conclusion to my final on theory as method

Writing long essays under deadline is often a process of working out your thinking as you go. Here is one paragraph i can believe in…

Engaging theoretical explanation as method poses a danger of intellectual isolationism. Theory too far removed from lived experience becomes self-referential and loses its potency. Wheaton (2007) purposefully limits her analysis of Surfers Against Sewage to exclude the group’s “real impact in policy terms” (p. 284). Perhaps such examination of the ‘real’ is taken up by the author elsewhere, but material outcomes, especially those concerning systems of power such as policy and legislation, must not be cast aside as insignificant to theoretical analysis. A challenge for communications scholars moving forward is to continue to develop sensitized concepts, while at the same time exploring ways to make our work accessible and relevant to the world beyond academic publications. Like the junior scholars in Latina/o studies referenced in Valdivia’s article, we must “envision an expanding scholarship that leads to greater social justice” (p. 7). Taking this goal seriously, we would do well to follow Gramsci, whose “theoretical writing was developed out of [an] organic engagement with his own society and times and was always intended to serve, not an abstract academic purpose, but the aim of ‘informing political practice’” (Hall, 1986, p. 5).

Hall, S. (1986). Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2).

Valdivia, A. (2008). Is my butt your island? The myth of discovery and contemporary Latina/o communication studies. In A. Valdivia (Ed.), Latina/o communication studies today. New York: Peter Lang.

Wheaton, B. (2007). Identity, politics, and the beach: Environmental activism in Surfers Against Sewage. Leisure Studies, 26(3).

How Taxes Really Work: email forward and response

About a week ago an email list of close friends got an interesting forward about the tax system. Perhaps you’ve seen this floating around the interweb. A friend of mine came up with a pretty great response, to which I added a post script. See what you think:

Original “Tax Lesson” forward:

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go
something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all
such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily
beers by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.’

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the
first four men were unaffected.

They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the
paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone
would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33.
But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and
the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill
by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each
should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings). The
sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings). The seventh now pay $5 instead
of $7 (28%savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings). The
ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings). The tenth now paid $49
instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before and the first four continued to
drink for free, but once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare
their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’ declared the sixth man.
He pointed to the tenth man, ‘but he got $10!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’
exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he
got TEN times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I
got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get
anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down
and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they
discovered something very important….they didn’t have enough money between
all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax
system works.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax
reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just
may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where
the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Here is my friend’s reply (with just a bit of editing):

Hmm…
The problem with this analogy is that that #1 poor guy and the #10 rich guy are drinking in the same bar, which would never happen.

In reality, the #10 guy pays more so he can have:
roads built to get him to his swanky bar, public works to clear the snow from the valet stand and clean the streets around the bar, police and fire resources to keep his bar safe, public transit into his downtown bar so his table gets cleared by busboys and so that a nice #2 can hand him a towel to dry his hands, homeless shelters to keep the “bums” out of the alley behind his condo, schools to help the #1’s kids grow up to be #4s that don’t need the help, prisons to keep his #10 family “safe”…

…And all with enough money left over to make sure that high real estate prices and gated communities keeps those #1-#4s out of their neighborhoods.

But I see your point…

To which I would only add:

But you forgot one important part of the story. #10 got rich in the first place because the company that’s been in his family for a few generations happens to know people in Washington, who happen to arrange the sub-contracting (aka “privatizing”) of most government functions like paving those roads or running health care or rebuilding newly destroyed middle eastern countries. So really, all that money in #10’s bank roll is actually the redistributed taxes of the bottom 9. I can make a flow chart if you want.

How controversial…

Bankrupting Hate

Finally, these ignorant fools are going down:

Gods hates Westboro Baptist Church

This article is great and it says it all.

Whack-a-Murdoch

Whack-a-Murdoch if you dare. Excellent.

Some thoughts on graduate school…

My neighbors and I were talking the other day about the information overload that comes as a part of grad education. Here’s a good metaphor we pieced together…

It’s like an intellectual free-climb. This wall you are climbing, this Olympus, is your field. Each concept or piece of writing or body of thought or mode of organizing the world that you come into contact with is a possible handhold. As you move through your education you try out all sorts of possibilities. There is no one way to climb this facade; the number of individual handholds is endless. Some concepts seem solid but you feel like many others could never support your weight. You try to develop a frame of reference, a map of where you’ve been, but your goal is never to reach any summit, only to establish a trajectory. To move in a direction. To strive for progress.

Your path is anything but linear, dependent upon reading lists, faculty research pursuits, assistantships, current socio-politico-economic events, and if there is time, even your own personal interests. As you climb, new footholds become available even as familiar outcroppings that you have relied on begin to crumble. Those you passed by, when taken from a new approach, may prove strong for you after all. Choose your battles, always keep an open mind. And remember, if all else fails, there is little shame in getting the hell off of the mountain and going to pizza hut.

Recent Project – NYT home page

I fell off the blog for a while this spring. I blame the emergence of nice weather, cross-Atlantic excursions, and finishing coursework for my degree! Granted, I do still have a ton of independent work to do this summer (including getting my video web logging study ready to submit for publication! more on that later), but I don’t have to physically sit in any classrooms. This makes me happy.

One of my projects for this quarter was a rhetorical design analysis of the New York Times home page. Overall, I’m glad I took the class that this project came out of, but I’ve found rhetorical analysis of design a little empty. I will completely own up to the fact that mine is no landmark study, but I did spend a fair amount of time looking at the NYT from the analytical lenses we were given by the prof and I came up wanting. I can definitely see the usefulness in a straight-up functional analysis of design as in human computer interaction and usability testing. I can also see the value of a cultural/rhetorical study of the NYT home page as a “text” having all sorts of layers of political meanings, inclusions and exclusions, frames of discourse, etc. Separate the rhetorical examination and the design analysis and it’s easier to digest.

But we were supposed to look at the rhetoric of the design and I ended up sort of lightly treading through various authors’ semiotic frameworks (the icon is a sign, a picture, a symbol, etc.) and talking about Gestalt, which is de-bunked at this point…

I guess I didn’t come up with anything particularly constructive using the analytical tools we were directed to use. But this isn’t really my area of research and we get out what we put in… Anyway, I’d be more interested in looking closely at the relationship between the print and online versions of the paper or alternative methods for presenting information such as the interactive map I talk about in the project (in the Verbal Codings, Visual Codings section). This is a great example of leveraging the web to present information in a useful way and in a manner that could never happen in print.

I’m still here…

Just a reminder to myself really. Hopefully I can pick up again after my trip to the UK. Cheers mates.

TV TurnOff Week April 23-29

From Adbusters:

The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult – yet also how life-changing – a week spent unplugged can really be.

But there’s a lot more to TV Turnoff Week than shaking up your relationship with passive entertainment. It’s all about saying no to being bombarded with unwelcome and unhealthy commercial messages. It’s about saying no to unfettered corporate media concentration and to the democratic deficit that results. And it’s about challenging the heavily distorted reflection of the world that we see on the screen, a reflection that is keeping us ill-informed and unaware of the very real political and environmental crises that we all currently face.

This will be pretty easy for me since my roommate moved out and took the TV with him. I’m just gonna go with it.

Spam Surpasses Real Email…

Check this article from Nate Anderson Ars Technica.

DC projects that spam will increase to 40 billion message in 2007. That’s six or seven messages for every single person on the planet, and it will be higher than the volume of person-to-person e-mail sent this year.

Damn. But there is hope…

Although the volume of spam is rising, customers are not necessarily seeing much more of it in their client of choice. Filter technology has not stood still, either, and the vast majority of spam e-mails now end up in “spam” or “bulk mail” folders where they are rarely seen. As long as spammers continue to hawk products that our friends and acquaintances talk about rarely (how many of your friends e-mail you with hot tips about where to score sex-enhancing horny goat weed?), the Bayesian filters so popular with users should remain relatively effective. Emphasis on relatively.

Marx, Engels, Schmidt?

In preparation for an independent study this summer, I’m trying to learn more about Marx’s conception of culture. This is oversimplified, but foundationally Marx argues that our consciousness does not determine our social being, rather our social being, our means of organizing our economic existence, gives rise to and conditions our consciousness, our ideologies, our culture.

In a recent interview, Wired Magazine’s Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt a seemingly simple question. He wanted to know: “How should we think about Google today?”

Schmidt answered:

Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system – Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values – all that kind of stuff.

Maybe it’s just me trying to create connections between classical theory and this here modern life, but it’s interesting how folks (myself included) like to think about Google first and foremost as a paradigm shifter. After all, “free and accessible information for all” is their corporate ideology. Now we’ve got all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, information wants to be free, and so on. Yet the man who makes the big decisions says “first we are an advertising system, fourth (not second or third) we are an ideology.”

YouTube study update

For the past six weeks I’ve been trying to look more closely at vlogging (video web logging) on YouTube – a project for my qualitative methods class. I’ve been watching a lot of vlogs and then starting conversations with some of the people that create them. Some of the folks I contacted didn’t respond, but a good amount of people did. And while some responses were short, sort of courteous replies, others turned into extended correspondence. It’s been great to do this.

The paper is meant to be an ethnography, broadly defined as an interpretative study of a group of people, social practices, and their context. Its due in 10 days and its now clear that it will not read like a traditional ethnographic work, but this project has given me an introduction to a different sort of lens for looking at media. I will post some bits of it, which always works out better when it is written… more about this later.

This is a link to the channel for my YouTube accoun. What’s more exciting than vlogs about vlogs?

Guerrilla Marketing Mistaken for Terrorist Activity

On Jan. 31 the city of Boston stopped traffic on certain major highways and called in bomb squads and the FBI in response to what were perceived to be IEDs placed on or near bridges and other structural parts of highways. In reality the objects were blinking signs with a homemade look to them (think Batteries Not Included) depicting characters from Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force. This is bizarre to say the least, but it gets even stranger. Apparently two individuals were arrested in connection with the guerrilla marketing campaign and Turner Broadcasting is going ro reimburse the city of Boston for the expenses incurred as a result of the incident, reportedly up to $1 mil.

On one hand, given the current political atmosphere, it’s probably not the best idea to place unknown electronic objects in conspicuous places on public property. However, these devices were really just lite-brites depicting meatballs with faces. Moreover, this campaign was carried out in 10 cities, none of which went to the extremes that Boston did…

Here’s a much better and more detailed description of events.

My YouTube Study

For my qualitative research class this quarter I’m doing a project that has me trying some new things: my very first attempt at an ethnographic study and my first videoblog on YouTube. More on all this as it develops.

For now check this out, and by all means, if you know anyone that’s active on the YouTube site, send them my way.

American Accents

This has nothing to do with media, but it’s fun. And what the hell is a blog for if you can’t post what you want?
What American Accent Do You Have?
It helps to say the words out loud.
If you are curious, I speak in the humble tones of the “midlander.”

Finally, conservatives on TV

This article is hilarious. In her column titled: “Conservatives? On network TV? It’s true” with the byline:
“Long neglected, often stereotyped, red-state America can see a glimpse (or two) of hope emerging on the small screen,” author Melana Zyla Vickers rejoices the re-emergence of good old-fashioned female conservatism in television characters from shows such as Brothers & Sisters and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Thank you Ms. Vickers, for pointing out yet another obvious example of hollywood’s liberal bias and relating your crystal clear notion of diversity. I couldn’t make this up if I tried:

Vague hints of the new diversity came in 2005-06, with Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross) owning a gun on ABC’s Desperate Housewives…

A pro-gun middle class white lady has made our airwaves more “diverse,” and not a moment too soon.

Tip: Benton Foundation Headlines