I’m a terrible blogger. But I went to a conference about media and the internet.

So, I started out strong, or relatively strong on this blogging front but then I fell apart fast. I saw Arianna Huffington speak at the National Conference for Media Reform this weekend. Not only does she have a blog that gets updated many times a day, she has readership and turns a profit. Not that I am looking for this little enterprise to be profitable, I just need to get better at writing down my mental “tags.”

Mary has been trying to get our whole department at work to use delicious, a social bookmarking site all year long. I signed up for an account, and have used it a few times, but I haven’t really gotten into it. When I logged on the other day, I see that she has been sending me links all this time using the site, including some suggestions for this very blog. I am using borrowed internet right now, so I don’t think that I can write a few long blog posts (its also one in the morning), but I will work through those links soon…I promise.

For now, you can watch this video from the conference I went to this past weekend.

It is Lawrence Lessig, giving the most impressive use of a powerpoint presentation I have ever seen, talking about why we need to reform congress, east-coast and west-coast code (the constitution, and computer code). While this presentation might only be tangentially related to this blog, he was one of the founders of the Creative Commons movement, talks about the internet, and just check out that powerpoint. (It may lose something that you can’t see him in all of this, just his slides, but you have to imagine that he was doing this all at the same time, the images weren’t added to the lecture after the fact.)

Stay tuned to Paradessence for killer robots, king kong meets godzilla, the future of the internet, and more.

-P

Community Access Television!

This is less a post and more of a plug. Make it, watch it, use it, support it. I think it will probably turn into more of a new media thing as funding decreases and the possibilities of online video and television continue to increase. I’ve heard good things about Denver’s access center making this transition, I think this is their website so you can check it out… http://denveropenmedia.org/

Also, I know I have written about map mash-ups before, but this is a great example of making media LOCAL: http://cctvcambridge.org/mediamap

Teen Buzz

I guess its probably going to be hard to write a world famous blog or achieve fame and fortune if I forget about the blog for months at a time…but…

I was just setting up the small studio at work so that one of the youth producers could record a voice over. That small studio control room has this terrible, awful high pitched noise spilling out of it all the time that usually makes me not want to hang out in it. Its a pretty cramped spot, and with the door closed and the sound proof walls, all of that whine hangs out with you. I was playing around with the knobs and turned off one of the camera monitors (which in the small studio, that doesn’t get used a whole lot, is probably circa 1986) and there it was, the whine went away. One of the community productions producers, who uses this studio a lot more than I, was walking by and I asked him if he ever noticed the noise. He didn’t know what I was talking about; I turned the monitor on and off again to show him, and he couldn’t hear it at all. Anyhow, all of that reminded me of a radio story that I heard a while back, about stores which were using high pitched noises that only the younger set could hear as a deterrent to keep them from loitering in front of the stores. In Germantown, where I went to high school, they just used polkas for that purpose.

The interview is with the inventor of the Mosquito, which creates the high pitched sounds, and his daughter. (If I remember correctly, I haven’t relistened to the interview.) His daughter, Isabel, recorded the sound with her cell phone to create a ringtone that her teachers couldn’t hear. That way, her and her friends were able to text message in class without their (older) teachers being able to hear the tones. I still dont’t know how they could be typing the messages without getting caught.

 I just started texting, maybe I’m a little late there. I also just figured out how to use bluetooth and garage band to make ringtones from .mp3s and put them on my computer, maybe I will try recording the sound from the control room and using it to pass messages at staff meetings.

You can listen to the interview, which originally aired on All Things Considered, May 26, 2006 here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687

Noah K Everyday

While this isn’t a new project, and maybe not entirely related to my blog, I re-found this project the other day while I was online. I think that I had only seen the youtube video before, and not actually checked out the projects website, Noah K Everyday, and I liked the project statement. While this isn’t a creepy exploit of new media or new technology, it is an interesting use and investigation of uses and applications of both new media and technology. In the FAQ section on his website, one of the questions is “Why?!” and the response is, “With the emergence of digital technology as a means to quickly and affordably take on a long term photography project, coupled with an interest in the subtleties of the ageing process, I started photographing myself every day.”

I spent an afternoon a few summers ago scanning all of the photos that my grandma has at her house from when she was my age and before. She has one photograph of one of my great-grandpas and very few photos of her when she was my age or from her college days (the only one I can think of is her finishing off a bottle of vodka, sitting at her dorm room desk in front of a photo of Johnny Mathis). I have gigabytes of photos from my college years, thousands of images documenting every semester, month, week, event of my college career. There is a short story that I read, and I can’t remember much about it now other than that the premise was that computer companies were stealing memory from people in order to insert that memory into computers, so as computers had more and more memory, we had less and less. (I just looked around and I can’t remember or figure out what the story was, it might have been an audio story, too. I can’t remember, if you know you should post it here as a comment). Regardless, the story was extreme, with Microsoft mining into peoples minds to steal megabytes, but has some truth. How much of the memories that I have are just mental images of a jpeg on my hard drive and how much comes from the event itself. I don’t want to make myself look totally reactionary, and I’m not against new media and technology. I think that there are definitely benefits that come from many of these advances, but I think that thinking about these changes, and being aware of them is also an important thing to do.

You can find a youtube video of the first six years of Noah’s project here:

And find newer photos from the project on his website, at www.everyday.noahkalina.com.

Mapping Mash-ups

 I was listening to a podcast of WNYC’s Radio Lab from 2004 themed “Contact” and had a segment about the Howard Dean presidential campaign and the website Meetup.com. At the time they talked very highly and hopefully about the potential of meetup.com, but even though the NYC Chihuahua Owner Meetup group still boasts over 700 members, I haven’t heard meetup causing much of a stir since Howard Dean left the presidental race.

The most interesting part of the story of Meetup, which seems to have came and gone, but the hope that the Radio Lab hosts and Harvard Professor (and author of Bowling Alone) Robert Putnam got from Meetup. The internet was supposed to be this dislocated place, a global community not tied to location, but here was Meetup, allowing 5 Bon Jovi fans in NYC to meet up at the Hard Rock Cafe and discuss their idol (okay, so no Bon Jovi fans showed up for the Bon Jovi Meetup that a Radio Lab producer tried to attend).

This localized internet use reminded me of a current mash-up that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this year, and that is the use of Google Map apps to construct personalized or communityized maps and posting them on the internet. The first of this type of mash-up that I saw (though not the first of its kinds, most likely) was from Cambridge Community Television. CCTV’s Media Map located specific local media in very specific locations, which I think is the #1 amazing asset of public and cable access television. You’re not watching a sitcom being broadcast around the world, but you are watching a show about a particular cultural performance in a particular space near your home. CCTV’s Media Map places these videos, performances, and discussions in their neighborhoods on the map so that CCTV viewers can view the map and see videos organize spacially. This change to community media, the ability to present the videos spacially on a map is really great, and I really think highlights the importance and specificity of the productions.

If you log into Google and go to the Google Maps page, you can select “My Maps” and create your own Google Map. In the bubbles that pop up when you click on one of your markers you can paste in html code, including the html embed code from Blip.tv, Google Video, or Youtube. Or html embed codes from many other websites which will allow you to add things to blogs. You can also map locations, shaded shapes, or lines so that you can specifiy different types of information on the maps. Another interesting Google Mapping project that I found while I was writing this post is safe2pee.org. This website maps (and provides a city tag cloud) of gender neutral or ungendered bathrooms in different cities. The city tag cloud will show you cities with more recorded gender neutral public bathrooms, and you are able to submit additional bathrooms to the site to add gender neutral bathrooms in your city. Feel free to post additional interesting internet mapping projects, or mash-up projects which localize the internet in interesting ways in the comment field.

ABCs

One of the additional reasons I started this blog, besides documenting interesting new and mass media that intrigues and frightens me was to find resources for being critical of the media. At my job at a cable access TV station working with youth I have been looking around at different media literacy. I plan on keeping that up in the future but I wanted to share one really great resource. Manhattan Neighborhood Network Youth Channel has their media literacy training curriculum available online, free to download. You can find the curriculum in PDF form, and their presentation slides here.

The arc of the curriculum is great, it opens by asking students to identify different types of trees based on their leaves, all trees found around NYC. They then show the alphabet to the left, and ask students to identify what product each of the letters comes from (try it, its scary how easy it is). They then move into an explanation of media consolidation and some analysis of different texts (I think they include some sort of dated ads, which can easily be swapped out for new ads), and then conclude with a call to action. A call to be media producers, cultural producers, to go down to MNN and make something. I think thats probably a good idea, so check out Youth Channel’s curriculum and find out if there are any public access centers, pirate radio stations, community radio in your area. Or, start a blog, print a zine. Make some of your own media. (Thats my call to action…)

Paradessence

So, my blog title comes from a book that I am currently reading titled The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar. Paradessence, as described by a character in the book, is the paradoxical essence of a product, and every successfully marketed product (according to this character) has one. Here is a passage from the book where the term is introduced:

———-

“What’s the paradessence of coffee?” Chas asks her.

Paradessence? She came across the word essence in a couple of the marketing books she skimmed, usually attached to some glib distillation of the product’s selling points. But paradessence? What could that mean? Something paradise, perhaps.

She takes a shot. “I guess something about how it wakes you up, maybe. Or the way it warms you up on a cold morning.”

“Waking and warming,” Chas says. “Very close. Now think. Locate the magic. Locate the impossibility.”

“‘The impossibility’? I don’t know. Being warm. Thats kind of like being sleepy, I guess.”

“The paradessence of coffee is stimulation and relaxation. Every successful ad campaign for coffee will promise both of those mutually exclusive states.” Chas snaps his fingers in front of her face. “That’s what consumer motivation is about, Ursula. Every product has this paradoxical essence. Two opposing desires that it can promise to satisfy simultaneously. The job of the marketer is to cultivate this schismatic core, this broken soul, at the center of every product.” (p. 60-61)

———-

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I like that term. Some of the other examples given in the book were air travel, which promises both adventure/exploration but in a sanitary contained way, and ice cream which is erotic and sensual but also has images of the 50s soda jerk and wholesomeness. Maybe I chose paradessence for the blog because my infatuation with horrible media is enjoyable (I have read many of the Left Behind books and got caught up in the stories) but also critical (those books are problematic all over the place), so maybe the essence of my infatuation with these stories is a paradox.

Your Skull, In Stereo

This is the audio story which helped to inspire this blog. Most Monday mornings on the bus from Minneapolis to Saint Paul I listen to a podcast of WNYC’s On The Media.

This weeks episode had a story about a new technology which is being tested with a billboard in New York. When someone on the street walks by sensors (or points which the billboard is sensing?) it sends a very directed broadcast (I don’t really understand the technology) which is able to use the person’s skull to resonate an audio message. The billboard is about a new TV show about paranormal activity, so the audio it sends you makes it seem like you are hearing voices advertising the show. There is no way to plug your ears to block out the audio because the voices are…in your head.

They interviewed someone who is researching this technology who talked about possible uses in the future and uses that are already being used. They include directed advertising in malls or cops using the technology for crowd control. Very loud noises could be directed to individuals in a crowd/protest/etc, incapacitating one of the organizers. The researcher made some comment about him not being comfortable with the idea, but that who knows, in twenty years it could be the norm. Ahh.

You can listen to the story here, http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2007/12/14/segments/90482

Trying blogging again.

I have tried to keep blogs before about myself, and I never end up keeping up with them, or never knowing what to say. So, here is an attempt to have a blog on a theme. Inspired by my co-worker Mary (who has been starting/working on some blogs this year: technolution.wordpress.com and amerimom.wordpress.com) and a creepy story that I heard on WNYC’s On The Media, I decided to keep track of creepy media and advertising, cool hunting (you should watch Frontline: The Merchants of Cool, if you haven’t), and media literacy resources and curriculum I find along the way. I think that I will be able to go strong in the beginning, I might have a backlog of these ideas in my head, so…stay tuned (or rss feeded).