my birthday, other sources of celebration, nonfiction
Thanks to
roxymissrose for the birthday wishes!
It’s the OTW’s April fundraising drive! I donated, and I’m looking forward to my spiffy reward cup. As
cesperanza says: “Support the OTW y'all! You know you want to! Your nonprofit, all-volunteer, one stop fanworks site made by people who did NOT sell you out to venture capitalists and who are NOT trying to take a percentage of your work when you eventually make millions with your hot erotica trilogy! Ten bucks gets you membership. A hundred bucks gets you a nifty tote bag with useful mesh pockets! And a sense of goodwill and community feeling!”
crack_impala is back!
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture: Attempts to define memes (and distinguish them from partially overlapping concepts like virality) as highly transmissible and reconfigurable units of digital culture. I was struck by the conclusion that very popular “user-generated” videos tend to be about “flawed masculinity”-something Shifman didn’t set out to study. Men were mostly the leading characters, and they generally failed to meet cultural standards for masculinity in some way or another, from the Numa Numa guy to the Star Wars kid to Chris Crocker in “Leave Britney Alone.” As elsewhere, “flawed” initial texts prove most open to reworking, since they invite responses/corrections.
I also really liked the observation that the genre of “advice animals” (also including human characters) like Fanfic Flamingo, as an array of stock character macros, “provides a glimpse into the drama of morality of the First World of the twenty-first century: it is a conceptual map of types that represent exaggerated forms of behavior….[T]hese extreme forms tend to focus on success and failure in the social life of a particular group.” In other words, they’re Pilgrim’s Progress for the 21st century. And this bit about the memetic force of “Gagnam Style,” which Shifman argues was suitable for wide adaptation because of the “connotative richness of the word ‘style’ … the ‘visible manifestation of social meanings.’” Thus Psy’s video could be repurposed to express national, regional, or subcultural entities, from “Mexi Style” to “Romney Style” to (my favorite) “NASA Johnson Style.”
Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society: This is mostly an autobiography: a black boy grows up in Florida, through luck makes it into the military where his interest in learning is slowly awakened, and ends up a tenured Columbia professor. Many in his family have downward trajectories instead; early poverty and violence didn’t provide them with the resource cushions that would have helped insulate them from individual bits of bad luck/bad decisions. Hart discusses his early experiments with drugs, crime, and random sex (in fact, he later discovered he had a son he didn’t know about-a son who didn’t graduate from high school and now has five children of his own, while the two slightly younger sons Hart raised are just teenagers) in the course of arguing that poverty and racism, not drugs, produce the scary things we’re taught come from drugs. Only a small percentage of users, he says, become truly addicted; even addicts make rational decisions; but if you’re poor, the alternatives to drugs aren’t that attractive. He advocates decriminalization and treatment, not so much to decrease the rate of drug use-he doesn’t think that’s the right goal-but to decrease the appalling toll of imprisonment, impaired job prospects, and destroyed lives that a police-oriented approach has on African-American communities and especially men.
Danah boyd, It’s Complicated: Boyd’s book, available for free on her website, recounts her ethnographic research on the internet lives of American teens of different races and classes. She challenges many of the simple conclusions popular in the media. Teens do value privacy-but they don’t often struggle through the difficulty of making their ordinary posts/tweets private, difficulty that’s been deliberately created by the corporations interested in having people expose themselves. The result: their ephemeral interactions are “suddenly persistent, creating the impression that norms have radically changed even though they haven’t.” Instead, teens are trying new ways to get privacy, for example by controlling access to meaning/using code words, as disempowered people have long done.
Boyd constantly emphasizes teens’ relative (pun intended) lack of power in their lives. Teens use social media to hang out with their friends, when their parents often cut off other ways of socializing because of fear of public spaces. Teens, she says, mostly aren’t addicted to social media; “if anything, they’re addicted to each other,” and it’s this desire for connection that’s misdiagnosed as antisocial texting. Teens are excluded from many physical spaces/parts of public life, but they struggle against this, using social media and other networked technologies both socially and politically.
Adult fears and mis-fears are a big part of the book. “American society despises any situation that requires addressing teen sexuality, let alone platforms that provide a conduit for teens to explore their desires.” But adult attempts to isolate teens from risks are damaging, undermining teens’ trust and eroding social ties: “When parents create cocoons to protect their children from potential harms, their decision to separate themselves and their children from what’s happening outside their household can have serious consequences for other youth, especially those who lack strong support systems. Communities aren’t safe when everyone turns inward; they are only safe when people work collectively to help one another.”
Boyd also critiques the rhetoric of teens as “digital natives” who are more savvy than their elders. First, she unpacks the term “native”: “throughout history, powerful immigrants have betrayed native populations while destroying their spiritual spaces and asserting power over them.” Also, she points out that teens aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about digital spaces (many have the same difficulty controlling their Facebook settings that their elders do) or about digital sources (they’ve been taught to distrust Wikipedia, but that just means they go to the next search result down, which is often worse; “[m]any teens I met assumed that someone verifies every link that Google shares,” and many people regardless of age treated Google as neutral, unlike the NYT or Fox).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
roxymissrose for the birthday wishes!
It’s the OTW’s April fundraising drive! I donated, and I’m looking forward to my spiffy reward cup. As
cesperanza says: “Support the OTW y'all! You know you want to! Your nonprofit, all-volunteer, one stop fanworks site made by people who did NOT sell you out to venture capitalists and who are NOT trying to take a percentage of your work when you eventually make millions with your hot erotica trilogy! Ten bucks gets you membership. A hundred bucks gets you a nifty tote bag with useful mesh pockets! And a sense of goodwill and community feeling!”
crack_impala is back!
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture: Attempts to define memes (and distinguish them from partially overlapping concepts like virality) as highly transmissible and reconfigurable units of digital culture. I was struck by the conclusion that very popular “user-generated” videos tend to be about “flawed masculinity”-something Shifman didn’t set out to study. Men were mostly the leading characters, and they generally failed to meet cultural standards for masculinity in some way or another, from the Numa Numa guy to the Star Wars kid to Chris Crocker in “Leave Britney Alone.” As elsewhere, “flawed” initial texts prove most open to reworking, since they invite responses/corrections.
I also really liked the observation that the genre of “advice animals” (also including human characters) like Fanfic Flamingo, as an array of stock character macros, “provides a glimpse into the drama of morality of the First World of the twenty-first century: it is a conceptual map of types that represent exaggerated forms of behavior….[T]hese extreme forms tend to focus on success and failure in the social life of a particular group.” In other words, they’re Pilgrim’s Progress for the 21st century. And this bit about the memetic force of “Gagnam Style,” which Shifman argues was suitable for wide adaptation because of the “connotative richness of the word ‘style’ … the ‘visible manifestation of social meanings.’” Thus Psy’s video could be repurposed to express national, regional, or subcultural entities, from “Mexi Style” to “Romney Style” to (my favorite) “NASA Johnson Style.”
Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society: This is mostly an autobiography: a black boy grows up in Florida, through luck makes it into the military where his interest in learning is slowly awakened, and ends up a tenured Columbia professor. Many in his family have downward trajectories instead; early poverty and violence didn’t provide them with the resource cushions that would have helped insulate them from individual bits of bad luck/bad decisions. Hart discusses his early experiments with drugs, crime, and random sex (in fact, he later discovered he had a son he didn’t know about-a son who didn’t graduate from high school and now has five children of his own, while the two slightly younger sons Hart raised are just teenagers) in the course of arguing that poverty and racism, not drugs, produce the scary things we’re taught come from drugs. Only a small percentage of users, he says, become truly addicted; even addicts make rational decisions; but if you’re poor, the alternatives to drugs aren’t that attractive. He advocates decriminalization and treatment, not so much to decrease the rate of drug use-he doesn’t think that’s the right goal-but to decrease the appalling toll of imprisonment, impaired job prospects, and destroyed lives that a police-oriented approach has on African-American communities and especially men.
Danah boyd, It’s Complicated: Boyd’s book, available for free on her website, recounts her ethnographic research on the internet lives of American teens of different races and classes. She challenges many of the simple conclusions popular in the media. Teens do value privacy-but they don’t often struggle through the difficulty of making their ordinary posts/tweets private, difficulty that’s been deliberately created by the corporations interested in having people expose themselves. The result: their ephemeral interactions are “suddenly persistent, creating the impression that norms have radically changed even though they haven’t.” Instead, teens are trying new ways to get privacy, for example by controlling access to meaning/using code words, as disempowered people have long done.
Boyd constantly emphasizes teens’ relative (pun intended) lack of power in their lives. Teens use social media to hang out with their friends, when their parents often cut off other ways of socializing because of fear of public spaces. Teens, she says, mostly aren’t addicted to social media; “if anything, they’re addicted to each other,” and it’s this desire for connection that’s misdiagnosed as antisocial texting. Teens are excluded from many physical spaces/parts of public life, but they struggle against this, using social media and other networked technologies both socially and politically.
Adult fears and mis-fears are a big part of the book. “American society despises any situation that requires addressing teen sexuality, let alone platforms that provide a conduit for teens to explore their desires.” But adult attempts to isolate teens from risks are damaging, undermining teens’ trust and eroding social ties: “When parents create cocoons to protect their children from potential harms, their decision to separate themselves and their children from what’s happening outside their household can have serious consequences for other youth, especially those who lack strong support systems. Communities aren’t safe when everyone turns inward; they are only safe when people work collectively to help one another.”
Boyd also critiques the rhetoric of teens as “digital natives” who are more savvy than their elders. First, she unpacks the term “native”: “throughout history, powerful immigrants have betrayed native populations while destroying their spiritual spaces and asserting power over them.” Also, she points out that teens aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about digital spaces (many have the same difficulty controlling their Facebook settings that their elders do) or about digital sources (they’ve been taught to distrust Wikipedia, but that just means they go to the next search result down, which is often worse; “[m]any teens I met assumed that someone verifies every link that Google shares,” and many people regardless of age treated Google as neutral, unlike the NYT or Fox).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.