This day in history

I justed added a nice new link over there ------>

Pops you over to the BBC's "This day in history" page, for the notable events of the past on any given day.

Was inspired by a similar linking idea from Mr. Selvarajah who does this by linking to the Wikipedia. But for this type of thing, I prefer the BBC.

Notable conference

Considering my fascination with the question of what it means to be human in digitally-dependent space, ACLA's annual conference next March is utterly fascinating to me. In particular, the streams, After the Post-Human: Beyond the Cyborg Manifesto and Creativity and the Human attract me greatly, though there are about a dozen others that sound utterly engrossing. The latter of the two streams I noted above probably interests me most strongly right now, possibly due to the paper I'm starting to research on sociological theories of creativity in action.

Oh to be able to have the money and time to attend!

Walmart Boycott

I have never felt completely comfortable shopping at Walmart. It has been suggested to me that my discomfort stems from the sheer size of the stores compared to the relatively smaller Zellers and Federated Co-op stores that were a fixture of my own childhood shopping landscape. But I don't think that is the reason.

Some of it stems from the way they moved into the Canadian marketplace. They bought out all the Kmarts across the country, shut them down, laid off the workers, then reopened under the Walmart banner. I remember telling people I would boycott Walmart as a result of that and their overly American, overly zealously capitalist philosophy. I remember people looking at me like I'd grown a third head and then telling me about all the bargains they'd gotten recently at Walmart.

Over time, my position softened and I have been guilty of stopping in and spending far too much on cosmetics, housewares, camping gear and the like. I usually leave feeling bewildered, anxious and more than little bit guilty. Seems I'm not alone in my spending habits, though most figures are for the US only, I believe.

They're opening another huge store not 10 minutes from my house. It seems to be about triple the size of the existing Laval Walmart store and the city is busy redoing all the roads and highways in the area to allow access to this shopping behemoth. Robert Greenwald gives me an idea of what is to come in my neighbourhood, though, and yes I'm worried. Not just for the traffic and noise and pollution, but also for the social implications for the small retailers down the street from me and for the family farms and greenhouses that operate near it. Fortune magazine has even written about these sorry aspects of the phenomenon and about the new documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price coming out soon from Robert Greenwald.

Then I read this AlterNet article today about Walmart and while, yes, it is obviously slanted towards being completely negative, I found it refreshingly honest and definitely eye-opening. And guilt-inducing too, I admit.

So I'm renewing my old boycott and strengthening my resolve to avoid the new store's lure. Perhaps I can arrange one of the first Canadian Whirl-Mart protests?

Internet Generations 6.0 report

Here it is, the end of the second day of presentations and networking at the AoIR's Internet Generations 6.0 conference in Chicago. I'm tired but happily so. Just got back from the gala event at the Mid-America club on the 80th floor of the AoN centre building. Breathtaking view and great buffet spread too.

the mix of people here seems to be heavily slanted in favour of communications faculty, and so far I've seen a lot of presentations that were survey data and not a lot of contextualization. The surveys themselves were well done by the looks of it though, not that I'm a good person to judge, given that I'm much more into theory and tend to fall asleep in my stats classes. However, I did see a few interesting analyses of website linking practices in political campaigns and another session on mobile technology and GPS usage for cultural public education purposes in a public park in Montreal.

I've also talked to quite a few people about MA and PhD programs in the US and the UK and gotten some great pointers on schools to look into that I hadn't considered, including NorthWestern, UMinn and UWash. I got good feedback too on the CCT program at Georgetown from a few alumni (though oddly no one from CCT was here as a presenter) as well as possiblities at UTA. I've met some nice people over the last few days, including a few students that might be able to contribute to GameCODE. One person even has a semiotics background, which should make Kelly happy.

I had a good response to my own paper, which relieved and pleased me. I got a lot of encouragement to submit it for journals so I might try doing that over the Christmas holidays when other papers aren't competing for my attention. I had a decent number of requests for a copy of it so they could review it and cite it. An interest in Mary Douglas' work on anomalies per my take on her work seems to have struck a chord for a few academics interested in sociolinguistics, of all things.

One more day to go and then it's home to finish my material culture paper. Real life and all of that.

Speaking of mind to action...

Ok so the sociology trading cards I get. And I like. A lot, as long-time readers of this space will probably know, this is about the fourth time or so I've blogged about them.

Heck, a pack of these peoples are even duly noted on my 2005 Christmas list (send me an email and I'll send the list to you...if you were thinking of getting me a gift, that is....)

But...Lego? Really? What are those people over there in England eating these days?

Okay maybe I'm just miffed because I don't know most of the people in the lineup, except by name hearsay. Okay...maybe Stuart Hall...but Michel Foucault? Just seems so plastic.

Now....the Foucault action figure, though? Oh yes....

Fragmentary experience = Holistic life

If I'm correctly reading Joas' (1996) philosophical overview of John Dewey's conceptions of art, religion, action and ideals in Joas' text, then these ideas could be brought to bear on theories of adaptation to the digital and multiple simultaneous presentations of self/identity...

Discussing Dewey's ideas, Joas says "a holistic self tends to sublate the rapid sequence of different scenarios that is our reality into a totality. It is through the creative powers of imagination that human beings gain access to the ideals" (p.143). Again looking through Dewey's conceptions, Joas notes that ideals are a person's "unquestionable binding values" and that they are "not something that we decide freely to set ourselves; rather they take hold of us and are at the root of our individual wishes and goals" (p.143).

Not sure what I'd need of this to make some arguments about the reality of the digital and the whole nature of the human living through that reality...or the conceptions of trust/risk in the digital (my current pre-occupation research and paper-wise) ...but at least by capturing it here, I've thought it out a bit.

Pragmatic pretzling

On this gloriously sunny late-September afternoon, when I'd much rather be outside walking in the briskly warm air, I'm instead hunkered over my desk and laptop, trying to suss out the concepts, logic, objections, refutations and adaptations of the philosophy known as Pragmatism. My poor brain just doesn't fire as fast as it used to, so it's taking a while to get pretzel it around these concepts.

I'm doing this by reading an expert of a book written by Hans Joas (1996) called The Creativity of Action, in which he conceptualizes action according to Pierce's pragmatic approach and G.H. Mead's approach to the integration of mind and self, in both the individual and social sense of the terms.

I do wish that the excerpt provided more meat about his take on Mead. I just finished re-reading swatches of Mead's Mind, Self & Society for my Contemporary Social Theory course and the professor seems rather enamoured of the whole school of pragmatism. So I'm sure Friday's class will be another exercise in pretzling my brain around new theories and takes that aren't quite in line with what I thought I read.

Cute commuter

My current car, a 2002 Honda Civic sedan, goes off-lease in a few weeks and with 93,000 km klicked into it, I'm looking to retire it and replace it with something else.

So...I'm car shopping.

If I lived solely in the city and never had to drive the 40 or the 401 anywhere, I'd definitely be looking more seriously at buying one of these new s.m.a.r.t. cars - turns out that they're CAD$16,000 which is less than I thought they'd be.

Doesn't hurt that the colour can be customized on a whim and they get amazing gas mileage. Plus they've got that cool euro hip factor going on.

Sadly, though, I'm a suburbanite these days. And when I move southward next summer, I'll need something that can really go on the Interstates. This probably won't be it.

But it's so cute!

Blogging it real

Clicked over to Spencer Steel's piece of the i-space, expecting to see information about the Straight Edge subculture (as my professor calls it) that I could use in my paper, only to find this blog entry.

Wow.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for smart, real and emotive prose. Especially from Brits.

Fighting the culture vultures

A few years ago, for an intro level field research course, I wrote a research proposal that proposed a study of how youth viewed music and software sharing and downloading. While I ended up dropping the class due to a clueless professor who didn't believe the study of things digital was a worthy sociological topic (?!) the idea of that research never quite left me. Back then, most of the info I found on the net was preaching how awful it was and how illegal. There was little in the discourse from the other side, or at least little that was actually informed, organized and overt.

Things have definitely changed. Today, while browsing the net for information on the Straight Edge youth subculture/movement/philosophy for my SOCI 398 Youth Culture course, I came across the website of a non-profit organization called Downhill Battle. They have a lot of information that presents the other side of the argument for music and software sharing. They've also done more street activism that I would not have thought possible. Their Thanksgiving 2003 warning sticker campaign on large US retailers of CDs is a case in point.

Perhaps it is time to revisit that idea of mine. Maybe for my new senior-level field research course? hmmm......

It's raining links

So this is what I've been needing to do to generate thoughts and links for this i-space. I needed a web-based, net-centric research project, like the one I'm doing on youth subcultures for my SOCI 398 course.

I've spent four hours googling tonight for this assignment. Here's the assignment:

Construct a history of one of the following youth subcultures:

a) riot grrls

b) straight edgers

c) rude boys

d) skinheads

e) Goths

f) metalheads

g) hippie kids

h) hip-hoppers

i) ravers

j) punks

Collect information through websites and tell the story of this subculture as it is told through the sites. You will produce a written testimony about what motivates youth to participate in the subculture as well as the experiences that constitute being a part of the subculture as presented through the websites.

Include as much of the following information as possible in your narrative:

1) Where and how did this subculture begin?

2) What are the signs, symbols and meanings attached to this subculture?

3) What does this subculture declare to be its principles and intentions (manifesto)?

4) What problems does this subcutlreu attempt to confront?

5) How does membership in this subculture attempt to deal with these problems?

6) Are there areas of disagreement between sites?

7) What is the story fo the subculture being told through the sites and for what audience is this story designed?

This narrative is to be between 4 and 5 double-spaced word-processed pages.

Shouldn't be that tough, but I'm having trouble choosing a topic. So....While trying to decide whether or not to do my project on Goths or Straight Edgers turned up the following interesting sites:

- Have a burning important question that you'd like experts to answer? Dropping Knowledge is setting out to do just that.

- Curious about what is important to youth? Alternet.org is a website dedicated to news and musings on all things youth.

- Looking for a really alternative goth/fetish club and just happen to be in Vancouver or plan to visit? Apparently the apt-named Sin City is the place to go.

- According to Morbid Outlook, my gothic name is Melusine Metalwing

I could put about a half-dozen more but I'll try to get back into googling.

Oh..and at the moment, topic-focus-wise, I've flip-flopped back to Straight-Edgers. Story seems more linear and therefore possibly easier to tell.

Micronations

School has started again and I'm beginning to think I'm a wee bit nuts. Five courses, of which 3 are senior/honours/uber-geek tough courses, replete with thick and chewy social theory and the requisite huge mind-pretzeling papers to write.

Ok so it's true that I'm not working full-time for a living anymore (note to self - must adjust my footer for this blog now that I'm "just" a student). But I am still working for cash. I've taken on the role of research coordinator/assistant for the GameCODE project at Concordia.

Enough about that...I have to post some real insight here or my friends won't stop sending me email asking me if this space is dead, and forcing me to respond that, no, it's not, it's only sleeping....

While googling today, looking for information on Goth youth subcultures for a sociology course project on youth music scenes, I stumbled across the concept of micronations on Google. Given that my head is very much into the distinctions between macro and micro manifestations of social phenomena (don't ask), I clicked over to Wikipedia to check it out and it presents micronations as a neological term to describe state-like entities. Hmmm...like digital communities?

Sort of, is the answer. This article then peaked my interest, so I delved further and according to this article on a seemingly academic site run by a Dutch PhD student, it is a valid social phenomena. Might have to look into this more, or at least keep a Google alert going on the term, in case it should go big (or is that macro?).

(and yes...neologism is the best new word I learn this week.....)

On top

Some Ottawa friends googled me recently and told me that I am now the top hit when my name is typed in, because of my impending presentation at the upcoming AoIR conference. I was surprised and skeptical because doing this in the past, I always turned up some woman from the U.S.

I tried it myself and sure enough...here I am.

And right underneath the AoIR links to that presentation and conference info is a link to this space.

Wow.

I have to admit, after 10+ years of search engine anonymity, this newfound top-o-the-charts celebrity is a bit intimidating. Suppose it can't hurt though when I'm applying for US grad schools this winter?

Speaking of which, I'm going to be totally schizo on the GRE tests I've got to take in order to get admitted to said schools. My math skills are so old and out of date that I don't even know where to begin on most of the math samples I've done, yet I tend to score pretty darn near 100% on the language tests. Wonder if the over-the-top language scores will be sufficient on their own to get me in?

Otherwise, I'll be stuck at the U of T, Carleton or as a last resort, McGill *shudder*

Snippets and bits

Yes I'm alive. Yes I'm back from camping. Yes it was good.

But, despite all my fitness training these last four months to strengthen my back, I hurt myself. Again.

More precisely, I strained my back and might have been able to work it out if it weren't for the fact that 5 days after I got back, I hitched a ride in the backseat of an Echo with some pals who were heading to Niagara Falls but I got off in Oshawa to visit an old pal. I then spent 9 hours walking around a huge mall in flip flops toting heavy Williams & Sonoma bags full of margarita mix, guacomole mix and measuring spoons. That, plus lugging heavy luggage aboard the VIA train home and then trying to remove it from the luggage storage area and *rrrriiip!* there it went.

I've been "convalescing" ever since, trying to get it back in shape.

So this week's variety of posts will be snippets and bits of things I've been thinking about or reading. I'll put them all down, rather than saving them for individual posts, as I won't be online much in the next two weeks - more travel and camping is forthcoming.

Brain food on vacation

As I prepare to go rustic camping for a week in the beautiful Laurentian mountains (i.e. no electricity or running water and I have to schlep my stuff almost a half a kilometre to my site), my friends have been snickering at me because my book bag is almost as large as my food and clothing bags. They're assuming that I am toting around all the latest in brain candy a la Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Sherrilyn Kenyon etc. However, if they had been able to take a peek in my admittedly bulging black nylon bookbag, they would be surprised -- it is holding as much brain food as candy.

So what am I bringing with me to read under the blue skies, pine and birch trees and sparkling waters of Lake Monroe? Here's a small crosscut:

Dilemmas of the American Self by John Hewitt
Hewitt is my new favourite symbolic interactionist. His view is more pessimistic than the classic SI theorists and his idea of juggling constructed identities through strategies of self construction make sense to me from the excerpted chapters I've read. I look forward to seeing how it ties together into a coherent unified theory.

The Internet Galaxy by Manuel Castells
I've read bits and drabs of this, of course. No self-respecting digital culture academic can ignore it. I've never taken the time to read it in its entirety though. I hope to do so this week.

Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
His latest book is one I've been waiting to read as he tends to take a rather positive approach to Western popular culture, while still managing to be analytically critical. This book in particular interests me because it deals with an issue that I know several digital game researchers have to confront daily - the perceived idea that video games are bad for us and bad for humanity overall. I look forward to seeing how he constructs the alternate argument.

What Just Happened? by James Glick
Got this in the remainders discount bin through Indigo. It goes over the beginnings of info tech and its strange laissez-faire attitude with software defects (aka "bugs"). While it may rehash much that I already knew, I hope to glean some new insights. And yes this book might straddle the divide between food and candy.

It is my hope that I get to read a few of these, though even I, fast-reader that I am, cannot hope to read all 30 of the books I've brought. But better feast than famine when on vacation, hmmm?

I leave today, so I'll be silent here for a week. I'll post again upon my return and let you know how I did, and what the balance between brain food and brain candy actually ended up being.

What I'm doing on my summer vacation

Exams are over until Thanksgiving. The sun is shining and I'm wearing flipflops and a tank top. It is summer and I'm on vacation.

Big deal, you say? Well, actually, for me, yes. As I've been telling all and sundry in the last few weeks, this summer will be the first summer I've had footloose and free since the late 70s. No job, no school, no schedule. Just 8 glorious weeks of hanging by the pool, reading and chilling.

Well, that's the plan anyway. As it has shaped up so far, I've actually not read much and have been busy visiting friends, planning my Laurentians camping trip (starts next week) and trying to figure out what, if anything, I need to cram for in order to do well on the GREs. For my Canadian pals who read this, the GRE is the exam you have to write in order to get into U.S. grad schools. Georgetown won't take me without it.

My plan for the summer, then, is to camp, read digital culture books that I've been meaning to get to, read scifi and fantasy novels, and indulge in some eBaying. Oh and slathering on the sunscreen too, of course.

I may or may not be posting much here, as a result. It will depend on whether or not the ideas I find in my reading feel appropriate for this space.

Have a great summer!

Gadget geek gear

I'm always on the lookout for new and cool geek gadgets. So the Thump from Oakley caught my eye. It's a mean combo of an MP3 player and Matrix-y frames and shades.

Now if only it was co-marketed with an Ipod instead of a generic player...

Who am I trying to kid? I am drooling anyway. They are fierce!

Aware of what I'm unaware

As I spend this muggy, sunny Sunday re-reading a selection of high canon sociological theory, from Emile Durkheim to Karl Marx, Max Weber to George Herbert Mead and not-yet-canonical John Hewitt to add modern-day spice, I realize that each time I approach their theories with a specific question in mind, I find a slightly new item to add to my answer. I am attempting to distill the main thoughts of this bunch down into 250 words each to regurgitate on a final exam tomorrow.

Marx for marks. Again.

So in a fine fit of academic procrastination, I started wandering the web and came across this article about Habermas, yet another almost canonical theorist that I have yet to read. It made me want to correct that oversight, though, rather than continuously plumbing the depths of the same 6 theorists yet again.

And so there are days when I'm more painfully aware that there is so much yet in social, philosophical and political theory that I have yet to read. Days when I realize that, seemingly voracious reader that I purport to be, my entire corpus of reading seems to be but a small ripple in the ocean of thought that is out there.

This is one of those days.

Another scholarly blog?

Found an interesting new site today. It isn't yet a blog per se, though it calls itself one. but it is new and may well become noteworthy and worth a daily browsing. It's called BlogScholar. Check it out.

[found via the Society of Applied Sociology mailing list]

Sociologists are dangerous!?!

A bunch of well-respected conservatives (probably in the US) were asked by an online conservative magazine to write down what books are the most dangerous to humanity, and they then voted on the compiled list.

The list of the most dangerous books ever published should make sociologists everywhere feel rather targeted - the top 10 list includes works from Auguste Comte, the acknowledged father of sociology and Karl Marx, the obvious founder of the conflict approach.

Reading through the rest of the list, I know I'm feeling rather racy by their standards, as I've read at least large excerpts from approximately 80% of the list.
[found via the Applied Sociologists mailing list]