my wondeful Twitter "follow me" stalkings

Gabby and Tal make amazing tattoo tights and socks that they sell on Etsy (they’re also on Twitter!). I found their stuff through a friend’s tweet and immediately bought myself a pair of these “Follow Me” “stalkings” haha. I admit they make me rather self-conscious and cautious of people who might literally be “following me,” but they’re too much of an eye-catching conversation piece to just keep in my drawer. I don’t regret buying these one bit and chances are I’ll be wearing them to tweet-ups and similarly geeky parties for years to come.

• I formatted my rationale as a guide to my intellectual trajectory at NYU, mapping the issues that most interested me according to the key texts that help me understand these topics. Gallatin has already approved this draft twice so I don’t need to edit it so much as dig into (and make sense of) the texts and ideas.
• Gallatin requires that every booklist contain seven (yes, SEVEN) ancient/medieval/renaissance classics, from before the year 1650. No joke. (Read: if you can think of any compelling connections between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Internet, feel free to leave a comment…)
• My actual colloquium will take place on the afternoon of December 11. I will preparing from now until then, so I appreciate any feedback you might have!

Title: New Media & Re-Imagining Communities

With three months remaining until I complete my undergraduate career at Gallatin, my concentration can be articulated as follows: the study of digital technology and the ways in which people utilize new media and the Internet to express their worldview; broadly, how media is produced by and simultaneously produces culture (as manifested in hierarchy, identity, community, knowledge, and so on); the Internet as an unprecedented medium that has transformed individuals from consumers to collaborators/producers, connecting people in real-time across the world; the decentralization of hierarchy in the spread of information and culture, and the power of “new” media in organizing collective action toward social/political progress; all of the above interpreted with an anthropological mindset.

The most basic foundation for my intellectual career developed relatively early in college and can be categorized into two themes: (1) reality/symbols/systems of meaning, and (2) race/Us vs. Them/the Other. In other words, how do we come to understand our reality and ourselves? Others who differ from us? How do symbols, prejudices, and stereotypes mold our beliefs and identities, and how can these symbols be exploited or manipulated? Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion form the epistemological basis of the first theme. Plato’s “Allegory” speaks to the façade of reality by positing a situation in which prisoners shackled in a cave can neither move nor turn their heads.  Though a fire burns from an elevated position behind the prisoners, they can only see what is in front of them – the shadows thrown onto the wall of the objects being carried by people behind the fire. Insomuch as the prisoners know of no other state of being, their perception of reality relies solely on these “shadows” as reality. Lippmann similarly labels this subjective perception the “pseudo-environment” that consists of mental representations (“pictures in our heads” of “the world outside”) upon which people act. Both Plato and Lippmann’s analyses apply to contemporary politics, mass media, and the daily struggle to steer the course of public discourse – to shape Public Opinion through vague symbols in “the manufacture of consent.” Whereas these two texts question the meaning of “the real” and the construction of popular beliefs, the next two focus on the dichotomous and Manichean worldview that sets the global East against the global West.

The Greek play, Persians, demonstrates this second theme in both its content and its broader historical context. Written by Aeschylus soon after the end of the Peloponnesian War, the play portrays its main characters – the defeated Persians – as suffering and deserving of pity. In that Greek citizens both performed and watched the play, Persians symbolizes a Grecian representation of the Oriental Other, an ancient statement of Western superiority. Edward Said’s Orientalism attributes the Occident-Orient relationship to a history of unbalanced power and domination, in which the Occident maintains its position of entitlement and superiority by colonizing the inferior Orient both physically and ideologically. Who has the ability to represent whom, and to what end? What is the status of the East-West binary today? How is fear and mistrust of the Oriental Other represented in Lippmann-esque linguistic symbols today (e.g. “War on Terrorism,” “radical Islamists,” and so on)? These four ancient and modern texts fundamentally address the psychological and cognitive underpinnings to identity, nationalism, and the need to be defined in opposition to an Other.

After revisiting my Intellectual Autobiography and Plan for Concentration (IAPC), I recognize that these two issues that energized me two years ago still comprise my core interests. They’ve simply expanded (or, rather, my interests have become more focused on the role of media in constructing reality, hierarchy, and race). When I classified my concentration in the spring of 2008 as “Power, Ideology, Representation,” I intended these three terms to implicate media as a function of identity, dominance and resistance, knowledge and interpretation. Drawing upon the inspiration I felt in my cultural anthropology courses – the first of two “major epiphan[ies] in my college career” – I began structuring my intellectual framework using concepts from Frankfurt School critical theorists.

Seminal works such as Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” – evaluate the impact of technology and mass production on people’s lives; however, these two works directly contrast in their view of mass culture and mass society. Whereas Benjamin asserts that the ability to watch film (with close-ups, slow motion, etc.) will open up people’s perception of reality for conscious exploration, Horkheimer and Adorno consider film an instrument of the dominant used to force the masses to remain passive viewers of “reality” and automatic consumers of prescribed culture. In dialogue with Benjamin as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” analyze how shifts to new technology alter people’s sense of identity, community, and nationalism. Anderson identifies the proliferation of  “print-capitalism” as the emergence of “imagined communities” and nationhood; by transitioning from sacred religious texts interpreted by the few to mass reproduced newspapers/books in a common vernacular, formerly disparate groups developed a shared national identity. McLuhan, on the other hand, famously locates the “message” of technology in its form as opposed to its content. As such, the significance of “electric” media like radio and television is evident in the way they transform people’s actions and relationships and collapse spatiotemporal boundaries. All of these texts relate to my earlier themes of reality and systems of meanings by suggesting the following questions: How does media technology determine our experience of reality and of culture? In what ways does technology reflect or restructure power relations and hierarchy?

The summer after my sophomore year marked another “epiphany” for my intellectual and professional career. I started my first internship at Undercurrent, a digital marketing/social media startup. Undercurrent ushered me into the young, tech-driven world of Twitter, other budding social networks, bookmarking sites, blogging, and RSS feeds – essentially catalyzing my interest in the Internet as a field of study. The experience of working in this sphere of emerging media and engaging directly with individuals in vibrant online communities further reinforced the meaning of Benjamin, Anderson, and McLuhan’s work, provoking more questions. In what ways does “new” media differ from other media through which we consume culture? Is virtual reality less tangible than “the real world” or is that just a romanticized notion? With the prominence of mobiles devices and various digital screens in our everyday lives, how has the Internet changed the “speed and pace” of people’s lives and how have individuals begun re-“imagining” their social ties?

With my concentration further expanding in the direction of the Internet, the prominent themes in my area of concentration include networks, collective action, decentralization, globalization, as well as issues of access (always bearing in mind identity, community, information, and so on). Marx and Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto” and Eben Moglen’s “The dotCommunist Manifesto” logically follows the critical theory texts in that both pieces convey the relation between revolution, socio-economic class structure, and technology. In Marx and Engels’s time, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution drove workers into industrial factories; though the bourgeoisie owned the means of production, Marx and Engels concluded that the proletariat would come together while working side-by-side in these factories, form unions, and overthrow the bourgeoisie. Moglen’s piece presents a modern spin on this class struggle – a revolution in which digital technology enables the new proletariat of knowledge workers/digital creators (rather than labor workers) to overthrow the bourgeois system of private ownership of ideas and culture. The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman is useful as it relates the “shrinking” of the world and the “flattening of the playing field” over time as digital technology enables the East to compete with the West (a reversal of Said’s Orientalism?), communities to challenge multinational corporations, and individuals to collaborate with the rest of the world. Moreover, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody provides a more timely account of the decentralizing effect of the Internet. What with individual consumers becoming producers and broadcasters of information/culture/ideas, Shirky explains the hitherto unprecedented ability of individuals to collaborate on projects and organize for collective social action. Questions continue to arise such as: Can we ever be less connected ever again? Does the Internet actually flatten or decentralize hierarchy? Does it reinforce hierarchy? Who has access to media technology? How has access changed with the rise of cyberspace?

I decided to explore the professional realm of digital media and politics by interning at the Center for American Progress this past summer. In conjunction with my current Air America Media internship, I have become increasingly embedded in the progressive movement and its use of progressive communications platforms for online advocacy. Some remaining questions I’m tackling include: What are the legal and technical constraints on the Internet? What are the politics of new media technology and how does this affect access and governance? How can the government use the Internet to improve transparency and accountability (dubbed Gov 2.0)? In my colloquium, I hope to delve into the intellectual history of my topic by first discussing basic theories of communication and sociocultural anthropology, applying these concepts to the present-day use of digital media, and then exploring future possibilities for the study of media and culture.

BOOKLIST

ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, & RENAISSANCE CLASSICS

1. Plato, “Allegory of the Cave”; Phaedrus
2. Aeschylus, Persians
3. William Shakespeare, Othello
4. Homer, Odyssey
5. The Holy Bible
6. Ovid, Metamorphoses
7. Aristophanes, Lysistrata

MODERN HUMANITIES

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

& Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

1. Edward Said, Orientalism

10.  Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

11.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

12.  Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

MODERN SOCIAL & NATURAL SCIENCES

13.  Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message”; Playboy Interview

14.  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

15.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

16.  Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, “Communist Manifesto” + Eben Moglen, “dotCommunist Manifesto”

17.  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

18.  George Lakoff, Don’t Think of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

AREA OF CONCENTRATION

19.  Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

20.  Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

21.  Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

22.  Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (for criticism)

23.  Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government

Summer in a nutshell. I made some great friends,

hung out with my 6yrold cousin, Salene,

walked by the White House every morning on the way to work,

attended a health care reform rally on the Senate lawn,

helped staff the Campus Progress National Conference & saw Pres. Clinton speak,

went on a roadtrip to Western Maryland,

put together this comprehensive Social Networks page for CAP's website,

visited memorials (including the FDR Memorial shown here),

and ate at some great DC restaurants like Agraria, where Max taught me to peel and eat shrimp.

Next up…

Me in the Center for American Progress internship video. I say the first 3 words: "Change does happen." Click to watch all of it.

I abandoned my blog this summer. Perhaps I could blame it on my apartment’s lack of wireless connectivity, or on my 9-6 working schedule (though my wireless hadn’t stopped me from posting twice in May and my internship provided more than enough content to blog about). It could be that summer vacation seeped into my brain as my academic thoughts seeped out (though I managed to blog throughout last summer, with two jobs). Then again, I could always just revert to the fact that I am more of a Twitter person (not to mention the only people who find this blog are ones who Google “Hunter Parrish” + any combination of “gay? girlfriend? naked? Silas?”).

My seeming aversion to blogging presents a dilemma insomuch as I feel like I should have put more effort into ninanyc.com these past two months; I say “should” because substantive blogging is a requirement for any hopeful up-and-comer in the digital media marketing/online advocacy sphere. And yet, is it so wrong that I don’t enjoy hearing or discussing the same topic (“social media,” or anything else, for that matter) interminably? While the Internet and social networks account for my major as well as my work/internship life, one can only handle so much 2.0 talk. Blasphemy or honesty? You decide.

That said, I’ll continue to blog, though on an infrequent basis. This blog never had an explicit purpose or goal and so it has drifted along, becoming more of an intermittent chronicle of my life. I’m content to keep it that way, since my life consists largely of online social networks anyway. As a happy and busy Sam explained, “I’m having a hard time adapting (or even caring about adapting) this blog to a new purpose. It was basically a time-filler, and the time is currently filled.” As I just explained…my blog has no new purpose to adapt to, but my time is currently filled with exciting opportunities, a pending graduation, loved ones, and a new apartment in the West Village.

I will probably post again soon to recount my experience interning in DC this summer and to review my new place with soon-to-be roommate (Gawker-dubbed “NYU’s new-media wunderkind”) Cody Brown. Of course, don’t hold your breath.

I’ve also been trying to get a start on my rationale/colloquium topic for graduation (trust me, it’s still in its convoluted/overbroad stage). Trying to find some inspiration, I watched this documentary that was recently launched online (May 12) by London-based Banyak Films – it’s titled Us Now. The documentary helped me formulate some key ideas on the topic of “mass collaboration, government, and the internet.” It takes a look at collaborative websites such as CouchSurfing.org, Mumsnet.com, and MyFootballClub.co.uk.  The case study of MyFootballClub.co.uk is particularly intriguing – the club is the first web community to own a football (read: U.S. soccer) team, Ebbsfleet United, while also deciding how the team plays by vote (e.g. player positions, budget, etc.); not to mention Ebbsfleet United went on to win the FA trophy at Wembley in 2008.

Us Now examines these sites’ successes as precursors to new forms of participatory government. The video below is only a teaser clip of some especially insightful parts of the documentary.

You can watch the hour-long documentary online in its entirety HERE.

The reason this post reads like a diary entry is because that’s basically what it is. I am in DC on my own and for the first time, I have to be completely independent and self-sufficient. This situation is not my forte. My Twitter bio says I “thrive when with loved ones” for a reason (okay, sorry, that was a bad example).  

To be honest, I’m struggling with how to spend my free time, how to be productive, and how not to feel lonely.  At times like these I normally call my mom, but she’s in Thailand for the next three weeks and not always available. I don’t want to cling to my aunt/uncle/cousin too much because I want to make it through this next week as an adult (I mean, by myself). Mallika (my roommate) and Max move to DC at the end of next week and I start work next Tuesday after Memorial Day. I know my new move isn’t a big deal but regardless, I get upset every time I confront the prospect of a full day/week with no set plans. I don’t know what to do with myself. At this point, I’m going to suck it up, pretend I didn’t just emo-word-vomit a blog post, take a shower, and go to sleep.

So close to submitting the post for review!

Two Sundays ago, I Skype-chatted with Ed Jezierski (VP of Engineering) and Shannon Oliver (Director of Communication, Mekong Region) for about an hour each. Ed had recently flown to Seattle from InSTEDD’s center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, whereas Shannon was still stationed in the region. I spoke with Ed first, whose technological expertise provided a detailed explanation of how InSTEDD uses its collaboration tools (GeoChat, Mesh4X, Evolve). The bandwidth in Cambodia wasn’t cooperating at first, so Shannon and I had to wait a few hours before reconnecting (Ed said the slow connection presents an everyday problem to communication between team members). When we were finally able to connect, Shannon presented a thorough overview of InSTEDD’s background, mission, and projects in the Mekong region; he helped me understand the recent successes of the organization and nicely complemented what I had learned from Ed. Both men were very enthusiastic about answering my questions and I felt like I came away with a lot of information (read: I recorded over two hours of conversation). They thanked me for the interview and encouraged me to Skype them if I had further questions.

I’ve spent the past couple days listening to the two interviews and jotting down important features to discuss. I just finished the draft of my DigiActive post an hour or so ago. Though it seemed pretty daunting to synthesize all the interview information into a blog post, I somehow managed to do so (not gonna lie, the post is rather long). Given all of the success InSTEDD has had with its innovative technology, I’m glad I have the opportunity to give their work more much-deserved attention (no pressure, right?). I’ll link to my post once it’s up on DigiActive’s site

UPDATE: The post is up, you can read it here.

• The CDC’s emergency Twitter feed (@CDCemergency) JUST announced that they have isolated the H1N1 virus that causes swine flu – this is great news because it means we should have a vaccine ready by next winter, when flu season starts up again and we’re more at risk of a pandemic (it’s warming up now so it’s harder for flu viruses to spread).

Good news.

• Another great Twitter account to follow is @Veratect – professionals in the field have been following it for a steady stream of the latest reported cases of swine flu around the world.

Of course, in the case of emergencies and the Internet (and Twitter, especially), there’s always the problem of separating valid information from rampant speculation and plain misinformation. My response to the argument that Twitter only serves as a medium for noise: the fact that Twitter functions as a community where people can @reply others and link to trusted news sources allows for a self-policing of information.  If someone says something false or misleading, there’s a strong chance that another Twitter user will address this person and provide accurate information.  Twitter by itself is never the best source for news – it’s the best source for linking to other sources and for facilitating conversation.

• In any case, this “Swine Flu Online: Panic and Bad Information” article gives a great rundown of the good, the bad, and the racist when it comes to swine flu talk on Twitter. 

Hm, did I say this was going to be a short post?  This InSTEDD resource, Trackernews.net,  is also amazing – aggregates lots of different articles/sites for swine flu information