In the park. Music in the distance. Reading.

When a girl came to sit next to me. Quietly.
With headphones.
Her look drifting off. Smoked a cigarette.

I lean back, and gaze at the sky.

After a while she puts out her cigarette
picks up a pocket book from her bag. Japanese.

I’m breathing real slow. Life is good.

(to the girl with headphones who came to sit next to me, in washington square park, on a sunny saturday afternoon – July 25, 2009 ~4pm)

Considering I have actual work that needs to be done – it seems like a rational choice to tune out the news. We need to come up with better ways for citizens to allow them to manage the news.

There is a long history in critical and cultural studies research on reading texts in popular culture, including television series, movies, etc., and exploring its implications for the political milieu. In a classic essay “The Triumph of Mass Idols”, Lowenthal examined popular biographies over time, and argued how the kind of people covered in these biographies evolved from ‘serious’ people to increasingly ‘mass’ idols, and as such, suggested the degradation of culture. I imagine he would have a field day analyzing the public’s adoration of contemporary idols, such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. More recently, Anna McCarthy, who was a visiting scholar at Annenberg, argued how the rise of reality television has to be seen in line with the rise, and legitimization of, neoliberalism, with its emphasis on individual responsibility. Both scholars make the case for the importance of interrogating popular culture in understanding how it shapes and influences the political beliefs of the public.

Sometimes, however, the analysis can simply go overboard. Yglesias *pwnes* (sorry, I have no better word for it) those who use the story of the Dark Knight to justify the war policies of the Bush administration:

“I think Cheney would look at the movie and say ’see — this is what we’re doing,’” Yglesias writes on his blog for The Atlantic. “I look at the movie and say ’see — if you were fighting a comic book bad guy and you were a comic book hero then your policies would make sense.’ ”

(hat tip to cbigman)

why do i study what i study? the video tells you why.

I am considering writing a paper on the Danish cartoons, and I was curious how many people were talking about it in the blogosphere. Looking at the graph, it isn’t hard to figure out when the incident took place.

I am interested in how incidents over taboos like the Danish cartoons do not just make social and cultural boundaries more rigid (I mean, yes, the Muslims and non-Muslims could barely see eye to eye on this matter), but at the same time, it also offers us an opportunity to renegotiate these very boundaries. Especially with the advent of the internet, it is now possible for citizens to directly talk and engage with each other, adding a much richer picture to the otherwise more simplistic picture the mainstream media provides us with, suggesting we are perhaps on our way to a truly global dialogue. Am I naive? I prefer idealistic.

Starting points for exploration:
Global Voices posts on the Danish cartoons and Bridge the Gap in Blogspace – a blog dedicated to cultivating a cross-cultural (trans-cultural?) dialogue.

When we spoke with teachers and after school programs, it was clear that they recognized that their students were interested in new forms of cultural production that are enabled by new media technologies and new forms of cultural distribution supported by the web. They knew that their students were fans, bloggers, and gamers. But they faced a number of issues: they had no standards by which to evaluate work produced in these new and emerging media; they didn’t know enough themselves to give good advice to student media makers; the students lacked role models to help them understand future opportunities in this space; and the students were facing ethical issues that their teachers and parents didn’t really understand.

Does this reminds anyone of teaching parents how to use the VCR? Except that learning how to tape something is a whole lot less significant for matters such as civic engagement or even entertainment, than learning how to use digital media, especially to produce culture. The awful state of academic education in its ability to teach us skills (social, technical, digital literacy) that will enable us to grow and develop in the new media, participatory culture environment is highlighted by Henry Jenkins, and he suggests what to do about it as well!

We’re more than halfway through 9/11/06 and I’m feeling like we’ve fetishized it.Thousands of innocent citizens were murdered, and they deserve remembrance. But listening to the public voices chattering without pause, today seems to have become about something else: Justifying the sacrifice of American ideals and values in the name of our fear.

On 9/10/01, if someone had told you that in response to a terrorist attack, a majority of Americans would back preemptive war and torture, would you have believed it?

For five minutes forget whether or not we’re safer now, five years after the attacks. The question I wish they’d talk about is: Are you proud of how our country has responded? I’m not. Our soldiers are brave and our fire fighters are heroes. We’ve done some things right. But, overall I’m not proud. And if the authorities weren’t out whipping up fear, I think most Americans would answer the same way.

One cannot view an event in a vacuum, out of context of the actions that have been undertaking in its very name. The uglier the actions (torture, illegitimate war, the loss of civil liberties through the Patriot Act etc), the more the need to increase the polarization between what is Good (us) and Bad (them), hence the timely appearance of a movie like World Trade Center (which I admittedly haven’t seen, except for the trailer).

Highlights:

What is a blog? Is it something that you write for yourself? I know that other people can go and read it, but I cannot believe that anyone would do that. There are several billion people in the world. Whose blog shall I go and look at? So I think that most people just write for themselves.

Alright, so only nobodies blog. So which one of them do you want me to read? In the end, there is nothing good to read and so we must write for ourselves.

You can write for yourself, but you should not complain that nobody is reading what you wrote, right? I am just curious. Does anyone read that stuff?