“Rabble Rouser” / “Everybody Poops”
So I tried several times to get a mini political discussion going on threadless. They talk about everything else on their website like music and movies so why not? My first blog of three (which appears on the blogging main page at the top until the next topic or comment is posted) simply asked if there were any good political t-shirts on threadless and 6 people responded in 9 minutes and then it stopped… Here is the first t-shirt links that I received:
Yes, “CUSTER PWN3D!!!” was the t-shirt but it was from a political t-shirt website called demokratees.
“Max? I hope you know what you are doing”
Hey. I need a little help. Let me explain.
So with great apprehension, Mushon has allowed me to alter our little blog outside of his controlled experiment. As you may notice to the right of every page, just below the tags, but above the authors and calendar, a chatbox, which looks something like this:
Micro-Blogging, or, please be my friend on Twitter
Since my last update I dove headlong into a bunch of websites that I otherwise would probably have never subscribed to to get a feel for the growing popularity of micro-blogging and other new blogging resources. Seeing as this is a sort of interactive participatory thing, I have begun blogging with varying degrees of success on a couple of sites and would invite you all to join up and be my friend…because not having any friends on twitter is pretty much the most boring thing ever.
Why elephants don’t like the internet… ?
User created content has created everything from videos to photos to news to postcards and beyond. Now businesses are taking the user created concept a step further. Not only are the makers of threadless t-shirts having users create and rate t-shirts but the creators also seem to be their target market, as seen through the comments on different designs. Only designs that receive enough votes and get approval by the staff are turned into t-shirts. Once t-shirts run out they usually don’t reprint them to encourage an ever circulating flow of content.
(here’s one of my favorite t-shirts entitled “Why Elephants Don’t Like The Internet”)
Let me know if you have any additional ideas, thoughts, likes or dislikes. THANKS!
Freedom, the Trap, and New Media
While reading Anna Notaro’s Lo(n)g Revolution, one of her citations of an article by Jon Katz immediately shocked me:
“Where freedom is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media anymore, it is ferociously defended - and exercised daily - on the Net.”
Although the date of the article is given as 1997, it’s blatantly obvious that this quote was taken from a pre-9/11 context. Since September 11th, the mainstream media has become completely saturated with a discourse of freedom. Such an abstract term as freedom is difficult to pin down to a single definition, but it’s obvious that the term can be warped to suit the need of whoever’s using it. The primary dictionary definition is simply “the condition of being free from restraints”, and although some political definitions are given afterwards (such as the distinction of being free rather than a slave), are equally vague. The link I’ve posted with the “NMRS” del.icio.us tag details a few of the current administration’s definitions of freedom (http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/02/brothers-in-arms-osamic-vision-of.html) . Unfortunately, the “free’m”, as W likes to call it, that we’re supposedly trying to provide to the Middle East through military action is freedom that we don’t necessarily get here in America.
The Trap’s definition of freedom is somewhat different. Theirs is the dark, consumerist freedom based on game theory and free market economics, which we’ve discussed already. Given that the idealistic version of freedom that the government lauds is often crippled in America (take, for example, demonstrations in which protesters are forced to stand in designated “Free Speech Zones”, herded like animals into small pens), perhaps the fragmented, perverse version of freedom presented in “The Trap” is really all we have. The one zone that brings this idea into question is the realm of new media, namely the Internet. Whether or not the blogosphere is truly a public forum is up for debate, given a few aspects of its nature (the tendency to overestimate its capabilities as a tool of democracy, the ability to ignore content one doesn’t want, and the individualizing nature of working at a computer). However, it certainly seems that there’s a modicum more freedom on the Internet. I find it difficult to believe that a spontaneous protest could erupt concerning the ideals mentioned in the link I posted, however, on the Internet, the idea can be posted with little fear of punishment.
However, it’s important to note that this freedom isn’t a freedom of anonymity. With a little work, anyone can discover who’s behind a blog post or YouTube video - including the government. It’s wise to question exactly how much freedom we have on the Internet, and what exactly this freedom is, compared to other commonly used definitions.
Does the “public sphere” necessarily lead to democracy?
In Anna Notaro’s “The Lo(n)g Revolution: The Blogosphere as an Alternative Public Sphere?†she cites Fraser’s idea of expanding the public sphere beyond the bourgeois domain to a space that is “open and accessible to all.†In Craig Saper’s “Blogademia,†he also articulates the open-to-all accessibility of the blogosphere by using Michael Benton’s explanation that blogs allow for “easy access to cultural capital for those outside the confines of academia. . . . [blogs] strengthen our public culture.” He continues to discuss the significance of allowing easy access to symbolic capital.
“I realize that it will not do any good to have countless voices shouting out into the cyber-wilderness, but we are seeing positive moves toward collective action . . . a vital moment . . . will we allow it to remain open to the free distribution of information/knowledge in the hopes that we will reverse the trends towards apathy/silence in our public culture(s) or, are we going to allow the corporate-industrial-academic-military industries to move in and claim these open spaces as private property to be regulated, classified and controlled?â€
The struggles between public sphere and cultural industry, as well as democracy and technology, have triggered a heated debate among the “digital era.†Habermas argues that “the greatest contribution to the development of the public sphere was the emergence of its institutional base.†But what would happen when institutional base became diverted from publishing a serious scholarship and into an unprofessional discourse? What would happen to the “democratic community of full human presence†while its members did no good but try to destroy the intellectual environment within this “digital nation?†With more intensive attention to “democracy†and “freedom,†“intellectual vitality†has not yet arrived to its full potentials. Migration of intellectuals out of blogging literacy results in the collapse of the public sphere, whereas those with time to blog may lack the time in exploring academic industry and cultivate to do little good to the public sphere.
So would a “utopian vision of the electronic agora,†as described by Rheingold, still exist? I doubt it. Wouldn’t the crimes, terrorism, pornography, and threats of violence be the best evidences of the disutopia? What should we do when the producer of the blogging crime becomes invisible?
