Molo

Hello out there

2010-12-10T14:04:00.001-08:00

I just realized that this blog is still up. Indeed it's the number one hit I get if I do a vanity google search.

Yes, it's been a long time. A lot has happened since I last posted. Starting with twins! (2 beautiful boys, Max and Charlie). I finished my dissertation (Consuming identities: Clubs, Drugs, and an Asian American Youth Culture) and Ph.D. And I co-authored a book: Youth, Drugs, and Nightlife

So, it's been a little busy around here. (Hence the whole abandoning the blog thing). And I'm not making any promises :-)

Visual evidence that I have too many books

2007-02-04T20:36:00.000-08:00

I've caught the bug over at Library Thing and made a photo mosaic of Michael and me, using pictures of the covers of all of our books. (Okay, they're mainly mine, but some are his. I wonder if there's a library thing for comic books?). Directions of how to do this can be found here.

Mars is actually quite far away

2006-08-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

Had you heard that yesterday Mars would appear closer than the Moon? That this was a once in a lifetime chance to see Mars upclose, which would not be repeated for decades and decades? My parents, along with millions of other email recipients, had. My poor dad even got the telescope ready!

So, if you peered up at the night sky last night and wondered why Mars didn't seem so big afterall, have solace that at least it wasn't because you were looking in the wrong place. This supposed phenomenon is simply not true. (Nor was it true in any of the previous years in which this email rumor circulated). Phil Plaitt helpfully explains in this article.

Phil runs a great site-- bad astronomy-- devoted to debunking myths, frauds, and bad science related to astronomy. And as an extra bonus, I listened to Phil (along with Cory Doctorow, and Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden and others) on an engaging panel about bloggers as public intellectuals at last week's WorldCon.

(And yes, I had a great time at WorldCon-- hopefully I'll get a chance to blog about it later)

Deadwood Pancakes

2006-08-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

The latest little amusement on youtube: Deadwood Pancakes. As with the show itself, not at all safe for work, nor for those easily offended by foul language. But, if you're a fan of the show, you're sure to appreciate this little diversion.

Word Nerd

2006-08-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

So, I finally made it to see Wordplay, the new documentary about NYT Crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz and the national crossword puzzle tournament. It's one of those movies that just made me smile-- nothing earth shattering, but truly delightful. While I'm a bit biased to the material, as someone who dabbles in puzzling, I think it would be fun for non-puzzlers too.

In the spirit of celebrating my (not-too-hidden) inner word nerd, here are a few other sources of amusement and edification for my fellow logophiles.

* AN ARTICLE: I liked Sudoku, I can see how it's an entertaining way to spend a few minutes, but I honestly got bored with the sameness of it after a while. Crosswords, on the other hand, draw on so many different things, often have a bit of novelty or serendipity-- challenging the history buff, trivia junky, and word nerd in me all at once. A quick look at the effect of Sudoku's wild success (my Dad for instance is a true addict!) on the world of crosswords: Matt Gaffney's Surviving Sudoku

* A NEWSLETTER: Michael Quinion's World Wide Words is a weekly newsletter that includes amusing discussions of neologisms, word mysteries, and word histories-- much in the spirit of his wonderful book Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds and , which debunks numerous folk etymologies, or urban legends about word origins. For example the word "crap" did not come from inventor of the toilet Thomas Crapper. And the expression "rule of thumb" does not derive from Puritan laws about the size of stick one's allowed to beat one's wife with. (These two I'd heard from what I'd taken to be somewhat credible sources).

* A BOOK: I always enjoy Geoff Nunberg's commentaries on Fresh Air when I come across them. His new book on conservative manipulation of language is definitely on my to-read-soon list. The book's title pretty much sums it up: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show

* A DATABASE: The Eggcorn Database is a wonderful collection of a very specific type of errors found in common English usage-- common malapropisms that almost make sense. Or as they describe it on the site:

"And eggcorns are not like just any amusing erroneous substitution: they are special because they arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term's or its constituents' meanings, origins or the under~~lining~~lying metaphors. If you are not convinced, browse our Â?nearly mainstreamÂ? section. Are you sure you've never honed in on an important point or goal? Given free reign to your creativity, or, on the contrary, towed the line? Check out what the man has to say whose refrigerator has given up the goat, so brilliantly retold by Jeanette Winterson in the (London) Times."

* A BLOG: The linguists over at Language Log (Mark Lieberman, Geoffrey Pullum, et al) have compiled their writings into a new book (blook!), Far From the Madding Gerund. I haven't read the book, but I've read enough of their blog postings to know that there's a lot of good material there. At times they delve into linguistic discussions that exceed my grasp of the discipline, but I've learned quite a bit in reading them. It's not purely academic discussion, though, and much of it is quite witty, engaging with politics, popular culture and beyond. See for example their various articles on Dan Brown

*A PODCAST: A Way with Words: This podcast, of a radio show from KPBS in San Diego, in not appropriate for those who cringe at bad puns. Indeed, if you believe in the concept of a "bad pun" you may want to shy away. It's an incredibly cheesy-- but always fun and often quite informative-- hour-long weekly show devoted to etymology, grammar debates, etc. (Um, it's better than it sounds. But only if you're a word nerd.)

Deep Genre

2006-08-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

I just frittered away my lunch hour, immersed in the new-ish blogDeep Genre. The group blog features contributions from Constance Ash, Carol Berg, Barbara Denz, David Louis Edelman, Kate Elliot, Katharine Kerr, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Sherwood Smith, and Lois Tilton-- quite a nice slate of accomplished SF/fantasy writers, that. The blog is chock full of provocative posts about story, narrative, and particularly interesting to me have been the discussions about the boundaries of genre definitions and the relationship between SF and Literature (with a big-fat capital L). See for instance Lois Tilton's posts "Genre Don't Get No Respect" and "Genre Don't Want No Respect." If you're an avid sf reader, it's definitely a blog to take a tour through. If you do check it out, be sure to read the comments-- like one of my very favorite blogs Making Light (from which I'm pretty sure I first found the link to Deep Genre), some of the best isn't just in the (themselves very good) formal entries, but in the ensuing discussions.

Jenkins blogs

2006-07-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that Henry Jenkins has a blog. (Long overdue, in my opinion!) It's only been up since June, but not surprisingly it's already chock full of great, provocative posts, examining such topics as: The longtail and the future of television , using one of my favorite shows (Firefly) as a case study; the meaning and possibilities for video game criticism; and the difficulties facing academics attempting to publish books with a wider audience. And it looks like his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture is due out soon as well. Jenkins's writings on fandom, on popular culture, on convergence and digital media have been quite influential for me. So, I'm happy to have more of his work to dig into.

World Con/Hugos

2006-07-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

In August, we’ll be attending the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), which is in California this year. I've never been before, and I'm looking forward to so many aspects of this—

the more literary emphasis of the con will be a nice change of pace from the ComiCon (though I promise we’ll go back to the ComiCon… and they do have a fair amount of media-related programming at WorldCon as well; for instance: a "Once More w Feeling" (Buffy musical) singalong!). It looks like there will be an excellent lineup. Plus, one of my favorites,Connie Willis, is Guest of Honor
getting to see Michael in action: he’s going to be on a panel, representing his game Star Trek Online, in the future of ST/40^th anniversary track
the lovely billion-degree weather that Anaheim promises in August (er, well, not so much on that one)

But, goofy though it may be, one of the things I’m looking forward to most is voting for the Hugo Awards. When I was first starting out reading the genre and didn’t know where to begin, I used these(and the Nebulas-- and at the time I didn't really understand the difference) to structure my initial reading, and I continue to be interested in (often applauding, occasionally baffled by) who wins each year.

The 5 nominees for best novel (a very boy-centric list this year…) are all entertaining reads, though not all ones likely to go onto my list of all-time faves. Some abbreviated thoughts on them are below.

I’m still working through the nominees for shorter categories (novella, short story, etc.) I’ll admit that I read far less short fiction than I do novels, but the impending the awards (combined with the fact that all of the shorter fiction nominees are available online) has inspired me to dig into them more. So, I’ll hopefully post more about those soon.

A Feast For Crows George R.R. Martin

The one fantasy novel on the list this year, this is the fourth installment in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. This is a remarkable series. While it’s accurate, I think, to describe it as sword & sorcery epic fantasy (though much heavier on the sword than the sorcery), it far surpasses many others in this category in the complexity of the characters, the eschewal of black/white character divisions in favor of a murky, sometimes dismal, gray. This volume was somewhat disappointing (especially after such a long wait) in that it only covered half of the POV characters—the other half of the characters (and the other half of the book, really)—will appear in the next volume. As a stand-alone book, I don’t think it deserves the Hugo (though there’s still much to be admired in it). As a proxy for the series as a whole, I could be convinced—as it is a series very much deserving of the high acclaim it receives.

Learning the World: Ken McLeod

A standalone book by McLeod, Learning the World on the surface could seem like a bit of a throwback to earlier days in the genre—a generation ship/alien first contact tale (albeit one mixed in with some blogging)—and a good one at that. McLeod plays around with (or winks at) the conventions of such a tale in entertaining ways. Less overtly politically engaged than some of his earlier books, it’s not my favorite of his (I’m partial to his initial Fall Revolution series), but a nice read nevertheless and as in all of his books is filled with loads of nifty ideas. It’s not my top Hugo pick, but I just noticed that he still hasn’t received a Hugo—something that seems wrong to me!

Old Man's War: John Scalzi

Scalzi’s debut novel is an entertaining read, to be sure. The book, widely acknowledged as a homage of sorts to Heinlein (and particularly Starship Troopers) tells the story of a new recruit to a fighting force of soldiers, comprising old-aged humans who trade 10 years of service (in deadly fights against aliens) for bodily enhancement/life extension. I’m not particularly a fan of military sf, but while there’s lots of action, the book isn’t terribly violent and though occasionally the dialogue sounded tinny to me, I generally enjoyed the voice of the narrator. It was a fast, fun read. I’m a bit puzzled, though, by Old Man’s War’s hugo nomination. While impressive as a debut novel, to be sure (and the Campbell best new writer award would seem quite appropriate), it just doesn’t quite seem in the league of the other books nominated. Still, though, it makes for good beach reading (and that’s not a category I use pejoratively). I’m also a bit unsure what to make of the politics of the book—or rather, what I think the politics of the book (vis-à-vis war) particularly are—while I suspect its unfair to simply label it as pro-war-rah-rah, it leaned a bit too heavily in that direction to leave me entirely comfortable. If you’ve read the book, I’d be keen to hear your insights on this.

Accelerando: Charles Stross

Perhaps the most important of the books on the list this year, the one that’s having the most impact on the field, Accelerando, however, is not really my favorite of the bunch.

Though most of the novel previously appeared as short stories, I read it for the first time in this full-book form; at times I felt that the parts didn’t completely gel together—though I can also see the argument that this makes sense given the huge transformations/disruptions going on within the near-future universe of the book.

To say that Stross exploded onto the scene in recent years is to risk understatement—his half-dozen novels in fewer than that many years would be hard (and a shame) to miss (and that on top of his prolific short story writing as well). Stross is perhaps the leading chronicler of the singularity and the buzz about him is more than mere hype. His books abound with ideas, fabulous riffs on technologies and politics and economics, and all share a wonderful sense of humor (no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments in this books—the geek-in-jokes, though occasionally distracting are usually quite good). On these fronts, Accelerando is probably his strongest book yet. This tale of 3 generations of humans negotiating (post)humanity on the cusp of a cultural and technological singularity, compresses and collates a phenomenal number of wild concepts and ideas.

Yet, as with Singularity Sky (though to a lesser extent; I do much prefer Accelerando), there is still something about this writing that leaves me a bit cold. The plots are interesting generally, the ideas provocative, yet the characters are perhaps too thinly drawn to fully pull me into the books. My favorite Stross book is actually The Family Trade, the first of his “Merchant Princes” series (I’ve not yet read the follow-up books, but hope to soon). Though I’ll concede that the book (which has misleadingly been labeled as “fantasy” and which was published within weeks of Accelerando) may be fluffier, less significant, there was something about it that drew me in in a way quite missing from my other encounters with Stross. All of that said, though, I would not be at all disappointed to see Accelerando win the Hugo—while not completely enamored with it, I do understand why it has generated the great acclaim that it has.

Spin: Robert Charles Wilson

Spin definitely gets my vote for best novel. Though I don’t predict that it will win—indeed it will be a (pleasant) surprise to me if it does—I do very much hope that Wilson takes the Hugo. Robert Charles Wilson (not to be confused with the Illuminatus Trilogy’s Robert Anton Wilson) is one of the most underrated writers in the genre today; I can’t fathom why he’s not much more widely recognized than he is.

Spin’s not my very favorite of his books—that honor remains with The Chronoliths (though I suspect that my particular fondness for The Chronoliths is deeply tied to the fact that it was the first of Wilson’s books that I’d read—so it was able to elicit from me an “Oh! Look what I’ve been missing!” response that a later novel can’t.) Spin does, though, share the basic characteristics and strengths of his other books—mysterious happenings, intriguing science, interesting extrapolations, a few spine-tingling moments as disparate parts of the story start to come together, beautiful prose, and rich, wonderful characters. It’s hard to do justice to his books with plot description: what happens to a few characters (and the world) after one night when the stars suddenly “turn off”? So, I particularly want to emphasize the latter elements, excellent writing/prose and richness of characters—which I really think is the lifeblood of his books—to correct anyone who may share the misapprehensions I had about Wilson before reading them. I’m not sure where I got this impression of Wilson’s books, but I distinctly remember thinking I should probably get around to reading him someday, he gets a lot of good reviews from people I respect, yet there was something that made me keep putting it off. I was under the impression that it was a sort of writing—big science, little characterization, decent plots, clunky prose (like, say, Greg Egan)—that I can get something out of, but never truly love. But that conception of Wilson was completely off-base, it’s really the opposite of how I’d characterize Wilson now, after having actually read him, and I’m still not entirely sure as to the true origins of my misperception.

Bonus: though it’s a stand alone book (not leaving one totally hanging at the end) I was happy to read (just today, actually, though it’s probably been known for a while) that there is a sequel in the works: Axis. Yay!

Happy Bloomsday

2006-06-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

Friday is Bloomsday-- the annual celebration of James Joyce. In honor of the day, get thee to this excellent New Yorker article, THE INJUSTICE COLLECTOR, which provides as good an example as any I've seen recently of the absurdities of current copyright overreach and the erosion of fair use.

Stephen Joyce, James's grandson, controls and inhibits scholarly use of Joyce's works with an iron-fist and with what seems to be incredible caprciousness:

Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a novelist, asked permission to publish a fictional version of “Sweets of Sin,” the risqué novel that Bloom picks up for his wife, Molly. (“Ulysses” offers only a glimpse of its contents.) Stephen wrote back, “Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form.” When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university’s sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.)

But perhaps he's now met his match: Joyce's attempts to censor publication of Carol Scloss's work on Lucia Joyce will provide the basis for a lawsuit soon to be filed by Lawrence Lessig. This will definitely be a case to follow.

(p.s. speaking of Joyce: we've decided on a honeymoon spot: Ireland!)

Stemloney

2006-03-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

We've officially set a date (March 10, 2007-- just over a year away) and a location (Madisons at the Lake Merrit Hotel in Oakland, CA).

This blog, though, won't turn into bridezilla-central. For that you need to go to our new wedding website at stemloney.weddingannouncer.com (there's not much there yet-- and it's likely to be in this in-construction phase for a while, but it's a start)

Octavia Butler will be missed

2006-03-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Last week, one of my favorite authors-- Octavia Butler-- died. I recently finished her latest (and sadly, now last) book, Fledgling, which like so many of her other books managed to be both deeply engaging on a narrative/story-telling level and highly provocative in the questions it raises about identity, difference, and race. While Kindred may be her most famous book (and its reputation is well-deserved; her exploration of slavery, responsibility, guilt, and love is truly haunting), I think my favorite book of hers is the first I read: Dawn, the beginning of her xenogenesis trilogy. I can't think of any work of science fiction that better captures (or, rather, mines) the utter alienness of aliens (as well as confronting issues of colonialism, environmental destruction, etc.) One danger in trying to describe Butler's work is that it can sometimes sound just like message-stories, good-for-you reading about key social problems. While she would be notable if this was her sole contribution-- bringing issues of race, gender, identity, colonialism, to the forefront of science fiction to an unprecedented degree-- her legacy for the genre extends much further. For, at the same time as dealing with these issues-- and as a part of dealing with these issues-- she was always a powerful and compelling storyteller who created memorable and complicated characters.

But others can say it far better than I can. Some links via Locus Online

Octavia E. Butler died Friday evening, February 24th, after falling and striking her head on a walkway outside her home. She was 58 years old. One of the few prominent African-American SF writers, she won 2 Hugos and 2 Nebulas during her career, including a Nebula for her 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant' in 1995.
» Initial report from Steven Barnes
» SFWA News
» Wikipedia entry
» Obituaries: Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Seattle Times; Chicago Tribune; USA Today
• Correction 27 Feb: Butler died on the 24th, not the 25th
» Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow
» Tribute by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
» The SF Museum in Seattle will host a Octavia Butler Memorial Gathering on Thursday, March 2nd at 7:30 p.m., with Greg Bear, Eileen Gunn, Vonda N. McIntyre, and others.
» KGB Bar in New York City is hosting an informal gathering this Friday, March 3rd, in memory of Octavia Butler (details).
» Long Los Angeles Times obit
» Washington Post profile
» 1 March: New York Times obituary
» 2 March: John Clute's Independent obituary
» Slate: Tyler Cowen's obit/tribute Octavia Butler: The outsider who changed science fiction
» Cleveland.com tribute by Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs
» LA Weekly's Sister from Another Planet by Jervey Tervalon » 3 March: LA Times's appreciation by Susan Salter Reynolds
» NPR's 1993 interview with Butler
» 7 March: Dragon Page podcasts this recent Octavia Butler interview
» Village Voice tribute by Dream Hampton

One more update

2006-01-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

Well, this isn't exactly my usual blogging material (if I can claim to have "usual blogging material" after such a long absence from actually blogging), but I thought one more update was in order, this one of a more personal nature.Yesterday (New Year's Eve), Michael and I got engaged to be married. No date's set-- indeed the logistics are sure to be a nightmare considering we're still separated by a couple hundred miles. But, it's official. Eek.

A little update

2005-12-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

Hello all. It's been a long time since I've updated this blog. So, as a preemptive strike on one of my New Year's resolutions, I thought I'd give a few updates.

First, in January, I'll be starting as Managing Editor of the film studies journal Camera Obscura. I've been working for the journal as an intern/editorial assistant for the past two years and am excited about the expansion in my responsibilities. The journal recently received an excellent write-up in the Times Literary Supplement, particularly for our special issue on Todd Haynes and on "New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood" (due out soon). I can't seem to find an online link to the review, though-- (I'll try to remedy that in a bit)-- but for now a quote:

"Since the 1970's, Camera Obscura's editorial line has been continuously redefined, moving away from its original stance, predominantly informed my Laconian pyschoanalysis (never perhaps themost fruitful way of looking at film), and broadening its field of scholarship to include new kinds of spectatorships, from race-related and postcolonial perspectives to queer theory. The hybrid result, with
its variety of voices and subject matter, makes for provaocative reading."

Second, I recently had a publication of my own released. It's the paper/chapter on television critics that I co-authored with my dissertation chair, Denise Bielby, and Bob Ngo and appears in the issue on Transformation in Cultural Industries of Research in the Sociology of Organizations series. It was pretty exciting to (finally!) get the hard copy in the mail last week. Here's a link to the volume's introduction.

Media Reform Conference

2005-05-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

I'm back from St. Louis and the National Conference for Media Reform. It was energizing to see and be around so many people passionately engaged with issues of media policy and transformation; there were over 2,000 registered participants.

Bill Moyers's closing speech (audio version/MP3; video version; transcript), in which he takes on the current crisis at PBS stemming from the conservative stacking of and attack on the CPB (which has been specifically an attack against Moyers in many cases) was a definite highlight.

Some of the fun of the conference came from celebrity appearances ("celebrity" of both the academic, activist, and media-star varieities) -- Al Franken's emceeing of the Saturday night keynote event (MP3) (which included appearances by Jim Hightower, Patti Smith (who, somewhat surreally, was backed up by FCC Commish Jonathein Adelstein on the harmonica!), and others; Phil Donahue moderating a panel with Naomi Klein and Juan Gonzalez; Amy Goodman all over the place, etc.

The theme of the conference was "Building Momentum" and they did a good job of rallying the troops, highlighting the victories of recent years and the importance of the struggles to come. Too often discussions of media, policy, and ownership issues get stuck at the level of (important) critique, painting a bleak picture of the current situation but without linking to strategies for change, hence enabling a kind of fatalism.

However, in some ways the weekend was more successful as an extended rally than as a conference, per se. One of the assets of the conference was the wide variety of participants/attendees-- from nationally prominant folks to people doing lots of work at the local grassroots level; from professional media workers, to full-time activists, to academics, to people who are involved in struggles that connect to but may not be primarily focused on media matters; from veterans to neophytes. This diversity, though, also provides some challenges.

For instance, at what level of expertise or towards what potential audience should sessions be aimed? Clearly, for the big, whole group events (the keynotes, plenaries, etc.) it makes sense to aim things rather broadly, to rally people, join issues together, etc. (and these sessions were largely successful at this.) For the smaller, topic-focused sessions, though, there sometimes seemed to be more of a struggle. Often I felt that things were so aimed down the middle that they may not have been fully satisfying for anyone-- too general for anyone steeped in the issue to learn anything new, but also too general for anyone truly new to that issue to gain much particular knowledge, either. These sessions tended to be quite large and participants, other than the speakers themselves, were positioned as listeners, audience members, but little chance to actually participate. Perhaps having more concurrent sessions-- which could be smaller and more specialized-- could help this in the future? (Not that everything should be specialized-- but having more of a blend of small and large venues; of celebrity-driven sessions and more ordinary-folk sessions, of rallying speeches and specifically educationally-oriented sessions, etc.)

I did get enjoy some of the smaller sessions. A panel comprising past (Nicholas Johnson and Gloria Tristani) and present (Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps) FCC Commissioners was cerly interesting (MP3 of FCC panel) The panel on copyright reform issues (MP3 of copyright panel)-- with Cady McLaren, Siva Vaidhyanthan, and Kembrew McLeod-- was very engaging. One interesting and important question was raised at the end of the session that I would have liked to have more time to explore: examining the barriers to links between the media reform movement and open source and copyfighting movements (e.g., the progressive politics of the former and the often pro-market libertarian bent of the latter). (Other than this session and Mark Cooper's contributions on two panels, there wasn't much of a copyfight presence at the conference.)

But like I said, overall the weekend was very energizing and these issues are so important right now-- especially in light of current events such as the attack on public broadcasting and as Congress is set to revisit the disastrous 1996 Telecommunications Act in the next year or so (about which CommonCause has recently published a helpful primer on:"The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned," pdf) , among other things.

Conferencing

2005-05-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

My bags are (almost) packed and I'm just about off to the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. The program looks great and the website is reporting that they're completely booked, in terms of capacity/registrations. Apparently, they'll be posting MP3s of the panels, etc. which is a nice bonus for those of you who can't attend. It will be interesting (and exciting) to be at a non-academic, explicitly activist-oriented conference.

And then after that, the following weekend is our much smaller conference, which covers many of the same issues: Media Ownership: Research and Regulation sponsored by the new Center for Film, Television, and New Media here at UCSB. (The conference itself, though, will be downtown at Victoria Hall, part of their effort to engage beyond the walls of academe.)

Bye Bye Broadcast Flag

2005-05-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

I have ZERO time to post right now, but I had to make an exception for this:
The DC Circuit Court has just released its ruling in the lawsuit filed against the broadcast flag: it unanimously struck it down!

Ernest Miller provides myriad links to reporting on and reactions to the ruling, from across the media and blogosphere: "Victory in Broadcast Flag Case!"

UPDATE: Of course, despite the title to this post, we've probably not really seen the end of the broadcast flag. The court-ruling means that the FCC can't act in this way without explicit Congressional authorization-- so the MPAA is writing legislation to get that authorization, and maybe more, Ernest Miller reports.

Turning the TV Off?

2005-04-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Today marks the beginning of TV Turn Off Week. I've always had some ambivalence toward this project.

On the one hand, I share many of the critiques of television made by the project's organizers-- critiques of specific television content and critiques of television's connection to the hyper-commercialization of our culture. Turning the television off encourages us to step back for a moment and evaluate the place that TV holds in our lives; certainly that's a good thing to do. Television's ubiquity and its position as a dominant channel of our media culture means that we often take it and its role for granted. As with most social institutions it is in part precisely because of and through this invisibility that it can be such a significant force. Making visible those things we don't always stop and look at in our daily lives, of course I support and encourage that. Indeed, that's what sociology is all about, isn't it?

However, I've long been uncomfortable with the tone of some of the critiques associated with TV Turn Off Week. These critiques are often dripping with contempt for anyone who watches television, which gets painted as universally mind-numbing or soul-killing. The medium as a whole is treated as unambiguously and inevitably negative and beyond repair. But is it really? This seems to me to be a dangerously technologically determinist position. And it completely forecloses any possibilities to engage with and intervene in television-- either at the user or production level.

Listening to a short segment about on this year's TV Turn Off Week, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" on the public radio program Weekend America, helped to bring into focus for me some of what's made me uneasy.

Apparently, the new twist in TV Turn Off Week, this year, is the inclusion of the TV-B-Gone in some of the culture jamming plans from adbusters.org etc. The TV-B-Gone is that key-chain, universal remote control, released a few months ago amidst much hooplah [I'll admit that I was amused when I heard about it], that allows one to turn off random televisions anywhere.

In the Weekend America piece, they visited sports bars, mocked those who might or might not be watching the TVs, zapped the televisions off, then used the fact that almost no one seemed to notice as evidence of... actually I'm not quite sure what that was evidence of. But the patronizing contempt toward both television and tv viewers, which permeated the piece, was more than a little off-putting and really distracted from some of the real criticisms of the unexamined place that television holds in our lives and the ever-expanding encroachment of commercialism that our current television system is a fundamental part of.

This was already irking me, but what really set me off was the juxtaposition of that story about television with one that followed just a few minutes later. In the TV Turn Off story, one of the criticisms was that television keeps us from participating in real life-- how sad it is that we spend more time watching Friends than having friends, viewing images of sexuality than having sex, watching nature programs rather than going into nature, etc. Just minutes later, though, was a story ("Poetry and Place: Susquehanna River")about the power of literature and poetry and specifically about how reading a poem or novel about something or some place can sometimes be more real for us than actually going there. But now, of course, this "more real than reality" quality-- just moments before invoked to dismiss television-- is used to celebrate literature.

The two stories were treated as totally unrelated to one another, but the easy dismissal of television and the easy praise of poetry for the same condition, frustrated me a great deal. The knee-jerk defense of written media and knee-jerk dismissal of the televisual are both part of a problematic technological determinism, which blinds us to the promises and dangers of both and the ways in which the power of either is the result of specific social and cultural practices that are never inevitable or set in stone.

Having just finished reading Steven Johnson's essay (blogged below) about the positive aspects of some current television, just before hearing this radio piece on TV Turn Off Week, undoubtedly helped prime my irritation about the treatment of television vs. poetry on Weekend America, as well as with the tone of the TV Turn Off Week discussion more generally. With all of this on my mind, I went to Johnson's blog and discovered that he, in the larger book from which the TV article was drawn, critiques just this sort of tendency-- the too easily privileging of some media and the too quickly dismissing of others-- along similar lines. Akin to the television/poetry juxtaposition that was frustrating me, Johnson raises these questions about books vs. video games:

It's a little thought experiment that comes near the beginning, trying to get around the traditional prejudice that assumes that reading is invariably "good for you" and that games are mostly a waste of time.
"Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Smart TV

2005-04-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

Steven Johnson provides an interesting defense of the current state of television in this week's New York Times Magazine, with the provocative title "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." I've excerpted the conclusion, below, but upon further reflection, I suspect that this excerpt might not have been the best one for me to choose: it encapsulates the point of the article (which is part of a larger project from his upcoming book), but perhaps doesn't capture the fun tone and concrete examples of the article as a whole. But I'm feeling too lazy to choose a juicier quote, so you'll just have to read the article for yourself...

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

Old vs. New Media

2005-04-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

Old media trumped new media for me today in alerting me to the selection of the new Pope. I learned the news not from the Internet or even television or radio. Rather, it was the bells that kept ringing outside that alerted me to the development.. I live quite near more than half a dozen churches, so hearing bells isn't altogether uncommon. So the chimes of the bells this morning didn't initially makemuch of an impression. But the bells primarily toll on Saturdays, after the weddings that seem to constantly take place around here. So, when the bells kept ringing and ringing on this Tuesday morning, I started to wonder and it finally dawned on me what it might mean.

Of course, I did have to go online or to the television to find out who in particular was elected. But the bells as initial source of the news for me brought a little smile to my face (the further news of the identity of the new Pope, however, certainly brought no such smile.)

Annotation

2005-04-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

Another cool tool: The Annotated New York Times, a subset of blogrunner, compiles discussions and commentary from across the blogosphere that cite particular NYT articles. It looks like a helpful way to chart buzz on a particular topic/article/op-ed piece. Meme-orandum works similarly, with more papers (e.g. Washington Post and Boston Globe) but (I think) a much narrower set of blogs (and a less slick look)

(via A Blog Doesn't Need a Clever Name, via Micropersuasion)

(Hmm, this also brings to mind Paul Boutin's Slate piece, from last month, on a different form of annotating the news: Newsmashing)

Cool? Creepy? Both, I guess

2005-04-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

The latest addition to GoogleMaps is its integration with satellite photos. As with so many technologies of this sort, I'm torn between being drawn into its coolness factor and creeped out by the surveillance implications [or at least creeped out by the reminder of the extent of surveillance out there). Of course I couldn't resist going immediately to look for the satellite view of my apartment.

Rank and file

2005-04-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

The U.S. News and World Reports annual graduate school rankings are out now and UCSB's sociology department fared quite well in two categories: We're number 6 in culture and number 2 in sex & gender. Our culture program has been ranked right around this number for a while now, but it is the first year that the magazine has included a sex & gender ranking. The methodology used is not without its problems, but it's still pretty nice to see.

Regarding the sex & gender list, Jeremy Freese made the interesting observation that of all of the sociology subfields ranked, and all but one other of any of the 25 social science subfields ranked, sex & gender is the only one to have a complete lack of Ivy League schools.

Happy Peeps Day

2005-03-27T10:35:00.000-08:00

Happy Peeps Day

Hot Peep-on-Peep Action: Peeps Porn

Lord of the Peeps: Fellowship of the Peeps

Peeps, It's What's for Dinner: Peeps Waldorf Salad Recipe

Finally, there is my personal favorite: Peeps Experiments at PeepResearch.org, in which the scientific method is rigorously applied to questions about the effects of extreme temperature on peeps, peeps and alcohol/drug use, and the viability of Peeps colonization of space.

UPDATE: Okay, I couldn't resist adding one more peeps link: Peep-o-matic: Make your own peeps

Grokster madness

2005-03-25T15:43:00.000-08:00

Once again, I didn't know whether to laugh or grimace when I read this in this Mediapost article that Fox-- one of the plaintiffs suing Grokster in the upcoming and very important MGM vs. Grokster case-- is apparently using the service for advertising. One of the key issues in this case, which could significantly transform the relationship between content ownership, copyright, and innovation in light of the old Sony/Betamax case, is whether or not there are substantial non-infringing uses for a technology. The studios say that's not a factor with Grokster, but this (among many other examples) seems to show something quite to the contrary:

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP., currently suing Grokster and Morpheus for alleged copyright violations enabled by their peer-to-peer technology, apparently advertises through software bundled with Grokster, according to adware researcher Eric Howes. Howes reported Thursday afternoon that he was served a full-screen trailer for the DVD of the 20th Century Fox movie "Fat Albert," after downloading all of the software bundled with Grokster--eight separate adware programs.

There are just a few short days before this goes to the Supreme Court and its hard to keep up with all of the buzz in the blogosphere and other media. Tech Law Advisor's Induce Act blog has been aggregating some of the coverage, here. If you want to get up to speed on this issue quickly, taking a look over there might be a good place to start.

It's been interesting to see how different groups have come down on this issue (to cast it simply as Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley is to gravely oversimplify the matter, but it's intriguing on this front, among others.) EFF has links to all of the briefs filed in the case. For example, 22 media scholars, many of them rather prominent filed this brief (pdf) in support of Grokster et al

Anyway, it's hard to overstate the potential importance of this case for copyright and copyfight issues, for media control and media democracy, for fair use and beyond.

UPDATE: Illustrating nicely a non-infringing use of P2P technology, outragedmoderates.org have posted this BitTorrent link to all of the briefs filed in the case. (via Lessig Blog)

UPDATE 2: IPTAblog has a really great round-up of the MGM vs. Grokster coverage in the immediate days before the Supreme Court case.

Free Culture Books

2005-03-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

3 texts on free culture, intellectual property, remix culture, media democracy-- Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, Dan Gillmor's We Media, and Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression-- are all available through Creative Commons licenses, which allows them to be shared. These books are worth purchasing, but being able to have them on your computer or PDA to read also is a great bonus. Off the shelf has posted nice Palm versions of these. I've only skimmed the recently-released McLeod book so far-- but it looks great. It was already high on my to read pile, but having it with me on my PDA will probably help get it read even more quickly than its place on my queue would have otherwise dictated.

I read Lessig's back when it came out last year (in actual bookform), and downloaded a different PDA version of it at the time as well. But, if you never read Free Culture, please do so NOW! (whether in digital-- be it PDA or PDF-- or paper format). Seriously, do it.

(via Copyfight)