Media activists and forward thinker Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, raps on “imaginary cosmopolitanism,” “wisdom of the flock,” and “human curators.” He shows that despite the global nature of networks, most of us still remain within cultural bubbles and there remains little crossover between users of different cultural environments. The solution? We need more DJing.

America’s Blog posted a series of images demonstrating how BP photoshopped its command center for its Website. Apparently there is a trickster in their midsts, but the photoshopped image (posted above) actually is from the set of the wonderful TV series, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not to make light of the seriousness of the Gulf oil spill, but is this not a plot line from the old TV show? Where are the robot comedian deconstructionists when we need them?

Update: here are some more hilarious photoshopped versions.

As Wired.com points out (Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High), there is a new hysteria about a craze called “i-dosing.” As the story goes, teens are encouraged to put on headphones and to listen to ambient tracks on the Internet that induce feelings of pleasure and ecstasy. God help them! As the Wired article points out, the phenomena is getting the attention of some concerned folks who worry that this is simply a gateway to some other drug, like marijuana or LSD. Never mind that this is much safer than a much more pressing addiction: our insatiable appetite for war and petroleum.

Indeed, their fears are likely confirmed by the graphic on the signature i-dose track (posted above), “Gates of Hades” (you have to let it run a little to see it). If anything I find the electronic pulse on this track annoying. I much prefer a Tibetan bowl, Balinese gongs, chanting ohm or my favorite: a live Sonic Youth feedback jam. But hey, who can fault teens for wanting to transcend the hellish nightmare we call school and American consumerism.

The fear of teens evading the control of the capitalist/Church mind trap are normal in America. During a time when corporations have hijacked democracy and are poisoning the planet, there’s never a better moment to whip up hysteria about how race music/rock/rave/Internet are abducting our children.

Incidentally, the article’s comments are hilarious. My favorite comment from Zombowski who put it this way: “I can’t figure out how to get the music into the needle. Do I shoot it up with an old record player?”

A good culture jam always brings me a smile! In case you can’t read the label on the right, it says L’oreal Insect Repellent.

Via Wooster.

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

I love both the aesthetic and paradigmatic approach of this video as a potential solution for the environmental crisis. Though I’m encouraged by the proposed solutions at the end of the video, I’m not sure if they will necessarily pan out as stated, mainly because I think it will emerge in ways that we can’t imagine quite yet (a la Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World). I also don’t agree with its “war on climate change” rhetoric. Nonetheless, the form of the video (it’s a collaboration between 24 artists) and its central concept of the swarm and its re-presentation of the ’60s as a rhizomatic prototype (and its critique of the co-optation of ’60s culture) shows us that we already have lots to build on.

You can learn more about the creators, Coalition of the Willing, here.

In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, which takes the “circuit of culture” approach by looking at how representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation are recursive. We need to update this model to incorporate a sense of social justice, as the above video is pushing for, and also the ecological dimension of production. It’s not just that conflict minerals are a problem in the supply chain, there is also disposal and externalization of the toxic byproduct resulting from built-in obsolescence (you know, what happens to your computer or iPod after you upgrade it).

Enter Lady Gaga. As Nancy Bauer writes in her NYTime philosophy blog post, Lady Power,

“Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, ‘Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.’ Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.”

This is a symptom of something I’ve written quite a bit about: postirony, a toxic byproduct of a peculiar American brand of pessimism that gets its sea-legs in Film Noir, but finds full expression in the commercial exploitation of Gen X cynicism. Postirony is a little hard to define, but is essentially irony turned in on itself: such as selling T-shirts that say “Your rebellion is my marketing strategy.” Thus we get to the perennial debate explored in Bauer’s piece: is the self-conscious exploitation of sexuality by female pop stars an act of empowerment? This discussion began in earnest with Madonna, and in particular her celebration by media critic Camille Paglia, but threads through Tila Tequila’s claim to DIY fame to Lady Gaga’s faux-performance art schtick. Bottom line: the music sucks and we’re venting far too much hot air about the subject (this post guilty as charged).

(You might be interested in Mark Dery’s take on whether or not Lady Gaga is stupid.)

But I have a larger project in mind, one that is tangentially related. After reviewing some of the comments at BoingBoing regarding Xeni Jardin’s post of a videotaped interview with a Gulf boat captain’s exposé of turtles getting fried by BP’s controlled burns, I was particularly saddened by the tone of respondents whose only (written) response to the horror was to joke about the futility of compassion for nature. I’m sure this can be psychoanalyzed to reveal that these cynical posts are actually masking a great deal of pain, but there is too much ironic disposition in the cultural atmosphere to even broach the subject. This may be specific to the kinds of readers at Boing Boing, whose writers are probably a bit dismayed by the pessimistic responses to their generally sincere concern for social justice.

Boing Boing’s writers are cut from the same cloth as punk. Mark Frauenfelder is a veteran zine publisher, and his maker ethic is true to the spirit of DIY. The openness of Boing Boing, and more broadly speaking libertarian Net culture, includes creating space for media freedom fighters like Douglas Rushkoff. But I was utterly dismayed by the overly cynical responses of Boing Boing’s readers to Rushkoff’s call for DIY participatory media democracy (I couldn’t find the link in their archive). I’m horrified by the thought of ever living up to the expectations of such a nasty bunch of readers who are more concerned with cleverness than dialog. Alas, trying to stick out from the fray through tricky turns of phrasing laced with cool bits of humor is what counts in the neoliberal economy that celebrates individual achievement above social cohesion.

Which brings me back to Lady Gaga. I’ve tried my best to ignore her, but every other TV and radio ad has her music in the background, and not a day goes by when my favorite news sites don’t feature a picture of her on their front pages. I’m forced to ask the perennial question of “why?????” But the answer is deceptively simple, and can be reduced to economic discourse: the bottom line is that it makes money. We can argue all we want about the celebration of fan and pop culture, and pooh-pooh the elitist critics for pointing out that we are arguing over the quality of dog crap. So be it. But I’ll go back to something I read when Lady Gaga was just first getting attention. Her big artistic epiphany happened while performing in college. Everyone one was ignoring her until she stripped to her undies. Suddenly the audience took notice and the idea stuck, albeit its expression has been elaborated to the extreme.

Now, I don’t get why someone like millennial it girl Kate Perry–another student of Madonna who learned that it earns interest to kiss a girl and show a lot of cleavage–can get away with calling Lady Gaga’s latest video, Alejandro, “obscene” (OK, I do read Huffingtonpost’s gossip page), when she can do a video with porn-maker Snoop Dogg while simultaneously giving head to a lollypop and sporting a Jesus tattoo on her arm. Honestly, when I began writing this, I didn’t mean to end with Kate Perry. I didn’t even know who she was until last month when suddenly I saw her image everywhere. Initially I thought perhaps her fame was due to some hidden song-writing talent, but discovered after a few quick views on YouTube that there was no there there. Sugary pop is as old as Coca-Cola advertising, and there is nothing to report here of any particular interest other than to reiterate the point that this whole philosophical exploration began with an inquiry into why it is we care to talk so much about the marketing of mammary glands under the pretension of writing about culture.

I suppose I’m engaging in another American tradition, the flipside of all this, iconoclasm, which puts me on the side of fundamentalists and their ilk who hate all images because they are somehow bodily and inherently sexual. Indeed, the lone commenter on my Tila Tequila post was a rabid Christian who obsessively tracked Tila and Suicide Girls in the name of god. Given that Kate Perry is a good Christian, I wonder how this will play out among the true believers who may have not realized that Christ can also be sold with a pair of bosoms. Madonna, who loved the play the Catholic card, got some good milage out of that one. In this sense, we could say there is nothing more rich in pop culture discourse than the mixing of sex and religion. Indeed, at the source this whole discussion is religion. After all, who speeketh? The priests of our age: marketers. And we have gotten on our knees to pray, once again, to their holy discourse. Such is the life of blogging.

I don’t subscribe to satellite or private service in Italy, and only have access to public TV, for which I pay a 100 Euro annual tax. RAI (pubic TV) is only broadcasting one World Cup game a day, which means I have missed many matches, including last night’s crucial game between Ghana and Uruguay. The Net in Italy is now thoroughly filtered so I cannot access live streams from the BBC or ESPN. This is all because the big media monopolies have agreed to gate off large chunks of media, essentially privatizing a global event that arguable belongs in the planetary public sphere.

Incidentally, who pays to train the national teams competing in the World Cup? We do! This is like corporations patenting inventions from public universities.

Burlusconi and Murdoch are big jerks!

As such, I’m now referring to the Deepwater Horizon as the Event Horizon, because for me it reveals the broken condition of our world system’s operating paradigm and offers us a point of visualization that our future selves could look back upon and say: that was the moment we went into recovery and ended our addiction to oil.

Here is some background information that informs my thinking:

After 9/11 people the world over said, “We are all Americans now,” which unfortunately got used for jingoistic purposes and led to two wars (and perhaps in someways indirectly caused the Gulf spill in that oil companies were given free reign to do whatever they wanted as part of the same overall discourse about resource control). If Edward Lorenz could ask the question, Can the flapping of a butterfly cause a tornado in Kansas? Then we should ask, Can a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico lead to the realization that we are all environmentalists?

As strange as this may sound, on Planet BP the oil giant may even seize on this (along with other oil companies) to position itself as a caring and responsible global citizen comprised of environmentalists who love turtles, whales and dolphins. We can’t let this happen. I’m tired of this level of consciousness, and frankly, we need to stop the aliens from ruining the planet. To quote Mike Davis, “sci-fi happens.” Or J.G. Ballard, “The only truly alien planet is Earth.” We don’t need this spill to turn into a Spielberg production. In fact, this might end (we hope) the idea that we can geo-engineer our way out of environmental calamity. Clearly the solution is cultural, political, economic, moral and, I dare say, spiritual. Time for collective intelligence.

BP, and in my opinion with the cooperation with the US government, is spinning this event in ways that are not enabling people to properly prepare for the consequences of what’s “really” happening on the ground/water. I put “really” into quotes because the event has the opacity of oil itself through the censoring and blocking of the press, and of course PR. The spill response is apparently modeled after greenwashing, as the use of the highly toxic Corexit 9500A to disperse ugly oil patches attests to. It’s like trying to use Photoshop to contain an oil spill, except far deadlier (read this post for a not-too-surprising linkage of the money/chemical food chain).

Additionally, consider the following case study.

This is the Website for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command. Everyday the images on the site’s splash page change, but none of them have oil in them. I find it interesting that today it features a turtle being cleaned, which is in stark contrast to a video linking throughout the Web that features the testimony of a boat captain who claims that turtles are being incinerated by BP’s oil burn.

Who is Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and who created the Website? The Economist pried a little and found the site’s origins a little dubious.

Regardless of who’s running the Website, it stinks of top level greenwashing. Meanwhile BP’s PR people have been masquerading themselves as journalists and reporting ridiculous things like, “It’s strangely peaceful up here – just right for surrendering to some meditation….I’m filled with the wonderment of what’s happening below our chopper only moments after it lifts off from an airport in Houma, La.” (Quoted here and also in BoingBoing.)

I could go on.

I intend to use this event as a case study during a summer course. I’d like to suggest that we craft a curricular response and teacher guide for the Fall semester. If we are really ambitious, we can also curate a series of Webinars. There could be a number of units, some of which could be based on the following themes and topics:

* Oil spill as case study of ecological disaster coverage in the media

* Frame analysis of disaster coverage

* Oil spill response as greenwashing

* History of BP greenwashing

* Golf spill discourse analysis

* Oil as a systems paradigm

* Alternative golf spill media

Anyone else game?

I’m a fan of David Korten, who has an uncanny ability to model economic worldviews very clearly. He has updated Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, which includes the following sign-posts of difference making behaviors.

5 Ways to Know if You’re Making a Difference :: Excerpt from the 2nd Edition of Agenda for a New Economy by David Korten:

To bring down the institutions of Empire, we must begin to build the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up.

So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.

1. Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?

2. Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?

3. Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?

4. Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?

5. Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?