Media
Media
Communion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/27/2007 - 02:17Sunday morning, very bright, I read Your book by colored light
That came in through the pretty window picture.
One of the most important rules about having a successful blog, all the experts say, is to have a clear niche. Write about one thing, stay on message and keep your focus. If you’re going to write about technology, stay with technology. If you’re going to write about progressive politics, stay with that. The same goes for religion, personal blogging, etc. The rationale for this seems to be the fear that strikes many media educators about what is happening to the way people consume media.
More and more, people are searching the web for viewpoints that match their own. As a progressive, I can go out and find other people writing from a progressive viewpoint. As a Christian, I can find people writing from a Christian viewpoint. The more different viewpoints a write brings to their blog, the more they will narrow the audience, the theory goes.
Yet the increasing Balkanization of our media consumption is something the media educators fear. Take a look at EPIC. How do we deal with the dangers of an increasingly Balkanized society of media consumers?
For me, the first line of defense is rejecting the adage to keep my blog confined to a narrow niche. Instead, I will write about politics, about being a husband, a father, a brother and a son. I will write about media and technology and even religion.
I started blogging several years ago as many of my friends from a different online community moved from a synchronous text based programmable game-oriented chat room to blogging. I spent a lot of time at a place called LambdaMOO. The space was created around the space of the originators house. I think a house is a great metaphor for that sort of space, as well as for the space that a blog creates, and I named the Orient Lodge Blog after the house I was living in when I started the blog.
In the dining room, there is a picture of Gov. Dean holding my daughter at one rally or another. It sits next to a crucifix and some crafts that my wife made to liven up and add a touch of hominess to the dining room.
At our table, we have had a wide variety of guests, political, religious, business leaders, and technologists. There has been great food and great laughter. There has been communion. I seek to share this communion online, knowing that if the experts are right, I will drive away everyone who doesn’t match my unique and eclectic views, yet believing that we are better than that. That we can sit down with people
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,
And where does magic come from? I think magic's in the learning,
So, I hope that my gifted pagan anime-loving lesbian readers, by Buddhist technology activist readers, my atheist progressive political readers, my cancer surviving southern Christian mommy readers, my retired conservative economic professor readers, and a wide range of other readers can all sit at the table and share ideas.
(Note: Lyrics are Hymn by Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Christians and the Pagans, by Dar Williams. It is my belief that both are protected by copyrights and the use falls within the best practices in fair use, specifically, “quoting copyrighted works of popular culture to illustrate an argument or point.” For more information on Fair use, please check out The Center for Social Media’s webpage, Copyright and Fair Use.)
Conference Fugues
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 11:04At the final wrap up of the Media in Transition conference, David Silver made a couple of interesting comments that seemed in contradiction with one another. He spoke about how the conference was too traditional in its format. You had your keynote speakers. You had your panelists and you had ten minutes at the end of each session where others could add their own brief thoughts in the form of questions. The conference wasn’t enough of a conversation. It didn’t reflect the way the transitioning media was changing the way we communicate.
At the same time, he bewailed the large number of people using email, twitter and other online tools during the conference. In this world of constant or continuous partial attention (CPA), it means that speakers only get partial attention. In an old media view, this isn’t desired. I remember teachers often asking for our total undivided attention, yet for those of us who probably would have been diagnosed with ADD, that was pretty hard. There was always a squirrel running by some window outside.
Most people tend to speak of CPA negatively. People are distracted from the keynote speakers. I would like to challenge that. Twitter, email and blogs are some of the tools that can be used to make the conference much more of a conversation. A few conferences I attend have a chat room which anyone can join and share their thoughts. These chat rooms are often projected on the screen behind the speaker or panelists so even those without a laptop at the conference can at least see what everyone else is writing.
Personal Democracy Forum has done this very effectively, yet it points out a problem. Sometimes the chat can be more interesting than the speaker, and if you aren’t an interesting speaker, this can be particularly threatening.
As people start doing mixed reality conferences that take place in part in Second Life, where the people in the audience can see what is going on in Second Life, and the people in Second Life have their chat going on, as well as seeing a video stream of the conference, the distractions can get even more confounding. A person can chose an avatar of a squirrel and go running across the virtual stage. “Look there goes a squirrel”, takes on a whole new meaning in these contexts.
Yet there are good reasons to include these sorts of tools for making conferences more participatory. First and foremost, there is Dan Gillmor’s old saying about the audience knowing more about the subject than the journalist. It seems to apply well to audiences and speakers at conferences. Then, there is another aspect, what I think of as the art of the fugue.
I think it is damaging to suggest that we should live single threaded lives, giving our undivided attention to one topic and then another. Life is more complicated than that. It is a fugue, a tapestry, with many themes or threads weaving together to create a beautiful picture. It is counter point.
So, tomorrow, I’ll attend Personal Democracy Forum, and I look forward to the whole event, the speakers, the chatting between sessions and the backchannel, not only for the information that I’ll get but also for the chance to participate in a fugue, a tapestry which celebrates the many voices, the point and the counter point of our political dialog.
Videoblogging as an antidote to too much TV
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/11/2007 - 10:53Several recent articles have caught my attention and have led me to the assertion that what we need to do to address problems with broadcast television isn’t more regulation, it’s more videoblogging.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor had an editorial entitled, Time to tame TV violence. The subtitle went on to say, “The media industry has not self-regulated to the satisfaction of parents. The government should step in.”
This went hand in glove with an article in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor:
For teens, too much TV can impair learning later, study says
If your 14-year-old is sitting in front of the TV for hours a day, your concerns about your teenager's education may be borne out.
That's because watching three or more hours of television a day leads to poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, bad grades, and poor performance in college, according to a study published this week.
Yet the question is, what is it about watching three or more hours of television a day that brings about poor performance and negative attitudes? Is it the violence, or is it something else?
An article in the Salem Oregon StatesmanJournal may provide an interesting clue. Students learn to thrive by not being bystanders.
According to a recent study, a kid's academic success may depend on whether he believes in his own ability to grow smarter.
Researchers divided poorly performing middle-school students into two groups and arranged for kids in both groups to receive intense, remedial instruction. Those in the second group, however, were also taught to understand intelligence as an expanding opportunity, rather than an unchangeable destiny. After several months, testing revealed slightly improved scores in the first group, but soaring success among students in the second.
Perhaps it is the passivity of so much television viewing that is the main culprit. Passive television viewers aren’t typically presented with the idea of ‘expanding opportunity’. The biggest opportunities they have are texting their votes to American Idol. The real opportunities seem to be reserved for those who make media. Perhaps our education system needs to be changed to help students understand the great opportunities that are available to them as a result of technological innovation.
Jonny Goldstien has a very interesting blog entry that relates to this. He videotaped Ed Markey, Chairman of the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, as Markey videotaped the hearings. People can bring their cameras to congress and create their own videos. There is even a new project, Open Source Cinema where people are working collaboratively to create a documentary about copyright in a digital age.
Groups like The Center for 21st Century Skills, Youth Rights Media, and Third World Majority are bringing media creation to students, and, I believe providing a real example of the expanding opportunity that technological innovation is bringing. Tufts New Literacy Summer Institute will be training teachers this summer in how to bring these expanded opportunities to the classroom.
Will more regulation of what can be broadcast over the airwaves address some of the problems we face as a nation? Perhaps. But it seems clear to me that if we want to have a real impact, we need to teach everyone that they have the power to change their lives and the change our country, and that an important starting point is to teach students the importance of creating their own media.
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
Digital Palimpsest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/08/2007 - 19:55Yesterday, I hit a milestone, of sorts. Over the past couple of months I’ve been on the road to one event or another. I’ve tried to keep up with my blogging, my emails, and my life in general, but things have slowly gotten out of hand. I climbed up to around 1400 unread emails. I haven’t looked at Bloglines in ages. My visits to NewsTrust are cursory at best, rarely resulting in a review. Yesterday, I looked at the pile of unread emails, and found the oldest date back for two months.
As I got through my emails, I try to catch the most important ones on as timely a basis as possible, put others pile up and some slip through the cracks. I can only spend so much time plowing through old emails, so I balance it out with other ways of trying to keep my figures on the digital pulse.
I often rant against those who spend all their time in the progressive blogosphere. I know how easy it is to do. If you make a concerted effort to stay on top of DailyKos, MyDD, and your regional progressive blogging community, there isn’t a lot of time to read much else. But there is so much more to read.
As I try to balancing things out, I sometime check Bloglines for other blogs that I’ve found interesting. I hop over to BlogExplosion to see where it will take me, and recently I’ve been exploring sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. All of this works together to create a complex digital palimpsest.
So, instead of trying to capture a clear picture of what I’ve been reading, I thought I would note random tidbits that have caught my eye. There are a lot of SAHM, and WAHM blogs. For those not up on the mommy blogging culture, that is Stay At Home Moms and Work At Home Blogs. These are all wonderful follow-ons to the fertility blogs and the pregnancy blogs. After delivery, there are the moms trying to keep passion alive, even aspiring to be MILFs.
As much as I love my wife and family, I do not describe myself on my blog in terms of whose spouse and whose parent I am, the way many people do, and I find Offsprung’s perspective particularly refreshing: “Welcome to the perfect online antidote to a parenting culture gone barking mad”.
I’ve always been interested in homeschooling. Learning is a life long activity and schooling should take place at home, whether or not kids are also being schooled elsewhere. Many people think of homeschoolers as the religious conservatives that don’t want their children in schools where evolution is taught. Yet I found a wonderful blog, Homeschooling Evolved. They have a link to a life-sized online whale. Another fun blog in this area is Fish Feet. She has a great graph of Global Tetrapod Diversity
There is more to schooling than just science. I find myself wandering through various blogs of freelance writers. Some are offering ideas to other writers. Some are writing about their own writing, or trying out new things. I remember stumbling across the phrase, “Butterfly effect in reverse”, and “Pinocchio’s now a boy who wants to turn back into a toy”. Then, there are all the discussions about 18,000 nude volunteers in Mexico City. Meanwhile, I read about people playing with the Hasbro Vcam Now 2.0 video camera and whether or not you can use a child’s toy to create art.
All of this, without any sort of social conscience is but vanity, and sites like World without Oil, Our Hearts for Haiti, and the National Human Services Assembly help keep this in perspective.
So, I’m catching up on my emails. I’m keeping my eyes open online, and I’m finding that just like in face to face experiences, I really, don’t know life, at all.
MIT5: LonelyGirl ’08 and Collective Identity Formation and Political Campaigns
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/02/2007 - 09:24One of the papers that I found particularly interesting at the Media in Transition conference, was The You in YouTube: The Emergence of Collective Identity Formation Through Online Video Sharing. It explorer the role of the community in forming the identity of Ysabella Brave.
Ysabella has 22,745 subscribers, over four times the number that Obama has and nearly ten times that of Edwards so it is particularly interesting to observe how her identity was shaped by the community on YouTube.
The abstract for the paper starts:
YouTube has redefined the basis according to which identities are constructed by supplanting individualism with a process of collective identity formation. On sites such as YouTube, identity creation becomes a process of negotiating authenticity and performance in public by taking into account the commentary of an audience of strangers.
My first thought was about how to use this in the political process. How can we shape the collective identity of candidates? Should we even try?
