What I thought was especially interesting here was the way that rhetoric had differing levels of efficacy as it was reoriented and placed in different contexts, particularly in the "noise abatement campaigns" article where some MP's even advocated for "minorities" (or immigrants). I would be curious to see how class and (essentially) race are built into arguments of noise pollution today.

But I was not always thoroughly convinced by the Victorian Soundscapes article. For one thing, there appear to have been at least some organ grinders (however small a percentage) who were honestly a public menace. The horse and cart organ was astounding, and I just really wonder what would possess a person to build such an extravagance. It seems that there were documented cases of extortion. That the rhetoric gets charged with xenophobia is one thing, but another, still very relevant issue, is what do we do about noise? It seems to me that the Victorian Soundscapes reading takes some kind of avowedly "democratic" stance and seeks to undermine a confrontation with a legitimate and enduring problem.

One question that I think I would like to answer if I had your topic, Ross, is how does one approach the problem of noise pollution? And how do we read such contemporary activism in the context of what appears to be a very deep history? How does that history inform our current approach? What does it mean to address noise as a problem?

Adding in the effects of reification creating what amount to negative stereotypes and problematic discursive formations and the resulting conflations of the reality of a sound's source with all that is reviled within a society embodied in the other leads to a situation only compounded when the word noise is linked to unwanted sound by technicians.

Noise is dirty diseased immigrants signifying a problem in the physical make up of the societal machine that should be fixed...

Air tight reasoning....

Oh, this is about noise pollution?

In regards to last week:
I think that Lauren's presentation was compelling and I think that it has a solid foundation. In order to solidify the structure though, some transitions from person to person are needed. I, personally, was having trouble seeing how she was going to do that. I thought it was interesting to look at Susan Boyle's performance on that show and to discuss it in the realm of culture. That interview was also quite interesting. For a professional interviewer Diane Sawyer didn't know how to talk to Susan and I wonder if it had to do with Susan's appearance. She wasn't glammed up with perfect skin and make up and a beautiful face. She was wearing what she would normally wear with the exception that her hair was a little more styled. It will be interesting to know if Lauren got in touch with that other youtube character. She had a good voice, but was just a little depressing in her presentation. I did find it quite entertaining though. I think that if Lauren is going to be looking at blacks and the integration of other races, Adrian Piper or Glenn Ligon would be two artists that can be referred to rather shallowly to tie things together maybe.

The Victorian Soundscapes reading illuminated similar issues, especially the tensions enabled by the first campaigns concerned with poor quality of life issues caused by overcrowding in cities.

I am interested to hear what direction Ross is taking his analysis. Ross, I know you are using contemporary films, are you making a comparison between representations around identity formation and noise in public space in 20th century media and its roots in Progressive reform type movements? Or does your analysis use the historical texts more as a background and go in another direction? I suppose I will find out in a few hours. Either way, there is a lot that can be said using these texts so I’ll be interested to discuss your argument.

We talked about Roediger in class, so I'll move on to Lacy. I liked this a lot. Most of this I didn't know about and found the accounts of many of these online phenomenon very interesting. I believe many of these stories occurred about the same time as the online uprising in the multi-player online role playing game Sony ran. Its does actually surprise me that these social online communities get so bent about changes and perceived slights. I see it now about every six months on facebook. I'd like to know a little more about the demise of the portals, but I assume it was a gradual attrition, and likely didn't fit into her piece.

Oh Miley Ray. Document 10 interested me greatly. I have run AV for a couple of different non-profit educational seminars about tween marketing and gender role issues. I find a lot of the consumptive nature problematic as well, but the dual assault of consumption and gender definition through specific consumption and the subject positioning of the practices abhorrent. It really does seem that as the one true success, Synergy is the big story with Disney. The ability to tap mainstream, non-Disney audiences at least for the purpose of advertising via its link to ABC is a huge asset in creating a media blitz. The kind of drivel they are producing is notable for its consistency and depth; flavorless gruel that anybody can digest and live on. For that to succeed, Disney only needs to have it on the radar of the target audience. They will seek it out because given the perceived media saturation and lack of competitive and alternative fare, there is nothing else and they think they want it.
Ew.
Of course, I burned things and hated TV then. I watched a lot of it, but I sought out very little of what I saw at that age...

Lauren, it seems like your biggest challenge will be the frame. I wonder if minstrelsy is going to be only one moment of a longer narrative. I think you can really draw on the Roediger, but that’s partially because he does a good job of trying to account for all of these different variables. Depending upon where you put your frame, you’ll have different variables to work with, but you can still tie them into a theoretical discussion of the Roediger.

I think you can definitely use all three, or just focus on one. But one thing that interests me is the juxtaposition of Sasa and Susan Boyle. I mean, they don’t correspond, but they do make me think of similar problems, and I think they might have something to say about each other. Without a doubt though, honestly, contact Sasa. I would be very surprised if a discussion with her wouldn’t shed some light on what’s happening here. Judging from her youTube videos, she will talk your ear off.

Jen, your topic is great. I’ve often wondered about television. The problems that especially interest me here are historical, and the idea of a history to all this definitely came up in the reading. I would even look as far back as the birth of Rock And Roll as a white, teen consumer phenomenon (obviously this appears to us as some kind of grotesque parody of that anyway). I would also do a critical reading of the Greenfeld and the Sexualization of Childhood. Both I think assume a lot of things, and though there intuition seems right to me, I think it would be interesting to see what’s going on there, and how it corresponds to your own proposed historical narrative and ethnographic study.

Beyond that, I would definitely take an object (like a game) and try and extract the logic. What is acceptable in this world that strikes us as so decidedly unpleasant? What Lauren was saying today about the changes in Dora the Explorer and the outrage (only from certain limited circles) surrounding it made me think that there is some kind of logic. And where does that logic come from? Why was it suggested that this “tween” entertainment should be free of double entendre?

Again, great presentations today! See you all next week.

It might actually be interesting to browse material on secret societies in the United States (or elsewhere, but obviously in any case you’re going to have a mountain of material to deal with). I think one of the most interesting questions is how do they form? It seems as if for now you’re going to deal with the lack of reliable demographic data, but it would be interesting to see how secret societies function, and how they’ve appeared at different historical moments. Again, I think this is only one variable, but you might be able to build something around that.

And as I mentioned today before class, I think some iconographic work would be useful for what you’re doing. As we saw in one of your readings, there really is a whole aesthetic being used in this “performance.” What can you pull out of that? Obviously a lot of really obvious stuff happens just in the computer head skull with gas mask. But you might look deeper, and compare it to other images.
What a mess! Enjoy!

I was wondering about the evolution of child-star branding. One of the news clips you assigned makes mention of the Olsen twins, I think that’s the first childstar brand I can think of, where a wide range of products became associated with the real life children rather than characters. How does branding affect Hannah Montana and other child stars who, now more than ever, have two identities: their character, and their real self? Celebrity gossip sites (I am thinking of Perez Hilton, especially) make the lives of these characters as well known as their personality. How then, does Miley Cyrus’ internet leaked racy photos, or better Jamie Lynn Spears’ (from Zoe101) pregnancy affect the representation of fictional Disney characters?

Also, how does a character like Raven Simone figure into the Disney princess/leading lady narrative? If scholars argue that Disney heroines are thin and white, then how do we explain the popularity of Raven Simone’s shows, and the Cheetah Girls, when Raven is African-American and isn’t thin by any stretch of the imagination? Also, what are the implications of Disney’s multicultural representation?

Regarding Aaron's readings:

I enjoyed the range of opinions expressed in the news articles, from the nearly objective to the completely subjective (Fox News). As opposed to traditional forms, technology seems to have the potential to be the great equalizer in the world of cyber activism. Physical, syntactical, and semantic tools of Electronic Civil Disobedience seem to happen at hyperspeed when compared to traditional forms of protest which involve a lot of slow processes. An interesting point was the shift from the Deluzian argument that the nomadic is positioned as the other in society to the nomad as the source of power. With a computer and some knowledge, a person has the power to effectively champion a social movement. I also found the counter-activism tactics to be remarkably traditional. Categorizing online protests as hacking--making them illegal--as one example, and the notion that cyberspace is private space, and you can't say what you want. Well why not? That seems to be the question these cyber hacktivists are really asking.

The voice recognition reads were great. I especially enjoy the simulated conversational systems that could imitate paranoia. Thats good irony and possibly telling about logic and brain chemistry. The theoretical models are interesting in the problems in interpreting they attempt to illustrate. It all reminds me of Derrida and his notion of play and the necessary negation of all other concepts in a single concept’s definition. The researchers have the advantage of being able to control the law.

What struck me most about the news pieces and Encurve document was the level of criminality ascribed to Internet crimes of hacktivism and Internet civil disobedience. The news pieces were funny in that they painted a rather dated vision of the Internet user, as a clandestine nerd, using the computer as a vengeful device against the inhospitable material world. This reveals how hacktivism, civil disobedience, and flat-out Internet crimes like cyber-bullying are interchangeable, and still inadequately articulated in contemporary culture. Rather than seeing the Internet as a public domain much like the rest of the world, the dominant discourse sees the Internet on the whole as a space that should be governed by the dominant social order; users who don’t ascribe to this have somehow broken some imaginary terms of service and are considered a-moral (“In an atmosphere where anything goes, the only thing that seems to truly rile a /b/tard is the abuse of a cat”). In this way, we see how the Internet is in fact implicitly considered a privatized space. Anonymous and other Internet hackers are accused of disrupting the flow of commerce and slander, although their action are more along the lines of free speech.
This notion of privatized Internet space was well articulated by the Lane piece. Lane’s ‘Digital Zapatistas’ illustrates the aversion to Internet activism, a form of non-violent protest, is seen as criminal because it disrupts the rationale of the hegemon or “liquid network of power itself.” Clearly the EDT is on the frontlines of activism in their aim to disrupt the privatization of digital public space. Because many Internet practices are outside of the grasp of formal legal discourse, it is a productive space in which real disruptions can be waged in hopes of achieving a material impact.

David’s Readings
This was a good overview, and actually reminded me of something you might consider incorporating or looking into while you do your final draft. The section on language understanding and its caveats reminded me of human intelligence driven sites like Yahoo! Answers or the mobile encyclopedia service ChaCha, which uses voice recognition technology to send questions via mobile phone to ‘experts’—real people—to answer questions. What distinguishes ChaCha from other voice recognition technologies (you can also text or send an email) is that it relies on human intuitive skills. So that a user could as ChaCha “What time is Lost on?” and get a correct answer, where a computer wouldn’t know how to answer that. I am bringing this up just as another consideration for the limits of voice recognition technology, as well as the limits of computer intelligence in general. Will computer intelligence ever be able to approach the intuitive nuances of human intelligence?

I think through these readings, we are at the stage where we can make some tentative characterizations of ringtones and mobile media. I thought the Uimonen piece was particularly illustrative of many of these themes; I’ll mention some of the most salient points. Uimonen discusses the ringtones as an individuating technology. We’ve seen this throughout the term, but perhaps ringtones are the current zenith of individuation. She talks about how ringtones individuate by creating identity through consumption and reproduction. This comes across through her study in which she describes a successful ringtone as one that is recognizable in order to communicate identity in a public sphere, but not so popular that it lacks distinction. This paradox was illustrative of the kind of work which goes into individuating oneself through consumption. It isn’t mindless work, in fact, what’s interesting about it is the kind of cognitive labor it requires from its user. What was specifically interesting for me was the point she made about the increasing need or (manufactured necessity) for individual signifiers in an increasingly noisy soundscape. Also, through her invocation of the cell phone ban in NYC the idea of ‘sacred spaces’ where cell phones are not allowed, and the idea that ringtones are impolite made me wonder if the ringtone could be thought of as a transgressive technology. If not turning of your phone can be constructed as an offense severe enough to incur a fine, then perhaps, the ringtone can be thought of as a mechanism through which one opposes state-imposed self-management.

I was interested by the Rafael article. We’ve discussed utopian constructions of technology, especially text-messaging because it is inexpensive and doesn’t seem to privilege any one group. I was interested in individuation here; Rafael notes how cell phones in the Philippines engendered both participation in the group and distinction from it. It was also interesting how the technology was used not for protest or to challenge authority, but rather in the name of transparency in government (412). Here the cell phone’s individuating process is constructed as a means to conform, or as Rafael states to gain “recognition from authority” through the “fetish of technology.”

As we’ve seen individuating technologies such as ringtones are not deterministic, rather they are expressive of historical and contemporary moments.

Professor Gopinath’s article explicitly expresses this, illustrating how ringtones are indicative of our contemporary moment in capitalism. He takes up the ringtone as illustrative of our move to rentier capitalism, but also the point I’ve focused on here of individuation.

I was also interested in the articles treatment of the disruption of public and private sphere. If ringtones, well mobile technologies in general are individuating, yet dually individuate the user publically, are they disruptive of this dichotomy or do they reinscribe it?

Certainly it’s apparent from the article that the music industry is trying to promote MP3 ringtones while telephone companies are perhaps sad to see the advertising function being shifted to pop singles, but there is a real sonic and perhaps even semantic difference between MP3 ringtones and monophonic or even polyphonic ringtones. Moreover, if MP3’s in all their power can be used to play Three Stooges, it really leaves the field pretty open in terms of the kinds of cultural forms we could see. I wonder: is that familiar “ringing phone” ringtone you can hear on iPhones an MP3 file? I would guess so. I think that’s a ring tone that opens up new questions about the potential future of the ringtone, and the semantic possibilities of the three (or at least two) different ringtone formats. I started thinking about this when I read,

“In Europe, many of the older cell phone markets (as in the U.K., Spain, France, Germany, and Italy) are focused on polyphonic ringtones and seem less inclined to switch to sound file ringtones. Paradoxically, regions that have been slower to adopt mobile telephony, as in Central and Eastern Europe, are adopting the newest technologies and thus seem to be more amenable to sound file ringtones.”

My intuition tells me that this paradox could be further investigated than Sumanth’s focus allowed. Does this phenomenon have anything to do with some kind of cultural memory? Do mono- or polyphonic ringtones carry some kind of meaning that MP3 files do not? If MP3 files are mimicking the “familiar” sound of an old rotary phone ringing, it’s certainly conceivable that one might synthesize a polyphonic ringtone. But what are the meanings there, (of course I don’t know if one is, so maybe it’s not worth considering at the moment)? Why are the older cell phone markets less likely to switch to sound file ringtones? Sumanth observes that “cultural memory in the world of mobile entertainment seems startlingly short.” This is true, but he also observed in class the other day the process of accretion in the transmission of cultural forms. Keeping both of these observations in mind might provide some insight. How does this inform our understanding of the “battle of musical taste?” And, for that matter, how does this inform our understanding of the three different frames Sumanth proposes in the conclusion? Is there a residual polyphonic ringtone form that complicates our understanding of the transitory fashion element in the first, changes our understanding of who rents what to whom in the second, and provides another angle on the relationship between different geographies and different cultural and technological forms in the third?

It's a great article, and I'm sure Sumanth's heard many, many, many questions from far more articulate people than myself. But I hope what I’m saying can generate some discussion.

The Rafael demands some attention. While it’s interesting to focus on a particular moment and location, I’ve grown to appreciate deeper dimensions in these kinds of readings of culture. What about People Power I, or a deeper Philippine history? And/or, what else has been written on the psychology of the crowd? Anyway, this is at least the second time we’ve come across People Power II, and this article is kind of “one of these things is not like the other . . .”

Anyway, I’ve written a lot already, but I think we’ll be able to dig into it tomorrow. Or perhaps someone will bring it up in a blog posting. Cheers!