The everyday

Currently teaching a course on media and everyday life. Right now we’re early on in the course and covering basic ideas about the everyday. Students seem to be enjoying it. But reading and teaching about such things always gets me reflecting on everyday practices, naturally enough.

We read Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body” which got me reflecting on when and where people walk around clasping their hands behind their backs (it’s either very formal, like in school or a form of attention, or quite informal—a stroll, though the latter seems to be a generational thing; do people do this anymore?).

The other somewhat random thought came up when the A/C system kicked on a bit earlier today. The thermostat is programmed by time of day and day of the week, so you can set it to your habits, or the habits of the household. When we first moved into this house years ago, it was set to someone else’s everyday. There was the preferred temperature (and preferred nighttime temp, daytime temp, etc.). But also the timer gives a clue to the schedule of the house: when it first kicks on (people are waking up), kicks back off (people have gone to school or work; or perhaps it doesn’t kick back off if they stay at home), back on in the afternoon (when expected home from school or work), and back off in the evening (when we go to bed); with different patterns for the weekend (does it shut off Sunday morning when you’re not expected to be at home?). Until I figured out how to change the programming, we were living in a house set for another family, continually overriding their everyday. It’s about the ways the everyday accretes in technologies and spaces.

in the news (old)

A former student of mine just sent me a copy of an article from last January from a college newspaper, The College Times. I remember talking with the reporter, but never saw the issue. So this is 8 months old, and I'm cited several times later on.
FWIW.

Beyond the Lighted Stage

Quite enjoying this documentary of Rush. Lots of old footage and interviews. Doesn't presume you're a fan. Deals with the seemingly utter lack of respect the band gets from rock critics (and reads out choice excerpts of scathing reviews). But as a portrait of a group of friends who have managed to hang together as a band for 40 years (accumulating the most consecutive gold or platinum albums except for the Beatles or the Rolling Stones), it's quite good. There's no scandal here, and none of the usual heavy metal excesses. Geddy, at the end, says that he told the filmmakers they were making a mistake: the band was just too boring. They're not boring, however, but are funny, reflective, honest guys (who happed to be extremely talented musicians). The documentary quietly skips a few late 80s albums (e.g., Presto), which is probably for the best :)

New Old Media

Picked this up in the Night Market in Hong Kong (my, that sounds exotic!).

Apparently it's a Seagull brand, but I haven't been able to trace much beyond that. What's different from the other Seagull TLR's that I can find online is that there is a figure of a rose on the top of the camera.

Professor

Just got promoted to Full Professor!

Next stop: Emeritus! :)
Eventually.
Maybe.

Surveillance Birdhouse

I love this!
http://sleekidentity.com/products/detail/wolfgang-s-birdhouse-Dennis-Clasen/

Up in the Air

Interesting reflection on non-places and hyperreality. In some ways, we could read George Clooney’s character’s (Ryan Bingham) life as the condition of postmodernity: living in the in-between, in non-spaces which are all shiny surface, desire collecting around rewards points and mileage levels, ephemeral signs of status. In this way, given the films critique of Bingham’s life, could this be a parable of the end of the postmodern?

There is a parallel of the airworld nonspace with another one: cyberspace. The plot revolves around a scheme to fire people online rather than face to face (and someone breaks up with their fiancée via text message). It seems the same shallow, friction-free space as the postmodern world of airports and chain hotels. The next generation, embodied in the up and coming Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick), seems heading towards the same disconnect as Bingham.

The film offers no simple solutions (for which I was grateful), though it being a Hollywood film it makes some predictable conclusions (triumph of humanity over technology—that shouldn’t be a spoiler, by the way), though it does leave things, for some, up in the air.


[new post coming up on the Clickable World blog, too]

Rainbows

Ain't Got Time to Blog just crept past 3,000 views in the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, beautiful double rainbow in the sky this afternoon. Bright, vivid. Tried to capture some of it.



They stretched from horizon to horizon.



You can see how bright it was.

New Books

It's always a nice surprise when books appear, unbidden, in my mailbox. And if they are interesting and useful books, so much the better! So thanks to Oxford University Press for sending these on.

Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture looks great, chock full of interesting examples and approaches to television studies from economics to production to critical analysis. It makes me want to teach Television Studies again.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. A second edition of this excellent and influential text.

ICA

Start stocking up on the sunscreen, Communication Scholars! I just found out that ICA (The International Communication Association) will be in Phoenix in 2012. May 24-28. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I just saw it.

Lecturing in the Age of Distraction

Following on from Jonathan's comment on my post-before-last. I recently ran across an article on lecturing within the context of proliferating technologies of attention. Eric Gordon and David Bogen (Spring 2009) "Designing Choreographies for the 'New Economy of Attention.'" DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(2).

It's an interesting article arguing how we should try to leverage the advantages of the new technologies to enrich lectures, rather than just fighting against them. Though in some ways it's like saying that the bucket has holes and the water is pouring out. Rather than plugging the holes, we should explore what the leaks have to offer the situation. Teachers should be sensitive to the means of communication and habits of thought and life of their students and be somewhat adaptable, flexible, and creative in that regard, but at the same time the students need to meet us at least half way. When they're signed up for a class, they should be in the class and make every effort to participate and pay attention (though perhaps I'm just old-fashioned). The article presents a number of suggestions for choreographing all these means of distraction and attention as part of the lecture. But I think there's a fine line between creatively engaging the situation and catering to rude behavior (electronically based or not, passing notes is passing notes).

Just my 2 cents.

Surveillance (2008)

To be disappointed in Jennifer Lynch's film, "Surveillance," which I just saw on DVD, would mean that I actually had high expectations in the first place. Since I had none (given some of the critical responses I've read), I was not disappointed. For a film that tries its hardest to be disturbing and shocking and brutal, it ended up being fairly affectless I thought. It's a mess, and not in a good way. It's got great actors, but the performances are all twitches and eccentricities (and not in a good way). The plot is predictable, the images gruesome in a fairly banal way (which is precisely the way death and pain and gore and brutality should NOT be represented, IMHO) or so studied that one finds oneself looking at it saying, "oh, I see, that's supposed to be creepy the way he leans in to the camera that way." Comparisons with her father's work are perhaps not fair, but the film keeps referring to her father's work and trying to mine the same territory. Even if I had not known she was David Lynch's daughter I would have found myself saying, "Wow. David Lynch did that so much better, and on broadcast TV to boot!"

What I *am* disappointed about concerned the film is that it's really not about surveillance. Yes, there is a conceit that witnesses in three separate rooms recount their stories while being filmed by Bill Pullman (who supposedly is closely attending to all three people talking at once), but nothing is really made of it. It's not really even a device. The only bit that is really about surveillance is the realization that the little girl is the real surveillor, who watches and understands much more than everyone else.

Distraction

"Workers on average spend just eleven minutes on a project before switching to another, and while focusing on a project, typically change tasks every three minutes....Once distracted, we take about twenty-five minutes to return to an interrupted task and usually plunge into two other work projects in the interim....Nearly 45 percent of workplace interruptions are self-initiated. (And when workers interrupt themselves, they take slightly longer to resume their original work--about twenty-eight minutes on average."
Maggie Jackson, Distracted, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. pp 84-86.
Jackson is referring to Gloria Mark, Victor Gonzalez, and Justin Harris, "No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work," Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (Portland, OR, 2005).

You mean it's not just me?

Get a Master's in Surveillance

City University London now offers an MA in Surveillance Studies, starting this semester.

Random Quote

This wasn't a meme or anything. I was dusting and randomly pulled off the shelf Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (which I've never read; I'm not a big Dreiser fan), opened to a random page and was drawn to this paragraph:

People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
p. 115, Signet edition, (1961)

Books/Reading

Stack of last minute, late summer reading (less than 2 weeks before school starts).

Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. Hill & Wang, 2009. Just about done with this. Whereas Clark (below) still, in the end, separates consciousness from the world, Noe does not. Noe: "Notably, neither Clark not Chalmers has sympathy for the idea developed here that consciousness itself can be explained only if we make use of such an extended conception of the machinery of the mind" (p. 196)

Andy Clark, Supersizing the Miind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford, 2008.

Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The erosion of attention and the coming dark age. Prometheus Books, 2008. Got this last summer, but finally sitting down to work my way through it. It really brings in a broad range of research.

Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The Penguin Press (2009).
Somewhat disappointed in this; it's more "lite" than Gallagher (which is more densely researched). Though as an argument for the need to pay attention in life, especially to others in one's life, to meditate, &c. it's a useful book.

Hal Niedzviecki, The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. CityLights Books. Just starting on it; it seems a fun read. (Thanks to Greg S for the recommendation)

And I've been lapped by Thomas Pynchon. His latest, Inherent Vice, is on the bedside table. Just six pages, in, but it's reading fast and seems lots of fun. Meanwhile, I'm still only on p. 322 of his last one, Against the Day, which I really like, but don't get great swaths of time to read. 763 pages to go (and the font's a couple points smaller than Inherent Vice, too)!

Still haven't cracked Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and am just over halfway through Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, which doesn't quite have the spark of the earlier ones in the series. Every few months I pick it up and read a couple of chapters.

Peeping Tom

Just finished watching Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). I’ve noticed that the film is often mentioned as an early and influential film regarding voyeurism and surveillance. However, I haven’t seen it discussed much in the surveillance literature beyond the fact that it’s about a disturbed individual who stalks women with a specially prepared camera with a knife in the tripod leg so he can film them as they die. The film is obviously quite Freudian (in fact, the writer and director had initially wanted to do a film about Freudian thought, but someone else was doing it so they did this instead). Mark, the filmmaker who is the murderer, was abused by his father, a psychiatrist who was studying fear and using his son as a case study by terrorizing him and coldly watching his reactions. But not only is he watching his son’s reactions, he is filming them. Indeed, Mark is subject as a young boy to constant surveillance. He says he was filmed constantly, even while he slept, and his entire house was wired for sound. In this way the film plays an interesting articulations between obsessive voyeurism (of the father) and the scientific gaze. These traits are passed down to Mark: his father gives him a camera of his own, another psychiatrist tells the grown up Mark that he has his father’s eyes, and Mark now controls his father’s house and his father’s instruments. What makes this really creepy is that Mark’s father is played in the old films that Mark shows by the director, Michael Powell, and the young Mark is played by Powell’s real son, and in the scene where child Mark is shown by the corpse of his mother—that’s his real mother (Powell’s wife) on the bed (presumably alive).

The commentary track on the Criterion DVD is by none other than Laura Mulvey. If you want a master class in psychoanalytic film criticism, watch the film with this commentary. There’s also a documentary on the writer, Leo Marks, which connects the film with the bookstore at 24 Charing Cross Road and WWII cryptography.

The film was incredibly controversial, universally panned by critics, who were shocked by its content. Carl Boehm, who plays Mark, comments in the accompanying documentary that after the press screening no one would even look he or Powell in the eye as they left the theater. The film was pulled from theaters after a week and promptly forgotten; Powell’s career ended. Apparently we know of the film today because Martin Scorsese discovered it and championed it in the 1970s as a masterpiece. Since the film is really about being a filmmaker (voyeurism and sadism and the camera), it’s an interesting self-reflexive exercise that unnerves the audience (and perhaps the early critics). It implicates us, the audience, in the voyeurism more directly than even a slasher film since it is self aware (this film keeps reminding us that we’re watching a film, since it makes us watch films in the film). The content of the film was also shocking for the time: the first shot of the film is of a prostitute being stalked by the killer; and from the underground pornography sold at the newsagents to the first shot of nudity in a mainstream British film its content pushes boundaries. The fact that we may feel sorry for this tortured man is also controversial.

Alfred Hitchcock (with whom Powell worked at one point) refused to do a critic’s screening for Psycho (which premiered a few months after Peeping Tom) because of what they had done to Powell’s film. Hitchcock thought his film was much more shocking. [This was mentioned in some of the supplemental material]

Ebert's got a discussion of the film here

Scorsese writes about the film here

CCTV at home

Newest intervention into "problem families": put CCTV in the home to make sure everyone behaves! This isn't control society stuff, this is simply the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms Foucault talked about. If you're a "problem" ("the worst families in England"; the Daily Mail calls them "Yobbish families"), now the State will tell you how to behave and watch you so you learn. They're calling the set up "sin bins." The papers like the Orwellian metaphor (The State placing cameras in the home; in England) though Big Brother watched everyone. This is discipline, pure and simple: render visible, document, differentiate.

How I wish this were April 1.

Sigh

Got the link from WIRED via Huffington Post originally.

Summer Heat

This is what happens when one leaves unopened soda cans in a car in the sun when the outside temperature reaches close to 115 degrees F. One can literally blew its top (kinda messy). All the others in the case are distended like the other one pictured here.

Hmmmm... do you think these are still drinkable?

Bookstores

I was reading Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print and came across a passage where he writes, “This discovery helps to explain the motivation behind the aggressive campaign by Waldenbooks in the late 1980s to bring its warehouses and 1,000 plus retail stores online…” (100).

Working, as I was, at a Waldenbooks (Summer and Fall 1988 in San Antonio), it made me reflect on the changes I was seeing in our little mall store at the time. This was the year between my undergraduate degree and starting grad school, when I was actually shopping for grad schools. I had just been to ICA in New Orleans to meet Larry (and James and a number of other folks) to talk about Illinois (and to talk about Wisconsin with Fiske). Anyway, I worked full time at a Waldenbooks in a mall in San Antonio. I liked the store because the manager had customized the stock a bit—we actually had copies of Foucault and other critical theorists on our shelves, and other more esoteric volumes tucked in with the usual wares. We were not computerized in those days. We hand entered ISBN’s, I think, into the register. Then we actually got our first scanner so that we could scan bar codes (and spent too much time playing with it). To look up something for a customer meant pulling out microfiches from Ingram or Baker and Taylor to see if they had things.

At some point in my six-month tenure at the bookstore (around Thanksgiving I quit and went to work for a small mail order company, Haverstick and Ballyk, selling classical CDs) we started getting inventory lists from the main office. These were lists of what we were to have on our shelves and we had to go through and pull anything not on it (bye bye Foucault). I got the sense that our store manager was getting increasingly frustrated by the controlling nature of the corporation (trying to rebel at one point by shelving an entire display of a new bestseller, dictated by the corporation, upside down--the Assistant Managers put them right). Anyway, the store became much less interesting after the purge.

One of the things that Waldenbooks did was run a deep discount of all New York Times bestsellers. What surprised me is that the company seemed to know what a bestseller was before a book was even released. So that the new Ludlum (for example) was discounted right out of the box even though, technically, it hadn’t been sold and couldn’t therefore be a bestseller.