LEAP OUT OF WATER, SOMETIMES THROUGH ICE, TO BITE AND KILL AND EAT THINGS), none of which amount to "revenge," which is what the media is (ridiculously) trying to call it ("there was no reason to believe that the orca had turned on its trainer out of anger").
i'm sorry, but when it comes to animals and humans, i'm almost uncompromisingly pro-fauna. if you put a bunch of fucking SHARKS in a tank with a tunnel thru it in the mother-fucking MALL for the sake of spectacle/thrill/etc. you deserve to lose your shit once that tank starts cracking and leaking water. and if you put an orca whale in a pool, feed it nothing but little fish and expect it to learn tricks for your amusement, you're damned right it's gonna leap out and eat you if you're not looking. it's not revenge, it's poetic justice.
it infuriates me how often the media covers these animal encounter stories and side unequivocally with the humans. i mean, i know it's common practice to be anthropomorphic, but dang, can't we just get over ourselves from time to time and see from another perspective? it seems that for the supposedly "most intelligent" animal, and the only one granted with reason, that we can be extremely unreasonable and myopic.
sheeyit.

the trouble with Tiger Woods

i read this really great article today, about Tiger Woods and his recent "fall from grace" (the only article about Tiger's recent media scandal i could bear to read. i can't stand watching the media pick apart celebrities like that, when they're obviously having some serious family/marital issues). [i find the more i try to read about grad programs in education and the more i try to write something related to a personal statement, the more news i end up reading, and the more blog posts i end up writing. at least i'm being productive in some way?]

i was working online when the Tiger story first broke, and was ostensibly mistaken in thinking it would subside quickly. since that Thanksgiving weekend, the story has been a topic of almost daily discussion in entertainment/celebrity news circles and manages to leak into the periphery whenever i venture online.

but this article i read today takes a much-needed critical stance on Tiger's problems that has been completely ignored and excluded in the majority all of recent corporate media coverage. [it is interesting to note that the article i read incidentally comes from a grassroots, socialist-leaning, online media co-op. coincidence?] the article discusses Tiger's loss in corporate sponsorship as a result of his negative media attention and the pulling of Tiger spots and commercials, even the halt of his own Gatorade drink, "Tiger Focus." of course, it came as no surprise that Tiger's irresponsible conduct would result in huge blows to his public image and career – the almost total loss of his billion-dollar sponsorships, the subsequent self-imposed exile from golf and life, the increasing amount of tarnish on a once veneered and venerable public image – but, what this article brings up that others have forgotten in the sizzle and scandal, is that Tiger's had it coming for a while, and not just in the sense that he's received his comeuppance for marital infidelity, i mean a practiced neglect for social responsibility in his career actions.

unbeknownst to me prior to the recent media attn, Tiger's had some pretty nasty corporate bed fellows, including Chevron and Nike (who, touchingly, bucked the trend of dropping him, choosing instead to stand by their cash cow, citing his tenure on their payroll and his proven athleticism). Nike, Tiger's sponsor for ten years and counting, is also, let's not forget, well known for their use of sweat shops. so Nike's loyalty is perhaps not undeserved: Tiger, in his ten years under their sponsorship, has never once spoken against or implored them to pursue different labor practices. and this, it seems, is only the tip of the iceberg. Tiger has been linked to selling his celebrity super power of distraction to aid the efforts of developers and military in ousting Filipino peasants from their land, in the name of bringing golf and golf courses to the Philippines.

as this article makes clear, Tiger's conduct has deserved scrutiny for quite some time, albeit for different reasons than what warranted his current media spanking. while the world continues to lament Tiger's tarnished public image, it is necessary that we pry a little beyond merely the celebrity tabloid fodder and get at the real reason for Tiger's declining success (considering his involvement with some questionably irresponsible corporations and businesses, is it any surprise that at the first sign of trouble, they decided to jump ship? corporations do not usually specialize in solidarity or compassion, maybe Tiger would have learned that if he'd checked up on some things).

accepting things for how they are and focusing on just how one benefits from the system is to live in denial that the system eventually comes back to screw you over.

-stephan!e

rhetorical questions

today, while watching the Daily Show, a number of things occurred to me. (pardon my inertia if these are really duh, but they were pretty a-ha to me about a minute ago.)

1) why is it that conservatives champion the "joe six packs," but refuse to pay them living wages? seems like one doesn't follow the other...

2) Trojan Brand Condoms is imploring Americans to "Join the movement to help America evolve. Use a condom every time." i thought that was interesting marketing, because the first thing that came to mind was "wow, i bet the creationists are going to have a problem with that." and then i remembered that creationists are probably also the same bunch teaching abstinence-only sex ed and not using birth control.


i thought the use of the word "evolve" was an interesting choice as well, considering the implications of "the smart choice," the non-ape-ish thing to do. but there's also the idea of "survival of the fittest" – thinning the gene pool and leaving only those best able to survive current conditions. and i thought that maybe in our current state of environmental, political, economic, financial, existential and spiritual duress, how maybe what we need is less "ignorant" people. and i thought of how maybe the "smart" thing to do would be less human reproduction. but then, isn't Trojan missing the demographic that needs birth control the most? hmm... ?

also, i found this segment from the Daily Show on undecided voters particularly on point:



"[McCain and Obama] are totally different! why can't you decide??!!"


my thoughts exactly, Sam Bee.

-stef lee


p.s. whilst organizing and editing tags today, i discovered that "rhetoric" is pretty much a greatest hits of free rad!cal writings. who knew? not me.

p.p.s. scary what-if: Palin as President. just try opening the windows and doors in that office. creeepy!

Bill Moyers is my elvis

as i usually do in the summer, i've been setting my alarm to wake me up to Democracy Now (sometimes it's the only way i can get up in the mornings).

and today, in a foggy half-sleep state, i thought i was dreaming of the '60s and listening to a poet, back from the dead, encouraging us to revolt and revolution. i was confused.

but as i gradually gained consciousness and listened more closely, i realized what i was actually hearing was a journalist's plea to the American ppl, and that this was actually the keynote speech at the National Conference for Media Reform which i was invited (and now regretting declining) to attend.



the speech itself was beautiful, the pace reminiscent of Ginsberg's "Howl", the urgency appropriate for our times. the post-speech was pretty awesome, too. as Amy Goodman explained, Bill O'Riley (yes, i spelled that wrong. no i'm not gonna change it. that's how much i care) and his slugs were "outing" Dan Rather and Bill Moyers as "leftwingnuts" for speaking at this conference with "these people" (read: progressives, liberals, media critics. oh my, indeed.)

apparently, they dispatched an O'Reilly factor producer to "ambush" and accost Mr. Moyers after his rousing speech. this is the verbal pounding that ensued:



it occurs to me that my generation has had the pleasure and honor of seeing several inspiring media moments in recent years:

Jon Stewart on CrossFire (2004):

"I'm here to confront you, because we need help from the media and they're hurting us..." (transcript here)

Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents dinner (2006) [click to play]:
"...And as excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of FOX News. FOX News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side, and the Vice President's side." (transcript here)

these have had the collective impact, for me anyway, of revealing the spectacular theatre of mainstream news media, and encouraging citizens' critical investigation and dissent.

as Bill Moyers said: "it's up to you to remind us that democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own."

-stephanie

dear Hillary and Obama (if you're listening): i live in Ohio, and i'm voting for Nader.

=UGLY! (boo hiss!)

"When again we can hold a fair election on real issues, let's vote, and not till then."

~ W.E.B. DuBois

i love that quote. after spending the majority of my Spring semester reading about democratic philosophy and theorizing about the meaning of democracy in modern America, looking for hope that the youth of America are becoming more engaged in their communities and are participating in political activity, i feel obligated to watch the democratic debates, even though i LOATHE them.

nevermind that most of it rapidly, inevitably devolves into immature bickering and quibbling, or that they NEVER answer the questions, or that they're always using the same empty rhetoric over and over ("Change" vs. "Experience" - as if they're completely separate and we can only have one!) ...

most of all, i hate the spectacle that politics has become. i gave this debate an honest shot. i took half an hour out of my already really packed day to watch the debate in the hopes i'd find something redeeming in either one of the candidates. because we're voting here in Ohio in less than a week, this undecided independent young adult minority woman (an important demographic, i believe?) needs to decide how to get her vote on!

i've been following the debates and the campaigns, with ever-growing disdain and distaste and disinterest and complete lack of faith in our political system. it was tolerable back when John Edwards was still in it. he was sensible, well-spoken, and miraculously managed to diffuse the awkward tension and animosity between Barack and Hillary. but let's face it, the media machine never even gave him a chance, it's always been Obama vs. Clinton from the beginning. and now look at the mess we're in! it doesn't matter who gets the nomination at this point, they're not going to pick each other as running mates (which leaves... Kucinich? if only...) and all this nonsense mud-slinging is doing nothing to get anyone excited about voting for either of their sorry asses!

this is exactly why youth, across the board, in surveys and polls on civic engagement, continually abstain from political activity. BECAUSE IT'S UGLY! why would we want to participate in a system that continually reeks of corruption, greed, equivocation, and disregard for real issues in the name of competition? i hate having to watch adults - full-blown grown-ups dressed up in power suits fer cryin' out loud! - whining and picking on each other to try to win sympathy from a (let's face it) apathetic crowd. these are our supposed leaders in D.C. and i can't even trust them to sit there and have a civilized, well-reasoned discussion for half an hour?! and you want me to vote for them??!!! i can't even believe i made the foolish mistake of turning on the TV to watch this garbage when i didn't even eat dinner today because i had so much work to do, i was worried leaving my room to grab a sandwich would be too much precious time lost. clearly i don't have any sense of propriety!

not that the idea of political theatre should be news to my generation. no, on the contrary, we should be pros at spotting it now. i'll admit i'm exceedingly suspicious of Obama because of all the media hype he's getting. it's almost trendy to be in support of his campaign. now, i can remember maybe 2 years ago or more hearing about the young junior senator from Chicago who was a great orator, and being kinda excited. but after that the spark faded. and when Hillary brought up his inclination to vote "present" on bills, rather than taking a side, that really turned me off. i want stances, not easy passes. and i'm still wary of his predilection to play it safe, taking neutral positions and employing flavorless rhetoric in an effort to offend as little as possible. the tendency to play the middle road reminds me of the mass media industry's practice of producing homogenized, low-quality, formulaic media fare in the interest of accumulating mass audiences, at the expense of accuracy, progress, and authentic representation. you can spin it as "unification," but it looks more to me like ball-less neutrality, and we all know you can't be neutral on a moving train...

at some point in the debate, Hillary and Barack were bickering and talking over the moderators trying to interject their various points of contention (what else is new? yawn yawn, right?) the camera cut to some slick-looking NBC guy, while Hillary was still talking, as he tried to cut to a commercial break (which would be incidentally filled with campaign commercials), saying "TELEVISION DOESN'T STOP!" indeed, it's apparent now, this spectacle does not stop, not for anyone. even if we want it to. we've got to jump off!

so screw it, i've had it. clearly politics are theatre and this theatre is vaudeville. worse, it's bad television!

i've always said a vote for Nader is a wasted vote. so maybe i'll just vote for (*gasp!*) Huckabee. because there is no way in hell our next Chief is going to be called "President Huckabee" (sorry, Mike!)

feeling disenfranchised,
stephan!e

elfed self

weird.

ho ho ho?
-stef

(i'd say yes, "ho ho ho" indeed. those are some naughty dance moves those robot elf selves are making...)

Lacanian Others: on love and the movies

"there are three absolutes: Life. Death. and Love."
- Dr. C.P. Gause
---
"i'm a thief, and a liar."
"it's OK. i like you anyway."

---

it's hard to say what makes you love someone. i'm beginning to suspect love is something we created in the movies. every date out on the town getting dinner and drinks is reenacting something they saw on the screen. every move is a reflection of something they've seen. this isn't reel life, this is reality.

are we doomed to search for these projected loves, extant in only the collective imagination of our generation? will we lose forever in these battles because we haven't learned that the enemy is our selves?

we are searching for ideas, images, tautological feelings we've been conditioned to want, by advertisements and soaring movie soundtracks. we're trying to live the dream, to live what we see, to feel, to be. we internalize these ideas, then become frustrated when our "Others" don't project the images we'd had in mind. is that love?

the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that love is the thing we don't have that we are trying to give to someone who doesn't exist. in other words, a null set between the self and a nonexistent other... so sad, but canonical post-freudian psychology!

[mp3's, yousendit]
The Idea of You - The Neo-Futurists.
Our Life Is Not a Movie, Or Maybe - Okkervil River.


-stephan!e

net neutrality!

i just spent near to my entire day trying to
1) reorganize my hefty harddrive (so many folders! goddam it, how did i get so many folders?! i can't find anything! wot a flippin' mess!) and
2) revamping my original net neutrality video.

this new version is FAR better, and MUCH improved. (the music is actually synced now!–no small feat, but a result, funnily enough, of knowledge gleaned in my current Media Aesthetics class*)

so take a look, won't you, and justify my time...


i hope it's still relevant now. (oh, who am i kidding?! OF COURSE it's still relevant! net neutrality is the blogger's battle of the decade!)

carry on, wayward suns.
-stephan!e


*sound travels slower than light. so, soundtracks must follow the film footage by at least a couple frames in order to "sync." now, how's that for applied learnin'?!

THE DEPARTED vs. INFERNAL AFFAIRS

"Thanks, Hollywood, you've uncovered a new way to simultaneously congratulate yourself while offending the basis of your success." -Brian Hu

---

everybody's talking 'bout the Oscars! all my friends have been asking for my film fan opinion on the results, and tho i don't feel inclined to go into depth on my disappointment in the Academy (who, let's face it, base decisions less on merit than industry politics), i will say that i was most thoroughly upset by THE DEPARTED's win for best screenplay adaptation.

i will concede that THE DEPARTED (TD) deserved its win for editing and directing. i thot Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese's wins were a testament to what longtime partnerships and friendships can do for a film. (they were longtime NYU film school friends, and they've been working together for most of their careers (and with such wonderful results! TD really needed a female perspective, and how wonderful that the film was in some large part the vision of a woman!)

i'll even admit that i was intensely hoping Marky Mark Wahlberg would win for his role as Dignam, a short-tempered fiery wise-crack cop.

TD was really not a bad film. in fact it was great. i remember loving it. but what irks me is that in his Oscar acceptance speech, Bill Monahan remembers to thank everyone, but fails to acknowledge the original story writers, Wai Keung Lai and Siu Fai Mak, the ones whose work he basically co-opted and claimed as his own, whose writing saved him unquantifiable amounts of time and creative labor.

furthermore, when Monahan went up to take the Oscar, the announcer said that "THE DEPARTED is based on a Japanese film." err, wrong. it is based ("based" being a significant understatement) on the Hong Kong original, INFERNAL AFFAIRS. and in the fall, when i first learnt this, promised a more thorough comparison than the one currently here.

so, as promised, and in light of recent events, i present my comparison of THE DEPARTED and INFERNAL AFFAIRS...
-stephan!e

"GNOME WINDOW"

here, for the first time ever in my personal blogging history, i present to you the final product of many days of hard work with my trusty camera, interminable patience, and fortuitous sunsets...

read it as you would a film (that is, by reading the images, not the words):

---

for the curious: "GNOME..." was a huge hit in my media aesthetics class. when my professor went around asking us how many pictures we took to get our final products, my peers all said "oh about 20 pictures, and i only used 18." they got to me and i was like "oh well i took about 350 photos in total. i only used 34." everyone just kinda stared at me... my professor alerted everyone to the "Hitchcock" in the class. considering my influences, i'll take that as a HUGE compliment!

unfortunately, though, the project + a paper resulted in my first ever full-out all-nighter. that is, i didn't sleep a wink the entire night. as of 5 pm today, i was going on 44 straight hours without sleep. suffice it to say, i am literally collapsing.

so, adieu.
-stephan!e
(who has decided she's going into the movies, to be a gaffer.)

my take on the kuleshov experiment, with gnomes

i spoke with my media aesthetics professor today and she said i could try creating an internal conflict. this, rather than an explicit narrative arc, is more appealing, but also more difficult. i'm not interested in crafting a dialogue, but am more concerned with providing the images that will elicit the dialogue themselves. i'm fairly laissez-faire in my own affairs, why not be that way with my art?


i'm so picky. is that the sign of an artiste? or mis-direction?

---

i've decided this gnome project could take a Lev Kuleshov historical turn. for those who don't know, the Kuleshov experiment took the same shot of a man with a neutral expression and juxtaposed it with images of different things: food, a woman, a funeral, and found that ppl read different emotions into his expression, based on their own associations.

see a short clip from the experiment here:

since i am working with a non-expressive, fixed/static subject (geoff), the responsibility for emotive effect lies solely on me and my ability to manipulate the images in just the right way.

only instead of intercutting images, i'm using lighting and camera angle to create my effects.

you see what i mean?