"A Christmas Trololo:" Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunities and Mocking Nostalgia (A Remix)

I just discovered the YouTube video, "A Christmas Trololo," which posits spatiotemporal critical opportunities in cyberspace through multimodal mashup. Completely subverting modern school-choir styling while aping mainstream Christmas aesthetics, "A Christmas Trololo" parodies the American tradition of teaching school children to sing pseudo-secular seasonal songs. (Try saying that five times fast.) The strange mixture of carnival masks, ironic choreography, deep internet literacies and references, a live pit band, and an audience of proud singing parents, works to conjure a mediated nostaligia while simultaneously exposing the way internet meme culture has affected all areas of American culture (and specifically within this example, Christmas and childhood education). The Gifford Children's Choir conjures a nostalgia that is directly tethered to American educational aesthetics, while simultaneously mocking the excessive work that parents and educators invest in holiday performance rituals and the overal cultural and economic currency in internet aesthetics. This kind of internet aesthetics reconstruction/deconstruction project raises the question of: what's the current relationship between aesthetics and content within American schools (be they public or private), and how does this relationship affect students' experiences? I find it really interesting how the spatiotemporal aesthetic underpinnings of internet culture in 2011 (and, by extension, Soviet Russian culture of 1976) are now having this kind of conversation with our educational system. In this shift we can see the way in which physical and virtual identities are substantially bound together in ways that were inconceivable in 1976, positing an understanding of aesthetics and content as not only bound together but almost indecipherable and absent of distinction.

On an aside, I've here remixed Jessica's blogpost from yesterday, "The Geocities-izer: Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunites and Mocking Nostalgia," in an effort to playfully gesture at the great conversations we've had this semester, and the way those conversations will continue to affect my thinking in a super great way. Too, I think Jessica's post can serve as an exemplar for how we might keep our class's conversation from trending too quickly and subsequently dying out equally as fast. In one sense, this kind of blogpost-remix points to the evolutionary speed of academic culture and aesthetics, as well as to the trending possibilities and detriments associated to this temporal understanding of academic consumption within cyberspace. In another sense, it points to something one might do, in the absence of assigned readings, if one were, say, a blogpost or two short for the semester.

The Geocities-izer: Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunites and Mocking Nostalgia

I just discovered the website The Geocities-izer, which posits spatiotemporal critical opportunities within cyberspace and web design. Completely destroying modern styling within web 2.0 design aesthetics, Geocities-izer makes "any website look like it was made by a 13-year old in 1996." It defaces web 2.0 CS5 and CSS aesthetics of clean, attractive design that yield a seamless user-experience. Try the New York Times newspaper website, for example. The reorientation of font, tacky GIFs, loud background colors, and the automated midi's version of British alt-rock band Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" playing on max volume (for best effect), works to conjure a mediated nostalgia of the 1990s while simultaneously exposing the heightened branding mechanisms that have entered current web design (and specifically within this example, in online newspaper branding). The Geocities-izer conjures a nostalgia that is directly tethered to 90s computer programming and internet aesthetics, while simultaneously mocking the excessive work that companies now invest in their correlative internet images and the overall cultural and economic currency in internet aesthetics. This kind of internet aesthetics reconstruction/deconstruction project raises the question of: what's the current relationship between aesthetics and content within internet identities (be it professional companies, individuals, etc.), and how does this relationship affect user-experience? I find it really interesting how the spatiotemporal aesthetic underpinnings of internet culture (and pop culture) in 1996 are now having this kind of conversation with contemporary web design and image. In this shift we can see the way in which physical and virtual identities are substantially bound together in ways that were inconceivable in 1996, positing an understanding of aesthetics and content as not only bound together but almost indecipherable and absent of distinction.

On an aside, the friend who shared this site with me, did so by intentionally posting it on my Facebook wall rather than posting it in his personal (and more public) feed. His reservations with public sharing of this site deal directly with his desire to save The Geocities-izer from trending too quickly and subsequently dying out equally as fast. In one sense, this kind of anxiety points to the evolutionary speed of internet culture and aesthetics, as well as to the trending possibilities and detriments associated to this temporal understanding of cultural consumption within cyberspace.

Outsourced Sex Education via Ouellette: revisiting Anna McCarthy's "Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering"

There’s a talk being held tomorrow at Annenberg, hosted by Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, that I find really relevant to our work during the week of November 14th on displaced civic support and responsibility from governmental programming to the private sector. Here’s the info on the talk:

Monday, November 28 at 12P in Annenberg Room 207 will be Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies, University of Minnesota. Her topic: “It's Not TV, It’s Birth Control: Reality Television and the ‘Problem’ of Teenage Pregnancy”
>From Professor Ouellette:
"This talk considers the recent deployment of reality entertainment (Baby Borrowers, Dad Camp, 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) as “birth control.” Why have commercial television and cable networks taken up biopolitical objectives? What possibilities and contradictions emerge when sex education is outsourced to commercial media? I situate recent reality interventions within gendered circuits of post-welfare governmentality in the United States and show how they fit within a genealogy of thinking and acting on the “problem” of teenage pregnancy."

Ouellette’s look at how reality television stands in as “birth control” points to Anna McCarthy’s similar interest in locating the work that reality television performs upon the viewer in reiterating national values while activating the viewer in an illusion of participation and prevention within a specific value-set. McCarthy states that “...some aspect of the work of the state in the realm of social citizenship - work that may be reparative, in the case of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or punitive, in the case of Judge Judy - seems to have been outsourced to the private sector, specifically television, and individualized in particular selves and experiences.” McCarthy’s notion of outsourced civic work can directly be seen in the influx of teen pregnancy reality programming that Ouellette cites in her research on outsourced sex education. As McCarthy recognizes with court television (but which can be applied in a larger context to reality television altogether), reality television is a space where “governance and entertainment blend together” (18). The ways in which teenage pregnancy reality television takes on the two disparate notions of ‘governance’ and ‘entertainment’ becomes highly problematic when recognizing their merge within the work of ‘sex education’. Questions that come up for me are: are the values within reality television of crisis, drama and shame - values that operate toward an entertainment value-set -- entering into the work of sex education for the viewer? How is relishing in the ‘mistakes’ of pregnancy operating toward a specific type of sex education? Does this perspective lean toward a more abstinence-based sex education, or an education geared more toward behavioral and preventative knowledge as well as awareness of public health resources and access? Also, looking at the ways in which women’s health and birth control resources are being pushed to the periphery within the last few months, significantly aligns with this influx of sex education programming within the televisual realm. This kind of governmental depletion of women’s health support directly feeds into the questions I raise above in terms of the specific type of sex education that reality television is producing.
Moreover, in considering teen pregnancy (and youthful pregnancy at large -- seeping into the early 20-something age range) within the realm of ‘celebrity’ as exhibited in other televisual and online/print media outlets, the work of reality television to this specific sex education end becomes extremely problematized. With news and entertainment televisual programming that takes up celebrity pregnancies (see Hillary Duff, Jamie Spears, Bristol Palin), the sex education premise seems to be diluted. These are not your common, anonymous, middle-class teens; they’re seamlessly having children, and can monetarily afford to take care of their children while maintaining their careers (or high school career?) with ease. Moreover, in light of their celebrity identities, these pregnancies are not necessarily deemed ‘mistakes’; the notion of ‘mistake’ leaks over from the reality television shows like 16 and Pregnant, but seems to be less prevalent within these examples of ‘successful youthful moms’. These archetypes of success in relation to the archetypes of disaster that both feed into the notion of youthful pregnancy share the same televisual space (and many times share the same televisual audience), which even moreso produces a flawed sex education program within realm of the private sphere of media.
I’m really looking forward to Ouellette’s talk, and thought I’d share this with you in the case that you missed the ZdC email update about the event! Seems like it’ll be really interesting and relevant to our work.

More Flashmobs -- Paper for Group Workshop

The on-going progress of this paper. Constructive criticism welcome, as always.... ---- “The Playful Politics of the Flash Mob”

Over the past decade flash mobs have risen as a global phenomena, temporarily transforming and transporting real spaces and people into a game-like space of “pretend,” and uniting communities across geopolitical boundaries through virtual media in the spirit of play. Though flash mobs can be games, with clear rules and uncertain outcomes (such as in the ‘Humans vs. Zombies’ game at the recent Indiecade convention in Culver City), as a matter of definition flash mobs are not strictly gamic--more often then not, though there are clearly defined rules and roles for every participant, the outcome of a flash mob is certain and predefined (ex. through the completion of a dance routine or other prespecified action). Yet, to anyone who has ever participated in or observed a flash mob, there is also something undeniably playful and game-like about it. The following flash mob video demonstrates this as participants slowly join in the Antwerp Station ‘Do-Re-Mi’ mob:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQLCZOG202k

This essential playfulness that is so akin to the reality of social gaming lies in the flash mob’s ability to create the “Magic Circle”--a term first coined by game studies theorist Johan Huizinga. Flash mobs offer a particularly useful demonstration of this concept as onlookers inevitably form a circular perimeter around the play-space (as seen in the video above.) In “The Definition of Play,” Roger Caillois elucidates on Johan Huizinga conceptualization of this magic circle and further defines it as a playful space that lies outside the traditional contexts of everyday reality:

In effect, play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place. There is place for play... nothing that takes place outside this ideal frontier is relevant... The same is true for time: the game starts and ends at a given signal... In every case, the game's domain is therefore a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space. (Caillois 125)

To this end, though flash mobs are not in essence games, their playfulness still invokes the transient, ‘pure space’ of the magic circle. It is on this basis that this paper moves forward to examine how flash mobs use the safety of the magic circle to engage with the contextual, geopolitical realities of their physically occupied spaces.

We begin first with three basic understandings of the flash mob:
1) That flash mobs provide transient, suspended (playful) realities in otherwise socially, economically, and politically ‘landlocked’ spaces. In the example of the flash mob provided above, the Antwerp Station is a specific locale with ever present cultural, political, and socioeconomic ties and connotations, which are only temporarily suspended by the flash mob’s invocation of the magic circle. (As seen in the survey of participants who appear to be from varied demographic backgrounds that might in other case be completely removed from each other within the station.)
2) That flash mobs mobilize urban populations into these spaces via social media--Facebook and Twitter, predominantly.
3) That social media is the mechanism for mobilization as well as viralization, communicating with global populations beyond the extent of the flash mob and activating new bases.

Despite the playful departure from reality that flash mobs provide, they are also inherently locative, drawing the keen attention of the participants and the observers to the space of mobilization and the social, political, and economic context of the space that is both being engaged and ruptured by the flash mob’s act of play. As a result, flash mobs also offer an opportunity for populations to engage with their local identities, within the safety of a positive space that is temporarily disengaged from the socioeconomic-political ramifications of such discourse.

The following flash mob video from the 2011 Bayonne Festivals demonstrates this clearly as the chief organizer quickly describes the variables involved in creating a flash mob, with a particular emphasis on identity (as expressed through their chosen colors, which reflect both their identities within teams and nationalities) and space-placement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG24E0EbQ7E

This point becomes even clearer when considering flash mob videos--arguably the final evolution and maturation of this play form--from a semiotic perspective. Typically, the title of every flash mob video follows a generic formula: [song/content/activity] + [location] + [date]. Occasionally the date will be omitted, though its inclusion only further proves the ephemeral quality of the mob. Yet, the location is vital to its identification, as seen in the following flash mob video from the Piazza Duomo in Italy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7zvoM2Frko

A mob such as the one above inextricably links itself to the space it occupies, both in term of identity (as seen in the naming of videos) as well as engaging with it physically. In watching the above video, observers cannot help but associate the context of the Piazza Duomo--historically, politically, etc.--while watching the flash mob dancers. In doing so, flash mobs create a paradox within the magic circle; they create a positive, ‘pure space’, but at the same time still actively interrogate the contextual realities of the occupied space in which it occurs.

In terms of the broader picture, as a result of this space entanglement, flash mobs also engage with the concept of global citizenship at a viral level. As an organism, a flash mob is born within virtual media, as the mobilizing call ventures forth through Facebook or Twitter, and then later returns to the Internet via Youtube or other video sharing sites, fully developed and executed, where it then spawns, its footage posted and reposted hundreds or thousands of times, and inspires half a dozen more flash mobs across the globe. The memorial flash mobs for Michael Jackson demonstrate this point particularly, as one tribute video from the Netherlands surfaced on the internet, it inspired a new flash mob in Sweden, which inspired one in San Francisco, which inspired a massive one in Mexico, and so and so on to the point where the Cebu prison in the Philippines--famous for its prisoners’ Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ tribute several years before--produced its own Michael Jackson memorial tribute (with extremely high production values) weeks later. To be a part of a flash mob is to claim both local and global citizenship, as the mobs coalesce around ideas and events that flow across boundaries and through social media.

San Francisco MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gHnZJTs8K4
Mexico MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7z8ZiRcQ9Q
Cebu Prison MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZC6JuTlOVM

As a result of this global-local engagement, the previous observations about flash mobs need to be revised:

1) Flash mobs are not entirely removed from their social, political, and economic contexts, but rather create positive, ‘pure spaces’ through the invocation of play, which are not denuded of context but rendered harmless and safe within the transience of their space.
2) In offering this positive space, flash mobs provide populations the opportunity to engage with ideas of global-local identity as well as the social, economic, and political contexts of their spaces through the act of mobilization.
3) That flash mobs are inherently products of social media and global communication, thus flash mobs also offer crucial intersections for engaging global-local citizenship.

Yet, within all flash mobs there is the tacit threat of “real” urban mobilization--a threat that we have seen play out in real time increasingly over the past year. Returning to the idea of flash mobs as play, Gregory Bateson theorizes both play and games as forms of metacommunication; what is demonstrated, acted out, or “played” with inside the playful space gestures towards another action or communication that exists in external reality. In flash mobs, the underlying metacommunication is that of urban mobilization--a potential threat that is continually rendered harmless through the flash mob’s playfulness and transience. The current fascination with flash mobs has as much to do with the idealistic, “spaceship earth” mentality that they can engender as it does with their implicit dark side: every flash mob holds the potential to become an angry mob. The Cebu prisoners’ Michael Jackson tribute is particularly haunting for this reason; though the intent is to invoke community and solidarity, a video of several hundred mobilized prison inmates shouting, “they don’t care about us” gestures a little too far towards the aggressive and destructive potential of the flash mob.

These videos of recent protests around the globe are the realities behind the threat of the flash mob:

Egypt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xWiBCIxjIk
London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhmF5p2Z7Ec
California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy6LQlpemiw

What is particularly noteworthy in each of these videos is that they all show the extreme ramifications of urban mobilization and assemblage within geopolitical contexts and without a pure space--in short: reactionary police and government action. When the bubble of suspended reality and positive space around the flash mob ‘pops’, the mob becomes politicized, sometimes aggressive, and lingering. Such a threat is particularly pertinent at this moment, in the wake of the London riots as well as the ongoing evolution of both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Each of these instances has relied upon the same social media resources to mobilize urban populations--some violently, some not--yet each of these is a flash mob after the “play” gets taken away; the people remain, still engaging with their global-local identities and their political, social, and economic realities, but the safety of a positive, playful space has disappeared.

Interestingly, though the safety of a play-space disappears with these mobs, many of them still gesture towards the playful spirit of flash mobs, as though to mitigate the tacit threat of urban mobilization. We saw this frequent in the (mostly) peaceful revolutions and protests across the Middle East and Africa in the past year as many participants in the non-violent protests often referred to their assembling in terms of a “flash mob,” despite their political motivations. More recently (and still on going), we see this in the Occupy movement across our country. Though some violence has erupted--predominantly around forced or poorly coordinate dconfrontations between police and demonstrators--the Occupiers have remained peaceful (if stubborn) and, more often then not, playful. We see this best in their picket signs:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/fjelstud/the-best-signs-from-occupy-wall-street

Most of them are ironic, some of them are outright angry, but many of them draw on a sense of humor and even a dark playfulness that gestures back towards the fun and toothlessness of the flash mobs and the playful space.

Revised Paper Abstract

I'm writing on filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary series, specifically situating her project as reflective of her anxiety associated with the United States national historical erasure that marks Korean transnational adoption, which is an erasure that has led to a subsequent Asian adoption movement that has increasingly become globally popular since the Korean War. I am positioning Deann's media project as reflective of her ultimate concern for the repercussions of history-unwritten or forgotten --- repercussions embodied by the contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American contemporary culture, specifically within the show Modern Family.

For me, what makes Liem’s personal story and her overall project of rewriting the Korean adoption experience and the ‘adoptee diaspora’ so interesting, is the way in which she takes up the documentary form in a serial model, and the way in which her historical rewriting project evolves within this serial model. She introduced her personal story with Third Person Plural (2000), where she maps out her journey as a Korean adoptee in realizing and accepting her three separate identities, bringing together her American and Korean families in an effort to write and validate her personal history as well as come to terms with her notion of ‘home’ and homeland. She then produces a sequel documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009), which serves as her journey to find the girl whose identity she assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann is now developing a less-personal, more comprehensive documentary called Geographies of Kinship - The Korean Adoption Story, which follows six Korean adoptees from the U.S. and Europe who trace their diverse experiences with identity. Deann takes up the documentary form in order to validate her experience and a ‘history untold’, while using it in a serial and seemingly obsessive way that reflects her anxieties associated with the histories-unwritten and subsequent misrepresentations/partial representations that she has personally assumed within her identity as well as that mark Asian adoption altogether. Deann’s documentaries take up the fact that the Korean model of adoption has permanently influenced and changed the way adoption is performed on a global scale, and subsequently raises questions about the familial, assimilation, and identity.

Looking at Deann's documentary series with these specific lenses will yield insight on the necessity of her mission as both a personal and historical rewriting project as well as a gesture to fill historical gaps within the United States imaginary. Moreover, I position her project as reflective of her anxieties associated with a tenuous identity crisis that is both private and public, reflected in global and local paradigms, as well as an identity characterized by affective and capital labor (with specific psychological, cultural, and gendered implications and effects). I will be looking at the ways her three films articulate her identity crisis within the context of rewriting her history untold, specifically addressing the constitutions of her personal history, as well as the history of transnational Asian adoption. Lastly, (as stated above) I am suggesting that Deann’s fears associated with the historical erasure of Korean transnational adoption are materialized in contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American culture, specifically within the show Modern Family. Evidence of Deann’s anxieties associated with historical and cultural misrepresentation and erasure, manifest in the character Lily, daughter of gay couple Cameron and Mitchell. It’s in Lily’s vacant and mute demeanor (specifically in Season 1), that reveal a national erasure of history that Deann cannot seem to overcome.

Bibliography:
1. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
2. Richard Fung, “Seeing Yellow: Asian Identities in Film and Video”
3. Ali Behdad : A Forgetful Nation - On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the US
4. David L. Eng, Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
5. Haile Gerima “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs Lucy*”
6. Andreas Huyssen Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia

Any bibliography recommendations are absolutely welcome!

"The Republic of Tyra"

A follow up to the McCarthy reading...

McCarthy on this issue on Flow in 2005:

http://flowtv.org/2005/04/reality-television-political-economy-neoliberalism-american-idol-americas-top-model-government/

Ayn Rand was on the radio this morning

Or at least archival recordings of her were. Absent context, I imagine she might well have resented such 'public' (scare quotes intentional) coverage, but as it was a piece naming her the ideological darling of conservative Congress, she might have appreciated the publicly-sponsored radio piece, if not the taxes responsible. 

What struck me, as John Boehner and Republican Congress Inc. waxed poetic about her prescient treatment of Occupy Wall Street's and others' witch hunt of the country's beset and atrociously victimized job creators in Atlas Shrugged, was how the issues of scale and agency were variously treated in The Corporation and Couldry's article. The former contends (and I think we all agree) that transnational corporations benefit from all the might associated with international scale, along with all the protections conferred upon an individual agent, minus a moral compass. Ira Jackson avers, capitalism is "amoral" (The Corporation); it is just a system. Milton Friedman asserts it makes no more sense to expect a corporation to act ethically than a building (The Corporation). Cute. Only a cursory examination of a building or a plan for a building tells us volumes about the political economy and social considerations (or lack thereof) constitutive of it, so we can rightly expect to look at corporations for cultural reflections (or lack thereof) and make normative assessments. Neither Friedman, nor any of the CEOs interviewed in the film, and certainly not any of Congress's Ayn Rand Reading Club devotees, seem the least bit preoccupied with the paradox of crying, "You hurt our corporate feelings," given the fact that the only human qualities inherent to a corporation are its individual rights and the shareholders that drive its increasingly immoral actions. 

Couldry's interest in scale is different, certainly, but he understands what the defendants of capitalism won't. "Scale is always a social construction" (28). Economic processes are not an inevitability. When we say that something is "too big to fail," we must first agree what "failure" means. Because at this point I think we can safely say that the only people in this recession that have gotten jobs are bankers. . . who have done a terrible job with their probationary extension. This is not Couldry's vantage point, but his call for "a more improvised microfocus" (28) is well-taken. The "too big" agents have obscured our possibilities for possibility, for a world where we really do look first to Sen's capability theory, knowing and not proposing that social and political values are more important than are economic ones. Moreover, and this is something I hope to speak about a bit more tomorrow, I feel as though Couldry might have written this piece with the Out the Window project in mind. (It's not my project, I'm just the researcher, so I really don't flatter myself by making this connection.) It is at once a hopeful expression of local possibilities and innovations, where people are generating "new contexts of public communication and trust, whether as frameworks primarily for consumption or for citizen participation (or both)" (26), as well as an institutional learning moment. Wuthnow's emergent "institutional frameworks" and "action sequences" abound, more successful at the grassroots level and increasingly complicated, almost stymied, as we approach the institutional scale.