Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the burgeoning (more like explosion) of global youth culture, a “community of youngish people, roughly from 14 to 35, who share a love of mainstream popular culture including music, movies and fashion and acknowledge a shared mindset with others in their age bracket around the world.” I mentioned that I didn’t think “youth” was a very accurate marker because:

“Global youth cultures is employed to mean both a shared outlook and understanding of the world, and a set of current popular tastes regarding art, music, fashion and other expressive activities. This new globalized outlook may be young right now, but as its adherents age, I think we’ll see it take its place as a normalized understanding of the world.”

Since I wrote this, Viacom (MTV) has released research about this very notion:

“The key finding of the study is that a youthful outlook is no longer the sole preserve of the young and the essential meaning and traditional definition of ‘youth’ has changed. The research identifies a distinct 25-34 year-old ‘Golden Youth’ stage, still actively and emotionally connected to youth culture largely ignored by marketers and advertisers who have been relying upon pure demographic information when targeting young people.”

I also stated that:

“Global youth culture is NOT synonymous with homogenization. Many young people who fit into this age bracket participate in certain mainstream cultural phenomena and not others, as suits their personality and backgrounds. Yes, some might be more conformist and product-oriented than others, but in all cases, it’s employed mostly as a means of expression of identity.”

Viacom/MTV research also addresses this point, finding that hyperfragmentation and expressive activity have converged:

Access to limitless options has fuelled the mix and match culture of individualism and personalised experience. Meanwhile, national pride and regional pride has grown, levelling out preferences for Western culture in Asia, creating a spintering and fusion of popular culture that media companies have had a hard time staying current with.

While the research conclusions from Viacom/MTV stress that youth should no longer be seen as purely a chronological limit, I still think it might make more sense to remove the word “youth” from the concept. There are/will be plenty of 40-year-olds who like to be current with popular culture, although perhaps the stats show a negligible number. For now.

Read the original post for other observations on global youth culture, as well as a little bit about the tricky relationship between the members and commodification/commercialization. The only conclusion I think has become outdated is about entrepreneurial ambition, which has understandably scaled back in light of the recession. On the other hand, expressive and creative ambition has skyrocketed, as MTV Asia notes in this study, with four in ten Asian youth dreaming or performing or writing a book, fully a third interested in creating music or movies or inventing a new product.

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangaremba
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Season of Migration to the North, Tayib Saleh
The Hunger Games, Sue Collins
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
“A Raisin in the Sun,” Langston Hughes
“New Boy,” Roddy Doyle
“The Siege,” James Lasdun
“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle dir.
La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz dir.
A Raisin in the Sun, Daniel Petrie dir.
Besieged, Bernardo Bertolucci dir.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella dir.
New Boy, Steph Green dir.

various, U2
various, M.I.A.
various, Fela Kuti
various, Justice
various, IAM
various, Lady Gaga
various, Madonna
various, Cyndi Lauper
various, David Bowie
various, Tricky

excerpts, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
excerpts, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Speeches and writings from Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
excerpts, Subculture, The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige
excerpts, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, Stuart Hall
excerpts, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
excerpts, The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
excerpts, Antonio Gramsci
excerpts, Michel Foucault
excerpts, Edward W. Said
excerpts, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
excerpts, Sound and Vision: the music video reader by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, Lawrence Grossberg

I don’t see either Slumdog or the Greenpeace-produced video highlighted in the original piece as “poverty porn,” a revolting phrase that I think the people who came up with should be more ashamed of than those who it’s applied to. I realize that pitching levels of sensitivity around contested areas is very hard to negotiate, but the “poverty porn” argument takes it to a very damaging and ultimately useless and bitter end by actually reinforcing the imperialist gaze that it seeks to undercut.

Briefly, poverty porn posits that Slumdog Millionaire, a story about three people from the slums, was exploitative in its focus on poor people in the slums as entertainment. As Alice Miles writes in the Times, “As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too.” It really honestly saddens me that people could think that the film revels in the subjects as pure entertainment, and that it’s a film made only for Westerners. Both of these positions, I think, really dishonor the intentions of Danny Boyle, the filmmaker, who has already made a beautiful film about children in Millions, in which two English brothers who also face poverty, violence, loss, and fantasy in equal measures. No one cried out about exploitation with this film, I suppose because it takes place in England.

The implication of the poverty porn argument is that Western filmmakers are not allowed to make entertainment films about poor people in non-Western countries. Why not? Why should every film about poor people be only about their struggles and strictly in a realist vein? To say that is to say that the only audience that matters is a Western one. To say that light, escapist films can only be about rich or reasonably well-off people is to imply that poor people can’t be happy, and that their enjoyment of a film doesn’t matter–ie, that the Western well-off viewer is the only one that matters.

On to the argument that Slumdog exploited the city of Mumbai by only focusing on certain parts of the city. Expecting every visual representation of a place be completely three-dimensional and accurately representational is totalizing and damaging to art. A film can only be as representational as what the person behind the camera sees on the streets. The film was made by a primarily Indian cast and crew, so who gets the blame for not accurately capturing the city?

Finally, why should any dramatic story about India be a wholesale comprehensive depiction of the entire country? This is giving too much import to the documentary aspects of storytelling and not enough to the imaginitive or artistic aspects. As a narrative adapted from a fictional plot-driven work (and in no way a documentary), Slumdog was hardly positioning itself as an accurate depiction of the entire country of India or the city of Mumbai–which could hardly happen in a single movie anyway, since it is so diverse.

One of the main problems with the arguments around poverty porn are that they are the arguments of a subjective voice wanting an objective product about a contested area. There is simply no way a visual depiction of a place is going to capture every aspect of a place that every viewer will want. There is also no way a narrative-based story is going to represent a city or country in its totality. And ultimately, there is no reason why it should. But at its core, I think the real argument against giving credence to the concept of poverty porn is that it ignores and belittles the gaze and sentiments of the very people it purports to protect.

Anderson’s first hint at this path is in The Royal Tenenbaums, where in a flashback, we see Margot and Richie run away to live in a museum, a reference to the lovely book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that enchanted my sister and I when we went to see it in the theatre.

What exactly do we call this trend? It’s new, no other generation has gone through a phase exactly like this. We are reliving/re-engaging with our childhoods through new media interpretations of old childhood experiences. Sesame Street turned 40 last week, and Facebook was there to host our memorializing (but ephemeral) clip-fest. Our past is our present.

Yes, other generations have experienced the return of the past, as the 70’s had their comeback and before that the 60s and before that…. But what’s different about that is that the pop music that came back into fashion, the clothes, the hairstyles and the idols, these are markers of adulthood for most people, the process of coming of age. It’s more an exercise in reliving a heady period of taking chances and maturation to immerse yourself in retro.

But our childhoods are indisputably back and taking center stage in our daily lives, and not necessarily through a reinterpretation for our children. Even before Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary, Wonder Showzen has already done its best to de-sacredize (desecrate isn’t working for me) the Sesame Street lessons and songs we grew up taking as gospel. Our childhood objects are no longer only the ken of children. Will this affect our relationship to childhood objects today?

My guess is no–I don’t watch Dora the Explorer, or Caillou, or any of the anime shows that seem to dominate children’s programming today. But will today’s children just keep holding onto their childhood idols as they age? That’s a better question. I’m not sure, today’s media cycle is speedy and fitful, longevity and endurance seems an unlikely by-product. But it’s the collision of that culture with Anderson’s Long Tail that makes me wonder.

Every free moment I’ve had for the past month has been consumed by planning and dealing with the logistics of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, a conference about digital labor. As the volunteer coordinator, I was responsible for staffing and recording the 3 day conference at the New School. The event finally happened on Thursday to Saturday, and our team accomplished so much in that time.

Together, 26 volunteers provided full coverage for 24 different events over 3 days in 7 different locations in 4 buildings. We provided a staggering 266.5 hours of work over the two-and-a-half days, with many people working 8+ hour days. The video team deserves a special mention most of whom pulled 8 hour days both Friday and Saturday, sharing 3 sets of equipment among 6 people, trading cards between sessions and successfully covering 15 sessions without losing a single cable, card or camera. And in terms of the attendees, panelists and hosting institution, the event was a huge success, as well as seeming to be an important marker in labor studies.

Was it worth it? Well, so far, I’m not really sure. My interest in volunteering in the first place was to be more intimately involved in the experience, and to be able to network with panelists and get really familiar with the arena of labor studies, particularly in the digital space. By that measure, my experience was a complete and utter failure. Since I was command post for all questions, problems, and fixes, I didn’t get to attend a single session, so I didn’t learn ANYTHING about the field academically.

I volunteered myself for this project with pretty high hopes, but ultimately it ended in the familiar experience of taking volunteer jobs as a way to push forward professionally, but without the anticipated payoff. Similarly, my internships have been less than the key to professional advancement I expected them to be. And while one volunteer experience turned into a regular consulting job, I was never paid at a competitive level, which I suspect is in part due to its free origins debasing its value for my clients.

In my experience, volunteer labor as a means of professional development is not adequately valued, an issue which has been written about in a New York Times series on internships by Douglas Martin and Anya Kamenetz among others. I know IPF included at least one session on extremely cheap labor that is essentially free in Second Life, and I hope they addressed strictly volunteer labor as well. I should add, there is a big difference between casual volunteering, like reading stories at your local library or helping with a fundraiser on the day of, versus being a part-time employee who just doesn’t get paid. And I’m definitely talking about the latter type of volunteering.

So this conference has left me a little sadder as I catch my breath before trying vainly to catch up in my three graduate classes, while teaching a 1.5 hour class to English Language Learners (also unpaid) and leading data research on an animation project at Eyebeam (also, you guessed it, unpaid). One of my few consolations is that I will be presenting a paper at the MLA conference at the end of the year, and will have a chance to immerse myself in a conference the way I want to — hearing interesting people talk about interesting subjects, and being able to engage in dialogue with them.

It would be remiss in me to not mention my other major consolation, which was recruiting, meeting, and working with the volunteers for this conference. Being part of a team is a really nice feeling, one I miss from my old days doing policy events and strategic communications full-time. And this team was one of the nicest I’ve worked with. The student life can be one of isolation, writing papers that engage in private conversations with often dead scholars and seen by a single professor, who may write only perfunctory comments back to you. Having the chance to hear everyone discuss the sessions they worked and saw was a pleasure, and I’m glad I got to be a part of that.

Will I stop doing big volunteer projects? I guess it depends on whether people stop doing really awesome things I want to be a part of. So come on people, stop being all creative and interesting! Right now. Stop it.

This is what I wrote in KQED’s Mixtape back in April of 2008:

“Heartbeat” – No Longer At Ease, Nneka

It completely stumps me that Nneka did not find worldwide acclaim with her 2005 debut release Victim of Truth, but if first single “Heartbeat” is any indication, it sounds like her forthcoming release No Longer At Ease may just do the trick. The stuttering chorus, trip hop-influenced beats and driving bassline all serve Nneka’s insistent vocals, delivering a passionate plea for global compassion. Nneka’s unique brand of globalized neo soul is fed by her Nigerian roots and subsequent transplatation to Germany. If you stop by her MySpace page, don’t leave without listening to “Suffri,” another standout from the new album which was released on April 25, 2008.

Nneka’s gearing up to put out her third album, and I think my prediction is finally going to come true — the crowd was small but completely attentive and enthusiastic — except for the laggard few still munching on the obligatory $12 purchase to get seats (Joe’s Pub is weird), who Nneka acknowledged with a “bon appetit!” Every song had been reworked from the studio version with new beats, she played quite a few new ones (all outstanding, none retreads), and her onstage passion for her songs and her cause was electric. As for her pipes and musicality? Totally flawless live.

Turns out this was Nneka’s debut US gig tonight, and I’m so glad I got a chance to be there for it. She’s jamming with The Roots tomorrow and a week from tomorrow at the Highline Ballroom, and stopping in SF at Cafe du Nord Nov 11. Don’t miss it.

From the article:
“The top 30 websites [serve] up 30 percent of net traffic, either from their own sets of pipes or from data centers around the world that connect much closer to your computer — and for much cheaper — than ever before.”

“In 2007, the majority of the internet’s traffic came distributed by 30,000 blocks of servers around the net. In 2009, 150 blocks served up half of the net’s traffic.”

“The real money is in the ads and services in the packets, not in moving the bits from computer to computer. The cost of bandwidth has fallen and so too have the profit margins for moving bits.”

But then I stumbled across Hipster Runoff, which uses the exact same format and tone, like exACT. (Except, not as funny or imaginative, at least in this painfully obvious post on the horrors of dentistry. Not to mention that it loses points for naming itself after a loathsome modern-day evil. And it is of course plastered at the moment with ads for Where The Wild Things Are.) Why?? What is it about people that they have to see something and then imitate it exactly down to the smallest details, like the way Huffington Post imitated the Drudge Report’s crappy fonts and colors and GIANT TEXT — what the hell is that? Can’t there be competition among products that aren’t interchangeable in design, if not content??

Now that I’ve found the two, the questions start plaguing me. Which came first? How many others are out there and fast multiplying? And which other types of blogs are going to adopt the image-heavy format with meandering writing style? Time for a gif party to calm me down. Yeah, This Recording wins hands down.