#scms15

Since this week in class I decided to go on 4chan for the first time.I based most of what 4chan had to offer through the reading by Julian Dibbell. For me it is completely overwhelming. But I see the draw, i’m not a part of 4chan culture so by keeping the format of the site simpler, it makes for people like me who are use to navigation Facebook and Google not sure of how to navigate the site. 

I have never visited a site like 4chan but I have decided to expand my internet knowledge. I don't like having transparency being a default for my internet life. 

I thought the most interesting part of this week’s readings was in Bill Wasik’s article where he described the paradox of technology in our society. He says that all of our devices are here to keep us out of crowds and out of meeting with people face-to-face. With everything from dating apps to online shopping apps, we technically don’t need to leave our houses. However, when we really want to, all of our technology ironically can work to bring us all together. 

I think a really cool example of this is the experience of Matt Stopera from BuzzFeed. In an article on BuzzFeed entitled, “I followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend for Life,” he chronicled this very strange journey. Here’s a quick summary of the article, but the real one is DEFINITELY worth a read:

So one day, a YEAR after his phone was stolen from a bar, he noticed weird pics showing up on his new phone.

Apparently most stolen phones end up in China and are sold in second hand stores. He goes to the Apple store and they solve the problem -- his stolen phone is in China and the man was still logged into his iCloud account. So the apple store bricks the phone and that’s the end of it...or so he thinks.

Matt posted an article on BuzzFeed called “Who Is This Man And Why Are His Photos Showing Up On My Phone” Within hours of this post, he begins getting tweets from people in China. The BuzzFeed story was translated and posted on Weibo, which is the Chinese equivalent of Facebook. Here are some of the tweets he received:

At one point, this guy became the #1 trending topic on Weibo!

Long story short, the Weibo community helped track down the strange man in the pictures, who was appropriately dubbed by the Weibo community as “Brother Orange” for the pictures that the man took in front of the orange tree. Eventually, Matt flew to China to meet the man and was welcomed with superstardom. People in China just loved the story! This is a pic of him being greeted at the airport and meeting Brother Orange -- absolutely insane!

Matt spent the next week touring China, doing press conferences, media events, kissing babies, you name it. And he also made a best friend for life.

Storify is being an asshole right now, so I only have a handful so far. But I’ll post others as I can compile them. In the meantime:

The ‘F’ Word: Fan Studies In and Beyond the Academy (in which #theoryoffanfictiongate and ethics in fan studies are discussed, among other things)

Playing Fans: Games and Fandom in Media Studies (under discussion: Hunger Games board games; Star Wars interactive museum exhibit; Skyrim)

The Transmedia Web Series (under discussion: LonelyGirl15, Lizzie Bennett Diaries, The Guild, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, M.D.)

Das ist eine Sammlung meiner stARTcamp Münster Livestream-Videos und während der Session genannter und gefragter Informationen. Sollte euch noch etwas dabei fehlen, schreibt es mir und ich werde es, wenn möglich, ergänzen.

This weekend for SCMS I am presenting some exploratory work that I'm trying to make sense of in my dissertation as part of a kick-ass panel. Thanks to Fenwick McKelvey for inviting me.

Society for Film and Media Studies 2015

Saturday, March 28, 2015 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session N)

N20: “Crawling Horrors” in Contemporary Network Policy Room: 20

Chair: Stephanie Schulte (University of Arkansas)

Kevin Driscoll (Microsoft Research), "Beyond the End-to-End Principle: Lessons from Store-and-Forward Internetworking"

Fenwick McKelvey (Concordia University), "Synchronizing Humans and Machines: Early Computer Networks, ARPANET, and Non-synchronous Communication"

Magdalena Olszanowski (Concordia University), "Crawling for Horrors: Tracing Women’s Public Intimacy Online through Guest Books and Webrings 1995-1999" Respondent: Thomas Streeter (University of Vermont)

Abstract:

Crawling for Horrors: tracing public intimacy online through feminist spaces 1995-1999

A horror is defined, among other things, as a bad or mischievous person. Women have been continually signified as horrors (i.e., witches). As outlined in our proposal, a horror can also be an object, an object that re-inscribes itself, finding ways to continually evade signification/control.  The objects I want to explore in my presentation are the traces left behind of websites maintained in the 1990s. These traces as fragmented links/pages/images have remained attached  to the network, are archived by the WayBack Machine, not written over by Yahoo and/or Geocities, or removed by their owners. The period from 1995 to 1999 is of interest because it comes just before the internet boom of social networking and blogging platforms. Specifically, I look to website guestbooks and webrings of young women who started websites as platforms of enunciation around the horrors of mental illness, violence, and compulsory heterosexuality.  Guestbooks are public spaces built for visitors to leave their contact information and comments to the web-owner or other people commenting in the guestbook. Webrings are self-organized networks of websites, often with a theme, that serve to link users interested in that theme. These communicative networks were a large part of the internet infrastructure in the 1990s, and created conditions for an alternate layer of finding relevant data through human versus algorithmic web crawling. Through content and discourse analysis, I frame these communicative nodes as participating in a feminist intimate public (Berlant 2008). More specifically, how do we deal with traces of public intimacy? (Olszanowski 2014) What are the politics of horrors? These markers of public intimacy are often left out of internet histories. I want to elucidate an alternate genealogy of the ways in which women make use of online technologies to resist control and create spaces for them to exist (Lovnik 2009). When theorizing contemporary public social networks, what can we learn about the precarity of these practices and their concomitant data (Hestres 2013) from the communicative traces of these women?

Bibliography

Lialina, Olia and Espenschied, Dragan. 2014. “One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age: Digging through the Geocities Torrent” http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ Accessed 28 Aug 2014.

Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hestres, Luis. 2013. “App Neutrality: Apple’s App Store and Freedom of Expression Online.” International Journal of Communication 7: 1265–1280.

Lovink, Geert. 2009. Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture: (1994-2001). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

By Elsie Walker

E.T.: John Williams’ score not only humanizes E.T. but tells the story with emotional directness, transcending the limits of speech. I relive it now as a mother hearing it with her five-year-old who instinctively grasps exactly what the orchestral music “says”.

Goodfellas: The compilation score, inspired by Martin Scorsese’s personal record collection, establishes authenticity across different eras explored by the film. It also ironically plays against what we see (in particular, who can forget the savagely surprising use of Donovan’s soft vocals for “Atlantis” in the scene where Billy Batts is killed?).

In the Mood for Love: The repetition of the waltz for strings, “Yumeji’s Theme” by Shigeru Umebayashi, achingly and obsessively underscores the experience of unconsummated desire and the dance the main characters would take with each other if only they could.

Whale Rider: Lisa Gerrard mixes world music with Maori chants and speeches, amplifying the film’s meaning for indigenous audiences of New Zealand and for all peoples who care for the mythological significance of Paikea’s new female leadership.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: An especially eclectic compilation score—from  Radiohead’s “Exit Music” to Des’ree’s “Kissing You” to Craig Armstrong’s orchestral homage to Carl Orff’s “Oh Fortuna” (“Oh Verona”)—featuring tracks that cowriter-director Baz Lurhmann wrote into the screenplay before filming even began. The score led to the release of two CDs of both “operatic” and pop music that represent the film’s harkening back to the powerful past (through Shakespeare) while also claiming a revered text for a new contemporary audience .