Participation: Blogs, Anime and 'Real Life'
The other day, I received an email with the comment:
I would like to see more people spend LESS time on computers and mix more f2f and develop better human interaction skills and become more conscious and concerned about his/her fellow man.
Often, these sort of comments rub me the wrong way. They often promote an image of bloggers and others that spend a lot of time online as a pasty white thirty year old overweight male living in his parents basement and eating nothing but Doritos, or an angst ridden teenage girl who hates everything. Such a stereotypes are inaccurate and don’t really help the discussion of the role of technology in our lives.
Yet I don’t think this is what my friend had in mind and stepping away from a knee jerk reaction to her comment, I think it actually points to an important strength of online media that we need to encourage more of.
Traditional media does not encourage participation. Yes, newspapers allow letters to the editors, but often have very strict limits on how long the letter can be and the number of letters from an individual that they will print over a period of time. Other forms of media are even more restrictive.
Yet with blogs, anyone can easily set one up. The better blogs allow for people to add their own comments. As media changes, we will hopefully see even more participation.
This weekend, I will be participating in Media in Transition 5 up at MIT. It has the tagline, “creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age”. I will be participating in a panel, Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics, and the discussion will be very much about efforts to use the Internet to increase participation.
As I read through the program, another paper caught my eye. Anime Pleasure as a Playground of Sexuality, Power, and Resistance,
Further, these evasive and transgressive pleasures empower anime otaku to go beyond image consumption, actively and constantly changing, manipulating, and subverting anime images in their practices, such as creating amateur manga, peer-to-peer networks and websites, and participating anime convention and cosplay (costume-role-play). Anime otaku’s pleasurable practices demonstrate de-assurance of their supposed identity and engender an imperceptible but playful politics that strays from social structures in which they reside. To that end, this paper suggests that anime pleasures offer a chance to develop not an escape from ideological constructions, but new ways of creative production and of resistance to the regulatory power in the practitioners’ own favor.
My eldest daughter just got back from an anime convention so we had a fascinating discussion which supported the author’s contention. It seems as if, when done well, people spending time on computers, whether it be blogging, role playing, or “changing, manipulating, and subverting anime images” can actually help people “develop better human interaction skills and become more conscious and concerned about his/her fellow man”. These skills and consciousness just may bring about “new ways of creative production and of resistance to the regulatory power” and I look forward to discussing this face to face with the author in Boston.
Blogs and Commenting
Submitted by notesbecomethee on Tue, 04/24/2007 - 23:51. span>"Yet with blogs, anyone can easily set one up. The better blogs allow for people to add their own comments. As media changes, we will hopefully see even more participation."
I love the ability blogs provide for anyone to post their ideas about various topics and get some real discussion going online. It is a way to expand one's perspective and can provide opportunities to engage in some really interesting dialogue. I hope to encourage more reader participation and interaction on my blog and salute others who do the same (and are often more successful than I am). Thanks for posting this insightful entry.
~ Laura
http://notesbecomethee.blogspot.com