Sunday, April 8, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Reality TV: Medium for Empowerment and Social Change?
But do we generally consider reality television to be more than lightweight, time-filling and slightly voyeuristic ways to entertain ourselves by looking into the private spaces of other peoples' lives or to participate in an interactive television game show that allows each of us, if we choose, to help vote someone off the island? Reality TV has had a tremendous impact upon the economics, style, and aesthetics of American television since Survivor and Big Brother hit American television screens in the summer of 2000 as adaptations of successful European programming formulas. Since that time, the reality formats--and the cloning phenomenon--have spread to most corners of the globe, with some local adaptations, as part of the globalization of Euro-American popular culture.
However, few Americans would speculate that the television genres associated with reality TV have the potential to effect any serious social or political change. A news story this week on CNN, "Reality shows revolutionize Arab TV," by Ashley Fantz, intrigues me as it suggests a more political, democratizing--and ultimately peacemaking--agenda for reality shows in regions filled with cultural conflict or under authoritarian regimes. Fantz writes:
The MTV show ["The Real World"], which debuted in 1992, was considered a groundbreaking social experiment. Its creators bet that if young people from vastly different backgrounds lived together, they would eventually -- through fits and fights and hugs -- find common ground. And by watching, the show's audience might, too.
While reality programming now dominates Western entertainment, "The Real World" remains a pioneering blueprint for a burgeoning reality show market in the Middle East and North Africa. Thanks to the region's proliferation of satellite television and its embrace of social media, more and more reality shows are appearing on air.Fantz continues:
The Arab Idol judges, from left, Hassan El Shafei, Ragheb Alama and Ahlam.
Some shows, like "Arab Idol," are imitations of Western franchises. Other productions are unique to Arab culture. "Million's Poet," for example, is a kind of "Def Poetry Jam" meets "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" where young people compete for cash to see who is the most talented poet performing traditional Arabic verse. In its first season, the show reportedly got higher ratings than the United Arab Emirates' national sport, soccer.
"Reality shows in the Arab world are a very big deal because they're showing real people are worthy of star attention that maybe only a political or religious leader might get," said Joe Khalil, a visiting assistant professor of communication at Northwestern University in Qatar. "Reality has nothing to do with a state-controlled message."
Khalil says the reality show audience is the same demographic represented in the Arab Spring uprisings.
"This is a demographic that has long been ignored, and reality show producers want that market," he said. "The shows are trying to say to this young and vibrant group who wants to learn, wants to be entertained: 'This is you. This is your culture. These are your values and your decisions. Make them count.' "
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This led me to explore the possibilities a bit further. In doing so, I came across an article, "Next Generation Peacebuilding and Social Change in the Arab World," on the U.S. Institute of Peace website, focusing upon a 2012 Iraqi reality television series "for young Iraqi peacebuilders" entitled Salam Shabab with the motto, "We are Iraq. We are all Iraq." (Episodes may be seen online, with English and Arabic subtitles.)
Social media are also powerful channels for community-building around the show: Salamshabab.com is a social networking forum that encourages Iraqi youth to express themselves freely, while the series also has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Of this program, Fantz writes:
Translated as "Peace Youth," the reality series is filmed in Kurdistan and stars teenagers from across Iraq, many from families who belong to warring sects. The show requires that boys and girls work together on competing teams to tackle increasingly harder physical and academic challenges. Winners get trophies and video cameras, and they become "Peace Ambassadors" with a chance to speak and meet with Iraqi parliament members.
Created by Iraqis with financial backing from Americans, the show debuted in 2010.
A section of the Wikipedia entry on Reality TV entitled "Political Impact" presents additional evidence that reality television may be carrying much more gravitas in its role as an instrument of social transformation in many countries:
Reality television's global success has been, in the eyes of some analysts, an important political phenomenon. In some authoritarian countries, reality television voting has been the first time many citizens have voted in any free and fair wide-scale elections. In addition, the frankness of the settings on some reality shows present situations that are often taboo in certain orthodox cultures, like Star Academy Arab World, which began airing in 2003, and which shows male and female contestants living together. In 2004, journalist Matt Labash, noting both of these issues, wrote that "the best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East could be Arab-produced reality TV."
In China, after the finale of the 2005 season of Super Girl (the local version of Pop Idol) drew an audience of around 400 million people, and 8 million text message votes, the state-run English-language newspaper Beijing Today ran the front-page headline "Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?" The Chinese government criticized the show, citing both its democratic nature and its excessive vulgarity, or "worldliness", and in 2006 banned it outright. Other attempts at introducing reality television have proved to be similarly controversial. A Pan-Arab version of Big Brother was cancelled in 2004 after less than two weeks on the air after a public outcry and street protests.
Hissa Hilal on Million's Poet, 2010.
In 2007, Abu Dhabi TV begain airing Million's Poet, a show featuring Pop Idol-style voting and elimination, but for the writing and oration of Arabic poetry. The show became popular in Arab countries, with around 18 million viewers, partly because, according to analysts such as University of Pennsylvania professor Marwan Kraidy, it was able to combine the excitement of reality television with a traditional, culturally relevant topic. In April 2010, however, the show also become a subject of political controversy, when Hissa Hilal, a 43-year-old female Saudi competitor, read out a poem criticizing her country's Muslim clerics. Hilal received the highest scores from the judges throughout the competition, and came in third place overall.
(for citations for this Wikipedia quotation, see below)
Bamyan Media is a not-for-profit media organization founded in 2009 by American Anna Elliot, a graduate of Hampshire College, after having first facilitated post-conflict reconciliation workshops in Afghanistan, produced a radio drama with Haitian youth, an ethnography on funeral cooperatives in Haiti, a radio documentary on soldiers in Burma, and a public awareness campaign for indigenous women on US reservations. Bamyan proclaims its mission: "Through producing locally relevant popular television programs, Bamyan Media inspires marginalized people in the developing world to lead change and create prosperity in their communities by building social enterprises."
In addressing why Bamyan has chosen the reality television program as the medium for effecting social change, the Bamyan website explains:
For further reading on the issues raised in the Wikipedia quotation above, please see:
Almost every country has its version of a pop idol contest — what if social entrepreneurs became the popular heroes of a new generation? Television is still the world’s most consumed medium. The reality TV genre has proliferated because it is popular with viewers and inexpensive to produce, giving it a vast reach — and making it a cost-effective way to reach millions of people with socially-responsible, empowering programming.
We believe that the reality TV genre offers a powerful platform for “edutainment.” It is also inexpensive to produce and has a vast reach, in addition to a compelling, untapped potential for high-impact dissemination of knowledge and resources. Our work will be to harnesses the power of mass media specifically television, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to inspire a new generation of youth leaders and accelerate the spread of social innovation through reality TV.
Our programming also serves as a platform for social change — with its selection of contestants and the development of episode topics and series plot, Bamyan Media works to promote cultural diversity, the status of women and minority groups, and healthy consumption and environmental practices. Bamyan believes in the power of popular media to influence behaviors and positively reflect society back onto itself.Exploring the impact of various types of participatory media (including both broadcast media and social media) on different cultures, and especially the adaptation of what seem innocuous program vehicles in one culture to vehicles of empowerment (with life-changing consequences) in another, are worthy areas of study and future research.
For further reading on the issues raised in the Wikipedia quotation above, please see:
- Lynch, Marc (2006). "'Reality is Not Enough': The Politics of Arab Reality TV".
- Labash, Matt (October 18, 2004). "When a Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss". The Weekly Standard.
- "Democracy Idol". The Economist. September 8, 2005.
- Macartney, Jane (August 29, 2005). "TV talent contest 'too democratic' for China's censors". The Times (London).
- "Footage from banned Chinese "Pop Idol" receives Cambridge premiere"(Press release). University of Cambridge. July 5, 2007. Retrieved July 29, 2007.
- "Arab Big Brother show suspended". BBC News. March 1, 2004.
- Winner's tribe put the millions in Million’s Poet, James Calderwood, The National, April 19, 2010
- Move over American Idol: Hissa Hilal in finals of Arab reality TV poetry contest, Kristen Chick, Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 2010
- Hassan, Hassan (March 19, 2010). "Million's Poet finalist defies death threats". The National
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Images as Witness: Photography, War and Peace
my testimony. The events I have recorded should
not be forgotten and must not be repeated."
-James Nachtwey-
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| James Nachtwey, Afghanistan, 1996. Woman mourning a brother killed by a Taliban rocket. |
Recently, on February 11, 2012, American war photographer James Nachtwey received the third Dresden International Peace Prize in Dresden, Germany--a leading city of European art and culture that was nearly completely destroyed on February 13, 1945, by Allied bombing. The prize was awarded and lauded by renowned German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who in his remarks said,
...It is the nature of war to engage and take in everything, to occupy and appropriate, without exception. Which war film, for example, isn’t, deep down, a glorification of war, even against better judgment, and often even in spite of the best intentions?
And: It is in the very nature of images to represent what they depict. “What you see is what you get.” That’s exactly what makes them so very powerful. It’s almost like trying to square the circle if you want to dissociate yourself from what an image presents and conveys, let alone try and tell the opposite of what it shows.
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Wenders continued:
War is a huge, infernal industry, the largest one on this planet. It seems presumptuous for one man to attempt to stand in the way of this machinery. Once war has broken out, everything spirals out of control almost immediately, turning even the armies and the soldiers who fight in it into helpless onlookers, victims of their own hubris.
Who would dare then to oppose it and put it into perspective with mere… photographs. Who would seriously deploy cameras against tanks? Just make the effort and visualize it for yourself!
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| James Nachtwey, 2007. Photograph by Jaap Arriens, from Wikimedia Commons. |
After all, almost all of us take pictures today. Even your cell phones don’t come without a camera any more. Or perhaps you have one of those small, convenient digital devices. Or you may even own some professional equipment… Just imagine going to war with that! And imagine doing so just to take a picture to undeceive the entire world and tell them what’s going on there.
Yes: a photo that would influence the outcome of the war or even end it! Right. That would be sheer madness!
All right then, imagine just this: You want to change the life of ONE person with a photograph. That alone is an enormous challenge, if you think about it.
The short moment when you look through the viewfinder or at the tiny display, as you point the camera at something, and finally press the shutter button… that second is supposed to achieve something, to capture something and thus captivate, and thereby move somebody, or more so: even shake up the world?
How can that be possible? Who do you have to be to attempt such a thing? How… would you possibly go about it?
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| Dresden, 1945 |
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| Dresden, 1945 |
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| Dresden, 1945. At least 25,000 people were killed in a single day during the Allied bombings. |
A Dresden press release reports:
In explaining the decision to award the Dresden Prize to James Nachtwey, Nobel Prize winner Guenter Blobel, President of the Friends of Dresden in New York and vice chairman of the Friends of Dresden Deutschland:
The prevention of violence is especially effective when a picture is conveyed of that which the violence of war is.
James Nachtwey is one of those who, without consideration of the danger to him- or herself, bring such pictures to us, pictures which we can never forget. And he does this as a moralist, as one who doesn’t merely hope, but rather believes that his pictures can change the way we think.
Without the photographs of Dresden in ruins, its destruction would have been long erased from the world’s memory and no longer a warning against armed conflict.
Through the photographs of James Nachtwey other wars remain in our thoughts.
Susan Sontag wrote: "Wars of which there are no pictures are forgotten."
And forgetting wars must not happen because then we forget their victims as well.
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| Nick Ut (Huynh Cong Ut), Villagers fleeing napalm attack on Trang Bang village, South Vietnam, June 8, 1972. From http://leicaphilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Nick-Ut-Children-Fleeing-an-Aerican-Napalm-Strike-1972.jpg. |
Photojournalists and documentary filmmakers who cover war and victims of injustice put themselves in danger's path every day to try to find and capture those images that might imprint themselves upon our collective conscience--that might make each of us stop, for a moment, from our busy lives and not only ponder the philosophical questions of morality and human responsibility but also, perhaps, to take some action.
What is it about an image, or a film, that can sear itself into our brains and continue to haunt us for the rest of our lives?
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| Jeff Widener, Tienanmen Square, Beijing, China, June 5, 1989 |
How can we be moved to not only think to ourselves, "Never again," but to do whatever is in our power to champion nonviolence and promote peace?
How can a "mere" image change a life? What is the power of the visual image? What is the power of art, in general, to move our hearts, to touch our souls, to motivate us to speak and act in new ways?
Monday, February 20, 2012
What's real? Dramatic and Documentary Realism
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?" These opening lines of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody reflect a set of binary concepts in our western culture that make a distinction between the "real" and what is "not real." In terms of the cultural production such as literature, art, and drama, this distinction generally leads to the separation of works into genres based upon the level of perceived realism: for example, fiction vs. nonfiction in literature, and representational vs. abstract in art.
In media, too, this binary becomes a guiding principle not just in assigning media products to genres, but also in terms of the relationship that we, the viewers/readers/consumers, have with each type of medium. We often choose to engage with different media based upon what we might call its "truth value"--consider our expectations of news (journalism) and documentary forms of media, which we expect to have a very high "truth value" as opposed to most entertainment media such as feature films, novels, and TV cartoons.
The concept of realism in visual media is very powerful in shaping our expectations of--and our judgments about--the media that we consume.
The degree of perceived realism in a media text (a movie or a television show, for example) is closely tied to genre conventions, stylistic techniques of cinematography and editing, and other classificatory schemes.
Different kinds of "realism" work in media to mask the constructed nature of all media forms, to try to make the story or information seem natural, "real" and unmediated. The power of these mechanisms to keep us, as viewers, from being able to think critically about the media texts is exactly why it is so absolutely essential to understand the concept of realism as we work to become more media literate. We need to be able to see the constructedness of all media--especially so-called realist media--to be critical media consumers.
Below, a quote from modernist artist Georgia O'Keefe.
So, what *is* real? And what is "realist" when it comes to media?
For this discussion, I'll limit myself to talking about film and television, and for purposes of analysis, I find it helpful to distinguish between two main types of realism:
1) realism in nonfiction media (documentary forms, journalism/television news, and Reality TV in all of its manifestations), and
2) dramatic or cinematic realism (in fiction films and television), a style of film language that became the hallmark of classical Hollywood cinema.
Let's start with nonfiction, or documentary realism.
DOCUMENTARY REALISM
The producers of nonfiction or documentary forms of media base their arguments on claims of truth, actuality and authenticity.
As viewers, we expect certain conventions of these kinds of media whether they are based upon the codes of journalism, on one end of the spectrum, or the norms of reality television programming, on the other end--with various types of documentary film falling in between.
What do we expect from these types of media forms, veiled in "truth," authenticity and objectivity (for the most part)? The norms for nonfiction film and television include unscripted dialogue, unstaged action, “real” people (i.e., not actors playing a fictitious role), and naturally-occurring behavior and events, including natural emotions. We may expect the narration or reporting to be scripted, but not the embedded events themselves.
However, despite the illusion of transparency of "truth" encoded into these forms of media, documentary realism in its style covers up the many levels of selectivity and structuring that go into making the media text.
It's important to remember that if filmmakers or producers go out looking for a certain type of action or certain kinds of characters, they will usually find them. So the first step in the selectivity process is in selecting a focus or story topic that fits into a preconceived notion of what will make an interesting or compelling story or film.
The next level of selectivity comes into play when the person(s) directing or operating the cameras or conducting the interviews decide what to shoot and who to spotlight. Not all perspectives will be represented.
The next stage is evaluating the rough footage and deciding what to make of it. Most documentaries and news programs are indeed scripted, but in general the scripting takes place *after* the footage and material are gathered, so that the script becomes a script for editing and structuring rather than a script for shooting. This is a significant way that Documentary Realism differs from dramatic realism.
Various models have developed over the years within each genre--television news, various types of documentaries, and subgenres of reality television--for styles of structuring this material to present it to an audience. All involve in their structuring:
a. the selective choices of what is filmed, who is interviewed, what perspectives are chosen (and not chosen)
b. the heavy hand of an editor, who selects, arranges, sequences, chooses to highlight or ignore certain information, and shapes the “real” information into a well-crafted presentation
c. the structuring of this “actuality” information and events into either structures of narrative (stories) with characters, plots and other characteristics of good storytelling or into informative or persuasive rhetorical arguments (and these often use narrative as well)
Below, a clip from an extraordinary documentary film by Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins, called The First Movie (2010), using lots of footage shot by Kurdish children in Northern Iraq. How does this film signify and encode realism? It is a good comparison and contrast with The Color of Paradise, a fictional feature film (see below).
Now let's turn to another, and perhaps even more popular, mode of representation: realism in fiction film and television (also called dramatic realism).
REALIST MODE IN FICTION FILM
Even if they are clearly works of fiction and thus not "real" in the same documentary sense of embodying objective truth, authenticity or actuality, media that employ dramatic realism SEEM true because they encourage the viewer to believe in them and to emotionally identify with them. Realism creates a sense of verisimilitude ("true-seemingness").
The following clip is from The Color of Paradise (1999), an Iranian feature film by Majid Majidi, a drama about the life of a blind little boy who returns home to his rural village from his special school for the blind in Tehran. In what ways is it realist?
Realism (both dramatic and documentary) encourages viewers to suspend disbelief, to forget they are watching a story constructed for them, and to get sucked in to the diegesis ("story world") of the film. We become passive spectators. We are invited to sit back and enjoy the ride, and not think about the way the film is constructed. We are not to do any work involving critical thinking; we are to be entertained or informed.
With both dramatic and documentary realism, we are encouraged to believe, if only for an hour or two, that a coherent and bounded world (in which these characters live and within the social and moral order of which they act) exists. We are not to be critical of the film or report, not to question (but to accept as natural) the ideological statements that it produces--statements about social and ethical values, gender roles, class, race and ethnic relationships, for example.
REALISM: REALLY?
In summary, these are the basic characteristics of classical film narrative having to do with the teller, the tale and the viewer. We can also question the degree to which these same mechanisms apply to documentary realism:
(1) The filmmaker's or producer's job is to make sure the mechanics of production and storytelling are invisible: to disguise his or her mediating presence as the constructor of the images and narrative.
(2) The text itself is a "closed" text, being self-contained and complete within itself: both the diegetic (story) world, and the plot.
(3) The audience is conditioned to be unconscious of their active participation in the construction of meaning, and in fact, the mechanisms of the text's construction work hard to keep the viewer from critically engaging but rather encourage the viewer to sit back and "enjoy the ride."
From the archives: A version of this blog was originally posted on 9 February 2011.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Pinterest: On Virtual Collecting and Identity Display
Pinterest's basic model is to encourage users to browse a feed--a flow of captioned visuals that have been "pinned" (as if to a virtual bulletin board) by other users--and to "like" or "repin" the favored images on one's own board. In fact, one of the enticing features of Pinterest is that you can organize all those images that inspire you, or catch your fancy, into themed groupings and collections. In addition to grabbing and fixing images from the feed upon your own board, you can also be an innovator and introduce new images into the feed through the browser icon that allows you to "pin" any interesting image you come across online.
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| The generic Pinterest feed |
The social part of Pinterest is that, like Facebook and other models, you can choose to follow the feeds of particular others, be they personal friends or just Pinterest trend-setters and trend-collectors. When you sign up, Pinterest asks about your interests and sets you up initially following a number of these "cool hunters" to which they've calculated you will find an affinity. Also affiliated with Facebook, Pinterest connects to your Facebook friends list. This allows you, one would assume, to share your collections-as-identity with friends in a more image-intense way.
The images on Pinterest tend to stereotypically be consumer-oriented, dominated by the interests of young adult women and focused upon home decorating, trendy fashions, and illustrated recipes for entertaining that might grace the pages of a womens magazine. Yet as Pinterest grows, I am seeing the aesthetic range of Pinterest images expanding beyond the commercial, advertising-type features to include images reflecting users' styles, interests, and aesthetic values. A growing body of art and art photography, photojournalistic images, handcrafted work, images of antiques and other material culture, travel photography, images of technological interest, and inspirational images (including text-based images) is appearing and circulating.
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| An example of a collection "board": this one of Antique Ceramic Tiles |
The act of creating and naming one's collection of gallery-like "boards" and of carefully selecting those images that reflect one's own aesthetic tastes and style also provides a significant space for identity building and display. One might easily embrace the notion that "This array of chosen images reflects my style and conveys the type of person I am," leading to a degree of emotional fulfillment and self-expression.
For example, WSJ columnist Katherine Rosman writes about how Pinterest allows her not only to express her identity but also as an effective way to share that identity with others. "It hadn't occurred to me that such an online service also would be a window into me for my husband who sees me every day," Rosman writes. "But it is: Joe peeks in on my boards all the time, frequently surprising me with supplies for projects, ingredients for recipes, and gifts of stationery and books I've flagged. Recently, I added a board, 'Things My Husband Would Love.' I pin photos of vintage cars and golf courses. Pinterest has become for us an affectionate way of communicating."
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| A stamp collection: so "old school"! |
Here is an example of my own collection of Pinterest boards. Analyzing my own cultural habitus, the pinned items in "Feels like my style" may tell you that I have a love for things old and weathered, a bit dusty perhaps, and handcrafted. I am a bookworm, perhaps: there are several pinned images of overstuffed bookshelves from ceiling to floor signifying also a taste for cluttered but comfortable living spaces. There seems to be a tree motif throughout, tied to a fondness for handmade jewelry; decor such as patchwork quilts, cabinets built from converted barn doors, and collages of antique portraits and lace indicate an attraction to repurposed and pastiched "old stuff" rather than slick and manufactured new products.
Other boards in my Pinterest collection exhibit a fascination for and appreciation of various cultures of the world, a range of architectural styles and natural environments, and an attraction to photographic portraits. One might surmise that I am a global traveler and that I would most likely have something of an inquisitive and adventurous personality that leads me to explore places off the beaten track.
Following Bourdieu, all of these personal affinities may tell you a good deal about my cultural positioning in American society. It may not be surprising to learn that I am an overly-educated college professor or that my first academic love is cultural anthropology or that traveling internationally and photography are passions of mine. Just as one reads a Facebook or Match.com profile to try to interpret and decode the semiotic clues about what kind of person is behind the profile, we can also read the Pinterest collections as a display of self and of cultural tastes, from which we can evaluate cultural positioning, social status, educational level, and more.
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| Rug dealers at the San Francisco Rug and Textile Show, 2011, catering to collectors |
Anthropologist James Clifford, in his book The Predicament of Culture (1988), writes about the significance of collecting:
"Some sort of gathering around the self and the group--the assemblage of the material world, the marking off of a subjective domain that is not 'other'--is probably universal. All such collections embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rule-governed territories of the self. But the notion that this gathering involves the accumulation of possessions, the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience) is surely not universal.... In the West, however, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity" (p. 218).
Pinterest's mission statement is "to connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests." Ostensibly purely non-commercial, Pinterest urges users not to abuse the system: "Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion."
Yet, as this Wall Street Journal article by Sarah Needleman and Pui-Wing Tam well illustrates, the start-up site has not yet settled upon a model for profit generation (monetization), and it has clearly already begun to be used by many companies, in various ways, as a "tool for self-promotion." It seems inevitable that it has become, and will continue to become, a way for commercial images to circulate in order to generate either publicity or sales for everyone from companies promoting their products to individual entrepreneurs finding a way to reach beyond etsy.com or eBay to broaden their customer base.
A social media blog, socialsonar.com recently advised about Pinterest: "Like with many social media sites, the point is to connect with your potential customers, not "shout" hard sales at them. ...So, for the right business, using Pinterest may be a new and interesting way to share content. If you aren't sure, start by asking your customers where they are spending their on-line social time. Then you will know where you should spend your time too." Another blog features a column by educational technology specialist Sarah Fudin on "How Pinterest Can Help Boost Your Career," who notes that "For January of 2012, Pinterest’s percentage of total referral traffic matched Twitter and surpassed other popular content-sharing sites like YouTube, Google+, Reddit, MySpace and LinkedIn." Fudin continues:
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| Pinterest board of teacher resources |
This last quote raises the idea of Pinterest as a site that may lend itself to collaborative knowledge building, a particular interest of mine. The site presents itself as a collaborative site, with etiquette guidelines "based upon collective input" from users. These include: (1) Be nice. (2) Credit your sources. (3) Avoid self-promotion. (4) Report objectionable content. (5) Tell us how to make Pinterest better.
Pinterest, for me at this particular moment, is an interesting blend of the link and photo sharing features of Facebook, the seemingly random web wanderlust of Stumble Upon, and the appreciative artistic community-building of Flickr. Technology and social media statistics show that it has been one of the most rapidly-growing social media sites in recent history, and businesses are eager to find ways to catch a ride on its wave. Reggie Bradford of Vitrue (a social media solutions company) provides the following suggestions for ways "brands can leverage Pinterest" in a recent TechCrunch column:
1. Add Pinterest Content to Your Existing Facebook Presence.
2. Optimize Your Web Properties to Draw People to Your Pinterest Content.
3. Tell Your Existing Social Audiences About What’s Happening on Pinterest.
4. Make Your Pins Work Harder For You.
5. Arm Your Staff and Agency Partners With Tools to Help Them Pin Great Content.
"Pinterest is still in its infancy," Bradford writes, "and time will tell if it continues its rapid growth or plateaus. But it certainly exhibits the potential to provide visually engaging experiences for consumers that marketers can weave into their social communities. Brands can start simple, then evaluate for effectiveness along the way. Being able to experiment with new and innovative platforms is part of the fun and excitement of social. And brands should start experimenting today."
It will be interesting to see how Pinterest develops as it loses its innocence and moves into its monetization phase. Digital culture critic Nir Eyal notes that Pinterest represents a new breed of startups that further the industry dream of personized e-commerce and that Pinterest, in particular, represents the next generation of web-based media, what he calls the Curated Web.
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| Nir Eyal's concept of the Curated Web |
The Curated Web, Eyal writes, is characterized by "a fundamentally different value to users than the social web. Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one. Like all successive phases, the curated web is a response to the weaknesses of the previous phase. Users inundated with too much content are looking for solutions to help them make sense of it all. Curated Web companies solve this problem by turning content curation into content creation and, following the predicted trend line, they see unprecedented percentages of user participation. Each re-pin, re-blog, re-tweet, creates a curated, easy-to-use stream for future information to flow."
I find Eyal's concept intriguing and worthy of more thought and discussion. The concept of the curated web and of "taste experts" is one that has been long in coming, and is a significant aspect of Web 2.0 as well. The role of what we might call "trusted opinion advisors" (comparable to Eyal's concept of taste experts) has long been a factor in communication studies but has never been as significant as in today's social media, especially for that growing percentage of the young population who only read or view media as it is filtered through, recommended, and passed along by their friends and others whose opinions they respect. The role of friend-filtered news, images, and other information is becoming increasingly important, and feed-based sites like Pinterest are built upon this principle.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink
A very important story about the impact of the online bookselling industry on the publishing industry.
"For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon’s reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing)."
'via Blog this'
Are you a college student? Keep reading!
I would like to turn this blog entry over to my friend and colleague Donald Gregory, a sociologist (currently President of the Georgia Sociological Association) who has gained a lot of wisdom by being a most pragmatic person who knows how to navigate through life quite effectively. He's worth listening to, as many of my students will well attest. A year ago, Prof. Gregory wrote this blog entry on his own blog, and it has become quite popular. I'd like to re-post it here (I added the images).
12 Tips for College Students
First written and posted by Dr. Donald Gregory in January 2011.
Ever wonder what professors' secret advice would be? Well, much of it isn’t too secretive, but there are a few gems I could tell you.
1. We didn’t read everything when we were students, either. How can you, right? Sometimes it seems like there is way too much to do. But what we were good at was figuring out the most important material to read and how to successfully skim the rest of the readings. This is one of the best skills you can improve.
Take five minutes and dissect your text or reading. Read the title, intro and conclusion. What is the main point? What are the chapter titles or headings? What are the three most important questions the titles or headings address? There you go--at least you have some idea about what is going on. Still, you will have to do more when it comes to exams, but this may work to get you through an occasional class.
2. Come and see us in the first three weeks. Want to impress your faculty? Arrange a meeting during office hours and show up with a few probing questions about the course material. We have big egos and want to hear ourselves talk. Taking such initiative makes you appear really engaged and, when push-comes-to-shove, your office visit will make you a favorite.
3. Don’t make my life hard. Deadlines serve to help us, and you, manage work flow. Every exception you ask for gets compounded for us. This lesson will serve you well in all of your future work. Make the life for your boss easy, and he or she will be more inclined to keep you around.
4. Organize your life--at least the part that I have to deal with. I spend a lot of time on organizing the course and the syllabus. You should get a calendar and write the due dates down. For projects, work backward. List the due date, break the assignment up into steps and work backward. If a paper is due on a certain day, how many days before that do you want the draft completed, the outline, the reading(s) done, the research? Work your schedule backward, and it will work for you.
5. Be engaged in class – or fake it. Notice any common themes? Our egos, our preparation, and our years of study mean we like to talk in class about our subject matter. If you don’t seem to have the same interest, then fake it. Again, this is an important life lesson. Sometimes you just have to play to get along. Laugh at a loved one’s joke. Feign interest in a boss’s story. Keep your mouth shut at the in-laws'. Life is not like Jersey Shore. You don’t have to express your true emotions. Grow up and get them under control. You can practice these skills in my class. Combine this point with skimming in point 1 and be ready to ask an open-ended question. For many professors, this will send them off on a topic of their interest and serve to make you look smart.
6. Don’t worry so much about the other students. I know, you want to be cool. Being cool means not being smart. You know what? You are paying a lot of money to learn and advance in your career. You are going to compete with these students for jobs. Start showing off now. You may party with some of them now and you may think that you have a huge number of friends, but they won’t be around ten years from now.
7. Cultivate your truest friendships. OK. A few of them will still be around. Party buddies are not the same as friends. Learn now to tell the difference. Friends (even twenty-something guys) will, at the end of the day, be kind to their friends. If they aren’t, then they are selfish and won’t be there when you need them. A need is more than “watching-your-back” at the club. It is, dare I say it, emotional and intellectual. Real life is about the mundane, not the insane.
8. Your career has already started. I know college equals party. I know hooking up seems like the most pressing goal. But from whom do you think you will be asking your first recommendation letters? That’s right. Me. So remember that when you roll into my 11 a.m. class in flip-flops and pajama bottoms only to come to me in a month asking for letters of recommendation to law school.... I’m just sayin’. And remember, the world is a small place. You never know who your professors might know. Your future employer could be my friend and ask for unsolicited advice. It happens, really.
9. Motivation. I can only affect your motivation a little. Seriously, this is important. How motivated are you to be here? The lower the motivation, the harder you need to work on a class. If your program isn’t your passion, then find one that is. Except for a few professional degrees, your major “may” only influence the first job you get. Everything after that is dependent upon your previous job performance. So what skill sets are you building if you are not motivated by your studies? Be honest with yourself.
10. Seriously, cultivate a love of learning. I know. How cliche. The inquisitive person is a problem solver. You may be able to get through your college degree, but will you have a college education?
11. Read mainstream news. Avoid the political margins. Read from the largest newspapers and weekly news magazines. You want to have a knowledge of the world (that means beyond the United States) when you graduate. Make a habit of turning off Facebook and reading the New York Times or Time magazine. After a short while, you will find your professors are even smarter than you thought, and you will feel pretty smart, too.
12. Be careful of debt. Please don’t lease a car. Please don’t carry a balance on your credit card. Please invest in a Roth IRA. If you have income and if your parents have any wealth at all, ask them to help you open a Roth IRA. Do this when you are young, even if it is only a few hundred dollars, and then continue to add to it. You will be so thankful you did.
I hope this is a good start for your semester.
12 Tips for College Students
First written and posted by Dr. Donald Gregory in January 2011.
Ever wonder what professors' secret advice would be? Well, much of it isn’t too secretive, but there are a few gems I could tell you.
 |
| Learn to read assigned materials quickly and effectively. There are secrets to scanning the material looking for the main points and supporting evidence-- learn them, and your job as a student will be much easier! |
Take five minutes and dissect your text or reading. Read the title, intro and conclusion. What is the main point? What are the chapter titles or headings? What are the three most important questions the titles or headings address? There you go--at least you have some idea about what is going on. Still, you will have to do more when it comes to exams, but this may work to get you through an occasional class.
 |
| Meet with your professor to ask questions! Photo from Wikimedia Commons. |
3. Don’t make my life hard. Deadlines serve to help us, and you, manage work flow. Every exception you ask for gets compounded for us. This lesson will serve you well in all of your future work. Make the life for your boss easy, and he or she will be more inclined to keep you around.
 |
| Organize your time! You will be amazed at how much more time you can find, and how much more accomplished you can be. |
5. Be engaged in class – or fake it. Notice any common themes? Our egos, our preparation, and our years of study mean we like to talk in class about our subject matter. If you don’t seem to have the same interest, then fake it. Again, this is an important life lesson. Sometimes you just have to play to get along. Laugh at a loved one’s joke. Feign interest in a boss’s story. Keep your mouth shut at the in-laws'. Life is not like Jersey Shore. You don’t have to express your true emotions. Grow up and get them under control. You can practice these skills in my class. Combine this point with skimming in point 1 and be ready to ask an open-ended question. For many professors, this will send them off on a topic of their interest and serve to make you look smart.
7. Cultivate your truest friendships. OK. A few of them will still be around. Party buddies are not the same as friends. Learn now to tell the difference. Friends (even twenty-something guys) will, at the end of the day, be kind to their friends. If they aren’t, then they are selfish and won’t be there when you need them. A need is more than “watching-your-back” at the club. It is, dare I say it, emotional and intellectual. Real life is about the mundane, not the insane.
8. Your career has already started. I know college equals party. I know hooking up seems like the most pressing goal. But from whom do you think you will be asking your first recommendation letters? That’s right. Me. So remember that when you roll into my 11 a.m. class in flip-flops and pajama bottoms only to come to me in a month asking for letters of recommendation to law school.... I’m just sayin’. And remember, the world is a small place. You never know who your professors might know. Your future employer could be my friend and ask for unsolicited advice. It happens, really.
9. Motivation. I can only affect your motivation a little. Seriously, this is important. How motivated are you to be here? The lower the motivation, the harder you need to work on a class. If your program isn’t your passion, then find one that is. Except for a few professional degrees, your major “may” only influence the first job you get. Everything after that is dependent upon your previous job performance. So what skill sets are you building if you are not motivated by your studies? Be honest with yourself.
10. Seriously, cultivate a love of learning. I know. How cliche. The inquisitive person is a problem solver. You may be able to get through your college degree, but will you have a college education?
12. Be careful of debt. Please don’t lease a car. Please don’t carry a balance on your credit card. Please invest in a Roth IRA. If you have income and if your parents have any wealth at all, ask them to help you open a Roth IRA. Do this when you are young, even if it is only a few hundred dollars, and then continue to add to it. You will be so thankful you did.
I hope this is a good start for your semester.
Performing the Self
I never found time to write last week's blog, mostly because of the demands requiring my actual physical presence (with no virtual connectivity) at nightly dress rehearsals for the community theatre play that I have been co-directing. Seeing Stars in Dixie opened last weekend at the Legion Theatre in Cartersville, a Pumphouse Players production--and I am very proud of the quality of the show and of the onstage world we created with a rich cast of characters. We have final performances tonight and tomorrow night. I've been co-director, set designer, propmaster, and stage manager.
Creating a fictional world onstage--and developing interesting, memorable characters--is not so different from creating identities and virtual worlds online. The physicality is missing online, definitely--but there are many similarities. My Digital Culture class and I have been reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together and discussing the issues that Turkle raises about the construction of identities in cyberspace.
In discussing the roles that digital users inhabit when they create avatars to play games such as Second Life, Turkle says, "Life on the screen becomes an identity workshop. Online worlds and role-playing games ask you to construct, edit, and perform a self.... Our lives on the screen may be play, but they are serious play"(p. 212).
But this play-acting of our selves is not limited to just role-playing games such as Second Life. It is equally as true in social media contexts where we construct profiles to represent the selves we desire to display to a particular online audience.
In constructing our Facebook profile, our LinkedIn profile (like the old school equivalent, the resume), or our online dating profile, each of us carefully selects and arranges an array of semiotically coded words, images, and "likes" (hobbies, movies, TV shows, favorite activities) to communicate to others the "me" that each of us would like them to see.
"What will they think of me if I say I watch this kind of television show?" we ask ourselves. "Wouldn't I appear to be [choose one: cooler, more attractive, more appealing, more mainstream] if I say that I like to listen to this type of music? Like the old personal ads that appeared in print publications, online profiles today are heavily coded with strategically-chosen characteristics that we hope will make our "selves" more presentable.
We often buy into the stereotypical judgments and expectations, and frequently become just as cliche as the old-style personal ads seeking someone to "share life's golden moments" or "take long walks on the beach."
During my exploration of online dating sites a decade ago, looking at Southern (Atlanta area), middle-aged (40s and 50s) men's and women's profiles, I was amazed at how many women said they were "equally as comfortable in evening gowns or blue jeans" and how many men made note of their love of NASCAR and of working out at the gym five times a week. An examination of online dating profiles shows how carefully and strategically they are constructed to convey a desirable side of one's personality--what is hidden from the profile is equally as important as what one has chosen to expose. It's not that people are necessarily being deceptive (though the stories of those who are deceptive get a lot of press)--we are merely well-socialized to conform to a socially-accepted image of who we should be, on the one hand, and we naturally (well, culturally) want to highlight the facets of our selves that we think are most interesting and attractive.
The work of Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 1960s, notably his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides us with an approach to thinking about this dramaturgical aspect of our real, physical lives as well as our online lives.
To what degree do we calculate the way we are presenting ourselves--the way we dress, the way we speak, our body language--in a given social situation so that we can maximize our positive impact and impression on those we wish to impress? Similarly, modern-day scademic studies of self presentation are flourishing--a quick search turned up articles such as (Mis)representing the Self in Online Dating, Self-presentation and Deception in Online Dating, Managing Impressions Online, and Self-presentation in Online Personals.
But one fascinating aspect of this issue, raised by Turkle, is about how we use these constructions of our selves--whether game avatars or online profiles--to rehearse inhabiting a character that we might want to be. Is what we might call "play-acting" necessarily a negative behavior? Are we developing self-realization by playing out these different sides of ourselves, expanding our repertoires, becoming more multi-faceted? Are these role-playing activities valuable (and perhaps necessary) to our personal growth and development?
Creating a fictional world onstage--and developing interesting, memorable characters--is not so different from creating identities and virtual worlds online. The physicality is missing online, definitely--but there are many similarities. My Digital Culture class and I have been reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together and discussing the issues that Turkle raises about the construction of identities in cyberspace.
In discussing the roles that digital users inhabit when they create avatars to play games such as Second Life, Turkle says, "Life on the screen becomes an identity workshop. Online worlds and role-playing games ask you to construct, edit, and perform a self.... Our lives on the screen may be play, but they are serious play"(p. 212).
But this play-acting of our selves is not limited to just role-playing games such as Second Life. It is equally as true in social media contexts where we construct profiles to represent the selves we desire to display to a particular online audience.
In constructing our Facebook profile, our LinkedIn profile (like the old school equivalent, the resume), or our online dating profile, each of us carefully selects and arranges an array of semiotically coded words, images, and "likes" (hobbies, movies, TV shows, favorite activities) to communicate to others the "me" that each of us would like them to see.
"What will they think of me if I say I watch this kind of television show?" we ask ourselves. "Wouldn't I appear to be [choose one: cooler, more attractive, more appealing, more mainstream] if I say that I like to listen to this type of music? Like the old personal ads that appeared in print publications, online profiles today are heavily coded with strategically-chosen characteristics that we hope will make our "selves" more presentable.
We often buy into the stereotypical judgments and expectations, and frequently become just as cliche as the old-style personal ads seeking someone to "share life's golden moments" or "take long walks on the beach."
During my exploration of online dating sites a decade ago, looking at Southern (Atlanta area), middle-aged (40s and 50s) men's and women's profiles, I was amazed at how many women said they were "equally as comfortable in evening gowns or blue jeans" and how many men made note of their love of NASCAR and of working out at the gym five times a week. An examination of online dating profiles shows how carefully and strategically they are constructed to convey a desirable side of one's personality--what is hidden from the profile is equally as important as what one has chosen to expose. It's not that people are necessarily being deceptive (though the stories of those who are deceptive get a lot of press)--we are merely well-socialized to conform to a socially-accepted image of who we should be, on the one hand, and we naturally (well, culturally) want to highlight the facets of our selves that we think are most interesting and attractive.
The work of Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 1960s, notably his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides us with an approach to thinking about this dramaturgical aspect of our real, physical lives as well as our online lives.
To what degree do we calculate the way we are presenting ourselves--the way we dress, the way we speak, our body language--in a given social situation so that we can maximize our positive impact and impression on those we wish to impress? Similarly, modern-day scademic studies of self presentation are flourishing--a quick search turned up articles such as (Mis)representing the Self in Online Dating, Self-presentation and Deception in Online Dating, Managing Impressions Online, and Self-presentation in Online Personals.
But one fascinating aspect of this issue, raised by Turkle, is about how we use these constructions of our selves--whether game avatars or online profiles--to rehearse inhabiting a character that we might want to be. Is what we might call "play-acting" necessarily a negative behavior? Are we developing self-realization by playing out these different sides of ourselves, expanding our repertoires, becoming more multi-faceted? Are these role-playing activities valuable (and perhaps necessary) to our personal growth and development?
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