SXSW- Part 2, Anonymity and Creativity

Well, I've been back from Texas since Wednesday night, but some of the stuff at SXSW was just so cool/interesting that I'll probably be posting about it through this week or even beyond.  At the very least, I'd like to discuss the keynote speeches I was lucky enough to catch.

There were so many people at SXSW that I didn't think I'd be able to see the keynotes from the main room where they were actually taking place, especially since the organizers were expecting a large enough audience that they simulcast the speeches to eight or nine other rooms.  Somehow, I managed to get into the main ballroom for the two I really wanted to see-- Christopher Poole and Felicia Day.  Felicia Day is probably the more recognizable name of the two of these, but Chris Poole is equally successful and well-known on the Internet front-- just not by name.  Rather, he's known as "moot", the founder of 4chan.org, which he jokingly refers to as "the dark heart of the Internet" (before arguing against this perception).

If you haven't been on 4chan, don't go while at work or while with people that you don't want accidentally exposed to adult material.  The website itself is a very simple imageboard, where users can post and comment on pictures, but it allows them to be entirely anonymous.  4chan has become the spawning point for a number of Internet subcultures and memes (fads or trends, such as Rickrolling).  It's darker side has been manifested in Internet attacks, such as flooding the bandwidth of the Motion Picture Association of America's website in retaliation for their cyberattacks against The Pirate Bay, crashing the MPAA's website for a short period of time.  The community's members have also used their computer and hacking skills for positive results, such as tracking down a poster who was threatening to blow up his school and passing the information along to the police.  It's actually a pretty fascinating website to look at from a media studies perspective, just because its users are completely anonymous but still manage to exert a heavy influence on popular culture, other areas of the Internet, and people who irritate 4chan users.

I found Moot's talk really interesting, because while he recognized the more negative side of sites like 4chan, he expressed almost infinite faith in the potential of anonymity to be a positive thing.  Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote a book called "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet", where he argues that the difficulty of deleting information from the Internet means that all the mistakes and errors we commit in life will follow us forever.  With a permanent chronicle of our lives stored online, we no longer have the ability to reinvent ourselves by moving to a new place or by meeting new people.  This stifles experimentation and creativity, as our failures, like our mistakes, will also be linked to us permanently.  Moot's argument was that sites like 4chan, which allow users to be completely anonymous, can help make up for this, by giving people places to fail risk-free.  He saw them as places that can help breed creativity by decreasing the repercussions of trying something and having it not work out, as well as by allowing others to take, change and sometimes even improve upon original works.

This perspective actually correlates with some of the points I made in my undergraduate thesis, about balancing the right to free speech with the negative repercussions of anonymity.  Anonymity really does unlink identity and consequences, allowing people to make posts or put forward ideas that they might otherwise have stifled.  This is a positive thing when it means that, as mentioned above, people get multiple chances to try something without being deemed a failure, or when people who are surrounded by others who are unlike or disagree with them can share their viewpoints without being ostracized.  It's a less positive thing when it means that individuals can attack or libel one another with impunity.  Unfortunately, I don't know the best way to balance this, and I'm not sure anyone else does either.  I would, however, agree with moot that 4chan and similarly anonymous sites serve a purpose.

Moot also had a number of other ideas that I really liked, but including them would make this post way too long, so I think I'll save them for Wednesday.  For now, what do you think about 4chan, if you've experienced it in the past?  Is it useful, or just a spot for people to waste time and be offensive?  And how do you think open speech and civility can be balanced online?

(Also, if interested, moot's talk is actually up on YouTube in its entirety.  And the Austin Chronicle did an interesting article on 4chan during SXSW.  My favorite quote from it-- "Anonymity allows identity to exhale". )

The Art of Video Games

When I was teaching my class on video games, we ended up in an interesting discussion one day that I had not foreseen or put on my syllabus-- whether or not video games could count as art.  To be honest, I hadn't even thought of this as a topic, and now I can't say whether it was because I assumed they did, assumed they didn't, or hadn't really thought about it.

My students mentioned an interesting editorial Roger Ebert wrote last spring, where he declared that "Video Games Can Never Be Art".  It was an interesting statement to make, considering that he later admit that the last video game he played, and which he didn't have the patience for, was Myst, released in 1993.  Ebert later issued another blog post, after further thought and after reading the very extensive comments left on his first post, saying, "I may be wrong, but if I'm not willing to play a video game to find that out, I should say so. I have books to read and movies to see. I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place."  Personally, I think this was the only way for him to get out of the conversation gracefully, and I respect him for being willing to admit that his first post was a mistake, although the post title "Ok, kids, play on my lawn" does still have a bit of a crotchety ring to it.

I don't critique film because I don't know film, and Ebert's attempt to critique video games when he hadn't played one in over fifteen years was poorly thought out.  Especially because it now appears that The Smithsonian American Art Museum disagrees.  They are currently putting together an exhibition that will air in March 2012 on "The Art of Video Games" and, even better, they are looking for fans to vote on the artwork they think should be included in the exhibit.  I'd definitely encourage all of you to go check it out!  You can vote for up to 80 games, separated into 5 eras by the Smithsonian organizers.  They only ask for games that demonstrate "a focus on striking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers... Remember, this is an art exhibition, so be sure to vote for games that you think are visually spectacular or boast innovative design!"

Personally, I can't wait for this to open and will definitely try to see it sometime next year.  I really love that the museum isn't focusing solely on the games themselves but also on the people behind them-- the artists and designers-- and on the relationships between video games and other aspects of culture like film and television.  I can only hope that the exhibition meets the high hopes I'm sure gamers will have for it, although if it's up to the Smithsonian's normal standards, I'm not too worried.

Movable Type-- Quality Undergrad Media Studies

I am in graduate school.  By definition, this makes me kind of (really) a nerd about my field of study.  Possibly one of the most nerdy things I've done, and also one of the best, was joining together with a few of my awesome fellow Media Studies majors as an undergrad to found Movable Type, an undergraduate media studies journal for the University of Virginia.

The reason I bring it up today is because the journal didn't close down when the original staff graduated in May.  In fact, it's still going strong, and the second edition is in the process of being released now.  As an online journal, new editions of Movable Type are released a few papers at a time, to keep postings more current.  Even better, all the content is archived and searchable, as well as sorted by keyword.

If you've ever been interested in exactly what media studies majors and scholars write about, Movable Type can give you more than enough insight.  One of my papers on gender and video games, a topic I covered briefly in an earlier post, is up on Movable Type, as well as some of the best work I've read by my fellow undergraduates.  If you're interested in hackers, crafts, Glee, Harry Potter fandom, political campaigns or more, I'd encourage you to check it out, read some material and leave your comments.  It's great to get feedback on work, especially if you're planning to go anywhere with it.

Because the articles and the journal can be a little heavy at times, however, I'll also leave you with "A Media Studies Love Story", a video created by one of the original Movable Type staffers, demonstrating not only her own nerdiness and love for media studies, but a bit of insight into what it is.



In case the video looks familiar, it was inspired by the follow advertisement, "Parisian Love", released by Google for the 2010 Superbowl.  Enjoy!

Everyone's A Little Bit Racist

Alright, before you get all mad at me for the title, you need to do two things.  First, watch this awesome clip from Avenue Q.  Second, you need to hear me out on this one.

My first year at UVa, I took an anthropology class called Racism, Nationalism and Multiculturalism with Professor Richard Handler.  In one of our very first classes, Handler based his lecture off a Los Angeles Times article by Michael Shermer titled, "He's a Racist.  So Are You.  So Am I".  The article deals with comedian Michael Richards' racist outburst during a comedy show, when he was being heckled by the audience.  Following this incident, he appeared on various talk shows to apologize and said, "I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this".

Shermer and Professor Handler disagree, instead arguing that, at least unconsciously, everyone is racist.  The reason why is because we are preconditioned and trained to sort things, including people, into categories.  To quote my class notes, "we think of the world in terms of a certain system or set of categories we have been trained to."  To illustrate this, Handler used a non-racially based example; there are only so many movie plots available in American cinema because American movies cannot have an unhappy ending.  In contrast to this, sad endings occur all the time in German cinema.

What this means is not that everyone should start blatantly insulting people of other races.  Rather, it means that trying to be "colorblind", in a way, works contrary to its stated goals.  Trying to be colorblind will not result in equal treatment of all people, because it ignores the system in which people have been socialized.  Rather, the important thing to do is to try to recognize the system and work around it.  To quote Handler again, "Everyone is racist in the sense that we are all taught and know racial and nationalist categories".  Furthermore, he explains that part of knowing who you are in society comes from knowing who you are not.  Saying you are white is also saying you are not black, Asian or Latino.  Like language and other cultural norms, these distinctions are absorbed to the point of becoming unconscious, which leads to outbursts like Richards'.

So how should you start recognizing what's really going on?  First, you need to know that sorting things is normal.  It's how we bring meaning to the world and is hardwired into us.  On the other hand, the categories we sort things into are socially and culturally defined.  In other words, they are arbitrary-- Handler pointed out that someone not socialized in our cultural system, like a Martian, would not naturally divide people along the lines we use to divide ourselves.  Therefore, it is important to recognize what groups exist but also to be aware that they are not natural.  People exist in multiple groups at a time, so while categorizing can help simplify interactions, it should not define them.

In case you are curious as to how racist you are, you can test it here with the Harvard Implicit Association Test.  The test has participants sort good and bad words in conjunction with other dichotomies, such as white/black, fat/thin, or old/young, to determine the inherent preferences we have been socialized with, taking advantage of the fact that people sort words faster when they correspond to preference for that category.  For instance, almost everyone sorts good words to "white" faster than to "black", regardless of their own race.  We also display a strong cultural preference for youth, thinness, and a number of other categories.  Go check it out.  It's an interesting way to start learning a little more about how you work.

Culture Jamming

I have a stats assignment and an essay on  Marxist media theory due tomorrow, so I don't have time to write a new post.  However, I'm really proud of how I've been updating this regularly (Wednesdays and Sundays for those of you who aren't paying attention), and I don't want to mess that trend up.  Therefore, today I'm just going to post a project I did first year for MDST 201, Intro to Media Studies.  

For this project, we had to perform a culture jam on a piece of print advertisement and then include a writeup explaining what we did.  To quote the assignment, "Culture Jamming is the practice of taking preexisting texts and altering their content so that they critique themselves.  The practice goes beyond parody in that its goals are not simply comic but political.  The successful culture jam subverts and destabilizes the text by pointing out its complicity in problematic practices."

I will say right now that this is not one of my best papers (it was quite a few years ago), but the assignment was an interesting one, and it's short enough that I don't feel it'll be overwhelming to post here.  I'd love to know what you think!