pjs and public space

PJs in Public

From Boing Boing, there’s a nice moment wherein we can see how the spaces of urban life create culture. Simmel wrote of social roles that spring up from urban life (e.g., the quatorzième), which Park picked up on, and Goffman writes about ‘make-dos’ in Asylums, to show how the constant existence within the semi-public spaces of a mental institution leads to little unauthorized strategies. A nice analysis by Chinese sociologist Zhang Jiehai, explains that the fashion is born as “a matter of practicality because people lived in cramped conditions with no clear line between public space and private place.” This, again, reminds me (again) of the winding walkways and the ‘unofficial streets’ of San Francisco, where public and private collide. What I’m a little surprised at is that this is hardly a youthful trend… From a quick scan of images (from National Geographic and Flickr) it appears to cut across age groups.

Of course, the reason this arises is because it is from an article on how the Chinese government is trying to crack down on this particular phenomenon.

public spaces, san francisco

Building off of a similar posting earlier, and a nice book on New York’s privately-owned public spaces, here’s a nice map of San Francisco’s spaces from Strange Maps, called ‘A Sense of POPOS’ (Privately Owned Public Open Spaces):

San Fransisco's Public Spaces

corporations as persons, “not true?”

I like showing the first few minutes of The Corporation when teaching Politics and Economics in 101. I’ll have the opportunity to touch up that opening gambit on Corporate Personhood with a few recent news clippings. The first is the much-avoided (in the mass media) topic of the Citizen’s United ruling which, according to the majority opinion, is a validation of First Amendment free speech. (Justice Alito, when POTUS did a public shaming of the Court on this matter, reportedly mouthed ‘Not true’.) The other part is a nice news clip (and here) about how, in the economic meltdown, corporations have been walking away from their $4.4 billion debt, called an ‘underwater property’ (like the massive 56-building/11,282 property Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town complex), to ‘protect shareholder value’ while individuals are shamed into their debts: In the Wall Street Journal, the head of the Mortgage Bankers Association was quoted as saying, “”What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends? (Morgan Stanley walked away from five San Fransisco office buildings last month too.)

how to file a news report

This pairs nicely with Laura Grindstaff’s The Money Shot and other production of media stuff.

david foster wallace and teaching theory

One of my standards is to crib from David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, ever since I assigned the Best American Non-Required Reading a few years back. I thought I posted it here, but I think that the link was to a site that had a copyright request to take it down. It’s here, for now, in its entirety. I think that this is just a lovely way to introduce thinking about theory, and then head off into talking about The Cave, etc. In part:

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.

ok go watch content

Three years ago, I admit that I watched my fair share of Ok Go’s catchy homespun video:

They were pretty successful, and made in my estimation an ok band into a bit of an internet sensation. And then there were follow-ups. But lately, it seems the band’s label has been giving them flack for their online content. This led to an interesting open letter on their website. Nothing too surprising, but a good introduction to what happens when hype-machine and capitalism don’t mesh so well and a band wants to make a career:

…But where are they gonna find money if no one buys music? One target is radio stations (there’s lots of articles out there. here’s one: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20…ouse-senate.ars ). And another is our friend The Internutz. As you’ve no doubt noticed, sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Blahzayblahblah.cn run ads on copyrighted content. (…) The labels are hurting and they need every penny they can find, so they’ve demanded a piece of the action. They got all huffy a couple years ago and threatened all sorts of legal terror and eventually all four majors struck deals with YouTube which pay them tiny, tiny sums of money every time one of their videos gets played. Seems like a fair enough solution, right? YouTube gets to keep the content, and the labels get some income.

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. (…)

Let’s take a wider view for a second. What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

The end result? EMI won’t ‘let them let fans’ post their content. Hmpf.

journey to the middle of taste

That’s the subtitle of a book I just finished, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: Journey to the End of Taste, which is the 57th in a series of books that center on and spin off of a single album by 33 1/3. This one is on Celene Dion, and was passed along to me last weekend. It is a tour de force, much like the album itself, as it swirls through cultural criticism, global hegemony, individual identification, class, etc. by relying upon Bourdieu, Adorno, Sennett, Duncan Watts, and Richard Peterson. It provides the most sociologists between the covers of a non-academic book outside of Malcolm Gladwell.

United States: Most Wanted Painting (Dishwasher Sized)

In order to explore why Dion can be so successful and yet is so hated, Wilson has a nice moment recounting Komar and Melamid’s ‘Most Wanted’ and ‘Least Wanted’ series, which surveyed the aesthetic likes and dislikes in a variety of countries and painted the results. It turns out that, on balance, Americans–and everyone else–like natural landscapes and the color blue. The look of aesthetic democracy looks likes the image to the left. (The ‘Worst’ and global comparisons are available here.)

Wilson then connects to Watts’ Music Lab 14,000-person study, which asked visitors to listen and rate songs from artists whom they had never heard of. There were two groups: One that saw the titles of the songs and the artists and some saw how many times a song was downloaded, and the other group could see how many people who were in their own ‘taste culture’ (i.e., those who express similar musical preferences). As he explains it in a 2007 New York Times Magazine article:

Duncan Watts, making me question my aesthetic taste when I wonder whether or not this is the coolest picture of a sociologist since Mills on a Motorcycle

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

Watts et al. found that a song that is ranked in the top five in the ‘blind’ market has a 50 percent chance to achieve that rating in the second group.

Wow.

Ok. So markets shape our tastes. To see the scholarly output of this project go to Matthew Salganik’s website.

Short story long, I cannot wait to teach this in a Culture class, as it is not only a great introduction to a diverse span of cultural theory and research, but lively writing that I think students would really engage with, even emulate. The fact that it is Celene Dion makes it all the better.

the breathtaking fall of old media & the rise of digital

Print Newspaper Circulation, 1990-2009

The Rise of Digital Media

Update (2/1/10): The New York Observer reports a little schadenfreude on New York’s Newsday’s $4 million firewall to have subscribers pay for content. After three months, there were exactly 35 people who were willing to pay for online content. According to reports from reporters, the website is ‘an abomination’ and they are still sore about changes in the media landscape affecting their paper: “People are still mad about losing our national correspondents, our foreign bureaus and the prestige of working for a great newspaper. The last thing we had was a living wage, being one of the few papers where you’re paid well. And to have that last thing yanked from you? It’s made people so mad.”

And then there is Greg Kot’s new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. The Nation’s J. Gabriel Boylan writes:

Unlike the introduction of the compact disc, which was developed by major labels and music retailers, as well as Phillips and Sony, the current tumult was unplanned and unforeseen. Digital technology has put far more power in the hands of ordinary consumers to wrest music from its gatekeepers. But crashing the gates has caused the music economy to dip down between cheap and free; people are storing more music on their hard drives than they’re likely to listen to in the next decade, yet major labels, music retailers and even jukebox manufacturers are spiraling toward obsolescence. Offbeat and invaluable aspects of the mass music experience are slipping away as well, from the cranky exclusivity of the niche record shop to the tastemaking role of college radio to the music press itself.

we’re all williamsburgers now

My new friend at The Meat Hook pointed out this nice map of the changing definitions of a gentrified neighborhood’s boundaries, from the Very Small Array. This plays well with any number of examples: from Venice to the East Village.

Williamsburg Augmented, 2010

1845 Williamsburg

iphone as educational tool

Data Logger

I’ve been interested in the iPhone as a research device for a while (Data Logger is a free iPhone app that allows you to geotag and track all sorts of input), but there’s a few movements on using the iPhone as an educational device. Is it a tool, or another example of the digital divide? More thoughts to come.

the uses of drugs

For the end of the semester I like to talk about Deviance and Drugs. It’s a good way to end on a high note. I have some shtick proposing that heroin should be legalized and how I’m an addict myself, of caffeine. But in discussing it with Ben we came upon the ‘uses’ of drugs, which would be a nice connection with Herb Gans’ ‘The Uses of Poverty.’ Ben pointed me to Doug Rushkoff’s book, Cyberia, wherein he illustrates how the computing innovations of the 90s were largely fueled by  MDMA. In an article, ‘E: Prescription For Cultural Renaissance,’ he describes a three-stage process of 1.) breaking down inhibitions, 2.) developing an empathy towards others’ emotional needs, and 3.) nurturing a sense of communal, non-verbal communication. As Ben explained, the thinking behind this is that the drug does different things, manifests itself in different subcultures and, for Rushkoff, as the “fledgling Silicon Alley firms became dependent on Grateful Deadheads and other psychedelics users as programmers, cyberculture became known as a ‘cyberdelic’ movement.” The entire second part of Cyberia, Drugs: The Substances of Designer Reality, is available here. Despite making note of Howard Rheingold’s fashion sense, I have never thought of this before.

Now those shirts and jackets make sense

Coffee as a substance is not without its historical moment as well. Peter Stallybrass, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, notes that coffee served as a powerful component matched with the rise of capitalism. Perhaps ‘Spirit’ isn’t the right word. He quotes an 18th Century James Howell:

’tis found already that this coffee-drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations… Whereas formerly apprentices and clerks, with others, used to take the morning draught with Ale, Beer, or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause the brain made many unfit for business, they use now to play the good fellow in this wakeful and civil drink. (1986: 97).

the fun theory

crank dat youtube marketing and copyright

This is an old story in the terms of internet history (two years ago), but I almost forgot it when teaching Media & Technology and I wanted to post it here so I would remember it next time. The video ‘Crank Dat’ (along with the dance in the video) because a huge hit, with everyone from MIT grad students to Pari and Harvin’s ‘Crank Dat Curry Sauce’ doing their own interpretations of the song and dance. It was so successful that when Soulja Boy was signed to a major label the new video portrayed a clueless African American Record Executive having the phenomenon explained to him by two little kids. As a sidenote, the MIT grad student who played a small part in the internet phenomenon received a letter from some lawyer with a ‘cease and desist’ order (view his response here). That, I imagine, would signal the end of the ‘internet sensation’ portion of the song’s shelf life!

Speaking of copyright, here’s a nice video by law professor Michael Geist about the super secret copyright treaty in the works at present.

 

desire lines

streets with no names

Despite reading Benjamin and Situationists, Urban Sociology students rarely see how individual practices can also be a part of shaping cities. It’s not the only thing, but it’s a part of the picture. I love these images, although I’m starting to feel mixed about Detroit being continually cast as the ultimate blighted, post-apocalyptic city. From the ever-fabulous Sweet Juniper blog:

In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go.

Update (bumped up from ‘comments’ so that I’ll remember it): Tom adds “This reminds me a of a story that a professor told me in one of my engineering classes about a new college that was built and decided to just place sidewalks and steps around the front and side exits of all the buildings. Then they allowed the students to use the campus for the first year. After that, they paved all the worn footpaths between the buildings, dorms and dining halls. It had something to do with allowing natural systems to develop on their own and how sometimes a solution more efficient than the best engineered design will arise.”

more than half of teachers report bringing in food for their students on their own dime

My students have a hard time imagining that all kids don’t start on a level playing field. After reading George Farkas’ ‘Black White Test Score Gap,’ and showing them this video, they’re changing their minds. (Although I may never convince them that Disney has racist and sexist elements to it.)

double crossing

The Specials

Last week for our culture reading group, I had to lead the discussion on Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, a classic that many had not read. So, instead of giving a mini-lecture on the book, I thought I would give some of the trans-Atlantic cultural exchanges a little context by going through some of the songs that seeped into my psyche when I was too young to know what it was all about. First, I showed them Toots and the Maytals’ 1968 song, ‘Pressure Drop‘ and then the title track cover of Robert Palmer’s 1975 R&B version, and then to show the link from Reggae to Punk: The Clash’s 1978 B-Side. Then The Specials’ version, which only came out in 1996, but their inter-racial ska-punk was certainly influenced by these movements. (And I hate to say it, but it was only when I read Hebdige’s book that I figured out that The Specials’ ‘A Message to You, Rudy‘ and The Clash’s ‘Rudy Can’t Fail‘ were references to Rude Boy subculture–Jamaican patois for a juvenile delinquent.)

The Gentlemen of Bacongo

Then, just to show that Toots wasn’t oblivious to the way in which cross-cultural exchanges had their benefits, I played for the group their killer rendition of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ which replaces ‘West Virginia’ with ‘West Jamaica.’

Update: Not completely disconnected, I came across Daniele Tamagni’s new book The Gentlement of Bacongo, a photo essay of the street style of the Sapeurs, or dandies, of the Congo. ‘Sape’ (the ‘Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance’ or ‘Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes’) is called ‘the religion of clothing.’ According to Dylan Jones, who reviewed the book, Sapeurs ‘fantasise about walking the streets of Paris or Brussels – places most can only dream of visiting – returning to Brazzaville as sartorial aristocrats of ultimate elegance.’ This distinctive style is a rebellion against traditional African costume… There is a strict code of honor and sense of morality as members, and there is no violence or fighting. According to the book, it’s all done with the clothes: Pierre Cardin, Roberto Cavalli, Dior, Fendi, Gaultier, Gucci, Issy Miyake, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Yohji Yamamoto. I would love to see a Hebdige version of this phenomenon.