While I tend to blog along the more social and theoretical sides of technology, I thought I would share a post that Phil Windley just threw up on his blog, featuring the top downloaded content on IT Conversations for 2007.

IT Conversations provides some of the most insightful interviews and programs, including a long time favorite, Tech Nation. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Phil, in an executive director role, has definitely poured his heart and soul into it.

I actually met Phil several years ago while I was doing the Dot.Com thing in “Little Silicon” (a.k.a. Utah Valley, just south of Salt Lake City). He would host (and I hope he still does) a monthly CTO forum that brought some wonderfully intelligent people together to talk about geeky, but always fun, topics. While Phil might not know this, it was here that I first began to consider the connections between culture and digital life on the internet. (more…)

The title kind of says it all.

I am in NYC for the weekend, and while waiting for the arrival of a friend I sat down on a convenient pair of benches in SoHo (here featured by our own Steve Frost). Apparently TimeOut magazine has deemed these benches as one of the gay hipster hot spots for the year. My being there, however, was a complete accident – I can only hope some of that big appley hipster-ish-ness rubbed off.

That said, these benches are in front of an American Apparel. Go figure. This last semester amid queer theory and authors including Butler and Halberstam, we began saying “Even queers aren’t queer anymore.”

I kind of thought that hipsters might have become the new queers. Maybe that’s only true if you are straight.

The semester is wrapping up, which means the last few weeks have produced an insane amount of academic product. I hope that some of it will end up here, but first I have to add some spit and polish. But here is one that seems ready.

For my Gender, Sexuality and the Body seminar, I created what Dr. Coventry calls a “Digital Storytelling Project.” I call it “One of the hardest finals I have ever had.” A Storytelling Project is basically a theoretical argument made in video format. In one vein of my semester’s worth of research on anonymous online behavior, I was looking at peer-to-peer regulation across digital and real world spaces, and in particular, public responses in the Missed Connections section of craigslist (A follow up of sort to some previous research).

Video after the jump. (more…)

Those who have been around me as of late, enduring my alternating states of exhaustion and over-caffeination, have probably also endured some conversation about LOLcats and their relationship to online communities. Imagine my surprise when Michael sent me this bizarrely accurate cross over.

Drop the cat and replace it with… Foucault? Or how about my personal favorite, Althusser!

Enjoy the best of them here.

I have just completed my first response to the Personal Identity Narrative I wrote for Gender, Sexuality, and the Body. Having spent the first part of this semester working through the problematic research issues that were originally raised in Joan Scott’s chapter “Experience”¹, I am now attempting to answer those criticisms in my own work.

Scott took issue with a number of practices she saw in the academic community, but the naturalization of experiences was at the top of the list.

“[Scholars] rhetorical treatment of [experience based] evidence and their use of it to falsify prevailing interpretations, depends on a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anything but a reflection of the real” (24).

Scott is complaining that when experiences are presented as data in academic research, say the experiences of several African-American women in 1872, it has the tendency to silence or otherwise not represent the diverse experiences of individuals whose stories were not included.

This seemingly obvious point (that different people have different experiences) becomes much less clear when the experiences represented come from a vastly different culture, time, or context than our own. Carrying on with the example of our 19th century black woman, Scott would ask us as researchers to consider not just the histories of those individuals, but also the history of womanhood, race, location, culture and time, historizing all of these factors into their relative and holistic context.

This was the task at hand when revisiting my previous narrative. I threw up a wall between myself as a researcher and myself as the researched. I wrote for quite a while, assessing absent labels in my story, presumptions I had made of the presumed readers, and the contexts in which the story took place. I ruminated on unclear aspects of the narrative, outlining possibilities which “the author” might have intended.

This is when things got strange.

(more…)

Footnotes:

1. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political, 1992.↩

Things always seem to begin right as the summer is ending. You know what they say about DC: “Its not the cherries in bloom, or how they put people on the moon.”

Good friends, speedies, and a little chance.

Thanks to ClickBoo, Kathryn and Bruno, and a lesser anteater who was cute enough to be scared for his life.

Have you ever found something from the past that just makes you cringe? A journal, perhaps. You twinge with every misplaced comma, and hold your breath as you espouse some maddening logic from the past. You want it to end, but you just can’t stop reading. Brace yourself, and read on.

With the Personal Identity Narrative I recently wrote, and the next version in the works, I have been thinking a lot about the artificiality of our memories. Tonight I was trying to find a statistic from a study performed in conjunction with an apparently now defunct/repurposed online magazine named Oasis. Finding the website non-existent, I ran over to the Internet Archive and began to search through time for the rough date when the data was published.

About two seconds after I found the data, I had a daunting epiphany: In high school I published an article with this magazine. (more…)

Today we are syndicating a featured article from Patricia Fancher’s ongoing series “Instead of studying”, in which she reviews the latest controversial film September Dawn. She offers a compelling analysis, so be sure to read on.

I think that Jed and I should be part of a case study about how people with antagonistic pasts can get along with a great deal of grace, empathy, and good wine.

In the new movie “September Dawn” the Mormons kill an entire wagon train of settlers to prevent them from settling in Mormon territory. The family that they killed was the Fancher clan. (more…)

Has anyone else noticed problems with Facebook recently? I seem to frequently get connection resets, and not even when I am uploading the latest batch of photos. Generally it seems limited to the servers on the Georgetown sub-domain, but given the resets, I don’t tend to get much further. Apparently 8PM is prime time for Georgetown students.

Cut off from the social world, all I am left with is memories of IBM consultants talking about scalability.

Is this happening to anyone else?

In order to improve my qualitative research methods, I am part of a seminar this semester entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Body. In order to both generate experiential data to work with and personal means by which to experience the theorists we will be discussing, Dr. Coventry open endedly asked us to come to class the first day with a written personal identity narrative. We were told that it should narrate our relationship with our gender, sexuality and body, and to keep it short (a task that proved substantially difficult and ended up having large ramifications on the product).

Over the course of this semester, this entry will be rewritten through the lense of theorists like Butler, Foucault, Lacan, and as Coventry might say, other “vauge and abstract French philosophers.” So without any other dressing or taste correction, here is my approximation of the past. (more…)