The Tough Guise

While watching the movie entitled “Tough Guise: Media Images and the Crisis in Masculinity” two of my close male friends kept appearing in my mind while Jackson Katz explained the various effects that media has on young men and women and their idea of what masculinity is. The following night that we finished the video, I was talking to these two friends and decided to ask them a couple questions just to see what they thought about different topics. Friend 1 is what I believed to be one of the best examples of a stereotypical male, and Friend 2 is what I believed to be not as largely affected by the stereotypical expectations of men.

From the various questions asked I picked the strongest six questions and responses to present in this blog…

Questions:

1)      Do you firmly believe in sports, and if so why?

2)      Why do you believe that sports are mandatory for men?

3)      How has your parents (particularly your father) influence your personal relationships and views on what a man should be?

4)      What would you describe as an acceptable man/ what would a guy have to be like to be your friend?

5)      Describe your dream girlfriend.

6)      How do you feel about how women are portrayed in ads (like the sex-pot, dish-pot, silenced objects of sex type ads)?

Answers…

Friend 1:

1)      Yes because sports are like mandatory for men.

2)      Because that how I was raised? You were a boy; you must play sports or be fat.

3)      I don’t know.

4)      Dutch and athletic.

5)      She has to be shorter than me, brown hair, not huge boobs, but has boobs. Walks with confidence in herself, cares about me and respects who I am.

6)      It doesn’t bug me, it’s their choice.

Friend 2:

1)      Yes… in a way, where they build character and friendships, and also that reassurance comfort from a team.

2)      No, they don’t make or shape a man. Nor do they don’t prove your manly, your virtues and beliefs do.

3)      I don’t want to be like him, he played sports and was a jock – I don’t (I’m a girly boy)  , his virtues and morals are few – mine are high, so my view on men and what they should be are of my own, and a man should be fair and just to everyone, treating everyone with respect. A man is as only good as his word – for relationships/commitments. Also a man should take responsibility for all his actions.

4)      An acceptable man would be someone who does what he can for himself and others around him, while treating everyone equal, and has a sense of duty to complete what he has committed himself to. An acceptable man also could be a man who tries to make the world better for himself and everyone else. For a guy to be my friend he just has to be who he is, as a man should be accepting of what anyone chooses to be. One thing though is that if morals of a guy are low and he treats people poorly I wouldn’t want him to be my friend, but I would accept him.

5)      My dream girlfriend would be described as someone who can accept me as I am, and not dislike me for what I’m not. Also I feel she should have strong morals and beliefs, in that she would stand up for anyone down and out or a cause that people might think stupid. She should also be able to wear pants.

6)      It’s wrong but women model for it sooooo? Also sex sells, which is wrong too, because if something can’t be sold because it’s not needed and needs to be sold as something “sexy” is just pathetic and a waste of time.

  CONSIDERATIONS:

Friend 1:

-         Lives as an only child although he has an older brother (who does not live with him)

-         Lives with both parents in the home

-         Is very sports focused throughout his entire life

-         Sixteen years old

-         Is currently in a relationship

Friend 2:

-         Lives with a younger sister

-         Parents are divorced and he lives with his mother

-         Has never been entirely sports focused

-         Sixteen years old

-         Is currently in a relationship

Analysis:

From the first and second questions it is easy to distinguish what each value and get out of the sports that they participate in. Friend 1 has a very straight focus on winning and looking athletic (of the physical benefits of sports) while Friend 2 focuses on the mental and emotional benefits of sports.  From these initial responses Friend 1 has already put the “tough guise” on and refuses to show any deep emotion when regarding sports for fear of appearing weak, while Friend 2 accepts it.

 The third question emphasizes the ability/want to look within themselves to find an answer that may not be able to quickly grasp. Friend 1 fluffs off the question with a simple “I don’t know” therefore showing that he does not feel the need to look for the answer or to appear weak by analyzing within himself. Friend 2 looks for the answer and hints heavily at the affect that his parent’s divorce has had on him by stating things like “I don’t want to be like him” and “A man is as only good as his word – for relationships/commitments. Also a man should take responsibility for all his actions.” From these two examples it is easy to gather that Friend 2 does not have a particularly strong relationship with his father. This is probably due to the stress that the divorce has placed on him and incidents that have happened afterward.

It is interesting to note that in the fourth question, for Friend 1, race enters the picture; therefore amplifying the racial stereotypes that are found within the media. Athletics, again repeats itself within Friend 1’s answers showing the need for acceptance through sports. Friend 2, again, identifies moral qualities and characteristics within men who he looks to befriend. He also stresses the idea of acceptance of all even though he may not agree with everything that that person does.

Regardless of the other questions, I believe that question five is the most telling of these two individuals. Friend 1 immediately identifies physical characteristics that are shallow and changeable (hair colour and breast size), he identifies height as an issue demonstrating that he needs to feel powerful in the relationship by being taller. The use of confidence, made me laugh to myself because the first thing I thought of was the phrase “confidence is sexy” contributing to the fact that he wants his girlfriend to be “sexy” which then can be related to other things. Both Friend 1 and 2 identify that they want to be accepted as who they are by their girlfriends and the need to be accepted; showing that they are both insecure with themselves. Friend 2, reinstates his importance for morals and values and shows a humorous side by adding, “She should also be able to wear pants.”  This phrase can be easily linked to, how he does not need a “girly-girlfriend” in order to feel appreciated.

The last question, I believe is also interesting to see how each of these young men appreciates women. Friend 1 says that it doesn’t bug him, therefore implying that he does not care for women’s rights and that he does not truly value or appreciate the women in his life. Friend 2 shows that its wrong but it’s also the women’s fault (as stated before with Friend 1). He also recognizes that most products do not relate to the sexy image that they are advertised with but admits that as a society, sex sells.

I find it very interesting that both of these friends have grown up in small towns and small schools so the exposure through schools is not high for either of these boys. The sibling issue is interesting however, that Friend 2 has a younger sister so he is more accustomed to having females around, and that Friend 1 has grown up in an environment where he is generally the center of his parents’ attention since his older brother does not live with him.

The imaging that the media presents to all young people are shocking and disgusting (see” I Gotta Feeling” post) but to see the direct influence that these medias have in both positive and negative effects hit so close to home is very eye-opening for myself.

**Both friends were notified that their answers would be published on the blog.

“Police Warns Women” (Politiet advarer kvinner) was the headline in at least two news outlets in Norway this week, complete with a photo of a worried, but confident looking policeman:

The six rape attempts that led to this big story happened in Stavanger, the city on the west coast of Norway, where I was doing a home-stay this weekend. I was made really uncomfortable when my host father brought out the newspaper to show me at breakfast, and warn me about going out at night. The other guy who was doing the home-stay with me got no such warning.

I do worry about my safety. In fact, I worry about it a lot. I wouldn’t walk home from downtown alone, and I wouldn’t take a cab on my own, but I don’t need a man to tell me so. To me, this male need to protect women from other men is not two separate forms of misogyny, but rather stems from the same essential lack of respect for the autonomy of the female body.

This is only one example of how we’re disciplining the wrong side of the equation.

In Norway, one of the hot topics right now is the rights of immigrant, specifically muslim, women. Thinking back to biopower, it’s very interesting how highly politicized the bodies of muslim women are in Norway. Issues of arranged/forced marriage and female genital mutilation are making bodies of immigrant women highly visible. In contrast to the United States, where the adage “all women are white, all blacks are men” is often true of our political discourse, here in Norway, it seems whenever we discuss issues of non-ethnically Norwegians, it all comes back to muslim women, and their oppression. While yes, arranged marriage can be a situation that leads to domestic violence, and I believe FGM to be sexual violence, the construction of muslim men as aggressors and muslim women as victims only silences these women as well any discussion of oppression in traditional Norwegian culture. (see: Unni Wikan) Fatemeh Fakhraie, in The dos and don’ts of defending Muslim women sums it up:

Pity doesn’t help anyone. And pitying me is just another type of oppression—just another way to construct yourself as better than I.

A recent debate here involved whether women police officers could wear a hijab while on duty. While it was decided that they should be allowed to, the question of the hijab, particularly in relation to the french headscarf ban (French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools) passed in 2004. I should note that I’m a bit nervous to talk about the hijab, partly because of complaints about the western preoccupation with muslim women’s clothing and the fact that women have very different relationships with it.

I bring up the headscarf ban, and discussions about banning the burqa or chadri, because it relates to the phenomenon I discussed earlier. There are a lot of problems with it, as Wendi Muse describes at Racialicious,

While I understand and sympathize with the reasoning behind Sarkozy’s proposal, that being to ensure women’s equality, I completely disagree with the way he is going about attempting this grand charge. He is exhibiting behavior that is the perfect example of what the women of so many marginalized communities often complain: 1) he is attempting to fight their struggles for them and 2) he is galvanizing a small issue in a minority sect of a larger community. He is using an attempt to protect women’s rights as a means of limiting them.

The second point is what’s most relevant here. That “protecting” women by restricting their behavior is patriarchy. Even if the burqa, headscarf or chadri were wholly oppressive and not a more complicated issue, banning them is punishing the wrong side of the equation. These sorts of limitations on women’s bodies are not getting to the source of the injustice (patriarchy) but rather reinforcing it. It’s an incredible exercise of power when racism against men of color is used to reinscribe women of color into the patriarchal system.

In the face of six rape attempts in a small Norwegian city, why is the question, how should women change their behavior rather than how do we stop men from raping? To respond with a headline “Police warns women” and a photo of a male policemen, allows men to congratulate themselves on protecting their women rather than addressing the real problem: that the culture in their city makes sexual violence permissable. I do not need men to protect me, and if I do, I’ll ask and define it for myself. And in fact, I’d like to ask men now to protect me from sexual violence, by asking themselves what they can do stop rape culture, not by regulating my body.

I noticed this myself  when I watched the trailer (?) earlier today for the apparently actual upcoming tea-bagger documentary. (Really. There is one.)

A black guy named Nate appears a LOT in the trailer. I think it’s probably because he’s so handsome, not because he was the only black guy they could find. Here are three of his five appearances.

*An early blog title by an early blog hero: Oliver Wills.

MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew (ABDC) is once again putting out the call for fierce, fabulous, hard-hitting dance crews with 5 – 7 members (ages 18 and older) for season 5 of the highly popular dance show.

Crews interested in possibly joining the ranks of past winners JabbaWockeez, We Are Heroes, Super Cr3w and Quest Crew can attend auditions held in the following remaining cities: Denver, CO (December 4),  Los Angeles, CA (December 5), Boston, MA (December 11) and New York City (December 12).

For more information, check out ABDC on MySpace.

Or follow them on Twitter at @ABDCCasting.

See the flyer below for more details.

The New York Times spotted Elle’s Creative Director Joe Zee and model Brooklyn Decker at the Equinox fitness club on Broadway and 19th Street in Manhattan.

Joe and Brooklyn were attending the Jakuri exercise regimen, inspired by Cirque du Soleil moves.

There have been awkward moves but Brooklyn managed it with grace, The New York Times reports.

Equinox instructor Kristin Kenney informed Joe Zee: “She did it better than you.” Joe, still huffing, smiled wryly. “When you’re younger, taller and thinner, everything looks better,” he said.

ELLE is working on a very exciting project with Brooklyn Decker: ELLE Make Better, a multiplatform initiative encompassing fitness, fashion and beauty content that will include a themed January issue, a dedicated website and a three-DVD set, out on Amazon.com and on HSN December 8.

Learn more about Elle’s DVD set here!

For anyone who is interested in the ever changing landscape of the church.

This isn’t going to end well for the Republican Party.

From the link:

Pundits have used their media stages to encourage political action before, but people like Mr. Beck and Mr. Hannity are taking on outsize roles now, political experts and conservative commentators say. One reason, they say, is the weakened state of the Republican Party.

The media figures’ roles may exacerbate the ideological feuds that are already roiling the party. For the diffuse tea party movement that taps into anti-government sentiments, “the media guys are the closest things we even have to a leader,” said Adam Brandon, the vice president for communications at FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group.

These efforts are reminiscent of the Contract With America pledge made by conservatives during the 1994 elections, though some Republicans who are uncomfortable with media personalities taking on new political roles note that that effort originated with lawmakers.

In his guest TechCrunch post today, Screening The News, Mrinal Desai, the co-founder of CrossLoop  (a do-it-yourself tech support app that lets you take over someone else’s computer remotely to fix it or walk them through technical issues), describes how he pulls together the media resources that fuel his insatiable appetite for news and information.

He describes his consumption of the 5 screens: Print, PC, Phone, TV and eReader.  What interested me was the correlation between his response and that of Rob Moore to a similar question posed last month in Why newspapers need to get sticky.

I don’t have time to read newspapers. I don’t have time to regularly visit newspaper websites either. Same thing for the news on T.V. … Recently though, I started using Twitter and realised I can follow ABC News. Since I have been visiting Twitter every day, I have been keeping updated with the news. That way, I can know what’s going on in the world with a quick skim read, and then I can click on the link for any articles that interest me.

I think in combination, Reader, Twitter, GMail and soon Wave are a great tool set, each potentially having sets of information that you would look at with differing frequencies.

Desai has also published an earlier piece on Is Twitter Turning Into MySpace?. The observations in this article also reflects Rob’s thoughts on Twitter

Twitter is more a community type site, my usage (and I imagine most people’s usage?) is more like the Portal segment

Desai he says in the post…

I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

In contrast Rob says…

The 140 characters (of Twitter) means I’m not overwhelmed with information. This was the problem when I was using Google Reader and RSS feed subscriptions: It took ages to read through everything so I only opened it up every now and then.

Clearly Rob’s approach is even more fragmented that Desai’s but more importantly his delivery channel is much narrower (i.e Twitter is his primary source of news) while at the same time the content is wider than it could be if he chose just to follow the news in the traditional media (i.e. Newspapers, TV, Radio and Magazines).

Rob has just completed is University Thesis (A Cross platform OS for Sensor Networks). He is of course younger than Desai and, while Desai’s habits may provide insight into ”the work in progress” that is media convergence, Rob’s attitudes and approach may be a far more accurate description of what the future of media consumption patterns will be like for the next generation of bright young innovators, influencers and entrepeneurs.

Having said that, I think Desai’s most interesting observation comes at the end of the article when he said… 

Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

Clearly this statement is at the core of the MobCon challenge that lays ahead for all the established media players. Forget the Murdoch Pay Wall . News Corp’s delivery channels aren’t even on the radar for the next generation of influencers and industry leaders.

The MobCon media challenge comes in two parts. The first is the platform or the package that brings all these disparate media source together into one single, searchable usable interface (and I’m not sure that Google’s idea of a super browser is the right answer to that problem. Indeed I suspect increasing the emerging MobCon audience may come to see Google as the biggest barrier to solving the challenge See: Find me if you can).

The second part will determine the future of Journalism. The day is rapidly approaching where the most influential player in the mass media value chain will no longer be the Author but the Audience… and by Audience I mean the key influencers who by their following on Twitter (or what ever other platform they choose to access the media) will determine what fragments of information people are exposed to.

Desai’s idea of  Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed is not only a challenge to the media it is also a very real challenge to Google.

The challenge of me finding you and the challenge of you finding me requires a totally different search and delivery model to the one that has been built by Google to date. There is, after all, a clear difference between Search and the 6 Degrees of Separation.

Clearly the future of media is going to be about how I choose to hook into you.

Put another way I cannot see the future of Media being supported by advertising because all media will become just that… Advertising.

All of which means there will be no more “Walled Gardens” for the professional journalists to attend (but I can see a big future for them in advertising and marketing). 

Of course, the new media stars will be those influencers who are savvy enough to monetize their “play list” to their followers. The new media moguls will be those smart enough to aggregate and promote these emerging new media stars.

I may be wrong, but it looks like Silicon Valley is set to become the Hollywood of the 21st Century

Thanks to all those that shared their ideas, views, knowledge, and interest in using technology in the classroom. I hope you found some new ideas and are now more able to move forward with your own education in technology development. I was about to put together a list of my favorite Web 2.0 software and went to a fellow teachers site where I knew there was a posting I wanted to include. I discovered he had already posted his list which included many of my favorite so I decided to post a list of other peoples sites of favorites on Web 2.0. If there was something specific that isn’t listed here that you heard me talk about and wanted to follow up on Please drop me a note. If you are looking for music related software that I either mentioned or demonstrated there should be a connection on my website at www.yismusic.net

Here are 10 articles to get you started that I found. Of course you can start here at Music Tech For Teachers.

1. Free Technology for Teachers

2. CindyDannerKuhn

3. Dallas “The Technology Component”

4. Frank “Creativity, Technology and Authentic Assessment”

5. iLearn – The education magazine for mac users

6. Linking Learning to Technology

7. Compiled List of Web 2.0 resources

8. “Technology for the Classroom”

9. “Cool Tech Tools for Teachers”

10. “Following the Thread” - How an English teacher started with technology

Yes he did….

Here Norton related how he met the President thru a charitable group in 2006…..when he pitched the idea to the young senator, he had no idea how it would come out…..

Edward Norton and Barack Obama both made out okay……

This from Jerome Armstrong over at mydd.com……..

* On page 78 you’ll learn that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ends discrimination based on pre-existing conditions.

* On page 17, it makes preventive care completely free, with no cost-sharing. (This might be of particular interest to those who have chosen to seize on concerns about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations on mammograms to spread baseless myths and advance their own political agenda.)

* Flipping back to page 16, you’ll find that insurance companies are prohibited from dropping your coverage or watering it down when you get sick and need it most.

* Also on page 16, you might notice that it puts an end to lifetime caps on coverage.

* Page 18 is where the bill extends family coverage eligibility for young Americans through the age of 26.

* On page 83 it requires insurance companies to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full – that means they can’t refuse to renew your coverage just because you get sick.

* Page 307 is home to tax credits for small businesses to help them afford insurance for their employees.

* And folks looking to scare our senior citizens about what reform means for them might be interested to check out page 923 and learn that it provides a 50% discount on drugs for seniors in the so-called donut hole.

Note: Jerome got his info from the White House Blog site…..

The headline is misleading.  Proceedings of a board  meeting of Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA)  was relayed live to the media on closed-circuit TV,  presumably,  for the first time  in MUDA’s history.   How could anyone object to such initiative for transparency ?

But some MUDA members,  notably state legislators,  were not enthusiastic about it . In fact, they opposed any  access to media,  as if  what transpires among MUDA board members is state secret .  Reasons they gave point to their mindset.

Some legislator members are quoted as saying,  1) MUDA board meets are comparable to in-camera  meetings of the Karnataka cabinet.

2) Media presence would  ‘disturb deliberations and decision-making ‘  process at MUDA meeting .

3) There  is no provision in law that ‘mandates’  MUDA to hold an open meeting, in media presence’.

What  they neglect  to mention is there is nothing in the law that bans media  access to MUDA meetings.  If the press had been kept out for so long,  it was for reasons best known to its board members.  Despite objections, or rather because of the member’s reservations,  MUDA chairman P  Manivannan worked out an arrangement,  by which local media can have access to proceedings of meetings without causing  ‘disturbance’  by their physical presence at the  MUDA boardroom. The boardroom proceedings were relayed through closed-circuit TV to reporters assembled elsewhere  at MUDA office.  However audio quality of telecast left much to be desired.

A local newspaper gave its own spin to this lapse,  saying  “it was not known if the audio was deliberately muffled or was due to a technical problem” .  Unpredictable are the ways of our  media.

Here’s a site with a directly opposite perspective from this blog: “Government is Good.” Its claim that the institution is “vital” is certainly one that not many would disagree with, but the degree to which this site goes in praising the “achievements of government” is, to say the least, a bit too high.

Most of the items on its list of supposed achievements are many of the same areas of government action criticized on this blog. It’s a huge stretch to say that business regulation, public-health programs, entitlements and housing policies — all listed as achievements — have had an “admirable record of success,” though the site claims just that.

I was reading an editorial (link below) where the writer’s opinion was that the liberal leaning left media was going after Sarah Palin because she “scares the left.”

The writer was questioning why “fact-checking” of other political figure’s books hadn’t occurred but were happening for Palin, interpreting the “fact-checking” as a frenzied response to her perceived threat.

Personally, I don’t think it’s because she’s perceived as a “threat” and there is the need to “gun her down”. She does fine on her own — just give her enough rope. It’s more like the desire to pour over her “facts” to to see what new Palin spins and incredible interpretations are embedded in the pages.

It’s fascinating to see how some people deal with the world. It’s like watching someone fervently espouse their beliefs, believing everything on the internet is real and true because they read it on Wiki as support for their beliefs and actions. It’s incredible that someone could actually believe that is the case and justify their positions based on those beliefs.

Why have other authors not been so treated? Well, maybe because, although they may have different views and spins on situations and events, maybe even fudging the facts and denying circumstances, Palin seems to be at the nth degree in her myopia — seeing what she wants to see, when she wants to see it and nothing else, and that’s how it is. And, no, she won’t sit down.

The liberal media backlash of Palin is from fear? No, from fascination with a political anomaly that seems to have no compunction at painting a picture the way she wished it were instead of how it was.

Fearful of a winning “Palin & Beck in 2012″ ticket? — Yeah. Okay. On December 21st…….

(link to editorial)

Ascultati noul single: Sunt al Tau (PROCONSUL)

Genova – 21 novembre 2009 

Un collezionista ha cercato di vendere su eBay alcuni campioni biologici del corpo del Duce.

«Io sottoscritto Doria Mario tecnico analista presso il Policlinico di Milano fui incaricato nei primi giorni del maggio 1945 di eseguire preparati istologici da materiale cerebrale del fu Benito Mussolini per incarico dell’allora direttore di Medicina Legale prof. Cattabeni. Confermo che i vetrini istologici in possesso del professor Virginio Gagliardi corrispondono a quanto descritto». E’ questa la breve lettera, due pagine, scritte a mano e datate Milano 1987, che, accompagnata da vetrini con sezioni della materia cerebrale di Mussolini, è stata messa in vendita alla mezzanotte di giovedì su e-Bay. Base d’asta 15 mila euro, venditore un collezionista ligure di cimeli del Ventennio. Alle 11 di venerdì l’asta è stata ritirata da e-Bay perché «non è consentito vendere materiale organico umano o reperti anatomici» e le immagini sono state oscurate.

fonte

The Ignite London challenge of telling the story of my 1794 heroes in five minutes and 20 slides set me thinking about other ways to package up a narrative in the most minimal way.

In parallel with preparing my talk, I used the slides as the starting point for some printed material. My experimental recipe is as follows:

First, catch your story. The idea of 1794 as a focal point struck me while reading, for different reasons, about Joseph Priestley, Camille Desmoulins, John Thelwall and Matthew Murray. Desmoulins led me to the war in France, and Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle and Claude Chappe. Antoine Lavoisier formed a further link between Priestley and Coutelle. Soon I had a map spelling out the connections.

Excite the attentions of the ingenious.^TM I’d been wondering how to break the all-male line-up of heroes when I saw this tweet:

Turns out Roberta Wedge has been engaging on Twitter on behalf of the mother of feminism for several months now. Thanks to her intervention, Mary Wollstonecraft was in.

Tell the story in 20 slides. The Ignite format demands concentration on the essence and pacing of a story. Since the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds, each slide needs to stand for no more than two or three connected points. To their credit, none of my fellow Ignite London speakers lost it under the time pressure. I’m not sure if it would be worse to stand gaping waiting for the next slide, or to watch powerless as a presentation runs away with itself.

Talk links, not nodes. One strategy I found to deal with the rigid timing was to make slides that represent the links in the story, not the nodes. For example, if I have a slide about Desmoulins and a slide about Lavoisier, I must speak for 15 seconds on each, and have to hit the slide change dead on. But If I have a slide that says both were executed, I have the flexibility to switch from Desmoulins to Lavoisier at any time in the 15 seconds…

This approach, born out of practicality, made me wonder if focusing on the links as much as the nodes could be a good model for lots of storytelling in the age of the web. After all, much of the static content of the nodes is well covered in my sources, both offline and online. The new value I bring is linking them together into a new narrative. Jeff Jarvis says “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest”. But maybe what you do best is links, not to, but between great pieces of content.

Go to press. It seemed a shame to leave those slides unrealised. My tangible object could have been a standard book, with binding and everything, but I liked the idea that my slides should be as easy to remix on paper as they are in the slide sorter mode of my presentation software.  I chose Moo business cards. For v0.1 of the prototype, I’ve cheated a bit, using stickers to hold the text on the reverse of the cards.

Smooth on the inside, crunchy on the outside. (Armadillos!) Without a binding it was a lot easier to reshuffle my story, but it still needed some kind of container to hold it together and give a more satisfying permanence than the cards alone. A business card holder seemed the obvious thing. Just a few pounds bought an engraved one.

(This was the second card holder I received. The first was an ENGRAVING FAIL) Altogether the kit looks like this…

Make it mobile. I set up a separate page for each slide, and printed its URL on the back of the corresponding card. Thanks to WordPress.com’s mobile template, this means there’s an instant small-screen, hyper-linked up, comment-ready version of every page.

Rinse and repeat. This is v0.1, and there will probably be a 0.2, once I’ve had a chance to play with the story and its tangible form a bit more. One bit that’s not quite there yet is the link between physical and virtual. I toyed with using QR codes to make the link between paper and phone, and may still do so. I guess the ideal would be an app with image recognition so that just pointing the camera at each card is enough to bring up the relevant links and comment box. Unless you have a better idea.

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

I have added five icons and one wallpaper to the media section.

Twilight Saga: New Moon Opens!



WATCH MOVIE NOW!

News on New Moon Opening:

Brought to you by the same people who linked the Columbine shootings with Marilyn Manson and Black Trench Coats.

via Huffington Post

E pentru prima data pentru mine, cand simt nevoia sa merg la vot. Pana acum nu am avut pe cine sa votez. Daca aveam pe cine sa votez, mergeam cu placere. Toti imi pareau la fel de nepotriviti.
Azi, insa, o sa merg si o sa votez pentru progres, pentru schimbarea directiei, pentru ventilarea politicii romanesti, care in ultima vreme a avut un outcome irespirabil si infect. Cred cu tarie ca tara asta nu merita vopsita in portocaliu.

PS: Choose well!