Embracing Convergence Culture

In re-reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture, I have been left to ponder YouTube anew.  Now that YouTube has worn off some of its newness and novelty, some other trends are starting to form.  Yes, YouTube is still a place of cat videos and kids messing around with cameras, but the emergence of truly independent music artists is striking.  Because Apple is now letting YouTubers selling itunes of their musical creations, the distribution hierarchy of music has the potential of being side-stepped.  Many of these musicians are participating in convergence culture, they are remixing popular music and showing off their talent by performing popular songs.  In many instances, I enjoy these YouTube musicians' performances much more than the originals.  Musicians that normally wouldn't get noticed or perhaps would get bypassed by record labels because they don't fit the pop music "type" can easily find a fan following. 

I don't want to sound overly optimistic.  I have spent enough time on YouTube to know that there are also a lot of not very talent musicians out there.  Yet, I find the more I spend time with mainstream media, the more I become disillusioned and unsatisfied, and look to other sources, particularly YouTube to find something that fits with my sensibilities.

Sometimes YouTube Gives Me Hope

I've been reading Digital Media and Democracy:  Tactics in Hard Times edited by Megan Boler with very mixed opinions about whether the internet and the proliferation of digital media is constructive or destructive to democracy.  Does being in a digital media saturated society with easy online interactions promote a "feeling" of being active online, which translates into not being active in the real world? Or does becoming interested in something online prompt to you real world action.  Especially, how can real life action be connected to something more explicitly political, not just merely consumer choice?  For example, does purchasing eco-friendly products really make a stand for environmental protection?

This collection is addressing democracy specifically, but I believe these questions can be posed to other areas as well.  As someone involved in humanitarian work, what kinds of implication do "feeling" active online, versus real action have for the poor, disenfranchised, or ill?  What good do literally buying into those products that donate a percentage of profit to charity do?   I believe in real human interaction to help real problems, but also believe in the power of information and access.  However, one can get easily lost in the overwhelming amounts of the digital online, distracted endlessly, and never find what you're really looking for in the same internet that provides the information to connect you with something that has the possibility of real solutions.

YouTube in particular makes me conflicted, but today, in spite of the silliness, it gave me some hope.  One of the Vloggers I watch got invited to Kenya by the Supply Education Group, and following his trip has been involved in raising money for a secondary school.

writing culture on the bodies of celebrities

As I've been reading The Persistence of Whiteness : Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema edited by Daniel Bernardi, one article in particular made itself manifest in my everyday life encounters.  In Framing Jennifer Lopez: Mobilizing Race From the Wide Shot to the Close-up,  Priscilla Pena Ovalle discusses how Lopez  at different points in her career has been whitened in her appearance and her characterization, while simultaneously remaining an Othered female.  For non-white female celebrities, the pressure to conform with mainstream standards of beauty go beyond thin frames and flawless skin, but include de-emphasizing ethnic features, especially hair.

Perhaps I am just a little idealistic in my hope that mainstream media images of beauty will one day reflect the diversity of women in all shapes and colors, but the "persistence of whiteness" is correct so far.  I was particularly struck by the images of Beyonce's latest album cover, which inscribes whiteness all over her body. It is probably touched up, but nevertheless, she seems almost unrecognizable from the Beyonce I remember from Destiny's Child and a very current example of what Pena Ovalle addresses in her article.   

Theory and Life

To encourage myself while I go through the qualifying exam process, I thought I would post updated examples of what I've been reading about.  By the very nature of reading for a qualifying exam, some materials may be "essentials" but have very dated examples. So, to connect theory with my life, I will attempt to draw those connections here. 

Currently, I am reading  Understanding Popular Culture by John Fiske and found some of his comments particularly helpful with thinking through my own work on fan cultures.  Fiske says that because we live in a late capitalist society we must act as consumers.  Few of us make our own shoes or build our own houses, in short we live in a society that has made it nearly impossible to provide the basic necessities of life on our own.  We must consume.  It is in the how we consume that makes up popular culture.  The truly popular is consumption made to fit the needs of the people, perhaps in ways the producers did not intent.  The popular can satisfy a need the producers have not filled, or satisfy the need to rebel against impersonal consumer products.

These particular comments by Fiske connected with me because I have been struggling to find a different answer to the idea that consumerism contributes to a system that values things over people and there is no way to escape.  I think Fiske is right, we have to consume, we can't just go hide out in a cave somewhere and weave clothing out of grass and forage for food.  That's not the society we live in.  It is the way we consume that can disrupt our impersonal consumer society.

Updating Fiske, for me, means we have to explore the ways in which the internet, cheap digital technology, and cell phones have helped us take our consumer products and make them popular, by altering them, changing their meaning, and appropriating them.

 

Prep for the GRE and get an iPad for FREE!?!

It's too good of an offer not to post this anywhere.  My work is giving out $499 rebates for iPads if you enroll in one of their test prep courses by Dec 31.  If you are already thinking about prepping for these test or know anyone who is thinking about prepping for the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT, LSAT then this is a fantastic deal.  The courses are a little expensive, but definitely get results, and would be totally worth it if you're getting an iPad out of it.

http://www.princetonreview.com/preponthemove.aspx

kids at the center

picking stickers for finishing homework

playing outside in the neighbor's field

balloon races

antony showing his origami

making collages

video about cajamarca

A video we made about the center in Cajamarca.  (We just like making videos)

More of Peru

showing off the origami I taught them

central plaza in Cajamarca (biggest city in the region)

crazy fruit that´s not really fruit

kids we work with (they love to color)

Ok.  That has to be it for now.  Pictures take forever at this internet cafe.

In Peru

Near where we volunteer

My Camera is Racist

Yes, I am a little bit crazy.  I´m living in Peru for the summer and I don´t quite speak Spanish.  The area where we´re staying can best be described as a small town, bu the area where we´re volunteering is definitely the country.  When my husband and I get on the micro (buses that are public transit but don´t seem to be government or city owned) the more traditional campesinos tend to stare at us.  We´ve gotten some great pictures, but something troubling has happened.  My camera is racist.  So, we have a newer Nikon camera that was given to us as a gift before going on this trip, and haven´t really gotten to use it much.  Much to my surprise the auto setting keeps asking if I have blinked when we take my picture. Sadly, no, I´m not blinking I´m just Asian.  Despite the fact that I´m of the opinion that technology is rarely neutral, it is still surprising that this has occured. 

Visual Research Methods Retrospective

I originally started this blog for my Visual Research Method course to fulfill the requirements for the class.  Initially, I thought that this would be a great idea.  I could articulate my scholarly thoughts in a centralized location, and maybe have a commitment to academic blogging that would be helpful as I begin to undertake my quals.  Throughout the course, I have found that I generally like blogging while I am actually typing, however, this seems to be complicated by two main issues:  finding the time to actually sit down to make the blog and finding thoughts to make a blog about.  This semester more than any other, I have been in a perpetual state of panic about not having enough time to complete all of my assignments and responsibilities.  Perhaps if I were taking less than a full load of classes, or not working, or not preparing to leave the country for the summer, I would look forward blogging instead of  having to find time in my schedule, which usually meant not going to bed in order to fit a post into my schedule.  Additionally, I found that most often when I sat down to compose my blogs, I simply felt like I was being redundant.  I thought my blog would be a place for me to work out my thoughts and have a less structured way to explore my theories, however, I hadn't realized that I am already participating in working out my thoughts outside the classroom and my academic papers as my husband and I are constantly doing this at home.  By the time I sat down to write my ideas for my blog, certain ideas had already been processed in my head and debated with my husband, which meant I had already worked through specific issues and was not really sure what to write, because I wasn't sure if I was writing this to myself, in which case I felt that I was simply rewriting what had been said, or if I was writing for someone who was completely unfamiliar with these topics, in which case I was spending too much time outlining background, also feeling redundant, and not really getting to the meat of the issue.  Even though I was kind of writing for classmates, so many of the members of the VRM class have different backgrounds, it was hard to figure out what was common ground. Perhaps if I simply need to figure out who my audience is.

I think I will continue blogging even when the class is over, but I do need to reevaluate the purpose of my blog and what my ultimate goal is in blogging, so that I don't feel self defeating.  It is helpful to have a record of ideas and theories, not just class papers, to see how ideas are developing over time.  Academic blogging has made me less wary of academic competition, especially since as recently as last semester I had been told that making your ideas known as an academic before projects are completed allows others to "steal" your ideas and complete books before you.  Especially in the humanities, I need to worry less about "unique" ideas, and worry more about being in conversation with existing scholarship, and blogging can help me find that existing scholarship.

The Good, the Bad, and the Misguided: Mixed Race Asian Digital Storytelling

This video project was done for my Visual Research Methods class with A Fevered Dictation as a part of examining digital storytelling.  We decided to work together on this project because both of us as "hapa" individuals have tried to theorize about being mixed race academically, and have also searched popular culture for satisfactory representation of being bi-racial.  As the use of video technology has become more available, individuals have started making their own digital stories, some of which attempt to address their personal struggles with being mixed race.  Unfortunatley, many of these personal stories only seem to be reiterating popular stereotypes about Asian mixed race individuals: hailing mixed race individuals as kind of natural “melting pot” signifying improved race relations, being able to disband racism with their mere existence, or that mixed race individuals represent some kind of superior hybrid.

Any attempt to challenge the discourse on racial categories must enter an already established discourse on racial and racial construction, as Pierre Bourdieu states that to "revalue upward the notion of multiraciality in American life" only comes as a part of a larger classification struggle. These videos almost always focus on bodies or physical appearance, which usually undermine the argument many mixed race individuals make by not wanting to be looked at as a racial Other, while inviting the viewer to gaze at the "foreign" features of the individual. Especially in the context of bi-racial Asian individuals in the U.S., identification by "white" Americans as being something other than Caucasian, only confirms existing discrimination in which Asian Americans have been perpetual foreigners as Asians first and Americans second.  The dominate mode of scholarly racial discourse revolves around the division between privilege and discrimination, privilege being almost always synonymous with whiteness.  Especially those of mixed white racial ancestry who have been typically denied their claims to whiteness, upward mobility in light of a newer acceptance of multiracials, brings with it economic and social capital that was once denied them.  

 Working on this video project, we made decisions about content, style, and voice very consciously.  While there are some good personal narratives (thoughtful, highlighting cultural/historic context, not making stereotypical melting pot statements), we found that they were harder to find, and more prevalent were the kinds of videos we decided to critique.  We talked extensively about how difficult it was when using video, not to undermine arguments about the gaze, looking, and bodies, when that is mostly what is present in our video.  This project as collaborative was difficult but enjoyable.  We spent a lot more time theorizing and outlining so that both of us could be satisfied with the project, especially since we were dealing with such a personal and issue ridden topic.  We were able to have some productive conversations about our mixed race experience, as well as comparing notes about the scholarly work we had both done in this area.  Also, it was good to work with a fellow scholar and friend.  

Gaming to Change the World?

Maybe we can pool collective wisdom to change the world.  I don't know if people believe in epic wins in real life, but I suppose its worth a shot.

thinking about docs on fandom

is weekend as a little break from hard work on final projects, I took a break and watched King of Kong:  A Fist Full of Quarters.  This documentary follows Steve Wiebe as he breaks the world record score for Donkey Kong and his attempt to get that score legitimized by Twin Galaxies, the official score keeper of classic video games.  The drama of this documentary is that the officials at Twin Galaxies all seem to be groupies of the existing world record score player, Billy Mitchell.



While I enjoyed this documentary on many levels, I always have mixed feelings watching these kinds of fan documentaries.  I understand that these docs cannot begin to explain the complex dynamics of these communities, but that the filmmakers can get at least a glimpse of a world we might not be apart of.   Additionally the skills or cultural capital of this group is made clear, which can help to illustrate how value is flexible according to the properties of specific communities.  However, there is always the major risk of bringing a community to outsiders attention, and exploiting that, and belittling the members of a community.

With King of Kong, this line between sharing a community and belittling its members seemed especially thin.  While the complicated process of validating scores and the politics of who gets recognition within the community seemed even more complex than I could have imagined, the lack of context for quotes especially from the non-major players in the documentary seemed to fall directly into the main kinds of video game player stereo-types (socially incompetent, nerdy, male, adolescent, intellectual in the wrong areas).   Even the protagonist Steve, seems set up from the start to be kind of abnormal--a desire to break a world record in order to fill his unemployment time.  Of course Steve's refusal to stop playing Donkey Kong to help his son in order to reach his top scoring goal is made insignificant when compared to Billy Mitchell's schemes in order to stay number one.  As the film progresses Steve's non-game playing activities are highlighted, in order for the audience to connect and sympathize with him and away from Billy.  While this is an effective filmmaking technique, it leaves me wondering how playing up "nerdiness" or "obsession" undermines the individuals while simultaneously enhancing the narrative of the film.  This happens so often in these types of docs, but is it ok?

Is it naive to want to change the world?

 After viewing Food Inc. and writing about it for one of my classes, I found myself continually coming back to some critics and bloggers who dismiss the film's message of consumer empowerment as naive.  Personally, I didn't feel that the film was naive, but found it refreshing that the film asked its audience members to do something about the issues raised in the film.  Well, maybe more than refreshing.  As a person interested in  the problems of consumerism and a believer that ordinary people do have power to make large scale changes, I want people to watch a film like Food Inc and actively make changes in their lives.  I frequently watch documentaries about social, environmental, and political issues that work to educate audiences, yet can leave an individual feeling overwhelmed and powerless to change anything.  Documentaries of this sort are usually made with a goal to shape opinions, but wouldn't shaping action be even more effective? 

Some might argue that it would be impossible to go all organic or all local, and I would have to agree.  It would be very time consuming and very expensive to undertake such a lifestyle, although some can do it.  Personally, I am not going to give up everything that's not local, and my trips to the 99 Ranch Market to purchase honeydew soymilk shipped from Hong Kong definitely disqualify me from being a locavore.  However, I am not silly enough to buy things like strawberries, oranges, or raisins from outside of my currently location in California, since all those things are made right where I live.  So what does it matter if I get my produce locally?  Would that even make a dent in corporate food?  If Steven Hopp is correct in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, then by eating one local meal a week, it could change the food economy up to 10 percent, and "reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.  That’s not gallons, but barrels." 

I also think back to a consumer culture course I took a couple years ago.  Most people think about consumer movements as Upton Sinclair's  Jungle or the addition of labeling on food products, but we talked extensively about the links between Civil Rights actions and consumerism.  Bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were an intricate part of protests and action against segregation.  The pressure placed on national chains that had segregated branches in the South were the most effective because the pressure placed on them was national.   Additionally, the U.S. government used commerce to get its way, in Katzenback v. McClung, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, deemed segregation at restaurants illegal because it violated the interstate commerce clause. 

I think in such a consumerist society that purchasing power can make a difference, and I don't think its naive to ask people to know how their food or other products are produced.

everyone should watch

the power of juxtaposition

This past week I've been working on a paper about reactions to the atomic bomb for my history class, and enlisted the film Atomic Cafe as one of my resources.  This documentary has been on my radar for a while, but this was a good excuse to move it up my queue.  The entire film was done using archival materials from newsreels, the dropping of the atomic bombs, military training videos, educational videos, and medical footage from the 1940s and 1950s.  The entire film was done without narration, with audio existing on the archival footage and minimal titles--in fact I think most of the titles were on the existing archival footage. 

Perhaps I haven't seen an only archival footage documentary in a long time, or one as exclusively based in archival footage, but the power of the creators thesis was clear, merely by the juxtapositioning of images.  After spending a considerable time thinking about how to make documentaries and ethnographies, I was unprepared to think so much about post-production, rather than the production aspect.  I've spent so much time thinking about how to respectfully approach subjects without making them objects, how to frame scenes, what questions to ask, etc., that I've spent little time thinking about editing.  In Atomic Cafe, the footage remaining the same, could have been edited together to make almost a whole new thesis, if one wanted too.  Obviously when much of the footage was originally used, it was propaganda supporting the bomb, and one could have edited that together to continue that point of view.  However,  It was very clear from the placement of "duck and cover" drill videos with images of some of the measurements of the damage at Hiroshima, that this not only advocated peace and anti-nuclear action, but implicated America as victimizer.

 

Besides the increased attention I will be doing to documentary and ethnography editing, I also feel like I need to reexamine the casual way in which atomic was used following the bombing.  Within and incredibly brief time, the term atomic began to be used for everything from music, to drinks, and to movie stars. But that's another project.  

my first video essay

Disposable Bodies Video Essay







I was immediately inspired while reading Norbert Wiener's "Men, Machines, and the World" to address a visual topic that also involved social responsibility.  The more theoretical work I read about media studies, the visual studies, and digital media, the more I was drawn into the notion of our changing view of our self and our bodies.  Here I was drawn to the work of  Amelia Jones's  "Dispersed Subjects and the Demise of the 'Individual 1990s Body in/as Art'"  and N. Katherine Hayles'  "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." We are constantly rethinking our bodily-kinesthetic relationship to computers based on the evolving technology of the interface.  The new tablet technology I use in the video is only the most recent manifestation of this.

However, the continued technologizing and multiplying of our bodies really only applies to those who constantly and consistently use this technology.  I began to think about a lecture I attended by Toby Miller in which he theorized our relationship to the television itself, as a thing. Our relationship with television screens and computer screens is not permanent, both metaphorically and physically.  The physical object of the screen will become obsolete as new technology comes to replace the old.  What happens to the self when the computer, which was once intimately connected to us, is disposed of?  What happens to those bodies that must deal with our techno-trash?

I propose that our relationship with the technobody, our and others, is entirely dependent on real world social and political realities.  Why else would we dump e-waste in developing countries where damage is being done to poor bodies of color?

Making this video essay was an interesting process.  I researched in the same way I would to write an essay, but the evidence I used seems more random and required more analysis on my part to make connections.  I also have not used irony in written essays before, but appreciate their use in visual text, and found it much easier to be visually ironic than on  paper.  I felt as if the technical process took up more time, not because of the use of video editing software, but because I was acutely aware that others would be viewing this video, and it was not just an exchange between myself and a professor.

Reading a Photo with Cultural Anthropology

I've find myself continually returning to this image. While the aesthetics of the photograph are poor, much to my own chagrin of having taken it in a rush, it is an image I am continually rethinking. This past week in my Visual Research Methods course, I encountered some ideas that will help me in this desire to better read this image.

Our guest lecture during the class did an incredibly contextual analysis of 17th Century Genoan depictions of the Virgin Mary and the controversy of crowning her the queen of Genoa.  While I cannot say that the inter-workings of  the Genoa Republic will be useful in any of my future scholarship, it was an incredible example of how to dig deeper and use all available avenues to really dissect an image more than merely discussing its aesthetics. 

In encouraging us to apply interdisciplinary principles to the study of visuals, we discussed Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner.  While this was not my first time working through Geertz, I think that the value of thick description should not be underestimated when applied to visual images.  In my Elivs-Stormtrooper image you could continue to read the image in terms of what made Elvis so popular and imitable as well as what makes Star Wars, and specifically Stormtroopers imitable.  However, it is probably more than merely the symbol of these two popular images that prompted this individual to don his attire, but a larger cultural impulse of media convergence that has become popular.  The media technology that we now possess (or those of us who use and possess) has encouraged all sorts of re-interpreting and re-inventing of popular images that makes something like a Elvis-Stormtrooper possible.  There are so many layers to what could be said:  Is it that Elvis will live on--even into the future?  Or perhaps because Star Wars was "a long time ago and a galaxy far far way" that no one can escape the influence of Elvis?  Is it a commentary of what he wished was under the Stormtrooper helmet?  Do the values of Star Wars and the values of Elvis coincide?  Is it merely an attempt to get extra usage out of both an Elvis costume and a Stormtrooper costume?

But perhaps I should point out that this particular image is also tied to the place in which I took the photograph, San-Diego Comi-con, which comes with another set of "cultural" values as well.  Comic-con has an atmosphere of festival and performance that is not typical of everyday settings, and one in which dressing as a convergence pop-culture imagined figure would not be unusual, and perhaps encouraged.  I find Victor Turner helpful here, and wish that I had read his material before when for a previous class I attempted to discuss some of the aspects of convention costumes.  When you think about performance as an integral part of culture, that life is very much like theater, it is helpful to see very obvious manifestation of this in the costume culture of  dressing up at a convention.  We perform as part of a space that brings social cohesion and inscribes meaning in an event.  Comi-con is a kind of imagined community that only appears physically once a year, and so in participating in one of its most popular events, the masquerade, one could be said to have credentials to show one belongs in that community.   Our Elvis-Stormtrooper is as much at Comi-con to see as he is to be seen.  While most of us don't don superhero or pop culture costumes everyday, there is performance for all of us in the way we select clothing, wear appropriate work attire, or style our hair, that makes the costuming of Elvis-Stormtrooper less unusual that I would have previously thought.  Our own everyday performance enables us to show what communities we belong to, as much as Elvis-Stormtrooper is proving his part in the Comi-con community.