Attention economy

Stumbled across an old Wired article today from Michael Goldhaber that says that the information economy is a misnomer. Instead, he argues, the Internet is ushering a new economic model based on the capture and resale of attention.

While I wouldn't agree that this is an entirely new model (to whit: "This Ed Sullivan Show is brought to you by Quaker Oats, the best oatmeal for your childrens' breakfast") the term itself is quite useful.

I just wish I had found this article and term two weeks ago when I was doing my writeup about the political economy of Second Life.

Feeling "brands r us"

Branding is something that I'd never thought much about beyond just reacting to certain brands and being able to say what I liked about them.

Take the Bell Canada brand. The stylized face has a certain female quality to it that has always appealed to me (perhaps also given that my mom was a Bell operator for most of the 60s) and I like the way the circles around the profiled face suggest the world. The brand just worked for me aesthetically.

Others that I've liked over the years are Sesame Street, Apple, Alienware, Turtles, Target, Molson Canadian and Toronto Star. Oh and of course also eBay and Google.

Brands I've disliked have included IBM, Dell, MuchMusic, Sega, Yahoo and CoorsLite.

I've never thought much about these brands themselves, beyond their association to the companies. But branding has become part of what I've found myself paying more attention to of late, especially as it relates to Second Life and to academics. And I'm realizing that what I call a brand, others call a logo, based on those I know who make it their business to know these things (like my pal Greg). A brand is more. It it the entire ensemble of feelings, associations, colours and experiences that are associated with a company, as often expressed and embodied in their brand. While I can't argue that this distinction isn't true, I do hold onto the idea for me that the logo is the brand and the brand is the logo.

In SL, I'm seeing a whole spate of new brands emerging and old ones converging. And perhaps what is interesting is what is being branded. If, as this article suggests, branding is about tying us emotionally to the companies who provide us our things, so that we have a feeling of easy familiarity and liking for that company, then what happens when emotions themselves (vis-a-vis avatar customizations and mods) get branded? Do you start to say "Look, my ability to smile is brought to you by Acme Grins Inc."?

And for academics, what happens when their brand changes? A friend of mine is splitting up with her husband. When they married, she took his name. Now that they're apart, she's got to decide if she is going to keep his name, given she's started doing presentations and the like under that name and so is starting to get known. Or does she go back to her maiden name?

Certainly suggests that people's names act as brands too and that for academics, it is perhaps their more crucial brand, more important even than the university institutional brand that they associate themselves with while at a given institution.

And with the sheer number of brands out there, identity has become not so much a case of subtly defining who we are vis-a-vis internal and external ideas "comme tel", but rather choosing a polyglot melange of brands that seem to speak to us and about us, to ourselves and to others.

This is the deepening of consumer mass culture that had so started to frighten the Frankfurt School theorists in the 30s and it is inescapable. The question remains then whether we need to rethink our concepts of authentic identity and core self in light of the way branding is now, simply, us. Period.

Theorizing consumption

According to the Economist, the work of Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Hall and Lyotard are all directly related to the retailing trends of today.

Is that the sound of rumbling earth and rolling bones I hear?

Paper productivity

Okay just finished submitting paper #2 of the semester, a cultural studies paper exploring the reality effect of the Oprah show. This follows on the heels of the political economy paper I finished this weekend, analyzing the political economy of Second Life.

That leaves me one more paper to go. I have to write a proposal by Saturday then a paper by January 3rd. Yep, you read that right... I'll be writing over the holidays *sigh*.

But that last paper should be quite fun. I'm arguing that the code of digital worlds like Second Life has its own agency and is implicated in a power struggle over the colonizing humans. I'll be using Latour, Deleuze (via a few texts, most notably Delanda), Virilio, Heidegger [pdf], Kroker and Bhabha. Because it is a philosophy paper, it doesn't need to be extensively researched and cited. The idea is more to tease out possible meanings and interpretations using things we've read in this class (TechnoPolitics). So that means I get to do a lot of slightly flowery stream of digital consciousness style writing, aping Kroker and Adorno somewhat. Should be fun, in a truly geeky way.

If only I didn't have to to it over the holidays though.

Stuttering in Second Life

I finally managed to find a way to take a snapshot of myself in Second Life. Here I am, at the Tropics Casino main bar:

Dead place, but I don't mind too much because I'm already incredibly frustrated with the stuttering performance I get while in-world. Whether it's my 2 year old Dell laptop that's the problem or its latency issues between myself and the SL servers, it has been painful to try to interact inworld for longer than five minutes per visit. Though today I made my first SL friend and managed to stay unlagged long enough to trade social niceties and add her my list.

I'm thinking I'll have to be sourcing a new PC early next year...

Ultimate postmodern implement?

Swiss Army knives fascinate me. Eschewing the notion of tool specialization that has made the fortune of kitchen gadget companies the world over, the Swiss Army company seems to believe that they can pack any tool a human might possibly need into one portable implement. And they do their best to try to manifest this belief into their legendary Swiss Army Knife.

I own a classic Swiss Army knife, given to me as a conference tchotke years ago at MacWorld. My knife is a basic one, with a knife and a nail file on one side, a Philips screwdriver and a tiny pair of scissors on the other, and a small plastic toothpick that I am wont to play with bemusedly, every time I find the knife ensemble again after losing it for the n'th time.

The only thing really missing for me in my own knife is a spoon and fork. Putting much more than that into the piece would be overkill and would make it hard to carry. Right?

Apparently not. Enter the ultimate postmodern implement, the Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife v1.0 (yes they actually version it).

Conjuring up images of brawny Australians saying "THIS is a knife!", the Wenger is in an implement category all on its own. It says, "to heck with all your modernist ultra-specialization bureaucratic claptrap.... when a guy needs a tool, he needs it now and I've got it for him, right here". All 85 of them.

For $1200.

Ultimate postmodern tool or ultimate he-man status toy? And more importantly, how do you carry that thing in a pocket?

There's the question, isn't it?

Mylo = reskinned PSP?

After I posted yesterday about the cool mobile comm. gadget I'd found and drooled over, I started clicking around to other companies that I figured might have some cool gadgets.

I came across the Sony Mylo. Similar in form factor to the one catching my interest yesterday, what particularly struck me about the Sony is the way in which shape evokes the general shape and hand feel of the PSP. Makes me wonder if, similar to the way car manufacturers use the same basic chassis and then just build on top, if Sony has done the same thing.

Christmas gift dreams

I have a cell phone. It's good, it does the job. But I'm enough of a gadget geek to drool over this little beauty, given how much of my cell time is spent texting.

Studying Second Life

I'm getting deeply interested in studying Second Life. I'm watching for stories and blogposts, I've signed up for Google News Alerts and yes I'm also now Sashay Talon in-world.

Discovering SL has been a bit of a renaissance mission for me. So much of what is going on in SL is what I was arguing for back in the early 90s, when I was deeply embroiled in the FirstClass vs. Lotus Notes smackdown. It's a revival of the idea of a pervasive rich community that is run by a company who encourages member content and customization.

True, Linden Lab isn't the idealistic community-serviced minded corporation Magic was back in the day. It didn't start as a Macintosh hobbyist's passion in his basement. SL is the result of a well funded business venture that seems determined to find ways to breathe new life into the old eyeballs-&-dollars "audience as commodity" business approach.

But the whole business side of SL is something that isn't getting covered much. Instead, journalists seem to be focusing once again on the hoary idea of Second Life not being life, per se. The zombie disocurse "it's digital so it's not real" is still lurching around in the media coverage around Second Life, as I read in a long feature article in this past weekend's Toronto Star.

Wouldn't it be so much better to be covering the encroachment of the out-world tropes, metaphors and business strategies into this digital Second Life world? Given how much of what is happening in SL may be strongly determing the way we all interact digitally in 5-10 years, shouldn't media coverage be truly focused on that?

I'm going to add a Second Life section to my customized Google News page and keep an eye on this. I'm also going to go Google Magic and FirstClass and see if any of the old crowd is still out there, keeping the flame alive.

Physics of superheroes

I've started paying attention to ways in which professors teach material that otherwise seems dry, boring and "old school". I may well soon be teaching (or at least ta-ing) a methods course (I hope) so this new awareness seems prudent.

And now that I understand what James Kakalios is up to, with his Superheroes approach to elementary physics, I'm wondering how to do the same thing using online digital worlds a la WoW and SL.

Another book to add to the Christmas list then!

Politics of proteins vs bytes

A key theme in two of the three papers I'm in the midst of writing to fulfill my end-of-semester obligations in my classes involve the notion of the politics of struggle between protein-based life and byte-based life. The idea of protein as a metaphor for the experiences lived outside of digital space is one I'm playing with as an appropriate counterpart to byte-based life.

I'm wondering how to bring one of my new favourite theorists, Bruno Latour, into it all. Especially given he says stuff like this (from his book Politics of Nature):

"By refusing to tie politics to humans, subjects or freedom, and to tie science to objects, nature or necessity, we have discovered the work common to politics and to the sciences alike: Stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable and to make them speak" (89)

So if this is the work of politics now, how does that apply to byte-based life? And what kind of agency does it give to non-human digital actors? And how do non-human digital actors speek? What are their speech acts?

Play action

Was re-reading bits of Hans Joas' Creativity of Action tonight. Found this:

Playful action is thus defined as that action which does not allow itself to be bound by the distinction between dream and reality, between internal and external reality. [p.166]

Curious....by this definition, is Second Life social interaction actually play?

T&T buzz continues

Trials & Tribulations in Montreal a few weeks back was a fantastic two days with some awesome people doing very interesting work around digital spaces, particularly blogs and game worlds. While there wasn't quite as much emphasis on the "how" as on the "what", I think that actually reflects a big part of the trials and tribulations of digital research, and so was incredibly apt for this inaugural event. There is so much to think about, study, reflect on around digital life that the how can easily get lost.

Through some of the presentations, I've been challenged and reinvigorated and recommitted to the idea of studying digital life and digital culture. I've even come up with a few topics around game studies, so the whole thing was a smashing success. Have a few ideas now too as to maybe where to go for my PhD - England? Ohio? Oh yeah. Possibilities.

Seems the symposium caused a bit of a buzz for a whole bunch of people and was even written up in the Concordia University Journal, a campus newspaper that circulates rather widely and is also read by alumni around the world.

There was some talk on the closing day at the final dinner about continuing the amazing success and collegiality created in Montreal through to another few years. T&T 2.0 in Toronto next year maybe? Yes, maybe, but filling Kelly's and Shanly's shoes as a coordinator of such an event will definitely be a tall order!

Life outside numbers and religion

I speak disparagingly of positivist scientific ethos in the disciplines at universities, particularly in sociology, what I am truly speaking of is the narrow focus and emphasis on numbers. There is life outside numbers, in my view.

I am starting to see, though, that a more important area to place my interests and scorn isn't against something that is a question of mere research approach, but rather against an entire movement that is diverting scientific resources. That movement is the ensemble of thought, work, power and people that centre around the notion of intelligent design.

A friend of mine (who is somewhat of an independent and public academic and whose opinions about life and thought I respect greatly) has been bringing the issues in this to my attention recently, directing me to the cadre of thinkers who are being dubbed the new atheists. These are a group of influential scientists, including Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg.

An excellent overview of the issues can be found here for science and here for religion And what I grapple with when I read overviews like these and I contemplate them, and when I link it back to the philosophy I'm currently reading, is the incredible arrogance of the human animal, that must believe that humans are of paramount importance to the world and that the beauty and elegance of the universe must be the creation of a conscious omnipotent being who sees humans as "his" children. But I also seem some arrogance in some of the science positions, for simply rejecting outright the fact that humans have long seemed to need some sort of spirituality.

Weinberg makes an excellent point in this presentation though that the approach to truth in science is that science doesn't have heroes. He says that science stamps out wishful thinking and its role is to stamp out religious belief in order free the world from the taint of religion. I think these are a valid point, and an excellent place to place some of my own fundamental beliefs. And I believe that I don't have to believe in a deity in order to act in an ethical and moral fashion. So how do I fashion my own morality and ethics?

It came up in class this week too, while reading and discussing Bhabha, that I seem to leave no room for morality and was implicated as an amoral scholar. I argued that this wasn't true but was then flummoxed. In what do I base my own beliefs in right action? How do I conceive of the right way to act and live, when I feel the need and fundamental rightness of doing has to lay outside of both science and religion?

Heavy questions. So what I'm trying now to suss out, then, through reading more of these new atheists, watching some of the lectures around these debates between science and religion (such as these and these) and through books like Somerville's Ethical Imagination (points of which are presented here in the Massey lectures), is what is it that directs my own sense of "right" behaviour and belief in the absence of an omnipotent director deity.

I'm working on papers that try to see what it is about the human imagination and concepts of agency that requires us to believe in some sort of transcendent human purpose and design, some ineffable spiritual will. Don't know where I'll end up with all of this, but for me, at the moment, the journey is the thing.

Getting that I am not getting it

Do you ever sit down to read theory and start to totally get into it, though you are sure that you're not getting it?

Much of my readings in my TechnoPolitics course have been like that for me. With the exception (oddly) of Heidegger and Marx, I keep delving into to works, reading them and walking away after with the niggling notion that I've only glossed them. That I've missed their profoundness and their applicability to the academic becoming that is me.

Another of those happened today, not in a book this time but in an extract from a cultural studies reader for my Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies course. The chapter in question is by postcolonial theorist Homi Babha. His ideas on intersubjectivity, the subversive possibilities of agency through language, and his readings of Arendt, Bakhtin, Derrida, etc. all feel profoundly right to me. Yet I don't claim to be understanding more than 20% of this.

I wonder how common that feeling is for other becoming academics?

News from the road

There is so much going on right now, in my head and in my external life. I am in Montreal, visiting and meetingup with friends and colleagues, on the tail end of presenting and attending Trials & Tribulations. But I have to beg net time from friends so I'll leave it for now. I'm going to think of this while driving home today and try to sort out what to say about all the various bits I heard, people I met, drinks I had and laughs too.

Bar conversation for grad students

Actual snippets of conversation overheard tonight at the bar, while filling glasses with beer from the not-so-cheap pitchers of Alexander Keiths...

"Oh don't get all Foucauldian on me!"

"...but the hermeneutics of that get so complex when you bring sports into the mix..."

"My distaste for positivist science stems from the first principle..."

"That's the best Starbucks for reading Marx and Hegel in!"

"In the Derrridian sense..."

"Are you going to answer the ICA CFP using your SSHRC or your OGS?"

You know you're in a group of graduate students when this is Friday night bar conversation.

Cultural force of video games

The fact that video games have been economic forces in the last 5-7 years can't be denied -- much of the technical development of video/audio cards and mass capacity hard drives could be said to be driven by the economics of wanting to sell more games through versioning. But the fact that they are become a cultural force is a fairly recent development.

I see a partnership between Telefilm and the video game industry, as they position a video game competition as a "great Canadian" endeavour, as an example of the emerging cultural force of games.

The web as science?

Part of the reason I left sociology to come over to communications & cultural studies is that this latter discipline makes no noises about wanting to be a science. And it seems to me that the study of digital culture needs a nuanced, multi-layered exploration that escapes the rigid instrumental reason of positivist science.

I'm not so happy, then, about Tim Berners-Lee making the pronouncement recently that the study of the web needs to be scientized.

History has shown me that, to date, sociological phenomenon and scientific methodologies are not good ontological and epistemological partners.

Discursive tactics of "American-ness"

Ever notice that once you start paying attention to certain phenomenon, you start finding examples and manifestations of it everywhere?

Among the various themes I'm noticing in public discourse is the idea of what and who is apparently being "anti-American". It's a long list these days, and includes not just rock bands and movie stars, but also entire states. It has been a common theme in my political economy and cultural studies classes.

I found this article via AL Daily about a new book that examines the themes and attitudes encompasses within the theme of "anti-American". Has me curious as to whether there is a paper in there somewhere for me, for one of my classes this semester.

And they're off!

They're finished and submitted. My OGS and SSHRC graduate funding apps are handed in. Just finished driving up to the middle of nowhere that is York campus, handing them in, and driving all the way back.

Done done done!

Now I wait until April to hear if I've managed to snag one which will give me a nice cushion of funding for next year, my thesis writing year.

Reductionism inherent to grad school

Another Sunday night, another important book of social theory reduced to a mere two page summary for a 5 minute in-class presentation.

This, following the reducing of my entire two years of MA life onto a single page for the Ontario Graduate Scholarship application, and a comparatively expansive two pages for the SSHRC Canada Masters Scholarship (both of which get submitted to my department tomorrow, for better or for worse...)

Reduce, summarize, compress, congeal. These seem to be the action verbs of my emerging MA identity. But since I prefer to expand, elaborate, detail and examine, this new ethos isn't fitting me so well. I'm tired of butchering amazing works of social theory (Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment today) to fit a five minute "bebe la-la" presentation for a class.

When do I get to be broad, deep and complete?

Explanations for schoolwork

I was asked by a fellow student why we need to do summaries and critiques of existing works of social theory. My answer, more or less, was to say that it was a way of encouraging us to engage critically, broadly and deeply with the work. She seemed unsatisfied by that answer.

I wish I'd had a link to this critique of a new book on aesthetics and culture by Oxford lit professor, John Carey. This is the kind of critique every student should strive to be capable of writing.

Build-up

This was the lead-in on AL Daily to reviews of the new book by Steve Best, long-time digerati...

It’s been a long march down the crunchy granola path from macramé and LSD to the Web, Wikipedia and Google...More > More >

Would you also have clicked the "mores"? Yeah me too.

(Oct 16 - Correction -- the book is from Fred Turner. I was reading Steve Best when I wrote the post, hence my silly error. Thanks Dean for noticing and alerting me to my error.)

Attention & retention

Another Sunday spent reading social theory...but how much of this am I retaining?

I'm doing the readings for my Political Economy of Communications & Culture course. And since I joined the class late, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Yes the underlying topic and approach fascinate me. Particularly in the way Canadian PEC theorist Vincent Mosco argues for a multilayered integrated analysis that privileges neither economics/materialist arguments (a la Marx / Frankfurt school) nor culture and individual/everyday arguments (a la Hall, Fiske and Williams). But if I'm so interested in this and I see so many tie-ins to my eventual MA thesis, why don't I retain the essence of the arguments?

You'd think that by now I'd know the various generalized theories about capitalism, cold. A year hasn't passed since I started this academic odyssey that I don't read some substantial bit of Marx, along with theorists extending the Marxian concepts out to various avenues of exploration.

But I still, to this day, have to constantly brush up on "use value" and "surplus value", not to mention the ideas of a "historical materialism" etc. etc.

Is it age? Is it simply a question of conditioning (e.g. raised to believe anything economic was boring)?

Whatever it is, I would like to conquer it. It is holding me back.

Industry "for dummies"

I glance over at my quartet of Billy bookcases, stuffed with books two layers deep, to the last white and birch centimetre of space. Full of books of all descriptions -- vampire fiction, classical literature, textbooks, my prized personal collection of books about digital culture. But in and among that admittedly eclectic company are a half dozen or so bumblebee coloured "For Dummies" books, on topics ranging from "NFL for Dummies" to "Pilates for Dummies" to "GRE for Dummies".

Apparently I'm not alone in having a few of these on my shelves. There are over 150 million copies in circulation...and growing. It would seem that there are over 1000 titles in this series, and most titles are written in a little under three months. The New York Times claims that "The list of Dummies topics is like a parallel history of contemporary consciousness". Perhaps it is.

Should this worry me? What does this say about the human race?

Finding the Bard online

When I was in high school, I was in love with English. The subject and the language. Despite the extra long near-daily English classes the Manitoba government stipulated as a requirement for university-entrance-level students and despite the constant grumbling of my fellow students, I loved that course. In particular, I loved Shakespeare.

Heading into university that first time around, as a fresh idealistic 20 year old, I majored in English and I deliberately took every Shakespearean-themed course I could find. Of course, it meant long hours in the library reading the secondary literature around the Bard.

I'm curious as to what a difference to me then it would have made to have had access to online resources such as this Shakespeare search engine. How much better would my papers have been?

Convergence

Not sure if it will be as good as it sounds, but this book is one I think I should read this semester, in addition to all of my chewy social and political theory for my courses. If Jenkins truly brings his concept of participatory culture to an examination of digital culture, as he claims in this Business Week interview, it might be a useful notion to add into my thoughts for my upcoming thesis proposal.

Finally a positive

While this article at Alternet about the positive educational potential of videogames in schools is interesting in and of itself, what I find noteworthy about the article is the positive spin itself. It isn't often these days that we hear anything positive in the media about video games. Most reports are dire, full of doom and gloom. Granted Alternet is supposed to be different in its mandate, but it isn't always.

Plagiarism and honesty

Being in academia, I am constantly exposed to the messages from faculty and the 'deme as to what would happen if I were to cheat or plagiarize. I don't know if I'd ever understood just how serious a problem it was, probably because in a rather odd but typical way, I assumed that since it has never entered my head to do so, it is over-reported as a phenomenon.

But according to various experts, including Susan J. Douglas, a feminist academic that I respect and whose work I've used, as high as 70% of undergraduates have cheated or plagiarized. That number is astonishing!

Douglas' most recent column in one of my favourite alternate current affairs magazine, In These Times, brings to light another form of plagiarism that is apparently just as practiced but is also made acceptable by corporate greed and message spin. It is done under the guise of journalism, reporting, news and platform promotion. The strident anti-Democrat and anti-progressive words of Ann Coulter are just one more example, Douglas says. Unlike for undergrads and others, it is acceptable for Coulter to directly plagiarize because she's big business for her publisher.

I was taught early that, while researching and writing, "when in doubt, cite". It is a rule I live by. I'd rather litter my work with references to their idea seeds from others than be a thief, liar and poseur. Sadly, too few others apparently share this belief and motivation, and corporate power is making acceptable to ignore it altogether, if it brings in money and fame.

My point here isn't to glorify or vilify plagiarism per se, but rather to show the double standard yet again at work in North America. And to point at another potential cause and effect relationship that is partly responsible for the continued disenfranchisement of youth and degradation of moral character in society in general.

Stuttering starts

As I was hefting 20 lb free weights at my new-to-me gym today, and having trouble with it, given the 2+ months hiatus I've had from regular workouts, it occurred to me that my life these days seems to be a series of stuttering starts. I was gung-ho to get into the gym this morning, having noticed that my "fat jeans" were starting to fit me snugly and my face was starting to pack on the baby fat. But once there, I was frustrated by my inability to find some of the things I needed and by the snickering chauvinism of some of the other male members at my desire to do decently weighted shoulder squats using a long bar and 30 pound weight plates.

The same is true of my emerging graduate student life. I arrived in Toronto all geared up to plunge into school, only to find that I didn't know what courses I'd be allowed to take and even once I did, that most of my classes for this week are cancelled. It seems as if the faculty are mainly all overseas attending conferences. So I hit a brick wall and find myself here, in the middle of September, with entirely more time on my hands than I had expected. Since I haven't yet been assigned to an RAship, I don't even have that to fall back on.

What have I done? Well, of course I've read. For my Techno Politics course, I've read much of Heidegger's illumination on Nietzsche's "Will to Power as Art". I don't get what the ruminations on art have to do with techno politics, but I guess I'll find out in class next week. I'm also halfway through Habermas' "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" for my Public Space and Political Culture course. But I've also read a new Nora Roberts book about vampires and a newish somewhat unsatisfying book on consciousness, AI and the nature of consciousness from one of my fave sci-fi writers, Robert J. Sawyer. I've read magazines and newspapers, and a few cookbooks too.

I've drank a lot of coffee, hung out a lot in one of my local Starbucks (oh the luxury of now having four within a five minute drive!). I've unpacked, decorated, redecorated, repacked, stored, unstored, restored all kinds of stuff. I've sold stuff too, through Craigslist, my new fave community site for such activities. I've bonded with my new housemates and argued with my new landlord. And still I've got time.

I really do feel as if I'm stuttering along here, jerkily carving out this new graduate student life in this city that I adore. It isn't working out as I'd hoped/dreamed (e.g. my pro seminar has over 60 students in it! 60! where I expected to find maybe a dozen or so). But I'm trying to keep an open mind and an optimistic heart and I keep reminding myself that, at worst, this stage of my own becoming will last a scant two years. I hope.

Beginning a new beginning

I just got back from The World's Biggest Bookstore, where I picked up yet another weighty tome of social philosophy, namely Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This one is for my Public Space and Political Culture course in the sociology department at York. I've got to read both this and Nietzsche's Will to Power as Art via Heidegger in the next week.

This is just the beginning of what will be a definite brain pretzling semester. But much has happened to me lately. Some snippets? ok..here goes...

I've fallen in love with Craigslist. I'd tried it while in Montreal and never had much success with it. Well, considering the fantastic success I've had with it here in Toronto, I must conclude that the Montreal problem was either linguistic (despite my posting in both languages) or cultural in general. Since moving here, I've found a house and two roommates (each separately from one another), and I've sold a couch, a bed set, a dog kennel and a few sundry books and decorative items. It's putting money in my pocket and I've met some super nice people too. Very cool.

I've had less of a love affair with York University to date. I won't go into details, lest one of my professors stumbles on my piece of the I-Space here. I'll just say that they're disorganized, somewhat lax and rather perplexingly uncaring of the idea that some MA students not only might *want* to finish their Masters' degrees in two years, they are fully *capable* of doing so! This latter comment stems from the fact that I was completely unable to register in any core, foundation or required courses this semester because, as a first year entering student, I'm at the bottom of the barrel in terms of course selection priority. Somehow it seems just fine that I work on my thesis and do electives prior to getting the strong grounding in my new discipline area.

So academically, it has been less than stellar so far (don't even get me going on the topic of how impossible it is for me to get my books from the bookstore!). But on the upside, the campus is gorgeous! It is a true campus, full of buildings scattered about in a relatively natural green setting. Though it is waaaaay up northwest of the city, making it a bit weird to get to, the cohesion that campus feeling gives to the school experience is very welcome to me, after spending five years in a few large office towers plunked down in the heart of Montreal.

Cha cha cha changes!

Summer is fast slipping away, to be replaced by the more golden amber hues and soft breezes and cool nights of Autumn. I sit here, in my former reading room, surrounded by moving boxes full of my stuff. Books and crystal and coffee cups and computer paraphanelia and clothes...all nestled into cardboard, awaiting the burly guys who'll put it all in a semi-truck and move it 5 hours south-westward down the 401, to my new home in Toronto.

I'm going to York, to do my MA in Communications and Culture. So I've rented a house in my old stomping grounds off the Danforth and tomorrow I drive myself and my dog Sandy back there to start the whirlwind leading-up-to-the-first-day-of-school activities. Meetings with advisers, course selection (feels so late compared to when you do it in the undergraduate years!), finding an RAship, settling into the new house, creating a new routine, that of a graduate student.

I'm hoping to get some publishable work out of my coursework this fall. I did present at the ASA meeting this past weekend and was once again mistaken for faculty and once again shocked them when they found out that I'm just starting my graduate study. But I need to start working towards journal articles, book chapters, editing a book, that sort of thing.

I'm not sure what to expect though. I've already learned that I can't base it on the rythym and demands of Concordia because it isn't a sociology program at York. Looks like the reading requirements will be lighter, despite the bump up in status.

And of course I've got to find a thesis topic. I have a few that I'm toying with, but I want to see what sort of facilities and people are in the program before I narrow it down too hard.

Annihilation of "being" through reason

I'm getting deeper into my prepatory background reading on Theodor Adorno's body of thought. I just finished reading the first of five chapters in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book he co-wrote with Max Horkheimer. I've filled a dozen index cards with quotes and notations and I'm puzzling over the contempt he seems to hold for Enlightenment thought and approach, considering his own marked snobbery in The Culture Industry.

The quantification of nature through science and its major handmaiden, mathematics, have led to a need for individuals to understand their selves in reasonable and quantifiable terms, they argue. Certainly I see this tendency openly in all kinds of sociological research. The self-conscious apologetic striving for sociology to become a "science" has led to the preference in the field for quantitative over qualitative research. Numbers are more important than stories. As A&H point out, stories make up myth and myth is suspect because it is seen as uncontainable, as something that transgresses boundaries and blurs categories.

But what really struck me today in my reading is the way in which he and Horkheimer clearly point out the role rationalism (as entrenched in positivist determination) has had on being. Here I see their clearly outlined argument for how positivism, mathematics and the death of myth have led to the commoditization of humans and their transformation from beings to things. This transformation has also contributed to individuals' increased feelings of powerlessness and inability to control self, in a rational way, as dictated by modern collectivities. Reason and action are put paramount in power, over feeling and even over thought, they argue.

As I worked to extend this train of thinking out to digital space, I started to see ways in which digital self-presentation is the ultimate extension of this rationalization of being. Online self-presentation is inherently and absolutely rationalized. It is a conscious choosing of ways to self- present, stripped of the possibly defining clues that Goffman speaks of as being ways we can inadvertently discredit ourselves. It is absolutely reasoned, yet more deliberately presented than in non-digital social space. The digital world is made of words. Even those areas where one can self-present using the physicality stand-ins of avatars is still rationalized and commoditized. And the opaqueness of the digital world, the way its inner workings and happenings are seen as inscrutably opaque to the average netizen, this leads to another paradox of feeling empowered while being disempowered. The empowerment feeling comes from the apparent ability to freely choose one's self-presentation. But at the same time, given how little control or understanding of the environment one has in digital space (more so even than in traditional non-digitized space, I'd argue). There is an increased sense of powerlessness and impotence.

I find much of A&H's argument compelling, gloomy that it is. When they say, "human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless", it seems to express this paradox. It seems to express an idea of annihilation of the power to be through the pre-eminence of the need to reason.

I'm not sure where I should go with this initial train of thought, though, as it applies in digital space.

Emotions influence physicality

According to work done in the labs at Queens, our overall emotional and intellectual state influences the way we hold ourselves and the way we walk. Researchers at the Biomotion Lab there have taken this seeming truism to the next level, by mapping out the walking gait of various individuals in various internal states.

They provide many demonstrations of how their work in cognitive psychology and kinetics influences the physical stance and motion of individuals. One that I like: an online modeling program where you can manipulate and test for yourself what happens to a person's body language as they feel stressed or relaxed, happy or sad.

I am paying attention to this type of thing these days, as I attempt to figure out how to create a research method that would allow me to map people's digitized physical cues (e.g. emoticons, avatar expressions, etc. ) to their unwired corporeal expressivity, as shown in their body language. I'm hoping to present a paper on this at the upcoming Trials & Tribulations symposium of digital research methods, co-managed by Kelly.

Bachelor of Arts

I'm still in shock. I'm sitting here staring down at my piece of parchment paper declaring that I'm a graduate of Concordia University, Arts and Sciences, Major in Sociology. I graduated "With Great Distinction", which is the same as "Summa Cum Laude", or straight A average.

So many years of dreaming of this day, of wanting it, of working towards it, sacrificing social life, material needs, free time. So much reading and thinking, researching and writing.

... and now here it is. In my hands. The day. The paper. The achievement.

Wow.

Cities' loss

The world lost a great lady yesterday. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs died at the age of 89.

I read her most famous book this past semester, Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her thesis is that the path to a vibrant city life can't be planned and developed in a sterile academic thinkers' context. Rather, in order to understand how a city should be, planners must pay attention to the everyday lived reality of everyday city-dwellers. She showed how and why a vibrant street life is more important than parks, why bars and restaurants that operate into the wee hours are vital to the health of a neighbourhood, and why large apartment buildings surrounded by green space do not work.

Her writing is down to earth and her style sparse, uncomplicated. And she loved Toronto just as much as I do.

RIP Jane.

Crossing the finish line

I wrote and finished my last exam at 10:49 this morning. So I’m done. And not done as in just finished this semester, but done as in finished this degree entirely.

Wow

Getting a degree was a dream for me, for as long as I can remember actually. I wanted to be the first person in my family to do this and it would seem I have. Never again can I be passed over for a promotion because I don’t have a uni degree, or told I can’t be hired/shouldn’t be hired just because I don’t have that piece of paper.

Of course when I started it, I had no idea it would consume me so, would become my new raison d’etre. Although, I suppose those who know me well aren’t that surprised, for it isn’t like me to settle for the easy stuff. Once I figured out that I was good at this whole academic thing and that
here was a place where I could make a living out of everything I’m good at – writing, presenting, mentoring/teaching, selling, thinking big thoughts, deconstructing social life, observing humans.

But as of today, April 24, 2006, my BA in Sociology at Concordia is finished. Completed. Done. Over in all but the formality of conferring the piece of paper on me at a ritual in June.

Wow.

Now what?

Marxist invasion

You know you're reading too much social theory and doing too much academic style thinking/writing when every time you open your mouth to speak, one of the following phrases or words pops out... :

That's just instrumental production.

It's all about alienation of your species being!

Yeah but the patterns of sociality don't lend themselves to that analysis.

Capitalist production within patriarchy says...

I think I need some brain down time....

Women and work

What is it about Lent and Easter that brings all the stories about women's lives out into the popular media?

Over breakfast this morning in the Montreal Gazette, I read that Canadian women are increasingly rejecting the workforce, despite a 30-year record low unemployment rate of 3.9% and strong demand for workers of all ages and stripes. Then Arts & Letters Daily tells me about this Economist article which states that women are the new power of the global economy. While the obvious tone of the Economist article seems positive and affirming, the underlying message is still that women bring their situation on themselves.

End of the real and the social

I got asked today what I'm working on right now (the person knew I had a bunch of stuff due in the next ten days). I'm researching theory for a paper for my senior contemporary social theory course (This would have been a required sociology course had I actually stayed around another year to do an honours degree so I took it because, well, I'm weird...nahhh just a self-professed theory geek).

The question:

Baudrillard talks about "the end of the real". What is the importance of this idea in for modern social theory?

As I delve into various Baudrillard writings and look at some of the analysis and critiques of his ideas, I find that the original notion I had on how to answer this question may hold up but there is another, more interesting way to approach it, albeit potentially more dangerous in terms of getting a good mark.

I know that the stock answer for this is that the death of the real is a standard postmodern position. The pomo view sees the real as Reality, an objective bit of fiction posited by the Enlightenment project. Along with the death of truth and subjectivity a la Foucault, the grounds on which the real was advanced were based in the desires and agenda of the E project: the need to establish a rational, liberal set of values that humans could strive to embody in their lives. Thus, along with Truth, Reality and Subjectivity comes Reason, Logic and the big one, Science. The latter work together to create and maintain the ultimate metadiscipline that wraps up all of these into a nice logical metapackage of thought and practice.

Postmodernism argues that the Holocaust is an example of how the modernity project never really got off the ground. The overt rationality and aims of science are illogical and irrational. In the strong pomo position, the argument is that the Real never was real; there is no objective reality, there is only situated and contingent subjectivity. Therefore, attempting to understand and describe that reality is simply an exercise in promotions of second, third and fourth order simulations and interpretations of simulations.

But! I see a more interesting explanation within Baudrillard for the question. Given that the question asks me to relate the death of the real to modern social theory, the more intriguing response would be to ground it in the illusion that there is a social around which one can theorize. Baudrillard argues that the social doesn't exist, never existed. Given this, the inferiority complex that the field of sociology suffers as it attempts in vain to scientize itself becomes understandable. Because not only is science not really scientific, but the social isn't really anything anyway. If there is no actual science around which to theorize, nor a society within which to situate analyses and arguments, then any attempts to create social theory as master narratives, as both environments and tools of scientific discourse, are deeply and profoundly deluded.

So the death of the real means not only the death of the social, but a complete negation of the social. If the real never was, then any theorizing about a society within it is useless posturing and dreaming. No society = no theory possible about it. It all becomes a collective and collaborative dream/nightmare.

Postmodern geek gear

While taking a break from understanding Baudrillard's concept of the "end of the real" for a cultural theory end-of-semester paper, I came across this laser keyboard. It is projected onto any flat surface, turning the surface into a keyboard.

How appropriate a piece of geek gear, given my topic!

Policing my style

Perhaps it is because I'm in the thick of writing a paper and I know that four more must follow this one. That might explain why any discussions of language, vocabulary, style and usage are interesting and relevant-feeling to me right now.
That might be why, then, that Howard Richler's Speaking of Language column in today's Montreal Gazette jumped out at me as a "must read" and then got me thinking about my real and perceived transgressions vis-a-vis the subject of the column.

The column is about the misuse of the phrase "Thanks to"... and Richler eloquently argues that it is a phrase that is getting overused. But worse -- it is being used wrongly.

Since you can't read the article without buying the paper itself (paper or digital), I'll reproduce the relevent part of it here.

(Usual copyright and disclaimers apply)

Ursula Chautems wrote: "I wince whenever I see the expression 'thanks to' in recent texts. Two examples from The Gazette are: 'Thanks to an increase in taxes, residents' disposable income has shrunk'; and 'Scientists say that the hurricanes may have redrawn the coastal map permanently, thanks partly to human attempts to control the forces of nature.' But I really flipped when I read in a major Canadian women's magazine, 'Thanks to a bout with breast cancer, she had to temporarily abandon her job.'

"I wrote to the editor-in-chief and asked her how such a thoughtless sentence could have been tolerated. She informed me that like other newspapers and magazines, they conformed to the style book which, as she told me, lists 'thanks to' as possible substitutes for 'due to' and 'because of.'

"I wrote back and told her that a style book had no brains and could not be expected to differentiate between emotionally charged expressions and that the people who followed its rules so blindly obviously did not have the necessary brains either to ask themselves the simple question: 'What is there to be thankful for?' before writing 'thanks to.' I mentioned as an example that I myself was a breast cancer survivor and that this ridiculous way of writing had really hit a nerve, when 'because of ... breast cancer' would have been the obvious alternative and would still have been sanctioned by their universal God, the style book.

I wonder whether editors and writers are grabbing the shortest expression they can find in the style book without examining its effect on their text. What exactly is that all-powerful 'style book' that appears to be the ne plus ultra of modern editors and writers?"

I'm self-conscious about this now. Makes me wonder...if I write here, "Thanks to Richler, I'll be paying closer attention to my use of the phrase from herein"...am I doing what he is disparaging? Or am I correct?

Oh! The things I think about when I am procrastinating from what I'm supposed to be thinking about...

Gestures (mis)interpreted?

As I attempt to extract myself from the apparently infinite amount of thought and theory written on the topic of modernization, industrialization and economic development in the Third World, so that I can actually get on with writing my term paper on the topic, I'm struck by the sheer quantity of it all. It would seem to me that no one person would ever be able to read everything good and pertinent to their areas of interest and expertise!

And it is here then, when my own in-built tendency towards collaboration clashes with the hierarchies built into academia. Upon discovering an article that a colleague would appreciate, my natural tendency would be to forward a copy of it or at least a link to it to the person, with a little note explaining why I think this might be useful to them. As a collaborative tactic, this always seemed appreciated in business, back when I was a working professional in the corporate world.

Yet, as I have discovered, there are a lot of academics, professors and students alike, who take this as an affront to their capacity to cope with the knowledge available to them. No matter how humbly and gently I write that little accompanying note, the responses I get back almost invariably demonstrate that my truly altruistic gesture has been taken as one of three types of apparently deliberate (on my part) insults:

1. Implication/insinuation that the person can't cope on their own without my help, and so outrage ensues.
   
2. Dismissal because they've already read it, of course, why wouldn't they have? (How little I know!)
   
3. Misunderstanding as to why this thing even applies to them, because their area of research isn't that at all (as I would apparently know if I'd paid any attention to them at all).

When this is compounded by my almost Pavlovian desire to share equally with people in all strata of academia, including my own professors in existing and past courses, the resulting state for me as I attempt to decide what to do is one of profound confusion, desire and care.

So as I sit here tonight, reading an amazingly rich and cogent account of modernization, development and aid history and concepts from a rather obscure little Human Geography journal Geografiska Annaler, I am struggling with my own compulsion to send the link to it to my professor and explain why I find it so powerful and necessary. What if he misinterprets my intent?

This, then, is politics of academia that I have to start learning to manage, even in such seemingly simple collegial gestures.

Grup is me

So here I am, heading into April, 2006, the last month of my undergraduate degree. I have ten or so more assignments and tests to do, then it's over. Done. Finished. Completed. One more checkmark on the list of accomplished dreams in my life.

Next up? Grad school. Okay yes my 38th birthday then grad school.

It got me to thinking - given my soon-to-be new age, school and city, do I equally have to present a new me? At the age I'm about to be, is it time to start looking it? I always said I'd never cut off my hair into one of those short haircuts women all over Canada do sometime around their 35th birthday. And I haven't.

But when I look into my wardrobe these days, one year post-retirement, I really have to laugh. What a difference a year makes. There is not a suit in sight. I don't know when I last wore pantyhose, and I think I may own one winter skirt, a short green corduroy thing that hasn't left my closet since the day I found it at Old Navy for $5 and brought it home and hung it up. My wardrobe is a consistent blending of a dozen pairs of jeans and corduroy jeans, along with a few dozen short and long-sleeved t-shirts in white, blue, green, brown and black. Throw in some sweatshirts, a bunch of yoga pants and workout wear, all the requisite socks and undies and bras... then peek on over at my collection of sneakers and flipflops in all the colours of the rainbow, and it quickly becomes clear to anyone that the closet belongs, not to a business professional, but rather... to a teenager?

See, that's the thing. I dress young. I feel young, so I dress young. And I'm told it works on me. But how much longer can it work? Being on campus every day, I am certainly influenced by what I see around me. And so I buy what I know. I'm comfortable being casual.

Again, does that need to change?

According to Adam Sternbergh, over at New Yorker magazine, the answer is a resounding "not necessarily". And it doesn't have to change because, apparently, there is a name for a person like me, in their late 30s, who's chucked over the corporate world to go out and find a better life for myself, that involves travelling and summers off and being passionate about one's work. Oh and a wardrobe full of jeans and tshirts.

There is a name and an entire socioeconomic class coming up. They're grups.

And Grup is me too. In a way. Probably. We'll see....

Internet "science"?

This looks like it might be an interesting journal in which to attempt to publish. One thing that made me chuckle is the title of the thing though - the "International Journal of Internet Science"? There is a science to the Internet? Oh the positivist/modernist leanings of the 'deme...

[found via DigitalConversations]

Am I too Canadian?

Okay so there may be no such thing to my fellow Canadians, but I wonder about it when I start getting responses back from US schools saying basically "thanks but no thanks" and yet all the Canadian schools so far are saying "please please come here!". I had thought that with my GPA, GRE scores, interesting professional background and all around scholarly potential (ahem!) that I would get some sort of a decent offer from one of the three US schools to which I applied.

Yes Georgetown accepted me, but not with funding and delving deeper into that program, I wonder now, in hindsight, if that is why they do all the flattering recruitment -- because they're hoping you'll pay the US$29K to attend. Emory was rude in their email followup (promising a refusal letter in the mail right away that hasn't arrived yet, three weeks later). Then today, the final rejection email -- UMass was polite but firmly refusing my potential for their program.

I'm so curious why I didn't make the US cut. I'll have to cultivate some US academic contacts, preferably on placement committees, so I can better understand what I did wrong in presenting myself to US schools. Given where I'm considering applying for my PhD in two years (yes I'm already looking to that), it would be good to get a game plan going on soon.

Amplifying our imaginations

Nice to find this article in Wired about videogames' positive effects on the human imagination. Written by the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, he suggests that the exploration, experiential learning and constant imagination stimulation provided by videogames fills a vital role in the lives of humans, especially children, in our world today. His point is that the daily lives of children are now so structured and controlled that they never have a chance to try out things and just play -- videogames offer that potential outlet. I find this a compelling statement, because it is a topic I've often brought up when talking about the everyday lived reality of today's youth.

While tangential to his overall argument, it was also nice to see someone echoing Kelly's dearly-held belief that watching someone play a videogame is never the same thing as playing one yourself. She's said to me more than a few times that the immersive aspects of gaming can only be felt and understood if you are participating fully yourself, firsthand, as a player. Wright seems to agree with this.

[Found via AL Daily ]

Must-attend lecture

I found out today that Sandra Harding will be giving a lecture at McGill on Tuesday, April 4 entitled "Women, Science and Modernity". I've read her stuff in methods and theory courses and she definitely seems to have an interesting mind. This might be an event that makes it worth missing an evening class.

Decision time

Just returned from a 6 day trip to Toronto, visiting friends and also doing the rounds of various students and faculty in the Communications and Culture joint programme at York/Ryerson. Met some amazing people there, who all seem to share at least some of my interests in digital culture, social theory, postmodernism and popular/consumer culture.

While everyone was super helpful, it was the city itself that is pushing me to make the decision in favour of Toronto. As I drove around, up and down the DVP on sunny spring days, and roaming throughout East York, the Annex, Leaside and Bathurst/St-Clair, I felt that ole tug at the heartstrings and flipflopping of my stomach. Oh yes, the love affair with that city is alive and well. Despite the changes I see everywhere, the increasingly rampant Americanization, it is still Toronto and still feels fundementally and viscerally like home.

The only thing holding me back is that York's offer is the smallest financially-speaking. Given how expensive Toronto is vis-a-vis accomodations, that does give me pause and makes Calgary and suburban Vancouver seem more attractive.

Tough choice. But it's decision time now.

What to do? What to do?

Digital qualitative methods

I attending an internal departmental seminar yesterday, in which the speaker, a post-doctoral fellow from the UK, presented "A sense of things". The point of his presentation was to use performativity and audio/visual methods to attempt to answer the questions:

• How do we become conscious of time (i.e. make time explicit)?
• How do we access the imagination?

In the Heideggerian sense, he suggested that the point of his research was not to arrive at an answer, but rather to find a new way to explore the original questions. I found his questions intriguing and I like the idea of using such methods to alter people's perceptions of their everyday mundane reality, by making their life "strange to them", in his words. I had issues though with the sparse way he fleshed it out for us and I question whether or not such performativity can actually allow any authentic access to the imagination in the sense of self.

His phenomenological bent aside, the idea of using visual methods to get beyond textual realities got me thinking of ways to do this when presenting digital experience. This seems to be a theme in my research these days -- I'm supposed to be doing a photographic assignment for my senior field research course.

Rather than only using photos of corporeal places, though, for this project, I think I might use screen snaps from a day in my life on the net and juxtapose them against past travel shots I've taken in Bermuda, Alaska, England and Norway to suggest the concept of travel as more than a corporeal activity. The underlying point, of course, is to show the net geist, the "there" that is there when on the net, the sense of place/space and environment that comes from being in the net 24/7. I expect this to juxtapose nicely with my other research project arguing against statistical data's notion and measurement of the Internet as a tool to be used.

And if I'm going to experiment with stuff like this, now is the time. I've only got four more weeks of undergrad study before I move on to the semi-big leagues...grad school, that is.....

Patriarchy and pregnancy

After having just finished writing a feminist theory in which I argue for the positive political ramifications for a woman to reject the patriarchal institution of motherhood and not be a mother, based on the writings of Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born, I read this article in Foreign Policy magainze. It posits a causal link between patriarchy (which it claims comes and goes in cycles) and declining birth rates in the Western World. The claim is that it is the enlightened liberals who are not procreating and so the conservatives are bearing up to the challenge of replicating the world's population.

Grading goes online - but is it more objective?

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today called A New Way to Grade that deals with the computerized grading system devised by a Texas Tech professor. As someone who is fairly good at writing and who also likes to play with mechanics of style and grammar in papers, in order to work through possibilities or provide jarring emphasis on certain points, I'm not sure what I think about this type of system.

I'm thinking of a recent paper I wrote for an urban sociology course. In it, in order to answer the question about modern urban culture using Georg Simmel and Sharon Zukin, I deliberately aped their style when dealing with the issues close to their writing. Only at the end of the paper did I "speak" in my own voice, when talking about comparisons and contradictions and my own ideas. In my actual course here, the professor knows me, has graded me before and respects me, so he liked my experimentation with style/voice and gave me an A. Though I noted, somewhat subtly, at the outset of the paper that I would do this, something he caught on to as he knows my style now, it is a line that may have been missed in a system such as this Texas Tech one and I might not have done nearly as well.

I'm also curious about whether this application will catch on, which would mean that at some point in the next few years, as a grad student, I'll be required to use it to do my own grading.

This system may seem more objective, but the postmodernist in me wonders if the state of being objective should always be the goal?

Only 19 more assignments, reports and exams to go before the end of it all.

In a blatent attempt to imagine life apres the BA, an email from Land's End announcing their new SPF30 clothing got me thinking about summertime and summer sunshine. I suspect that this time will arrive sooner than I think, though probably not feel soon enough, given what I have left to do and read.

Piercing racial dichotomoy

Alternet does it again - this article illustrates why Crash was the right choice for Best Picture at the recent Oscars. It shows how race and discrimination cut both ways.

Uneasy feminism

I've started reading feminist theory from what is known as the "third wave feminism". It starts with the anti-racist movement and then moves into post-modern and post-structuralist feminism.

What bothers me though about the turn in this wave is the notion of embracing difference, not just of race, class and sexuality but also of differences of tactics and approaches. I get the sense from these readings that they are reifying the notion of women's nurturing as intrinsically female and therefore completely alien to men. The suggestion seems to be that this nurturing, supporting, emotional femininity is better than an apparently male logical analytical nature.

I keep wanting to ask in my class - why can't we both both? Why can't I use my cool head as much as my hot heart?

This article says as much too, better than I have put it here. When reading Audre Lorde's introduction to her book "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house", I kept asking myself what's wrong with using the Master's tools against him? Why can't I be subversive AND inventive AND compassionate?

Seeking and discovering

I went looking for theories that would work into my feminist theory paper and instead found Audre Lorde's poetry. This one in particular spoke to me tonight.

All in a day's procrastination - Ch. II

The end of my final semester as a BA student is imminent... but will it beat the end of the world? [ flash required ]

...This is what you think about and look for on the net at this point in the semester.

Advancing the art

Oh the things you can find on the net when you're practicting the fine art of procrastination, in order to avoid the actual work that you know is due but which you're choosing to pretend doesn't exist....thereby playing the ostrich...

Example: Came across the Urban Dictionary tonight while attempting to pretend that I do not, actually, have to prepare to lead my class in my feminist theory course on Tuesday.

Also found this site full of cool t-shirts, linked through the UD site.

I'm running a straight 4.0 on procrastination this weekend!

Sourcing books

I can't count the number of times I've found a citation for a book that I would like to check out, but can't find it in my university library. Depending on the cost of the book, I'm often likely to buy it outright.

My online resources for sourcing these books have always been fairly limited in scope, however. I'd do the rounds of Indigo, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, Alibris and Powells. If they didn't have them, I'd maybe check eBay but I'd probably just give up.

Then today, while looking for a book on discourse analysis, I stumbled across FetchBook. It is an inventory comparison system for booksellers and has over 160 or so different sources in its crawling system. It will even allow you to put in your country and then will give you a complete price quote for each seller, including shipping, in the currency of your choice. Nice!

This one will be going into my "Frequently used sources" folder in Mozilla.

Finding answers

"Spring break" as it is euphemistically called here, has started officially for me today. One week with no classes. But it is no true break, because while there are no classes, there is a lot of work to be done.

Case in point: I'm currently working on paper that asks me to respond to this question:

Critical Reflection: Are you Modern or a Postmodern?

For this assignment you may take a side in the Foucault/Habermas debate as long as you can make a claim as to what you think the debate is about. When taking a position be careful, consider what has been written, stay aware of the context, and try to imagine limitations and problems with your position as well as that of your “opponent.” Be aware of contradictions and ambiguities (hint: this is not a two-sided debate; beware of simple dichotomies).

I recognized immediately that I was far more post-modern than modern, but I'm not sure I fully appreciated how modern I was until I had a discussion with Kelly, who challenged me on some of my personal assumptions of my self and allowed me to see more clearly the fuzzy delineations between the two realms of thought.

Sadly we are only allowed to use the ten theorists from our coursepack of readings. I would have liked to do some background work using Baudelaire and Voltaire. I have a feeling I'd have had a strong affinity to Voltaire, who, according to the Wikipedia, is known for saying:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities

...Meaning that if people believed in what is unreasonable, they will do what is unreasonable.

Considering world events of late, that remark seems to be still very much on the mark.

Credibility online

Reading this IHT story about endangered predators, I was struck not only by the old-fashioned and very un-weblike practice of laying out the story in four columns (a layout that almost guarantees people won't read it or like reading it online) but also the way in which the embedded auto-inserted paid advertising at the bottom undermines the credibility of the story itself.

It is rather grimly ironic that a story about the endangerment of marine predators like sharks, and that bemoans the catching and killing of sharks for trifles such as soup and jewellery, would feature advertisements below it for shark tooth pendants and necklaces.

Meeple is me

One of my professors claimed last night in class that you can tell the personality of someone by playing a few games of Risk with them. He argues that you'll quickly see if they're cowardly, collaborative, courageous or cut-throat. You'll know if you can trust them by whether or not they honour their bargains and allegiances and if they consistently win at the world domination variant, you'll have an idea of how ambitious and aggressive they are. He says that the best dating insurance, then, is to play a board game night with your potential beloved and pull out Risk. Play a few rounds. See how they play.

He was counselling this because he'd broken up with his girlfriend that morning and he argued that if he'd taken his own advice and played Risk with her, he might have known about all of her much earlier and saved himself quite a few months of effort.

This made me laugh rather hard...and then pause.

You see, I'm a boardgame geek. In fact, I'd have to confess they're a bit of an obsession for me. I blame it on my parents, who had an entire board game closet available to my brothers and I. Many an early Saturday morning was spent playing and fighting over Monopoly, Trouble, Battleship...you name it, we played it.

Since then, I've played literally hundreds of games. For those who know the 3D me, this is no surprise at all. And Risk counts among my favourite games of all time.

Parties and drinking be damned -- my favourite social evening involves a good dinner, a few nice beers and a half a dozen hours spent playing any of my current favourites like Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcassone or any of the many silly but cutthroat versions of Munchkin. But I also like standard card games, including Wizard, Joker Rummy or Canasta

I even belong to a social club here in Montreal based on board games. We get together on Saturdays now and again and we play all kinds of games, though most tend to be the kinds of games you can only buy in stores like Montreal's Le Valet de Coeur or online. My biggest current obsession is Puerto Rico, and I'm finally grokking it. Though this past weekend, Kelly's 13 year old daughter trounced me rather badly. She's a very good player. Will have to schedule a few re-matches.

Apparently this obsession of mine means I'm a Meeple, an avid game player. And I now badly want this Meeple hoodie take on Settlers of Catan. *drool*

Oh! so..yeah..what kind of a Risk player am I? Put it this way...I'd rather play world domination Risk over mission Risk anyday. I've figured out how to win even without starting out in control of Australia or Africa. I've proven you can dwindle to a half dozen armies and still rally back to win the game. I honour my alliances but make them rarely. And I'm known for pursuing an ailing player hard to try to kill them off and grab their card sets.

It would be interesting to play Risk with my professor. Not sure I want him to see that side of me though. Cutthroat? That's me. Aggressive and enigmatic? Yes, check.

Think if I wupped him in Risk, he'd still give me an A+?

Questioning the Winter Olympics

I'll come clean here, as publicly as my tiny and marginal piece of the I-Space can be called public.

I am an Olympics junkie.

I admit it -- every year there has been an Olympics since I was old enough to understand what they were, I've plopped my butt in front of the TV and watched from beginning to end. From the parade of teams and flags to the extinguishing of the flame, I'm there, watching and cheering, not just for Canada but for any underdogs who attempt to compete with the powerhouses of the world.

And perhaps because of my childhood hometown of Winnipeg, colloquially often referred to as "Winterpeg", I've always been particularly partial to the Winter Olympics.

So it shouldn't be that surprising that I was all excited about the opening ceremonies today, for the Winter Olympics in Turin (Turino?) Italy.

Just as I was about to pack it up here at my laptop and move down to the TV, I read this article. And I paused.

And I questioned myself.

By watching, by participating in the spectacle and giving my eyes over to the commercials, am I contributing to the elitism of the Games?

Oh I'll probably go downstairs anyway now, but at the same time, now I'm wondering. Now I'm being self-critical.

Now I'm not so sure I should be fanning the flames.

Heroes and icons - possible or passé?

With the death of Betty Friedan and a few other iconic feminists in the last few weeks, this Alternet article asks what will happen now? Where are the future feminist icons?

That lament, along with this CFP for a book about superheroes, got me thinking about the whole nature of heroes and icons. Are they actually possible now? Given that most people understand that there is a small wizened cynical scared person behind the curtain of all the greater-than-life wizardry and wonder they see on screen, read about in the paper and consider buying in stores, can anyone emerge anymore with all the qualities expected of an icon or a superhero? Or are we destined to live in a world from herein where pop starlets and spoiled heiresses and jumping-on-couches movie stars act as second-rate substitutes?

I think through these things, too, in the context of my current Contemporary Cultural Theory course, which is setup as an ideological wrestling match between the great German moderns (Think Habermas, Luhmann, Adorno) and the great French post-moderns (think Foucault and Lyotard), all moderated and mediated by the Americans (Haraway and Jameson come to mind). It would seem to me that heroes and cultural icons belong to a world in which meta-narratives are alive and thrive and in which people are able to not only suspend disbelief, but to believe uncritically from the outset.

I don't see this world in existence around me today. Fractured consciousness, stunted attention spans and a deep cynicism for anything resembling Truth, Beauty and Freedom are what I see reigning instead. Short of the major prophets acting as heroes and icons in fundamentalist religious discourse, and the wanna-be hero that is US President George Bush, Western culture is no longer birthing great heroes.

In the feminist camp, young activist feminists are trying to nominate and raise up certain possible influential women to that status, through things like the Real Hot 100 list, but the sheer number of feminism-is-dying journal articles and newspaper pieces shows they have a long uphill battle ahead.

In a po-mo world, then, are heroes and icons possible or passé?

Women's double lives?

While I accept the possibility that social theory can affect a profoundly transformative effect on a person’s beliefs, ideas and preconceptions, it has been my experience that such theory is rare. Therefore, it was with no small amount of shock and awe that I found myself deeply moved by Adrienne Rich’s (1980) article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”*.

The premise of Rich’s theory is deceptively simple: All women exist on a continuum of female intimacy and bonding. This continuum of “woman-identified experience” (p.648) is normal and natural for women, but it becomes stunted and thwarted by patriarchal systems of socialization. These systems and structures isolate women from each other and push them towards hetronormativity in the service of male power, as evidenced in procreation, property and security. Women, however, are not conscious of the oppression inherent to their sexual choice, however, and therefore deny themselves the full potential richness of a female-centric life.

Given my own preoccupation with ideas of choice, agency and power, I suppose it should not surprise me that I had such a reaction to her work. Because she deals with the issue of women’s awareness (or lack thereof) of the knowledge of their potential for alternate ways of being, her argument strikes me as having a rather Foucaldian slant. Akin to his twinning of the concepts of power/knowledge, Rich seems to be saying that the lack of knowledge of choice itself is what disempowers women. I see a link, too, between knowledge and consciousness in her writing, or a lack thereof in the lives of women. I find this argument persuasive – In the distractions of modern life and the multiple demands to which a woman submits, there is often, sadly, little to help her to understand the nature of her own subjective oppression.

I find that Rich muddies her theoretical waters through her use of the term lesbian, however. At times, she seems to want to reclaim the term from its subordination to an implication of sexuality, in order that she may use it as a sign for a deep and apparent asexual universal bond between women. Yet, at other times, she links it very directly with woman-woman sexuality and buts it up against the term “erotic”. Juxtapose this ambiguity or contradiction with her argument about a pervasive socially-ingrained revulsion towards sexual lesbianism in many people, and I can now better understand my fellow classmates’ strong initial reactions and widespread rejection of her central thesis in our classroom discussion of Rich’s work. I see now how and why it centred around the term lesbian.

Also, as provocative as Rich’s argument seems, and despite her token discussions of particular ethnicities and their experiences of womanhood, her argument still seems overly universalistic. In her desire to generalize her argument out to include all women, she ignores the other determinants at work in “sex colonization” (p644). Finally, at times, her argument has the texture and tone of a manifesto, evident whether she is calling women to bestir themselves to action against hegemonic heterosexuality, pointing out what is wrong with existing feminist theory or simultaneously exalting and bemoaning the courage it takes to be a self-defined lesbian in a patriarchal world.

Despite these criticisms, I still find myself profoundly affected by her ideas and argument. The article led me face-to-face, as it were, with the unconscious blindness inherent in my own apparent heterosexuality. While I found many passages noteworthy in this article, the passage that stuck out for me in particular was Rich’s discussion of the imposition of a female “double life”:

Nor can it be assumed that women…who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly female emotional and passional [sic] world, “preferred” or “chose” heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal”, and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty and fulfilment (p.654)

I see much of myself in this passage. And so I am left questioning myself. Given my own troubled background, given my long history of struggle between wanting to stop the bullying and just be normal versus wanting to be able to walk my own self-defined life path and normality be damned, between wanting to rejoice in being female and not trusting my femininity to get me what I want out of life, have I been living the double life of which Rich speaks? I have always prided myself on my own ability to live a conscious life and be aware of the reasons and factors that have influenced my being. But how conscious have I been, really? Where am I on the continuum? Given my life choices to date, am I even on the continuum?

Rich’s theory has affected me. In doing so, she has perhaps fulfilled her ultimate intent behind the article: to sound a clarion call to women everywhere that jolts them into awareness of the extent of their unconscious duplicity in their own sexual submission. I hear that call. I am aware now. If social theory is truly about affecting social change in any degree, Rich’s theory is a compelling example of just how possible that can be.

*Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.
Signs, 5(4), 631-660.