This Friday, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Information Studies (SOIS), along with co-conveners School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), UW-Madison, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will come together to present, "Out of the Attic and into the Stacks: Feminism in LIS,"… Continue reading “Out of the Attic and into the Stacks: The Feminism in LIS Unconference” at UW-M – and Why We Desperately Need It
Category: Meditations
Early or free-form writing on topics. Thoughts likely not fully formed; these posts serve as a springboard for discussions or for lengthier work.
Social Media’s Dirty Work: Contextualizing the Facebook Screening Controversy
In the past few days my inbox has seen an influx in forwards from friends and colleagues, all sharing links with me covering the recent revelation that Facebook outsources some of its dirtiest work, and that those firms handling Facebook's outsourced labor pay exploitatively low wages for some of the most psychologically damaging digital work… Continue reading Social Media’s Dirty Work: Contextualizing the Facebook Screening Controversy
The Wisconsin Uprising Archive and the Importance of Digital Media Curation in Resistance
The paradox of digital material is its ability to disappear: despite a potentially infinite lifetime and no degredation of quality as suffered over time by their analog media counterparts, digital objects are only as good as the ability to find them - to avoid, in essence, digital ephemerality. These are themes that are not unfamiliar… Continue reading The Wisconsin Uprising Archive and the Importance of Digital Media Curation in Resistance
1:10.
1 minute, ten seconds. That's how long I withstood a viewing of the video, posted on October 27th and now approaching two million views, of Hillary Adams, aged 16 at the time, being viciously beaten by her father, Aransas Co. family court Judge William Adams. In 2004, Hillary Adams was caught accessing content online for… Continue reading 1:10.
Bodies and Technologies in Resistance: The Wisconsin Union Protests, from the Ground
Since February 12th, I have been involved in participating in and documenting the protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's "budget repair bill," underway at the State Capitol in Madison, WI. As an academic engaged with issues of both labor as well as critical media scholarship, I have been keenly aware of the peculiar situation of… Continue reading Bodies and Technologies in Resistance: The Wisconsin Union Protests, from the Ground
Questioning “The Cloud”: Andrejevic’s “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure”
In his article, "Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure," scholar Mark Andrejevic takes on the task of questioning the often-idyllic and largely positive rhetoric frequently used to describe the variety types of ubiquitous, cloud and always-on computing. In so doing, he invokes the sci-fi visionary of the 1980s, William Gibson, who imagined many characteristics of the modern… Continue reading Questioning “The Cloud”: Andrejevic’s “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure”
Some Musings on Labor in “The Culture Industry”
Theodor Adorno's primary critiques in the selections brought together in Routledge's The Culture Industry focus on what can be termed generally mass culture (or, to use the term he coined along with Horkheimer, "the culture industry"), being those artifacts which are mass-produced, reproduced, distributed - both as the means and the end to advertise, promote and consume the products. The result is that what was once the province of cultural output such as artistic expression is reduced instead to artifacts and emblems of products and commodities; this then becomes the common cultural currency. Advertising stands in for art, and cultural objects are created expressly for consumption - by necessity, as a result of their mass-production - and to generate capital.
Getting to Grips with Video Gaming’s Past, Present and Future: Exploring “Platform Studies”
Thirty years ago, video games captured the imagination and the attention of a society. They served as a touchstone for both promise and anxiety about our identity, both individual and as a whole. They forced us to ask hard questions about youth culture, about attitudes regarding leisure and work. They challenged educators to rethink their means of engaging young people in learning. They provided new tools for the forward-thinking and they were an obvious target of those looking to score easy political points, too. Video games have been shape-shifters, and they will continue to be, changing in meaning and importance based on their beholder, their utility, their dollar value. But the essence of video games, with their reliance on novelty in both the cultural representations that make up their content and in the technological power they need to run, places them irrevocably at the fore of the new, and of the future.
The Vast World of Vast Narratives, Fandom and Participatory Culture
What makes a narrative vast, according to the contributors to the recent MIT volume Third Person? Based on the varied content, spread across multiple media, covered by the book, vast narratives receive their designation not only due to the interior nature of the narrative, which may span unusual lengths when measured in years, amount of content produced, number of media in which the world is present, among other features (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2). Yet the volume is also vast, as in catholic, given its broad interpretation of what constitutes a narrative: consider outsider artist/author Henry Darger's inclusion alongside other constructed worlds and universes of comic books (Ford and Jenkins), traditional paper and pen gaming (Laws), video games, television programs whose mythologies extend beyond the reach of traditional broadcast and into transmedia, such as in the case of Lost (Lavery). (In the interest of full disclosure: Lost is of particular interest to me at present, as I only discovered it last semester, watching five seasons on Netflix while I read about the show elsewhere.)
Digital Labor, Cold-War Roots
Doing some reading over the past week, I was prompted to think about, then comment on, a chapter by Friedrich Kittler on Cold War computing technology and the implicit (and explicit) ways in which an examination of so-called “defense technology” comes into direct contact with, and within the purview of, media studies, information studies and labor studies.
Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the history of these technologies and their development, particularly when the when many defense technologies have been considered value-neutral or even as beneficial (and perhaps were, particularly when they moved from the province of military applications to consumer or mass-market ones). Additionally, the process of uncovering the hidden labor embedded in digital and computing technologies and processes, is inextricalbly tied to the critically important task of uncovering their hidden agendas, applications and roots within the military-academic-industrial complex.