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.

Sound and fury continued...

As I continue to follow the machinations and permutations of those involved in the Cartoon Wars (as they're now rather officially being called, it seems), I am occasionally coming across articles, like this one in the German publication "signandsight, that attempt to demonstrate to Western minds the absurdity of the entire affair, by firmly putting the shoe on the other foot to evaluate its fit. And frequently finding it fitting ridiculously.

Pay attention to the analogy in that article to the movie, Life of Brian, a longtime favourite of mine. It is an choice to prove the point that this is a lot of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing. Don't believe me though...with this whole issue in mind, watch the trailer and see the similarities to this whole farcical affair.

Struggles for the future

If I had any doubts as to what is most important in the US, money or people, especially when it came to the Internet, this new hare-brained mega scheme on the part of the multi-billion dollar telecom companies would lay it to rest.

Money. Money trumps all, even the transformative open systems nature of the net.

Cartoon Wars

Every week, I sit in a contemporary cultural theory class, listening to the professor discuss and debate the supremacy of modernity versus post-modernity, all very abstract and tidy and nice and ultimately useless. Or is it?

That very battle is right now being played out on the streets and in the media vehicles, in the minds of everyday people, as a battle between respect for the supremacy of religion (aka meta-narrative par excellence) and the need for the supremacy of free speech (aka post-modernist splintered individual positioned rationalities).

What the heck am I talking about? Have you been following the Cartoon Wars here, here, here, here and here....? I have. Throughout this last week, I've read about what's been going on, with shock, disbelief, annoyance, anger and a certain mounting sense of bitter pessimism roiling within me.

I'm at the point where there are no words that come to me to express the totality of what I am feeling, of how disgusted I am with the world in general, the posturing, the prostituting of ideals, the threats, the capitulation to a culture of fear that is gradually spreading a black plague of ideological junk over this earth.

Since I can't seem to come up with any coherent sentence to describe my feelings, allow me instead to direct you to Ibn Warraq's column that presents one decidedly western and unapologetically passionate and yet critical view. Then go on over to the All Things Beautiful blog and wallow/flounder/submerse yourself in a dizzying series of clearinghouse-style snapshot views on what is happening, why its worth paying attention to and how serious it could end up being for this earth.

Oh woe is definitely us these days.

Pit bull hysteria

The excellent Malcolm Gladwell has written an article in the recent New Yorker about the pit bull profiling hysteria and he shows why pit bulls aren't the dangerous creatures some law makers would have people believe

Rape worse than death?

In my feminist theory course, we've had some discussions and debates about the role of women in the military. Framed within that debate in the class was the idea that women are nuts for wanting to be part of the military, considering if they are caught, they will be raped. My classmates couldn't believe that any women would lay herself open to that potentiality by choice.

I remember feeling uneasy about the whole debate and yet incredulous too -- why do so many women fear rape so much? And why, in debates about the military, is rape framed as the deciding reason why or why not to join up? It would seem to me that having to kill another human being would be far worse than rape, that it would be more damaging to the soul. And wouldn't your own death be worse than rape? If given a choice between rape and death, wouldn't you choose life? And be proactive about tactics to avoid rape, so long as you safe-guarded your health? Isn't avoiding rape all about maintaining your health and your life, after all?

Apparently not, according to this Alternet article. It lays bare details on the circumstances of the numbers of US female soldiers in Iraq who consciously chose to not drink water after 2 or 3pm, in order to not feel a need to urinate during the night. Apparently, the path to the latrines are unlit and this lays female soldiers open as potential victims to predatory males. And the males were their own platoon mates.

The confounding issue? The heat. It reached as high as 50C degrees. At that heat, frequent and plentiful hydration is necessary and going without water for extended periods of time can be lethal. Tragically, in the case of many of the female soldiers, it was lethal.

Yet still, despite knowing this, many female soldiers consciously chose to avoid water and liquids so as to avoid the risk of rape. And many of them paid for this choice with their death, expiring in the middle of the night from dehydration.

After learning about this, I'm left questioning my assumptions about rape and patriarchy and power and the military. The structural inbalances in this situation are huge and the path these women seemed to have needed to navigate was littered with obstacles against them. I can't pretend to begin to understand their complete situation, true, but at the same time, it would seem to me that there should have been ways around this.

Call me a pessimistic realist, but I had to laugh bitterly at the US Army's Sexual Assault Prevention motto, An Army of One, Caring for All and their own Human Resources Commander's pledge/call to action that soldiers "require us to provide the world-class human resource support they deserve". Despite the command's assertion that "the Army is committed to supporting and caring for victims of sexual assault and to ensuring that victims and offenders are treated according to Army policy", it would certainly as if Command is unable and indeed unwilling to back up those words.

Obviously, whistle-blowing and working within the Army system hasn't worked for the women serving. What I don't understand, then, is why they didn't find ways to take matters into their own hands? What about the buddy system? Or a pail under your bunk? Or carrying their guns when they had to go after dark? Aren't these women trained to kill? Weren't there ways for them to defend themselves? Wasn't there other ways to deal with the threat that wouldn't have resulted in so many perishing?

Don't get me wrong...I am not blaming these women for their victimization and for paying the ultimate price for attempting to avoid it. I am not exonerating the structural factors that legitimated the behaviour of the male servicemen and turned a blind eye to the very real problem and the tragic loss of life. But when the structure fails you, when the system turns a blind eye, as the resourceful, smart and capable woman you must be to be serving your country overseas, couldn't you find a way to ensure your own surivival? Isn't your own life worth that?

Was the situation so bad for those women soldiers that they saw their condition as hopeless and viewed rape as worse than death?

Reacting to the Feminine Mystique

The paper I started on Friday is done. Since it's brief, I figured, why not post it? So here it is:

The key argument in the opening chapter to Betty Friedan’s (1974) seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, is that women in the early to mid period of the 20th century were socialized to believe that biology was destiny (p.11). Inculcated into them was the idea that the pinnacle of fulfillment for a woman was to be a wife and mother (pp.11-13). Women threw themselves into their role, subsuming any personal individuality to the societal dictates of perfect womanhood (p.14). In women’s pursuit of the mystique of utter femininity, however, they found a vague, nameless, malaise that they could not speak of to others (p.14-15). Friedan named the problem (p.27), and later in her book suggested the solution was more education and greater choice. However, I argue that this combination has not yet brought about the ultimate goal of liberal feminism, which is the true freedom to achieve feminine self-fulfilment on our own terms.

Reading the book’s introduction, I was struck by the similarities between the behaviour, feelings and views of women of the 50s and 60s and of women today. The basic ideal of seeking self-fulfillment is still there, though now a plethora of seeming choice has been opened for women. But are they truly choices? While the ability to go to school and forge a career are now equally available as valid goals for women, there are still strong societal expectations that these will be pursued alongside the old goals. The techniques for achieving these goals of education, career, family and hearth are depressingly the same now as they were in Friedan’s time. Through family pressures, the media and the market, women are told to be smart and goal-oriented, yes, but also continue to be pretty and thin, busty and sexy. Go ahead and be successful in your career, certainly, but also remember that you have a moral duty to get married, keep a clean and attractive house and have a few well-adjusted, smart and active children.

As Friedan herself notes, the liberation women were supposed to have achieved as a result of the industrial revolution’s new inventions such as the electric washers and dryers is a myth (p.14-15) and women realized it, but internalized it as a “problem that has no name” (p.15) .

Today, partly as a result of Friedan’s book, we have a name for the problem – desire for self-fulfilment as women. Yet we are not necessarily any closer to being able to actualize that desire than women were in the time Friedan was writing. All that has happened is that we have more choices to make in how we live our lives and an apparent freedom to choose among them. The consumerist thrust of late modern life belies the freedom of such choices, however, reducing them to pseudo-choices of a stunted feminine agency. While women are certainly are no longer silenced and unable to talk about the problem, as evidenced by the proliferation of women’s magazines, daytime talk shows and self-help books, the problem itself is still there.

The old expectations of a specific housewife role for women, that almost mythical role which Friedan argues so eloquently was the stultifying straightjacket of perfect zombie femininity (p.24), has been merged into an additional role – that of a successful wage-earner. Thus, I posit that we have not moved beyond the ideal of the feminine mystique, but have rather merged it into a new ideal of femininity that incorporates most of the expectations and techniques of the old and has layered new ones on top of it.

In Friedan’s time, the “problem” was, as one woman put it, “always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (p.23). This has not changed. The roles of mother and wife persist as prescribed and desirable goals on the path to feminine self-fulfillment. Layered on top of them now is the goal of successful careerist, consummate consumer, ageless beauty and socially-conscious citizen. While that liberal feminist goal, the ability to choose, has seemingly been obtained, I am left questioning how much better off women are today than they were in Friedan’s time. Despite the advances and expansive roster of choices, women today still often feel as if they are frantically treading water, filling their time with activity and obligation, but never able to stop long enough to concentrate (p.25). In looking for herself, she continues to lose herself. The problem may be named, but it is not yet solved.

Critiquing an introduction

I sat down this morning and attempted to construct a reaction paper to the introduction to Betty Friedan's seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique. But how can you critique/analyze an introduction to a larger work if you haven't read the larger work?

Friedan discusses how the mania over obtaining a husband and becoming a housewife so occupied women of the 50s and early 60s that they stopped going to college, obsessed over their weight (by consuming a chalk product called Metrecal) and appearance, pretended, at age 10, to have "bosoms", and generally subsumed any sense of individuality into their prescribed role.

This sounded interesting to me, because if you swap out the reason for this (i.e. getting a husband) for getting a lover (i.e. having sex), you still see the same end result behaviour today.

Plus ca change....?? Should that be my theme?

Memories of farming

I am potentially one of the last generation of Canadians who can claim to come from a traditional farming family. I can remember Easters and summers spent on my uncle's Saskatchewan wheat farm, with chickens and cows and horses, with a huge vegetable garden and mangy cats who caught the mice that otherwise nested in the hay bales. My uncles road the tractors and stalked the fields day in and day out. They talked about the weather and worried about tornadoes and rain, drought and bugs. They chewed tobacco, talked very little, and with their wrinkled careworn faces, they seemed much older and wiser than my own government engineer father. They seemed larger than the life, yet inextricably tied to it.

Because I lay claim to the idea of having been a half farm kid (the other half being the kind of suburban/rural kid you can only be when you grow up on the outskirts of a small and relatively unimportant Canadian prairie city) , stories of farming and farmers have always touched a chord. My uncles are part of that for me. Which is probably why I want to see the film "The Real Dirt on Farmer John". While it is American made and will no doubt have some of the US patriotic jingoism that goes with that, it is made by a man who grew up in a farming community, on a family farm and watched the changes wrought by weather, politics, economics and globalization. Alternet's overview has piqued my interest. I hope it shows in a theatre near me this summer.

Downsizing

As I begin to prepare for what will probably be smaller living quarters, starting this summer, I am trying to figure out how to handle all of those electronic components I've got that are rechargeable and whose mess of cables look rather untidy in a small place.

So I'm rather interested in the eNook, a wall mounted charging station that acts as a mini-desk. You plug all of your adapters and the like into a strip powerbar that the desk hides at the bottom, then you pull the cables up and pin them to various shelves.

In a bachelor apartment, this might make a lot of sense to hang in a hallway near the entry.

First conservatives, then what?

Given that the Conservatives won the election last night, I should be wearing black today. Especially given their promised assault on liberal and feminist values and laws.

Is the US scenario going to be the case in Canada now, if the abortion rights legislation is struck down?

Page out of the Odd

While doing other things on the web tonight, I stumbled across this eBay auction for a t-shirt.

Yeah, so what, you're saying. T-shirts are sold every second on eBay. Right?

Well, the story behind the t-shirt is what makes the auction interesting. The auction is being offered by the Swedish owners of PirateBay, one of the web's most popular piracy/warez sites.

This auction may not be JC in a piece of toast, but it is definitely a page from the odd files. I wonder if the buyer will actually pay up? And if they will actually make it to Sweden to see if it is true that polar bears really don't wander the streets there? And why, if they can afford a trip to Sweden and the purchasing of copious amounts of alcohol for probably a large-ish swedish man and his fellow pirates, why they wouldn't just buy their software and music to start with?

Would be cheaper wouldn't it?

Or is this proof that price/cost isn't everything?

Paradox of undergraduate education

Jotted in the margins of the reference page of one of my first undergraduate essays was the comment, "Excellent grasp of the theoretical material and original ideas of your own, but the whole paper could have been deeper if you had read and considered the entirety of the major works you use".

I remember that comment giving me pause. Deeper thought. It stuck with me and since that day, I've strived to do that in my academic works; be deeper, write deeper, display more nuance.
Yet, this afternoon, while reading the lyrical introduction to Marshall Berman's excellent and compelling book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, I came face to face with that concept again. This time, though, it was presented as an issue of 20th century modernity. The problem with this third phase of modernity, Berman argues, is that thought and analysis have flattened into dualisms and polarities. He seems to suggest we've lost the colour and nuance to our thinking and, in doing so, have become passive in our cultural participation. As a consequence, too few 20th century modern thinkers dare to think big thoughts, to create grand narratives, or to delve deeply into the messy contradictions of life.

While I could go on about how he develops this and show how much I agree with it, the point here is rather to talk about how the originating idea of modernity, the call from Kant to have the courage to think, has been so compartmentalized by the acceleration of time and thought that it becomes difficult to be original, to demonstrate a largesse of vision or an incisive depth of thought.

Case in point - my undergraduate education. As an emerging sociologist and cultural theorist, it is to be my job to contemplate the questions of human social life. I am expected to have read all the greats from all the tiers and to understand how they link to one another in a rich and strong web of understanding and argumentation on what it means to be human. The tacit expectation is that I will have read each of these great thinkers deeply, and that I will have a strong and almost didactic grasp of who said what about what and whom.

Sounds right? Of course.

Yet, the reality of my education falls far short of this expectation. Rather than take courses that deal with the entirely of thought that is a single thinker (e.g. Marx, Weber, Habermas, Foucault), all of my courses have been survey courses. They have been about tracing a large field of thought, be it classical social theory, theories of self and society or, as of now, contemporary cultural theory. In all cases, my exposure to various big-T theorists and thinkers has often consisted of a 20-30 page excerpt of their work.

So, when it comes time for me to sit down and write a 10 or 20 page paper on some aspect of someone's theory, I stumble in the gloaming of their work, the short brief evening of their thought to which I've been exposed that semester. As I do this, time and again, I'm reminded of how little of their overall body of work and argument I can claim to know.

The remedy for this may seem obvious -- read more. Take all the books for those theorists out of the library, sit down and read them. Doing so would allow me to answer Berman's call.

But the structure of my undergraduate education is not built for that. Often, I am given a set of essay topics and must produce a compelling and original paper within two week. Fourteen short days. And while working on that paper, let us not forget that I am juggling four to five other courses, each demanding a minimum of 40-60 pages of dense theoretical reading weekly.

A quick mathematical calculation tells me that I am reading somewhere in the vicinity of 250-300 pages a week. On top of attending 15-20 hours of class lectures. And, of course, commuting to school, staying in touch with my social circle, exercising, doing household chores and grocery shopping and, by necessity, eating and sleeping and bathing.

Add onto that the assignments that pile up each week in each class, the seminars I have to lead, the papers and critiques and replies I have to create, exams I have to study for and things I have to just plain know and the overall picture of a sociology undergraduate falls far short of the ideal to which Berman would have me aspire.

How can I have broad knowledge of theory, have read anyone extensively and deeply enough to be able to redress the issue noted in that first of my undergraduate essays, given the realities of my undergraduate life? When all of the enormity of a theory or theorist is instructed in confetti-like bits and drags and drops, what one is left with is a murky Andy Warhol-meets-Jackson Pollock-like collage of an understanding, rather than a cohesive, all-dots-connected flowing knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom.

Like today. I would dearly love to rush out to the library or bookstore, buy Berman's book, whose introduction I enjoyed thoroughly, and sit down with a few cups of tea and read it, cover to cover, spending the weekend wallowing in it and engaging with Berman's take on modernity. But, if I do that, I will not be able to read the Baumann reading for this week for that class, nor will I read chapters 3 through 5 in my Cities and Urban Life textbook (all 100 pages) for my Urban Regions course. Nor would I get to reading Friedan, Trebilcot and Jones for my Feminist Theory course, rending me unable to participate as expected in Tuesday's seminar. Nor would I read the four chapters for my Comm course, or the two chapters for my development course or do the literature review for my field research course...along with the reading for the week in that textbook too.

And so it goes. Be thorough, be broad, be deep, dig and sift and think, think, think. Yet each of the readings for each of my classes jumps me around each week from topic to topic, from writer to theorist, never pausing anywhere long enough to get more than a glossed-over white bread understanding of an incomplete microcosm of some important person or thought or book. Demands of each course being what they are, where am I supposed to get the time to read broadly and deeply enough of any single theorist to be able to make any knowledge claims about their work? Let alone be able to think deep thoughts about any one topic, or write deep and nuanced analytical paragraphs into a coherence of brilliance that will show that I've heeded those comments on that first paper.

Do as we say, not as we demand of you. This is the message I'm taking away from my undergraduate education. This, it seems, is the paradox of my undergraduate education.

New addition to my family

After a looooong day on campus in three intense three-hour-per class classes, I gingerly made my way back to my car, chipped it free of ice, drove carefully home in yet another Montreal ice storm and wearily dropped all my stuff at the front door. I was looking forward to just making a cup of tea and settling into my bed to watch some TV on my laptop.

But there it was.

The box, sitting all innocently on my table. The return address? Somewhere in Alabama. Was it...?

My heart started to race.

I force myself to calmly walk to the gadget drawer in the kitchen, find a paring knife, slit open the packing tape. Pop open the top. Rummage through the peanuts.

Allelujah! Yesss!!

My new 30GB iPod has arrived. The new addition to my family of tech toys is here!

I got it from eBay at a good price for a Canadian (hence the Alabama return address). As I therefore didn't get a colour choice, I ended up getting it in white. I don't mind.

Only odd thing is that it doesn't come with a way to power it independently of the computer. Luckily I have gadgets and cables for it that are universal and can be appropriated from my mini, which I'm now selling.

I can actually fit my entire iTunes library on this baby. Wow!

Is it dorky to be so in love with a probably-over-hyped piece of technology?

Call me guilty, then.

Book about film and myth

Through ALDaily, I stumbled across this book that treats how film has changed our view of the myths of modern society. Wonder if it would illuminate anything in game studies?

CFP risk

Okay so I'm probably dreaming in technicolour, but I just finished putting together and submitting a paper submission to the American Sociological Association's 2006 conference, Great Divide. I sent in a paper called "Rapping Adorno" that uses German-Turkish youth rappers to gainsay the seeming stifling totality of Adorno's negative stance towards mass culture and popular culture.

It felt odd though to see no institution after my name on my submission. As of May, I'll be in a rather liminal state academically. I'll no longer be a student at Concordia but will not yet be a student at whatever grad school accepts me and me them.

I know that I probably haven't a hope in Hades of getting accepted -- I've heard it said that the rejection rate for this conference is somewhere around 80%?!? But I couldn't resist - the conference will be in Montreal, after all. Funnily enough, though, I may not be by then - I hope to be in Toronto, Burnaby, Amherst (MA), or Atlanta.

If it doesn't (when it doesn't?) get accepted, I'll start working on submitting it to a few journals, though at this point, I have no ideas which ones.

Gendering online activity

As I begin my own small-scale qualitative research project on female adolescents' online activity, which compares the richness of their interactions in digital space against the sterile and stereotyped "use" captured in Canadian statistical data, I stumbled upon this Alternet article that makes a cogent argument against the gendering of online activity.

Urge to converge

An article in today's Montreal Gazette gave an overview of a new Nissan concept car to be shown at the upcoming Montreal car show. Called the Urge, it is designed to appeal to the so-called Echo generation, the teenage children of boomers.

Based on online survey data from the target group, the car is built to appeal to video game and gadget geeks, which Nissan claims exemplifies the large majority of that demographic. The car is unusual in that it takes the idea of being a toy to a new level. Instead of marketing it by talking about how fast and powerful the car is, instead, the marketing is centered around how fast and powerful the game system is that is in the trunk. In this case, the Microsoft Xbox 360.

Yes, that's right. This car has a built-in Xbox in the trunk, with a flipdown screen in the dashboard. The controller is the steering wheel and pedals and the sound is channeled into the car's existing audio system.

No, it can't be played while driving (thankfully!). It is strictly a stationary only thing. Interestingly enough, it comes with a customized special edition version of Project Gotham Racing and was developed as a joint venture with, yes, Microsoft.

Oh and there is no key to speak of -- the car starts using a cellphone as a "smart key". And yes it has an integrated iPod docking station.

Politics of the art prize

Since writing a paper last semester on Theodor Adorno's views of high/low culture divisions and the culture industry's commodification of culture, I've been interested in how art prizes play into the economics and interests of this. While writing that paper, I came across an excellent article on this in one of my favourite journals, Media Culture & Society.

Then today, AL Daily pointed me to this New Yorker article that provides an overview of this topic from the perspective mainly of author and English professor, James F. English, who has written a book on the topic. As the New Yorker article points out about English's book, his central idea is that the need for authors to have the power to create economic value (cultural capital?) increases, so too do the number of prizes created and given out each year. The intent behind these prizes is to create value where it otherwise didn't exist, but that value is intended to be economic only. Thing is, how many consumers pay attention to such prizes? And since when did consumerism become so important to the art and vocation of writing?

Of course, this very topic is one that Adorno deals with extensively and at least in the case of literature, many of his concerns are valid. But I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's views on the culture division between high and low and I think they play into this too. Perhaps even moreso.

As I believe I blogged here last month, Arendt is quite critical of the notion that an author's work reflects the author themselves. Rather, she notes that the work instead reflects the author's ability to author and to play the role of author -- there is little, if any, within any artistic work that can lead us to the true inner-ness of the artist. Their artistic output can give us hints of what the artist is, but not who they are.

I believe this distinction is important to consider when looking at the role of art prizes such as the Booker, Giller, Pulitzer, and yes even the Nobel.

Google PC?

Friends have been joking with me over the last year about what the next big innovation to come out of the Googlesphere would be. They were putting their money on an operating system.

Seems they weren't wrong -- Google is expected to announce this week at the keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that they are bringing out a low-cost Google PC.

My friends were more prescient than they realized.

Science without proof

Last year, John Brockman sent out a call to the global scientific and digerati community to answer the question "What ideas do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?"and 120 eminent thinkers answered. The result created a book, What we Believe but Cannot Prove.

This year, the big question being sent out is, "What is your most dangerous idea?". Now this is one that really interests me.

If I had to think of my own and narrow it down? None of them are new, though they aren't very popular. For me, it would be the disservice both science and religion have done to mankind. Probably also the idea that life isn't supposed to have innate meaning - humans aren't here to create, the world doesn't have to have a purpose. It just is.

Like I said, not new. But perhaps something from one of the more complicated and erudite minds out there may spur something for me. I'll look forward to the book.

Value of the intangible

As I recover from a long and hellish December spent writing umpteen pages of essays for various courses, not to mention many application letters for grad school, I am looking ahead to the new semester that starts next week and considering what it means....my last one. Of my BA. Last one. Wow.

It's got me thinking about all the work I have done to get to this point. All the pages I've read of theory and articles. All the pages I've written of theory and ideas and garbage (sometimes). What of it is valuable? What is worth keeping? What would happen if I lost it? If my laptop got stolen?

Stories like this one about a stolen master thesis remind me that I should use the spanky new 200gb external drive I got for Christmas to back up the contents of my Uni folder. Also suggests that I should subscribe to a service like Xdrive when I head into thesis writing land later in the semester, when it is time for me to write up the results of the research project I'll be spearheading.

Sodoku isn't math?

Sodoku has become incredibly popular in La Belle Province of Quebec and has managed to infiltrate my household. I've avoided it, thinking it requires number skill, which I definitely do not have. However, according to American Scientist Online, it doesn't require math so much as it require logic and pattern recognition.

Okay I can buy that. But the medium of its message is still numbers. And I avoid numbers.

[found via Arts & Letters Daily]

Responsibility for action

Reading Arendt's Human Condition. Came across an interesting passage that could be useful in any analysis of the uses to which people put artistic works.

The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the "hero" of the story, we never can point unequivocally to him as the author of is eventual outcome" (p.185).

I take this to mean that the author/artist of a work can be seen in their work, but they cannot be held responsible for any action that is the outcome of their speech.

When one considers how this is otherwise often done around violence in video games, Hollywood movies, etc., this quote gives me pause to question my own beliefs.

Gaming in the old media

Does this Economist article that takes on Castronova's new book, Synthetic Worlds indicate that gaming and the analysts who cover it seriously have become newsworthy? I'll let Kelly do the dissecting of the article though, she's far more qualified.

Defining terms

A conversation with Kelly yesterday about terms and their definitions got me thinking about how common academic concepts get taken for granted in the classroom. While I have had an entire class that explained the concepts of ontology, epistemology and methodology, that was a rare occurence. Too often, the professors and instructors assume that we know what a given term or theme is or means.

To whit: dialectic.

Has anyone ever truly explained to you what it means? Independant of using it with Marxian thought?

I realized last night, as I worked through parts of Arendt's Human Condition, that the argument I'm attempting to setup for a long detailed paper on music as mass culture or art requires me to contrast Arendt's work sharply with Adorno's thought. It would seem to me that I'm attempting a dialectical argument.

My understanding of dialectic is the presentation of an argument that has a thesis, an opposing thesis (antithesis?) and a compare/contrast analytical conclusion (synthesis). But is this actually a dialectic?

I'd look downright silly if, in the title of my paper, I grandly proclaimed that I was presenting a dialectical argument, with Arendt on one side, Adorno on the other and my syntehsis of their thoughts with others and my own, if/when, in fact, I am not.

So what does dialectic truly mean anyway? And how am I supposed to know all of these terms and concepts that have cropped up if I've never had the chance to discuss them with someone?

There's my collaborative verbal learning style coming up to bite me again.

Anyway, if you have opinions on the meaning of dialectic, speak up please. My paper is due next wek and I don't want to read as a twit to the professor in question.

Yawning over movies

Yup, there it is. On the front page of my local daily newspaper. "Hollywood fears meltdown".

Seems that movie attendance in theatres is on a sharp decline with no signs of improving. Theatres are pinning their hopes on Jackson's newest, King Kong.

I have nothing against the big ape, but I was never interested in the other versions of this film. I mean, an oversized ape rampaging in Manhattan because he's fallen for a human woman? I have a lot of imagination, but that premise has just never worked for me. I'll be staying home this weekend.

And maybe that's the problem. For much of this year, I haven't gone to the movies. Oh sure I've seen films, including Narnia and the latest Hogwarts saga, and I've actually been very impressed and surprised by one (Derailed, believe it or not....see it definitely if you haven't already), but the year overall has been a big yawn at the box office, as far as I'm concerned. I've been getting more satisfaction out of my PVR.

Perhaps that's the reason? With so many of us able to now be choosy about what and when we watch anything, more of us are choosing to watch only what we think is interesting and forgoing the rest.

Or is it actually a sign that online entertainment, a la MMOs and downloadable TV via iTunes, has really started to hit it big?

I look at the near horizon and I see only one movie I'm looking forward to seeing...Brokeback Mountain. A big screen buddy movie about the lives of two cowboys and their more-than-average homosexual relationship? Wow. Count me in.

The rest of what's coming out though? *Yawn*.

Think I'll read a good book instead.

From the "OMG!" files

Talk about stupid ways to advertise...Alternet reports that Starbucks is paying people to drive around cities with fake coffee cups affixed to the roof of their cars. Why? Read the blogpost.

Order out of randomness

A friend has recently been exploring spirituality as a way of making sense of the world. His main argument for his exploration is that the world is too ordered to be a happy accident.

My own preference is for the theories of emergence trickling out these days from biology and sociology, from people like Barabi and from Johnson.

Then through Arts & Letters Daily, I found this article that makes a very coherent statement for the idea of the randomness of order and the impacts of that on religiosity.

Hopefully he reads it so we can continue our intense and enjoyable exchange on this topic. If you want to join in through the comments below, please do!

Feminism, femininity and me

A few things from this week that have me pondering femininity, feminism and me.

The first has to do with sexuality. While sitting in an intro level life development psychology class the other day, the professor asked the students what age do girls get sexy and at what age are women no longer sexy. The class overwhelmingly decided that the age range for "sexiness" was 14 to 40.

40!

Based on that, then, I have only two years and a few months before I fall off the map of human sexuality.

Hmph.

Why is it that, despite the portrayals of sexier older women in movies and television, a large number of supposedly forward-thinking university students still cling to the outmoded idea that women lose their sexiness once they hit their prime years, whereas men only get sexier?

Then today, I was reading that part of the blame may lay in the failure of feminism to change people's private opinions on the 21st century female experience. The issue is apparently with women's choices, as this excellent Alternet article on Stay-at-home feminists discusses.

The issue, they say, is that much of feminism's attacks and efforts have gone into changing public policy and business practice. Little has been done, though, to change individual opinions and the individual female's idea of what it means to be a woman in this century. Hence the fact that many successful women still give up their careers to stay at home once they have children, and most men still see this choice as a given necessity.

I ponder this these days as I attempt to discover how deeply into exploring female voices I want to go in my own social research. Am I ready to adopt a feminist agenda, when for years I've scoffed at the idea and avoided the label as if it carried the plague?

My first tentative forays into the idea were done last week when I finished a paper that explored digital practice as a safe and empowering place for teenage girls, who are otherwise excluded from public physical space and protected (smothered?) by parents concerned for their bodily safety.

Now I'm contemplating doing a small-scale dual qual/quan research project that explores how national survey data from Canada, US and the UK marginalize and trivialize female digital practice by studying it and configuring it as use, rather than practice, regardless of the ages they study.

The idea would be to use feminist research methods which propose a holistic approach merging quantitative data analysis with qualitative exploration of female meaning through oral histories of a few women at various points in the life span of women. One teenager, one young adult, one career adult and one retiree.

Is this the beginning of a way to redress the wrongs pointed out in the Alternet article? Am I willing to start working on research that will immediately be labeled feminist? Am I prepared for the results, both in the research and in me?

Has feminism truly failed? Am I willing to do something to stop it?

Good questions. Don't know yet. But have to decide soon. My undergraduate studies are rapidly coming to an close, as this semester winds down and leaves me only one more to go. One more before I have to hit the ground running as an emerging scholar.

Am I willing to take this issue on and make it a big part of my future efforts? Am I willing to wear the feminist label and do what it takes to be sure the goals of feminism don't fail?

Stay tuned.

Geek gear

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Some snow on the ground, -8 degrees and the promotional emails advertising geek geer are coming into my Outlook all fast and furious.

Most make me yawn.. but this? Are you kidding? That is definitely geek gear. Exceedingly cool.

Homogenity of taste

20 years ago, had someone said to the Europeans that the American wine makers would threaten their business by changing the palates of the populace, the Euro vintners would have laughed at them.

Now, though, it seems like the US cultural juggernaut has managed just that. The sales of fruity, soft wines have gone up, prompting some European winemakers to start using US methods and apparently threatening ancient European traditions and techniques.

More proof of the globalizing homogeneity of taste?

Quiet calm of classic poems

With snow softly falling outside my window, muffling street sounds and blanketing the bare flowerbeds of my front yard, I find myself in a pensive and literary mindset.

On such days, I look to poetry to explain the thoughts and feelings drifting in and around me. So today, rather than pithy or deep thoughts of my own, I shall share a favourite poem.

Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait

Why some languages & not others

Found out about this book on why certain languages endured while others died out, despite the fact that both may have been used for trade.

An excellent review of it is available here.

Many of my friends and fellow scholars are interested in sociolinguistics, so I can see this book going under the tree for a few of them.

On my plate

I got asked today what I'm working on at the moment. Rather than repeating it to a few people, I thought I'd blog it.

My writing plate as of today:

• Paper - How digital fan fiction communities allow adolescent females to transcend the uncertainty and stigma of their changing female bodies while remaining firmly entrenched in their bedroom princessdoms. (For a Youth Culture course)
  
• Paper - How commodification of diamonds has led to the right hand diamond ring as part of a social system of identity presentation for successful, independent career women. (For a Material Culture course)
  
• Presentation - The social system of the right hand diamond ring. (For the material culture course)
  
• Paper - The acceleration of the use and destruction of time through the dominance of the mass culture system over high culture (For a Contemporary Social Theory course)
• 1 mid-term exam (Field Research) and two finals (Youth Culture; Womb to Tomb: Psychological Development through the Life Span)
• Five grad school applications, with their letters of intent or statements of purpose.
  
• Phase II of the GameCODE website.
  

I think I needed to see it presented this way, in a list. Now I can recognize that I have a lot to do in the next 30 days and perhaps I'll stop procrastinating?

yeah....right...sounds good though hmmm? Everyone needs goals!

A list of "isms"

Went looking in the Wikipedia for a definition of social determinism and then, in classic procrastination style, followed a sideways link to a master list of "isms" -- ideas, concepts or schools of thought that end in 'ism".

I knew there were quite a few, but had no idea of how many until I started scrolling that list.

Language evolution or devolution?

This book excerpt about the constant (insidious?) creeping of popular culture speak into the everyday vernacular was interesting, but more interesting perhaps is the comment one person makes about "hasn't it always been thus?"

Got me thinking. What words do I use from my own pop culture background that aren't so popular anymore?

"Whatever"

"Excellent"

"It's just a little thing"

"Talk to the hand".

Wow. More than I thought, and that was just based on a quick 30 second brainstorm.

Doe that make me more accessible or do I just sound dumb? Is this all a devolution of the English language or just another step forward in its constant mutation and evolution?

Digerati

While a bit trite in the way they have been labelled, many of the people on this list do fit my idea of who the digerati would be or are.

Scholar or Researcher?

As I work on my statements of intent for grad schools, I'm grappling with the idea of whether I want to be a scholar or a researcher. I was having trouble figuring out the finer distinction between the two when I got an email from the autoethnography mailing list that deals with exactly that.

Robert Scholes draws a distinction between research and scholarship. Research," he writes, "is progressive; it involves invention or discovery of something new. And it often leads to new techniques or products, for which it is highly rewarded. Scholarship, by contrast, is more about recovery than discovery. It is about understanding more clearly or more richly the meaning of texts or events from the past, including how we got to our present cultural situation. And this is true whether the past is ancient, as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or early modern, as in Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or quite recent, as in Jane Gallop's Around 1981. The end product of this scholarship is not new commercial processes or products; it is a pedagogy enhanced by the best knowledge available. Scholarship is learning in the service of teaching.

I think this is a perfect synthesis of what I've been trying to express.

It also will give me a way to counter a professor I've been having a friendly argument with about the "proper" result of grad school and post-grad studies, because I now realize I was expressing a desire to be a researcher whereas he gets his satisfaction from being a scholar.

Avatars

Much of what is in this journal article about avatars in online space isn't surprising to me, but I'm pleased to see some truly scholarly research addressed to the concept outside of game studies.

Shortlist getting shorter

My slog into research on potential grad schools and their requirements for a grad student continues. Amazing how many different hoops have to be jumped through - I really hope my references will come along for the ride.

I had a chat this afternoon with an alumni of the Communications department at University of Massachusetts - Amherst who is now a professor at Concordia. His input and feedback were very enlightening and fanned the flames of my desire go to UMass.

(He has also suggested Concordia's own Communication program. I like the idea of not having to sell my house and move right away, but I'm not sure there is anyone there interested in the same things as I am. Still worth keeping in mind...)

Plus the discovery of the joint York University / Ryerson University MA in Communications and Culture has got me rethinking the need to go to the USA.

So as of today, I'm kicking off a Grad School Shortlist over there on the right ---->

I've whittled that list down to 5 schools from an original group of somewhere between 12 and 16. Ideally I'd like it to be even shorter, but the application deadlines just won't allow it. Current cities then are Toronto, Amherst (MA), Calgary, Vancouver and Washington, DC.

If you have opinions about any of the programs and/or schools listed, do drop me a note.

Power and agency

I originally created this space to explore the ideas of power, agency and discourse around the digital. Power, in my mind, is crucial to understanding popular discourse, consumerism, indeed to culture itself. It is ubiquitous and omniscient. As I’ve explained to people what it is I’m trying to get at through this space and what it gives me, the terms “power” and “agency” keep coming up. Every now and then, someone will actually ask me what I mean by power and I end up articulating it to them, only to find that their idea of power and mine are quite different.

Social sciences are dominated by the ideal concept of power explained by Michel Foucault, which is that power is a force at work in social constructs (institutions, social order, etc.) and as such, isn’t something one “has” or “hasn’t”. It isn’t something one uses over someone.

Yet, while this may be the ideal concept, in reality, the research and popular discourse of power still clings to the polarized duality of power as being something owned by one person at the expense of the other. Perhaps this is why the notion of agency gets so troublesome, then, for social scientists. They are supposed to be trained in the Foucauldian sense of power, but their own culture structures power as the result of an interaction, rather than a force at work on all parties in the interaction.

Before I explain my own conception of the concepts of power and agency, I should point out that I have not yet read Foucault in the original – I have only read other people’s interpretations or truth claims about Foucault’s work. Nor have I read much yet on other people’s interpretations of agency. Thus, I refuse to claim that my ideas and conceptualizations are necessary novel or unique or even nuanced per se. One of my personal projects, then, for the next few months will be to work my way through the essays in Power/Knowledge, in order to try to get a sense for myself of what Foucault himself says about power.

So what is power for me? What is agency? Power is a force that is at work in the social. It is a result of past interactions, generalized out to the effects that is then concretized down again into new interactions. Power is initiator and result. It is the ability to accomplish action, whether that action is goal-directed or purely creative in Joas’ sense of the term. Here, then, the social concept of power meets up with the individual concept of agency.

Agency is the sense of empowerment internalized by an individual that allows them to act in life. Action, then, in this sense, is the creation and synthesis of choice. The act of choosing is an action in and of itself. Agency is that creative taking-in of power, merging it with idea, ideals and will and through that recipe, the creation of an act. The act can be a thought crystallized into knowing. It can be a desire acted upon. It can be a goal to which one strived. At work within all action, then, is the idea of agency, the pure ability to act. Agency gives the ability for an individual the ability to work within the world. Agency, then, is power integrated or operationalized within the individual.

In this sense, then, neither power nor agency are binary forces and should not be talked about as such. The nuances and subtleties of power and agency working within and above interaction, structure and social order are crucial to understanding humananity and the world and should, therefore, never be trivialized down to the level of a dichotomy.