Who Do I Blog? On (almost) 5 Years

I first blogged about five years ago (on August 21, 2007) following the always astute advise of Yvonne Welbon who was, at that time, producing a feature documentary I was making with and about my sister Antonia. Always a student of industry, Yvonne was convinced that producing a vibrant web-presence for myself would also enable grand possibilities for SCALE. In this she proved both dead-on and also off-target. Over three-hundred posts later, and a much more dispersed and vast Internet life than I could have ever imagined in 2007—one that includes this blog and another, three YouTube channels, a born-digital video-book, several websites, a global initiative to teach feminism and technology online, and uncountable web articles, interviews, reviews, guest-posts—I would like to pause and think about what and why I do here; who I am when on this blog; and why none of that mattered much for my documentary but did end up affecting my work and myself in other ways:

I am also speaking (metaphorically) to Geert Lovink, who I have been reading lately (about blogs: see his Networks without a Cause and Zero Comments), and to graduate students and their mentors who just might be reading, some of whom I’ve (literally) been talking with a lot about the role of blogs and other forms of Internet presence within our profession. I think, with all the best intentions, like my producer Yvonne before us, we’re getting some of this quite wrong (that is to say in what ways it actually helps us; and how we might best use it) as well as other parts right. Most specifically, the Internet’s unassailable logic of numbers, popularity, or virality is actually not well-suited to the kind of work that most of us do which is deep, focused and small by design; and the neo-liberal production of glossy or cool, sellable, spreadable things and surfaces (selves, websites, blogs) does not map neatly to careers based first upon content. By looking to mainstream Internet practices (as was true for Hollywood film before us) we fail to understand the norms and needs of marginal, radical, or alternative users or uses of a medium. So:

• I see this blog as a tool and extension of my professional life as media scholar, maker, and activist. I think of it as an “academic blog” or “professional blog” with little in common with blogs that re-post things by other people, mark the mundane and private, or sell things.
• I write quickly (usually in an hour or less) about the work I am currently seeing, making or reading, what I am thinking or teaching about (including other blogs), and cultural concerns that connect to topics of interest to my work and so now also to this blog (AIDS, fake and real documentary, YouTube and Internet culture, queer and feminist art and media).
• I write short because: that is part of the style I have honed for this place (I also try to include at least one video); I imagine that that is what readers expect online; this allows me to write quick, so I can do so often and even when I have other responsibilities.
• I try to write in a voice that is neither overly academic nor excessively personal, even as
• I write in the I voice.
• I am not anonymous even as I rarely discuss my private life.
• When I reveal personal things about my non-professional life this is because theyare part of my professional life, in that my work is most often about the personal and political. Even so, I do so with care (marking and monitoring my own limits for revelation) and because my feminist methods, topics, and politics so demand.
• I write to a small but steady group of readers who rarely comment. I know who a few of you are, I guess about some of the others, and a significant chunk I have no idea about, although I know you wouldn’t read me if you didn’t share some of my professional concerns. I am small and specific enough not to draw haters (although I get a lot of spam).
• I have no interest in growing my readership although I do cross-blog, on occasion, because I think communities outside my niche might be interested.
• I have met people through my blog and have gone on to work on projects with them.
• I have met readers of my blog, and learned that sometimes I speak to them.
• I have used writing from the blog towards other, larger projects. The quick words often become more thoughtful talks, larger articles, or merely the records of thoughts I had that help me to develop new thinking and remember old.
• I do not think about this as a “publication” (for my cv), but I do include it as an entry under the category: “on the Internet.”
• I do not think of this writing as self-branding, although I suppose it could be construed as such. Rather, I imagine myself talking first to myself, and then anyone else who might want to listen because we share interests and might want to learn more from each other.
• I do not think of this writing as self-promotion, although I suppose it could be construed that way. Rather, I imagine it at work within a network of the like-minded who are seeking evidence of, and new insights upon, our shared interests in our rather hostile, inane, or rushed culture.
• I do not think of this writing as a diary: it is neither personal nor hidden.
• I do think of this writing as critical Internet and cultural studies, about and in its vernacular, place, and spirit while also exhibiting and enacting the feminist qualities I wish for this and other places: visibility, context, criticality, safety, community.
• I think of this Internet practice as Internet theory.
• I write first to craft and share this Internet self to myself, then to place my marginal cultural interests and insights into the record, and finally, to anyone else who will have me.

Hello Avatar! by Beth Coleman

Now that it’s summer, I can read from that precarious pile of books on my desk. First up, Hello Avatar! There is much to recommend here, but let me begin by noting Coleman’s play with design and format, a necessary and successful experimentation in the writing forms that might be better suited for scholarship on networked experience. I was pleased to note that many of the players at the MIT Press who worked with me to push publishing norms and forms for LFYT (albeit in its more uncertain digital environment) also collaborated with Coleman. Her beautiful book indicates that those great folks are still best equipped institutionally (and perhaps conceptually) to make such interventions onto books and paper—from Coleman’s use of color-coding, to font, to writing styles—and I say this not as a complaint, but as a sign-post marking how far the field of “digital publishing” (about digital culture) and its most staunch supporters can go in 2012.

Given our many points of convergence, and that this is a blog-post and not a “real” review, I will merely point out a few cherished ideas from Coleman’s book and how they might relate to my ongoing concerns, often discussed here. The first is her use of the term X-reality to mark that place, experience, modality of being that I’m always tripping over when I try to describe the bleed and continuum of on/offline experience. Better yet are her picture-perfect snapshots of the mundane yet elegant ways we encounter X-reality daily.

Her discussion of the vividly actual, neither virtual nor real, and never inauthentic, to better understand X-reality also presses up nicely against my ongoing interest in the fake. In her discussion of the “uncanny valley” of felt virtual inauthenticity, I see my own considerations of the particular power of the productive fake-documentary that is and is undone in one view. The uncanny knowing of a thing and its reverse, a form and its fake, can liberate critique and self-knowing. However, needless to say, my more current understanding of this mode of seeing and knowing as being dominant and ubiquitous online in the ways that we see and show and know, and therefore defanged of its most radical possibilities for unmaking and rethinking, raises interesting questions for Coleman’s ever more visible body of study (ha) the Avatar.

Finally, her careful consideration of both the changing nature of agency and presence, given her understanding that technology extends our capabilities of communication, community and collaboration, thereby pressing us to both extreme and extended behavior, dovetails neatly with my newest work concerned with the what and how of these lived possibilities: can or should we bring previous norms of being and practice, learned from decades of organizing and thinking within the politics of social justice, to the places and ways that we are now human?

Guess Who’s Monetizing Now?

I got a notice from Google on my “Learning from YouTube” YouTube channel. Apparently I passed some metric and have enough traffic to qualify to money-up with Google. While I am quite worried that I’ve signed away more than I’ll ever know, I felt that the learning mandate of this course demands that I go for it. We’ve been talking about Google’s (and corporate and money’s reach) on YouTube in class, and we can now watch how (or if) that happens in real time.

(Guess what: my first ad was for “Mad Men.” Good choice)

I given even make money on Monetizing Learning (above!). See Details below.

Documentary and Space

According to Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, in their introduction to “Documentary and Space,” Media Fields Journal, Issue 3: “New forms, modes, and genres of documentary have sparked their own debates and raised their own particular issues. And it is perhaps this moment of changing modes, technologies, and practices that draws our attention to the importance of considering documentary space. But ours is not a new consideration; rather, it is a reconsideration of why space has always been a hugely important issue not only for those in documentary studies but also for visual anthropologists, geographers, ethnographers and journalists, among others. Yes, when we look to online production and video sharing, interactive “documentary games” and “immersive nonfictions,” it seems apparent that “viewers” are indeed interacting with and experiencing documentaries in different ways.”

My contribution to this special issue is A Place in the Online Feminist Documentary Cyber-Closet, but it’s chock full of strong essays, including Jason Alley’s “Spaces of Reticence,” Laura Rascaroli’s  “Sonic Interstices: Essayistic Voiceover and Spectatorial Space in Robert Cambrinus’s Commentary (2009)” and Elizabeth Cowie’s Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape.

Take a look.

I Support the Digital Picket Line: Goodbye Huffington Post

“In response to what labor leaders see as an exploitative situation, on March 17th, the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union both called for bloggers to refuse to blog at the Huffington Post and join an electronic picket line against the Huffington Post.” Mike Elk

While this is the first I’ve heard of this “strike,” its aims are not really news to me. I have been blogging at HuffPo for a little over a year (and here for close to four years!) and in that short time my experience at Huffington Post has really soured. Before I summarize my transition from pleased to pissed, it seems important to note how my not knowing about the virtual picket line reflects some of the larger problem, and how my honoring it will as well. I am not a professional journalist, nor do I even think of my blogging as “journalism,” and I do not need to get paid for this effort because I write as a professor who sees some reflection of my professional efforts in my salary (questions about how to “count” blogging are rife across academia, but I won’t go into that here, and will only suggest that I am well aware of its links to my more traditional work). I am like any number of bloggers who “work for free” because we actually can: whether this be because our labor is paid elsewhere or because we do this work/hobby/activity for fun. In political solidarity with working (unpaid, outsourced) journalists, I am, in fact, a large part of the very flooding of the Internet with other forms of professional (or “pro-am”) content that devalues the worth of their professional labor. And, when I choose to only post this here, I’ll get my small, refined, micro-readership (whoever you may be) to know about the picket line. The only reason I use the Huffington Post is to make my topical writing more visible to people outside my niche. But no longer. And no big loss.

I was initially invited to respond to a piece in their College section that made fun of my course Learning From YouTube (as did most mainstream coverage), but I used this opportunity to first call them out on their silly sarcasm, and then to start duplicating some posts from this blog that seemed to be of more general interest. A number of my posts on things that were both really topical and really mainstream did benefit from their duplication on HuffPo. I’d watch them ride the Internet waves for awhile once they surfaced there, and that never happens here. At one point, writing on Juaquin Phoenix, I even crossed some magic threshold (of views perhaps), and unannounced, uninvited elves started editing my posts (for style and content). After several frustrating days of attempting to get to any person who worked there, I informed them that I was not allowing them to edit my work without my permission and that their user agreement seemed to be in violation. They returned it to its original state. And then they were bought out.

After this, my experience changed immediately, and entirely for the worse. I have attempted to cross-post four times since then, but now their policy is that they select posts, and only one of mine has crossed their unstated threshhold: a recent piece on Cave of Dreams. Meanwhile, other blogs on Cedar Rapids, YouTube and the Arab Spring, and my most recent post on the phony lesbian blogger, did not pass muster.

Now that Huffington Post selects content it would only be right to explain their standards to their authors, allow bloggers contact with the editors who are making these decisions, and then … well, obviously, to pay us for our now-selected content.

A Truly New Genre: Lessons Learned from Digital Publishing

An essay that I wrote, reflecting upon my experiences in online digital scholarship and publishing, has just been published at Inside Higher Education.

I begin:

“It’s true, unlike most academic e-books — erudite words placed into regulation paragraphs unceremoniously plopped onto a new environment with a few links and illustrations added — my video-book (according to my Glossary) is “large-scale online writing that depends upon video, text, design, and architecture for its meaning making.” That I can’t begin without defining the work itself (like the press’s request that I add a glossary to help readers) demonstrates how common terms of scholarly writing and publishing must be reworked, modified, or scare-quoted to most effectively describe and traverse the “limits of scholarship” of the digital sphere. But what, precisely, gets muddled at these borders and what might we best do about it?”

I then go on to enumerate nine lessons of fully online scholarly publishing that raise questions about medium specificity, reading practices, writing practices, temporal expectations, expanded audience, expanded authorship, legal challenges, vetting and support structures.

Anxiety Is a State of Media/Mind: On SCMS and Feminist Blogging

I’ve returned from SCMS and Louisiana (having seen two alligators in the wild on a hike and eaten crawfish and shrimp in innumerable yummy formats) and would like to briefly mention a few of my more memorable media encounters: like the alligator, anxiety-defined all.

Tara McPherson organized New Media Futures: The Digital + the Academy, the workshop where she and I spoke with Nick Mirzoeff, Joan Saab, and Wendy Chun about how digital technologies are altering our new media labor (research and teaching), writing, and publishing practices. While the fact that the projector did not work, definitively disenabling our techie show ‘n tell (has this even not happened at a conference where I am speaking about the Internet?), and thereby providing some felt anxiety for each of the able speakers who could not readily rely on machines to illustrate our points as planned, I’m more interested in highlighting some of Wendy’s brilliant observations about anxiety and new media (studies). She suggested that fears about the future of new media (and its theories and applications) are definitive of the findings and methods of the field, as well as anticipating and self-defining the very forms that new media will take, leading to more uneasiness, more anxious findings, and more twittery tools needed to soothe our ever more shattered nerves and brains. For instance, an anxiety about loss leads to tools that save and thereby produce easily erased, unfindable, updated, quickly unusable, outmoded, unstable records that so engulf us that we become too overwhelmed to remember or (re)visit our saved stuff, thus already producing the loss we anxiously anticipated and the need to build even newer tools and theories to remedy all the more future loss we do and must anticipate.

Now, one might imagine that old-school (dying?) feminist (academic) blogging (and “self-promotion”), the topic of another workshop I attended (highlighting the powerful blogging and other online experiences of Miranda Banks, Ryan Bowles, Alisa Perren, Anne Petersen, Julie Russo, Patty Ahn, and Inna Arzumanova), might be a remedy to our nervous media condition in that blogs (like this one) might allow the lady-theorist (like this one) to calmly, and perhaps communally (or at least in-community) name her own terms, moods, tools, and forms; boy did Wendy Chun get this one right! These amazing, ambitious, bright, primarily young academic women (most were in grad school or ABD, one had just gotten tenure), as well as the mostly young feminists in the room, discussed their blogging, tweeting, and online personae (and thereby use of new media tools and the futures anticipated, hoped for, and associated) as organized by what … Anxiety of course (about being hired, promoted, and otherwise evaluated) and even fear (of hostile readers and punitive potential committees).

Their anxiety made me feel, well, anxious (to feel so differently from everyone else in the room, my comrades, and then try to articulate it cogently) but mostly sad. Then mad, and now compelled to speak and explain. My feminist (academic) blogging might be understood or termed as “self-promotion,” or even “self-branding” (a term tossed about, uneasily, at the session), just look below: I pitch my films and books. Yet I truly think of this very same practice (without fear) as a public engagement in thinking out loud, honing a voice, self-naming, community-building, and stake-holding.

This media platform, like all others, is pretty neutral (yes I know, ownership, design, protocols have meaning, but this is not my point here). Rather, we assign to platforms like blogging (or are assigned) feelings and anticipated futures, but we feminists need not accept the anxiety that holds us in check, that makes us self-doubt, that assures us that speaking about our own good work or new ideas is somehow too prideful rather than merely productive. Feminism gives us all the tools we need to understand that economic conditions like a depression and an academy that sells advanced degrees to pay for itself,  social conditions like patriarchy and racism and homophobia, and psychological conditions like anxiety, should not be suffered as a personal, debilitating and self-censoring problem, but should be understood and fought as political issues best addressed by being named, refused, refined, and remade within the power of movements and with the tools of technology. Sure, all these amazing young women should be anxious about getting a job, but they shouldn’t be anxious about blogging that fact, or blaming whoever they want to blame, or naming the forces in their way, and then doing, showing, and sharing their great work, from which we can all learn and build. I choose anger over anxiety any day (including in your comments, or as I like to think of them my no-mments. We fruitfully discussed in the workshop the value of the under-sung, underdone labor of commenting to better build dialogue, community, and confidence in the anxious world of feminist academic blogging).

Also, a shout out to a great panel I went to on Interactivity. Marina Hassapopoulou spoke about the legacy of expanded cinema and video installation to help us historicize new media, Aubrey Anable about the lie that interactivity is a forum for democratic participation in the new urban planning of New Orleans, and Vinicius Navarro about the new media index as an emptiness that points to a referent in-between.

CulturalStudies with Toby Miller

Toby Miller, Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, chatted with me over tofu for his podcast, CULTURALSTUDIES. Since last summer, Toby has recorded meandering, lively and detailed conversations with scholars, artists, and activists and he releases them in unedited real time on his podcast to 1000 or so subscribers, all probably three men and their dog in Sweden, according to Toby.

Sitting over lunch with just his shiny laptop open doing the quiet work of recording us—slurps, clinks, and all—I was reminded about the beauty of these kinds of DIY, “hand-made” practices (something we discuss in relation to my video-book’s fears about YouTube and the corporatization of “DIY”) enabled by technology. We discuss this, revolution, AIDS video activism and more. Hope you’ll take a listen.

Learning from the Book Tour

I’ve been on the road with the video-book: CAA, NYU, University of Toronto and OCADU. I’ve been having fun, and learning a lot too during long and intense Q and As where people are actually critical and productive (in this sense it feels more like a film screening than my image of a book tour, but maybe that’s because showing the video-book is more filmic in that it is screen-based, live, loud, and defined by images). A few beginning thoughts, now that I’m live, and being read and even talked to (btw: write a texteo in my book and talk back through the v-book, please!)

-The video-book is harder than most online experiences (more dense and has its own rules of navigation) and this turns readers off. Food for thought for other budding digital-auteurs, and like everything else in this self-reflexive process, useful in its failures.

-Along this vein, the video-book takes time. I’m suggesting now that people should give it the length of a movie, not the three clicks usually afforded a web-site. It takes that much commitment to take in its logic, scope, scale, and structure, which in some ways makes it like a book (that is if you all actually read books, and don’t just buy them as a sign of [later] commitment).

-Users really don’t like my (highly limited, fiercely constrained, but ultimately, I think, empowering) mode for commenting (see link above), and feel it goes against the best of the internet. They want a wiki.

Two more cool things: this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and an invitation from the Library of Congress for “inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials.” Who knew!?

Digital Praxis/Filmic Texts

My colleague at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, Virgina Kuhn, has just published Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate which “maps the use of a documentary film as a main text in an undergraduate course, explaining its practices and elaborating its theoretical underpinnings before gesturing toward some of the more salient unresolved issues that offer avenues for further research.”

The essay sits online and is written in Scalar, an authoring tool by the same people at IML and Vectors who helped me design Learning From YouTube. In fact, built into Scalar are many of the features we had to make from scratch to write LFYT: the linking and moving of video and text as one composite object and a way to make and mark recursivity as a digital authoring stylistic, for example. It’s an amazing tool, and Virgina has done really interesting things with it. Her essay has three paths (what I call YouTours), covering theory, pedagogy, praxis, and then attending to her own writing forms and practices.

It is this last move—describing her new digital writing tools, methods, and concerns, the subject of the path called “structure”—that seems particularly telling about this new breed of writing. Yesterday, I gave my first talk about LFYT at NYU’s Anthropology Department (thanks to Faye Ginsburg!), and I seem to have the very same impulse when asked to discuss my digital publication. My talk begins: “While I’m very pleased to present to you my video-book’s content (my ideas about YouTube) today I will be as interested in thinking about this online, networked, multimodal academic writing about YouTube as one offering in a sea change of texts and from a developing community of practitioners—all humanities based experiments and experimenters working in what I call digital praxis. Today my goal is to demonstrate how for my work of digital praxis the forms, processes and structures I choose and use are inseparable from my YouTube findings.”

In my recent teaching on Feminist Online Spaces, I’ve been wanting to think about such self-reflexivity in relation to form, practice, and structure as a decidedly feminist act. In the Q and A at NYU we further discussed this in relation to the devoted labor practices such forms demand, not to mention their ephemerality, and devotion to economies of the gift (feminist principles all).