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.
