A Quick, Yet Important Post  

Posted by bryce in , , ,

up to my eyebrows in reading. will do big post this weekend (I swear) on the topic of Gluttony. You'll dig it. It was another special on the history channel.


But for now. Congratulations US, you have a new president. He seems to be excited for change, excited for his job, excited for his people. It's good, it's we needed the change- it's inspiring. BUT...

If I hear one more white person talk about this is proof we are all equal regardless of skin color, I may be forced to strangle them. Those of you who consider yourself white and think the problem is dead: The only reason you can ignore difference is because of the power you have in the social hierarchy- the social hegemony. As Hirsch states in her book Family Frames (talking about the family of man exhibit) the only people who see equality [in all of the exhibit's images] are the ones with the power to accept that they're not us. While this is a radical phrasing of that, there is some truth to it.

Am I a racist- absolutely not. But I do believe that the way to combat racism is to stop talking about the birth of equality, and to talk about how racism looms in our every action; how it is a subliminal structure in our every day existence. Brushing it under the carpet with the excuse of a semi-black president is not going to make things better. We need to talk about the elephant in the room until the non-existent, social categories begin to deconstruct. As it stands now, we're pretending that we can see through the mesh wall that is the barrier of racism. It is not dead, merely more translucent because the white people say so.

Disclaimer: I am not a race theorist. This may possibly be an ignorant post- yet it is how I've felt the last couple of days. Am I excited for change? Yes. I am not, however, in the false sense of hope that the racist underpinnings have been destroyed merely because we've put a black man, a powerful and brilliant one at that, in the white house. 

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A Conversation with Kim Burk  

Posted by bryce in , , ,

This is a media-based conversation that I've engaged Kim Burk in on facebook. I thought it particularly apropos to my cultural criticism blog...

Kim Posts:
"In all of these self-deprivation experiments, there comes a moment when self-denial becomes self-defeating. An Internet entrepreneur from San Diego named Dave Bruno has received a lot of back pats for his "100 Thing Challenge," a goal to limit his possessions to that magic number. It's a useful thought experiment, but do shoes count as one thing, or should each shoe count as a separate item? The point—how much crap do you really need?—can quickly get lost in the details. Ascetics often become distracted by the rules or take things too far. Consider the fervent subculture of people who try to live plastic-free lives. Another perfectly worthy goal, but then you stumble upon advice like this on the blog PlasticLess.com: "Get a Vasectomy: Children are the target market for pointless plastic stuff. Most temporary forms of birth control involve some plastic packaging." (Uh, okay.)

I don't mean to throw cold water on earnest self-improvement. But maybe we should set about such tasks in a way that doesn't reek of personal branding. Thoreau, after all, left the cabin behind, which earned the respect of Robert Louis Stevenson: "When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the story of hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example." While that doesn't mean not writing a book, it may mean not letting the rigor of your experiment get in the way of the lessons."

I Reply:
But, in our current social and cultural climate, fetishizing becomes a grand motivator. What better way to accomplish your "100 things" goal than to be held accountable by the entire internet, which is populated by figures beyond our imagination...

I'm not defending it, cause I know what you mean. But personal betterment has become less about the person and more about that which it says about the person. Less important than the manifest of having less stuff is the latent statement of breaking the bonds of an over invested culture.

While it was not Thoreau's implication to become a mediated individual, isn't that what makes his message so powerful? If nobody knew about it, we wouldn't talk about it. Further, by saying "Well Thoreau didn't need a pat on the back" aren't we undermining his goal in not doing it for media attention? Perhaps this is the best example of the essence of late capitalism, which effortlessly produces and appropriates the possibilities of all of its internal critiques. 
But we could also consider it in terms of not really being about the Internet. We, I, assume that he is posting this on the internet as a way of saying what he's sending a message as part of a late capitalism culture. Maybe he's transcended this idea? Maybe he's doing it to teach others how he believes one could live- a religious statement per chance?

Actions speak louder than words, but if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound?


It will be interesting to see how Kim replies. She's absolutely brilliant, and I always enjoy talking with her...see this conversation:




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A few quick thoughts on the video embedded below..  

Posted by bryce in , ,

This video makes me so excited. Especially the idea that there is a real self that the box on the screen can present. To kind of elaborate on an idea that I had previously (maybe somewhere else), but the masked self that one may be on YouTube isn't even the real masked self! It's not a self! It's a contextual box that only exists if you find it! The personas that you find are exactly that, ones that you find. They are not there until you click on them. So, the question becomes not are you the real you, but am I making you the real you. Or, even better, maybe I'm making you the real me...

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My thoughts on the semester  

Posted by bryce

As the spring semester quickly approaches, I've been planning out the subjects I want to explore in my various courses. For the visuality and culture course I'm taking, youtube seems to be a good medium to thing about when one contemplates the effects (and affects) of visuality and culture. Right now, the questions I'm asking in these regards are:


1- How is the framing, that is the background of the video, part of the message? Would Ron Strickland's cultural theory videos have the same meaning on a beach? Why are the normative YouTube framings norms? What is the "norm", is there a pattern? Why is this the norm? (especially considering the amount of professionals that are on the tube- maybe my points in the "The Beauty of YouTube" are salient here.)

2- If we consider YouTube as an interface, in what ways are people entrapped in the video box and unable to interact with the interface? How can one interact with it, and what does it mean to do so (is it a violation of norms? or maybe just something that hasn't been thought of?) What is the foreground/background relationship and are there implications to collapsing these?

3- Are there aesthetic differences between informational videos, vlogs, and "features" (something that is a non-habitual posting i.e. response)? Again, like above, what does this say about the video and how is it part of the message? I think of this video:




in what ways is the background a truth statement? I suppose this is the same as question 1 in the end, but I'm too lazy to backspace and edit. I will say, though, I think this would make Erving Goffman wet himself. 

Another question I'm intersted in exploring, that unfortunately doesn't have anything to YouTube, is why the changing landscape in Malta is so offensive to Maltese people. A simple search in the Malta Times shows so many irate people in regards to the facial reconstruction of Maltese buildings- why is this? The Maltese are a people very concerned with looking modern, yet they don't want the landscape to look that way! An interesting compromise occurring between the visuality of self and the visuality of space to say the least.

Now I just need to think about the semiotics course I'm taking, and I'll be golden for the semester.

Comments would be accepted lovingly.

Happy blogging.

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Posted by bryce

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The Beauty of YouTube  

Posted by bryce in , , ,

As I prepare to do an internship in mediated ethnography, I've been reading a lot about YouTube. Of particular interests are the fears of intellectual property violations that are held by both corporate American and some private citizens. 


YouTube is no stranger to copyright infringement fears: numerous clips have been removed from the site over the past couple of months in response to notices of infringement sent by copyright holders. While these acts have destructive qualities, which are often harped on by numerous media venues, no one seems to be considering the generative qualities that piracy brings to the table. More simply, no one is asking what media piracy is creating in terms of aesthetics...

Piracy is not simply a neutral conduit, but imposes particular conditions on the things being posted. Constant copying, alongside make-shift methods of data transfer and YouTube's own compression procedures, degrade the image and sound in such a way that the "noise" (be it audio or visual pixelation) produced by the means of reproduction is overwhelming the pristine "aesthetic" of media content. Pirated videos are marked by certain aesthetics that are often appraised as "amateur" and more closely resemble those of leisure technology-based work, rather than professional. This creates a material screen through which the audiences' engagement with media and sense of time, speed, and space are filtered. In this sense, prated content creates a set of formal qualities that generate a particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission and massive interference. 

In many ways, as I suggested above, this mimics the aesthetic of user generated YouTube content- it acts as a way to re-appropriate the corporate imagination as part of the populations. In this sense, we can consider the YouTube aesthetic to give us an escape from the all-to-real experience of corporate and commercial aesthetics of perfection. Where the original movie media may have aimed at reproducing the image as if it weren't reproduction but experienced, YouTube allows us to re-draw the  simulacrum (or hyper-real) of the theatre experience (where one is supposed to assume they are not in the theatre, but of the panoptican in the reality being projected) as being a simulation of reality. 

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A blog filled with anthro-inspired cultural criticism (with a strong continental philosophy bent), focusing on the digi-physical worlds we inhabit and the end of the world (complete with zombie apocalypse).

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