For Valentine’s Day! And now I’m really tired and have to do real work.
Look, It’s A Plato Quiz!
February 14, 2012Real World Perk #1001: Making Media Instead of Talking About It
February 9, 2012Making media was one of my New Year’s Resolutions, and it just so happened the women’s business organization I work with, Sharp Skirts, made a video inviting Tina Fey to be the headline speaker at their SxSW event. I contributed what I’d call the “script concept,” as in, a basic structure and a few jokes. But the real work was done by charismatic women entrepreneurs speaking for themselves — I’m the weak link you’ll spot amongst the sea of natural, smiling faces — and our fantastic videographer, Mary Kang and expert producer/editor, Ellie Scarborough. Due to connections that are far beyond my social circle, we even got it in front of her actual manager, so if you’re on board with what we’re saying, please share, “like”, or comment!
Because women making media is important. Take the Superbowl ads, for example. It’s great that Twitter allowed us to point out the stupid stereotypes en masse, but the next step is to get women making some ads of their own. Advertising is still 97% male and apparently disinterested in listening to the people it pays to give advice on how not to be terrible. Q.E.D.: We need women doing the writing, producing, directing, and decision-making.
Ditto for every other male-dominated media industry; as Sarah Silverman has noted, women have to stop complaining about the stories and start writing some of their own. And ditto for Tina Fey. One of my favorite parts of her book is the list of real-life lessons learned from improv, particularly the part about MAKING STATEMENTS instead of only asking questions:
In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.”
Or the person who wants to argue about the definition of “narrativity” instead of writing effective stories. No matter. The point is, media-making is way more fun – and empowering – than media-talking-about ever was, and I’d recommend it to anyone — and if you agree that women should listen to Tina Fey instead of Cosmopolitan, please do pass it on.
When Oral History Argues Back
February 1, 2012Last night I went to a panel called “Can Women Change Politics? The Life and Politics of Ann Richards.” The panel members were political journalist Wayne Slater, documentarian Paul Stekler, and actress Holland Taylor, who wrote Ann, a one-woman play about Richards, and whom you probably know from Two and a Half Men, Legally Blonde, and a billion other things.
It was a hoot listening to an hour’s worth of stories about Ann Richards. Slater and Stekler had worked with Richards. Taylor had only met her once, but had meticulously researched Richards’s life for her play, to universal acclaim.
And really, it was a discussion of doing history. Taylor talked about the need to take diverse sources and synthesize them into a character; Stekler talked about the similarity of this process to editing footage; and Slater told some great stories about accompanying Richards on the campaign trail. All of them talked about falling in love with Ann Richards.
Audience questions made this an interactive event, and that’s when things got really interesting. The first woman in line announced that as someone who wanted to get into politics, she was frustrated by the fact that they kept talking about Richards’s accomplishments as a woman, because she (the asker) wanted to know about Ann Richards’s accomplishments as a politician. I thought it was a fair question; there had been a bit much of the “what women bring to politics that men don’t” talk, involving the dread “empathy” point.
The panel’s reaction was not happy. Stekler started to man-splain to the asker, essentially implying that she just didn’t get how important and revolutionary Ann Richards was. Taylor joined in, so maybe it wasn’t man-splaining.
The asker politely pressed again, saying “I already know how to be a woman. I want to know what made Ann Richards a great Democrat. I want to know what we can learn from her that way.” Then and only then did they throw the question to Slater, who gave a really good answer about Ann Richards’s policies. He talked about governing for the sake of the weakest; voicing strong opinions (“remember when Democrats did that?” ); and being willing to disagree with other, more conservative Democrats. Good answer.
Then Slater, Stekler, and Taylor all agreed that it was Ann Richards’s character that made her a great politician, because people voted on character, not issues. Another fair point, and they seemed to be implying that this was the reason they were talking so much about her as a woman. I don’t think that was quite true, but it allowed them a dignified exit, and by the end they admitted that Ann Richards would have supported anyone’s right to challenge them on the issue.
After the show, the audience around me seemed as displeased with the question as the panel had been. So I found the asker and tapped her on the shoulder, and told her I was glad she asked twice because having to do so was pretty much standard for women, still.
I then spent the better part of the evening trying to bridge the generation gap, explaining to several people that the asker’s attitude was very typical of Gen-Y feminism, and that we shouldn’t assume this approach is based on ignorance of the past. Also, telling people they just don’t get it rarely works, unless you’re using a finely tuned form of sarcastic pedagogy, face-to-face. But of course as a historian I understand the concern that people just don’t understand what things used to be like.
It strikes me that oral history is the same as any other history. You always go to the primary sources to ask questions; when the sources happen to be human and still alive, they’re fiestier than dead pages, canvas, or parchment. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the questions. Even if you have to do it twice.
My Two Cents on SOPA
January 18, 2012Okay, if I were going to black out this site, I’d redirect you to the Oatmeal’s protest site: it’s short, funny, and doesn’t talk about information being free.
No, I’m not darkening my website. To be honest, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to achieve other than making it harder for millions of Americans to dick around during work – oh, but wait, Twitter and Facebook are still up. So maybe it will force students to type out their plagiarized assignments, like kids did in the old days.
I can already imagine a world without “free” knowledge; I’m old enough to have lived it. Before the internet, you just walked to the goddamned library, which had thoughtfully purchased those expensive tomes. Actually, it was free, except for the cost in energy and motivation.
Free? Then why are you begging me for money? Oh, I see, you've just discovered nothing is free, after driving down the price of information? Fuck you very much.
Now, it’s obvious that old-school lawmakers have been complete, head-in-the-sand morons about the realities of the internet. Look at my footer. It was inspired by several moments in my internet career – such as when, back in 2005, I called the copyright office to ask about internet publication, and they gave me what was obviously a canned answer equating to “We don’t know if writing appearing on the internet counts as publication yet.”Okey-dokey, I thought, it really is the Wild West out here.
But then started I teaching media literacy in my classes, and found out that certain entities did count the internet as publication, namely large media corporations (they weren’t people yet). Because of them I couldn’t use the audio-visual materials I needed in class, at least in any convenient online fashion.
What they were preventing, in fact, was audio-visual citation. Once, just as an experiment, I tried copying the video snippet and putting it YourTube with full and correct citation and attribution, as well as commentary and a fair use clause. Just like I’d require in, say, a paper. Just like I’d be required to do if I worked for anyone other than the Huff Post. But no, I got slapped by Google/YouTube/Fox and of course the citation just made it easier for them find. Yes, Fox was being a dick – but so was Google.
Where have I heard that before? Oh, right, large corporations..er, people.
So I don’t want to hear grandiose statements about information being “free.” It’s never free, as Wikipedia’s begging campaign and Google’s data mining demonstrate. As much as we all like to think we’re fighting for a cause, this isn’t Cowboys and Indians. It’s a messy issue, and all of us are still struggling to adapt to the new era of information and what it all means. Sure, it’s annoying that lawmakers how the internet works, but it’s also annoying that Google and Wikipedia are trying to paint themselves as the “good guys.” They’re doing nothing more than looking out for their corporate interests, just as much as the media companies are looking out for theirs. Everybody has an agenda.
Here’s mine: I want the right to cite audio-visual material, online, for commentary and analysis. That’s a basic principle of fair use (one that even dinosaur legislators should understand) and muzzling it is a really good way to prevent people from acquiring critical media viewing skills. Think about it. If you’re a media commentator, you’re still left explaining visual scenes – which are effective because they’re fucking visual - like some Film Studies grad student.
It really makes me think George Carlin was right – they want you to be stupid. All of them.
Anyway, although it’s totally obvious that nobody’s without an agenda in this fight, I support Google and Wikipedia’s right to lobby, just as the other large media corporations do. And punishing unauthorized online reproduction is both unenforcable and, when practiced as selectively as it is now, philosopihically objectionable. And it’s true that deciding to pursue this legislation would both break the internet and the bank, so I don’t support it – not because anybody’s got an unassailable moral ground in this fight, but because I’m a pragmatist who thinks nostalgia is not a good basis for legislation.
I may have to adapt to the Brave New World. Hell, I may even be good at it. But that doesn’t mean I have to throw a party for it.
Science!
January 17, 2012Science is a belief in the ignorance of experts
–Richard Feynman
It’s been a helluva couple weeks, but I’ve been meaning to report on the January Dionysium.
Our theme was science, and Richard Feynman in particular. Right off the bat, Dr. Carl Feierabend gave us a brief history of action, from Aristotle to the present day. Then actor Jason Liebrecht read Richard Feynman’s 1974 Cal Tech commencement address, “Cargo Cult Science.” Fireworks followed as two physicists, Dr. Eamonn Healy and Dr. Todd Krause, debated whether God plays dice with the universe. Next came Dionysium President L.B. Deyo’s report on the new graphic biography, Feynman, and Lance Myers’s presentation of Céline Desrumaux’s Countdown cartoon - and look, you can skip my blather, but you really should watch the cartoon. It’s at the bottom of the post.
Exhibit one: visual learning aid courtesy of our fearless leader, L.B. Deyo.
In the spirit of my previous post and given my interest in edutainment, I’ve been thinking about how this event compares to a traditional lecture. One example that springs to mind is sound check, probably my favorite moment of the evening, when dueling physicists were accompanied by the Golden Arm Trio warming up – where else are you going to hear that?
Including “Cargo Cult Science” was my idea. I’m a huge fan of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and primary sources in general. Having a professional actor deliver the speech was a far better means of conveying information than when I, a rank amateur, used to read things aloud in class.
L.B. makes a groovy Flash slideshow for every part of the show – and Flash, by the way, is what he does for a living. Same goes for the cartoon and the music: Lance is a professional cartoonist and the members of the Golden Arm Trio make music for a living. And of course, the two physicists present were professionals and it’s not unusual to see academics duking it out – but both were mindful of the debate as performance. They weren’t just physics experts, they were teaching/performance professionals.
So, instead of the one-man-show model that dominates traditional teaching, our event was an abstraction on the theme of science, incorporating the talents of many people. I suppose it’s not proper education in that you couldn’t use a standardized test to measure the results – but that’s sort of the point. And I’m not saying it’s feasible to include the talents of so many professionals in every single classroom lecture, of course. I am saying, however, that online classes, which claim to have an edge in multimedia mental stimulation, do just that. And we should recognize that it’s ludicrous to ask already-busy educators to magically absorb the all the skills needed for a good presentation.
We always end with a cartoon (a bit of honey to make the medicine go down) and Lance always curates really cool stuff from around of the world. Even if you couldn’t be there, you can do the next best thing and end with the cartoon. In reality, Blastoff is itself a curation of touchstone images from the history of space travel and the cartoon has been covered in the Atlantic. See how many you recognize, and contemplate the act of visual citation and improvisation.
Countdown – HD from Desrumaux Celine on Vimeo.