Although the film eventually veers into unconvincing melodrama hinging on a villainous predatory hobo’s self-sacrificial change of heart, the early parts of Wild Bill Wellman’s silent Beggars of Life are very beautiful and atmospheric. Indeed, the opening passage tries to prepare us for Oklahoma Red’s transformation with back-to-back reversals of expectation. Jim, a hobo in his twenties, enters a home where it appears that a man is eating breakfast at the dining room table. He begs for food, assuring the man that he is willing to work for it. The silent film’s silence effortlessly suggests that the boy’s pleas are falling on deaf ears. When he moves in closer to the man from whom he is begging food, Jim discovers that the man, slumped over, has in fact been shot to death. The boy must get out of there; only, just at that moment a teenaged girl comes down the stairs. He protests his innocence of the crime; how can he possibly convince the girl? He doesn’t have to; Nancy confesses that it is she who shot her adoptive father moments earlier when he attempted to rape her. The flashback of the whole event, studded with superimpositions, stuns. The two team up and head for Canada, with the authorities at their heels. The opening image, a closeup of Jim’s legs walking and walking, is replaced by shots of Jim’s and Nancy’s legs walking side by side.
     Train tracks constitute one motif; the interiors of cars of hopped trains, another—although realism takes a hit by the absence of any sign or sense, and of course sound, of locomotion in these interior shots. (Occasionally, an exterior shot of a moving train is inserted.) Passing from sepia to black and white, the film explains its title as Jim and Nancy approach sleep—again, side by side, for Jim has become Nancy’s protector—with a wonderful point-of-view shot of a field of haystacks underneath a full moon. (The gorgeous cinematography is by Henry Gerrard.) Jim: “Ain’t it funny when you think of the millions of people in warm houses and feather beds, an’ us just driftin’ ’round like the clouds? . . . Even the people in feather beds[, however,] ain’t satisfied. [W]e’re all beggars of life.” Poignant: how modest are Nancy’s dreams—how little she begs of life.
     Wellman’s film anticipates his own Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), especially since Nancy-on-the-lam dresses up as a boy, whom Jim introduces as his kid brother. (Ah, but will that ample lip rouge of hers give her away?) There is also a trial among the hobos, devised by bully Oklahoma Red, who wants Nancy for his own, that may have influenced the underground/underworld trial in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Regardless, it is certainly the case that it needles the extent to which U.S. justice is biased against the poor and the helpless: Red ignorantly refers to himself as the “persecutin’ attorney” and, not intending the word with, declares, “The court will dispense with justice.” The script by Benjamin Glazer is from a story by Jim Tully.
     Richard Arlen is adequate as Jim, Wallace Beery less than adequate as Oklahoma Red, and, in her last appearance in a Hollywood film, Louise Brooks is luminous as Nancy.

El Enemigo Público

Año: 1931
País: Estados Unidos.
Idioma: Ingles.Español (Dual) + Subts Español (Archivo Aparte)
Director: Williams A. Wellman
Guión: Harvey Thew, Kubec Glasman, John Bright
Música: David Mendoza
Fotografía: Dev Jennings (B&W)
Reparto: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell,
Donald Cook, Mae Clarke, Beryl Mercer
Productora: Warner Bros. Pictures

Género y Crítica: Cine negro. Policiaca

Famoso film de género que narra el auge y caída de un temible e implacable gangster, que contó con una de las mejores interpretaciones del gran James Cagney.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KG9DFFOU
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VZ5AXPKK
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6VKDLWQ6
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XNI28599
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=H0HTFQOI
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BP95P0EX
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J6EG9CSN
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7GF4I82L

Subtitulos
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SX92BSBP

The Seven-Days-a-Week Church

The augmented community can also be seen in the temporal aspects of communication within the community.  The face-to-face communication of a located community is often seen to be higher in quality due to physical and social cues largely unavailable over online interaction.[1] However, while the quality of face-to-face communication is much higher, the amount of time spent in face-to-face contact is limited by the amount of time spent in the same place.  This limitation is not as highly enacted in the traditional small town community, where members of the community maintain daily interaction, but as Barry Wellman points out, most communities do not exist in these little boxes anymore.[2] People move between spheres of their workplace, home, and church, and in doing so each sphere becomes separated.  The traditional church is now someplace visited on Sunday mornings and largely forgotten until next week, this makes it hard to consider a once-a-week congregation to be a community.

Global tools of communication, unbounded by time and space, allow the place-bound church to remain active seven days a week.  When asked how often they were in contact with other members of The Well, the most common answer was “daily.”[3] The explanation of this answer always included the fact that members were using online communication to stay in touch.  Twitter, Facebook, and email keep the members of this offline community in touch with each other through their community network.  One member called these connections, “short and sweet and on the fly.”[4] The convenience of online communication allows the community to reach out to each other outside of the time and space of once-a-week services.  The drawback here is that connections are, in fact, “short and sweet.”   Does the quality of the conversation go down as the quantity goes up, and is personal connection lost?

Quality of Global Communication

There were a few members of The Well that were critical of the online aspect of the church because it was impersonal and not as in-depth as a face-to-face conversation.  One member admitted that an online message is easier to do, but struggled with that fact that it was simplistic and therefore lacking in real connection.[5] Can writing a publicly posted tweet hold a candle to visiting somebody’s home to offer condolences?

The question of the effect of quantity on quality through online communication perhaps depends on how this qualitative measurement is made.  When taken in the single communicative act, online communication does seem impersonal when compared to face-to-face interactions.  However, if we look at online communication as an act of community in the public sense, then perhaps there is a stronger argument for the qualitative improvement of the online community based in the locally concerned offline community.

When online community becomes locally concerned, the increase in quantity of communication can add up to an increase in quality of communication, as measured by how the communication improves the purpose of the community.  In The Well quality is therefore measured by how well the communication implements the acting and proclaiming of Jesus in Feasterville, PA.  Mentioned above, online communication is easier and more convenient than offline communication and therefore leads to a likelihood of increased contact.  Clive Thompson notices this increased immersion in contact with others can in fact cause a stronger connection in those relations. He uses the term ambient awareness to describe how these small details add up to a more complete understanding of the whole.  “Each little update – each individual bit of social information – is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane.  But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”[6]

The aggregation of all of those exchanges that were “short and sweet and on the fly” becomes a much more detailed picture of the other person or the community as a whole. When a leader of The Well posts a Twitter message reading, “Complete this sentence: ‘To live the kingdom means to,’[7] this is almost the Christian equivalent of asking people to list their favorite movie.  However, this question is more than superfluous information, because it follows the tradition of the community and supports development of that tradition by aggregating a communal response.  A community that exhibits more communication, in some sense, exhibits better communal awareness.  By being able to continually refocus the direction of the community through small posts and daily interaction, the community takes on a more communally driven approach to tradition.

The rise in contact over online communication in fact carries over into offline interactions.  Observers have found that statistically those who are most active in online interaction are also more active in offline socializing.[8] While interviewing a group of members from The Well, the group began discussing conversations they had held over Twitter during the week.  Indifferent to boundaries between their online conversations and their offline conversations, the group continued the discussion without missing a beat between the online and offline worlds.[9] The globally concerned online becomes locally concerned as it forms an augmentation of the local community.  Integrated with face-to-face conversation, the online conversation becomes a seamless conversion of the limited local community to the unlimited global realm.

[2] Barry Wellman, “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism,” (2002) http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/littleboxes/littlebox.PDF (accessed February 5, 2009).

[3] Interview by author. Feasterville, PA., March 22, 2009.

[4] Deb, Interview by author. Feasterville, PA., March 22, 2009.

[5] Gary and Clyde, Interview by author. Feasterville, PA., March 22, 2009.

[6] Clive Thompson, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” The New York Times (Sept. 7, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all (accessed February 2, 2009).

[7] toddhiestand, Twitter Post, July 17, 2009.

[8] Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, “Living Networked On and Off Line,” Contemporary Sociology 28:6 (November 1999), 648-654, www.mysocialnetwork.net/downloads/onandoff.pdf (accessed November 10, 2009) and Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Touchstone, 2000).

[9] Onsite observations, Feasterville, PA., March 22, 2009.

In the 1920s William A. Wellman’s lavish aerial war adventure, Wings (1927), took the first best picture Oscar; in the 1930s Wellman made splendid films about American aspiration and defeat: So Big (1932) and A Star Is Born (1937). But three of his four best films arrived during the Second World War: Roxie Hart (1942), a brilliant comedy testing reality against romantic idealism, and an equally brilliant satire of American criminal justice; The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a Western illustrating the perils of democracy in the form of mob rule; and “the best memorial for every ordinary soldier who fought in the war” (Gabicz & Klinowski), his Story of G.I. Joe, based on war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s observations as Pyle accompanies a U.S. Army infantry unit, first in North Africa and subsequently in Italy. (The other of the four is the Western Yellow Sky, 1948.) Ironically, Wellman came to his masterpiece most reluctantly; it took Pyle himself to convince him to get onboard. Killed during the Okinawa invasion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist would never see Wellman’s film, in which soon-to-be-blacklisted Burgess Meredith plays him beautifully, largely silently.
     After a spate of Hollywood films that “thrilled up” and sentimentalized war for homefront consumption, Wellman’s came as a breath of fresh air; its realism captured the experience of soldiers and the world of sadness, loneliness, exhaustion and sudden death in which they dutifully waited or performed. Leaning on two of Pyle’s four books, which themselves derived from his newspaper columns, Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson fashioned a marvelous script consisting of small incidents (such as a soldier’s repeated attempts to hear his child speak on a phonograph record that his wife has sent him), snatches of rumination and conversation, and Pyle’s voiceover.
     It is an episodic script, and Wellman’s principal contributions, in addition to the excellent performances he drew (playing Lt., then Capt. Walker, Robert Mitchum is unforgettable), are the unhinging of conventional narrative that resulted from his honoring the intended episodic presentation and the bone-weary tone he brought to the material. (By comparison, Wellman’s Battleground, 1949, would prove giddy.) At various intervals Pyle is shown reconnecting with the same company when in fact he has never been shown leaving it. A major death occurs offscreen. In another episode, an awaited military order, rather than generating the presumed advantage for the U.S. infantry unit, maintains the status quo. What we have here is a discontinuous “road picture” in a dangerous foreign land. There had never been an American war film like this one; there had never been any kind of American film like this.
     Nice touch: because the company assumes the care of an adorable little dog, we anticipate the dog’s death; but this never materializes. The animal remains as a potent sign of home—the normalcy for which the soldiers long. By contrast, many men are killed. And one, monstrously fatigued, falls asleep on his wedding night.

“You know, Esther, there will always be a wilderness to conquer. Maybe Hollywood is your wilderness now.” — Lettie, to her granddaughter

Tremendous and overwhelming, the original A Star Is Born is the one substantial film among the three versions. People will continue to argue whether Janet Gaynor or Judy Garland gives the better performance (most agree that Barbra Streisand is dreadful in the third version), but in truth neither is so wonderful that the decision matters; on the other hand, Fredric March’s Norman Maine is among the greatest performances in cinema. March’s Maine, “[whose] work,” someone notes, “has begun to interfere with his drinking,” must watch his wife’s film career skyrocket as his own fades. March is terribly, painfully, brilliantly moving. By now it is an open secret that the marriage of the Maines, with its one career rising as the other falls into the Pacific Ocean, was based on Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, who eventually scored a comeback when he started seeing and hearing a gigantic rabbit that nobody else could see or hear.
     March, then, is the film’s principal claim to artistic glory. But what would the film have been without Wild Bill Wellman at the helm? It is his toughness that cuts across the material’s potential for self-pitying soap opera; we see this potential come into its messy own with George Cukor directing Garland and James Mason, both of whom never miss an opportunity to have their voices throb with emotion. Wellman directs the thing right—and creates an unexpectedly quiet film, as though Maine were recollecting the story right before, or right after, he drowns. (When news of the drowning reaches him, Maine’s publicity agent quips, “First drink of water he’s had in twenty years.”)
     Wellman never won a directorial Oscar, although his Wings (1927) won the first best picture Oscar, and A Star Is Born brought him and Robert Carson the prize for best original story. Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Carson, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner Jr. and Budd Schulberg were among those who worked on the script.
     However, those familiar with her novels will detect the spirit of Willa Cather also at work here; and the most decisive influence of all is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which appeared only a few years earlier, and whose doctor-patient have become established movie star-new movie star.
     Unlike Fitzgerald’s novel, Wellman’s film was a big hit.

Hollywood took advantage of the absence of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.—the U.S. would recognize the Soviet Union the following year—by not bothering to credit the more substantial film that inspired its Wild Boys of the Road: Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (Putyovka v Zhizn, 1931). Ekk’s film proceeds from a compelling basis: the countless orphans generated by the 1917 Revolution. Relocated, the Hollywood version replaced this with a sob story of the Great Depression. The original is marred by melodrama; this is even more so the case with the partial remake that Wild Bill Wellman directed much in the same vein as his earlier Public Enemy (1931), with its calculated mixture of sensationalism, corniness, vivid journalistic description, and liberal sentiment. However, no James Cagney in the new cast provides a riveting performance.
     Two small-town highschoolers, Eddie and Tommy, hop a train and head out for urban territories (first stop: Chicago), hoping to find jobs and not wanting to burden their unemployed and underemployed parents any further. They become a threesome when they meet Sally, an orphan, onboard the train. Thereafter, the police are a constant worry; Tommy loses his legs when a train crushes them.
     A happy ending to all this is not the only problem. Wellman juggles individual narrative and thematic social elements but fails to connect them in any meaningful way. The New York Times critic noted this problem upon the film’s original release, calling Wild Boys “pointless”—the most damning way of tagging this sort of film. Let us just say it is full of hope for F.D.R.’s first term.
     The best acting comes from Dorothy Coonan as Sally. Wellman, twenty years her senior, married Coonan. Their union lasted a lifetime.

As a hospital-affiliated private nurse, Lora Hart suspects that her two patients—young children; sisters—are being starved to death by an ambitious thug who plans on marrying the mother so he can inherit the girls’ trust fund. Essentially, Wild Bill Wellman’s compulsively watchable Depression melodrama Night Nurse is an assault on medical “ethics”—code, for doctors not interfering with other doctors and their patients. The thug is in cahoots with Dr. Ranger, and respectable Dr. Bell won’t interfere until his own life is threatened.
     The main attraction here is Barbara Stanwyck in a stupendously entertaining performance—tough, sexy, full of heart; her Lora insists on humanity and honesty above professional protocol and obedience, and “proper” behavior. For her conventional acting here, but more so for her revolutionary acting that year in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman, I have named Stanwyck the best film actress of 1931.
     The thug, who has become the family chauffeur, is played as someone purely vicious by a supporting actor bound for stardom and unprecedented likeability: “The King” himself, Clark Gable. He knocks around Stanwyck with seeming impunity; Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer are among other actresses whose characters Gable’s brutalized in this phase of his career.
     But Nick, the character that Gable plays, “gets his.” A bootlegger enamored of Lora, who extracted a bullet from him without notifying the police, arranges for a hit to take out Nick. The pre-Code film ends with Lora and bootlegger Mortie riding off into the sunset together after Mortie draws a smile from Lora by telling her about the arrangement. However grisly this may appear, as far as Nick goes, it fits into the overarching theme enunciated above in the second paragraph. What Mortie has done is not legal but is moral.

flow

I fully intended to attend  George Siemen’s and Stephen Downes’ Connectivism e-learning event last year but work dictated otherwise however I earmarked the material for future viewing. Yesterday was the first day of that future. I started with some research by Barry Wellmann from the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto entitled ‘Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism‘. It traces the development of non-digital man through global and localization man ( glocalization) towards what he named networked individualism. Especially interesting are the tables at the end which illustrate the specific characteristics of each.

networked individualism
]]> http://grunes.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/heroes-for-sale-william-a-wellman-1933/ Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:39:34 +0000 grunes http://grunes.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/heroes-for-sale-william-a-wellman-1933/

“I’ve been in the shadow of death so long that nothing in life seems so important anymore.”

Tom Holmes is the protagonist of Wild Bill Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, a stark, massively moving pilgrim’s progress that opens with a suicidal American mission in the First World War, where one soldier takes credit—honor, medals and all—for a courageous, decisive act that Holmes performs, and ends with Holmes among the army of the homeless during the Great Depression, right after the first inauguration of F.D.R. The platoon of this army in which Tom participates, which is constantly being routed out by law-and-order local thugs, at one point, single file, passes by a gigantic billboard: ‘JOBLESS MEN, KEEP GOING. WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN.” Of course, if the idea of nation means anything, these men are their own.
     Tom’s life, as we see it, includes viciously painful war injuries, resultant morphine addiction, incarceration in a “drug camp” to make him kick his habit (nothing is ever done to relieve his pain; it may be a flaw in Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script that Tom’s pain seems to vanish once his addiction his documented as “cured”), his being wrongly blamed by co-workers for the loss of their jobs to automated machinery in a laundry, the ensuing riot, which Tom is attempting to stop, in which Tom’s wife, Ruth, who is desperately trying to locate Tom, is killed by a stick-wielding police officer, Tom’s wrong imprisonment at hard labor for inciting the riot, upon his release his forcible exit out of town by local thugs, with his young son left behind, and his ironical re-meeting with the soldier who took credit for Tom’s bravery, a rich man whom the 1929 stock market crash reduced to poverty. But Tom himself is rich, having made money without pursuing it—except that he has given it all away so that others won’t go hungry and his son will be provided for.
     Perhaps the finest aspect of this remarkable film, which draws upon Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and nicely complements LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933, is the warm, buoyant performance that Richard Barthelmess gives as Tom Holmes, which suits both the character’s lack of self-pity, his empathetic nature, as much philosophical as emotional (“I guess we’re all a little cracked, one way or the other”), and his closing speech on what he sees as the imminent American resurgence. This is a lot to say, given Barthelmess’s prolific and stellar career; but this may be the performance of his life. But Barthelmess is almost always a spot-on actor. Loretta Young, however, is normally dreadful—along with Faye Dunaway, perhaps the most artificial U.S.-born actress to become a major star. As Ruth Holmes, though, she is warm, gracious, tender, entirely believable. We may say then that Wellman proved a better director for Young than Frank Borzage, John Ford or Orson Welles. Moreover, then a teenager, she was never lovelier than here. Barthelmess and Young really seem a couple, I might add. Still, the best female performance comes from Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis, who silently loves Tom and inherits his son. Two of MacMahon’s best moments find her subtly expressive back facing the camera.
     One asks: What kind of country doesn’t see to it that someone like Tom Holmes gets a fair shake? One ultimately asks: Is America more just today?

]]> http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-weakness-of-weak-ties/ Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:30:45 +0000 John Postill http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-weakness-of-weak-ties/

I have just submitted an article for publication entitled  ”The weakness of weak ties: personal media and social leadership in a Malaysian suburb”. Many thanks to those of you who’ve contributed to earlier versions of this text. As always, I look forward to your views. I have Google-docked the draft article here and what follows is the abstract (Update 19 April 2009 - see also scribd version): 

This article draws from fieldwork in a Malaysian suburb to investigate whether personal media (email, laptops, blogs, mobile phones, etc.) are making any significant difference to local leadership practices. I argue that residential politics does not provide fertile ground for the growth of ‘networked individualism’ – the claim that contemporary social relations are being reconfigured around individuals (Wellman, Castells). Instead of egocentrism, leaders’ personal media practices sustain a sociocentric field of residential politics around ‘community’ issues such as waste disposal and petty crime. Leaders exploit the affordances of personal media (portability, ubiquity, personalisation, etc.) to derive strength from their weak ties (Granovetter) and further their public careers. Yet when operating within the field of residential politics they must align their personal media practices with the field’s egalitarian doxa and communitarian media.

John Postill

View this document on Scribd
]]> http://queers-inspace.com/2009/02/24/new-needs/ Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:01:22 +0000 queersinspace http://queers-inspace.com/2009/02/24/new-needs/

At the end of his essay “Little Boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism,” Barry Wellman asks a very astute question: Does glocalization and networked individualism create new social needs?

Initially I thought he was probing, a la Lewis Mumford in The Pentagon of Power (1964). Mumford critiqued Westerners for their unquestioning embrace of technology. He said we had a tendency to “surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to the human consequences.” The old technology creates the imperative for using it principle. 

But actually this was not what Wellman was wondering about. He was more concerned with how networked individuals would learn and cultivate the skills inherent to the network: “Networked individuals need to know how to maintain a networked computer; search for information on the Internet and use the knowledge gained; create and sustain online relationships….” 

I think perhaps implicit in those practical concerns are the bigger concerns that Mumford explored years earlier about “the machine.” And this is reflected a bit in an Out magazine article about Manhunt, very likely the largest gay male online dating site/social network. It has 1 million users, it’s the second “stickiest” web site in America and, rather ironically, it started and is still headquartered in Cambridge. 

The author is lamenting the impact Manhunt (and other online dating venues) has had on the gay community. To that end, there’s this quote:

“The implications of that trend are enormous,” says Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “It means that gay men who were once socialized in brick-and-mortar establishments, surrounded by other people, are now being socialized online.” 

At the end, the piece gets particularly reflective about the idea that while Manhunt purports to satisfy a need (loneliness/sexual desire), it actually succeeds in creating and fostering that need as well.   

When we turn it on, says novelist Andrew Holleran, we enter a world that amounts to “the nightmare that gay people always have just underneath the surface, the fear that, I’m just my dick. I’m just my body. I’m just my age. It reduces everybody to statistics. You’re presuming that nobody will love you for yourself, if you’re offering yourself as just a bunch of statistics.”

This is, to say the least, a lonely place to be — a place that anyone would want to escape. Problem is, the easiest way to salve that loneliness is to go back online. Manhunt “creates loneliness and then relieves it,” Holleran says. Manhunt offers itself as the way out of the isolation it creates.

Obviously Manhunt is an esoteric example of the social web, but its structure and function as a network is arguably the same as other social networking sites. Before technology enabled constant connection to our friends, we didn’t have a need to have around-the-clock awareness of our their thoughts, activities and reflections. Likewise, we didn’t need to share. It’s interesting, to get back to Wellman, to think of these impulses as the skills/practices we “need” to succeed as networked individuals.

And to get back to a pre-networked vision: It’s interesting to think by comparison of what people needed, in terms of skills/practices, to succeed in traditional social places.

]]> http://jayrton.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/glocalization-context-free/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:41:07 +0000 jayrton http://jayrton.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/glocalization-context-free/

Barry Wellman describes Glocalization as being context-less.

“Place – in the form of households and work units does remain important – even if neighborhood or village does not.”

This is perhaps a generally accurate view, especially in the work world that Wellman is specifically interested in.  However, while the idea of neighborhood has certainly lost importance, what about a sense of locality.  We are still creatures from a location.

When you meet someone for the first time one of the first questions you ask is where are you from.  This is an attempt to get an idea of who somebody is based on where they are from.  It is stereotypical, but it also works.  I can give these people a context when the relationship further develops.  I can automatically relate to somebody from Pennsylvania, because I know what it is like to have grown up there.  I know what the general values and experiences are (hint: we cling to guns, religion, and apathy).

In the case of The Well, the church I am researching, community is based strongly on local context.  Blog entries will often mention the Phillies, snow storms, local coffeeshops because these are common contexts for the community.  However, they are glocal because they are not all in the same neighborhood.  I know that at least a few members travel from New jersey to join the community.  They still meet at a common place, but they also meet over the common virtual place (internet).  Additionally, the church is networked to a number of other communities across the country.  How does this work out in their relationships.  Comments can come from members of the local community and from members of the global network.

“The internet both provides a ramp onto the global information highway and strengthens local links within neighborhoods and households.”

-Wellman (Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism)

]]> http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/wellman-inc-effective-date-occurs/ Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:53:03 +0000 Randall Reese http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/wellman-inc-effective-date-occurs/

On January 30, 2009, Wellman, Inc. filed a notice with the bankruptcy court announcing that the effective date of its Third Amended Joint Plan of Reorganization (as Modified) Pursuant to Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code had occurred.  Wellman filed the Third Amended Plan on January 13, 2009 and the bankruptcy court entered an order confirming the Plan on January 14, 2009.  As reported in an earlier post (available here), creditors overwhelmingly voted in favor of the Plan.

Download copies of the plan of reorganization, confirmation order, and every other document filed in Wellman’s bankruptcy case using netDockets.  Sign up now for a free trial account.

]]> http://gamerbrblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/midway-vendida-por-us-100000/ Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:11:48 +0000 praphael http://gamerbrblog.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/midway-vendida-por-us-100000/

Não, eu não esqueci de nenhum zero, um investidor muito doido comprou cada ação da Midway por US$ 0,0012 isso mesmo, pouco mais de um décimo de centavo de dolar, totalizando cerca de US$100,000. Nos tempos das vacas gordas as ações da empresa valiam US$ 23,00 e começaram a cair chegando a US$ 0,38 e agora os US$ 0,0012.

]]> http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/best-of-mediaanthropology-2008/ Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:12:26 +0000 John Postill http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/best-of-mediaanthropology-2008/

Daniel Lende over at Neuroanthropology has launched a Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008 Call for Submissions and kindly asked me to submit the most popular media/anthropology post as well as my own selection for best entry.  So here are my two submissions:

The most popular post has been “Tim Ingold:  ‘Anthropology is not Ethnography’“. Why this particular post? asks Daniel in his call for submissions. I don’t know, but possibly because (a) this is a topic with broad appeal beyond the specialist confines of media anthropology, (b) it was picked up by the widely read collective blog Savage Minds and then spread to other anthropology blogs faster than you can say ‘festive season’,  (c) Tim Ingold is a household name to many in the  anthropological world, and (d) the heading reads like a journalistic exclusive (although, as someone pointed out, the post referred to a British Academy lecture delivered by Ingold quite some time previously).

My own favourite post? That’s a trickier one as this choice doesn’t rely on the hard figures supplied by Worpress.com. I suppose it would have to be my paper proposal ”The limits of networked individualism” because the swift response by Barry Wellman (a few hours after I posted it) actually got me thinking about this working paper. This led to a change in its title and focus, away from its original focus on networked individualism and towards what I hope is an original contribution that extends the theory of practice to new terrain, namely the question of digital media and local-level leadership around the globe, an issue about which we still know surprisingly little.

]]> http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/creditors-vote-in-favor-of-wellman-inc-plan-of-reorganization/ Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:28:07 +0000 Randall Reese http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/creditors-vote-in-favor-of-wellman-inc-plan-of-reorganization/

On Friday, the results of voting on the Third Amended Joint Plan of Reorganization (as Modified) for Wellman, Inc. and its affiliates were filed with the bankruptcy court.  Only three classes of claims were entitled to vote on the plan and all three classes voted in favor of the plan.  The results were as follows:

• Class 2 (First Lien Term Loan Claims):
  • Number of Valid Votes: 50 (none rejected as non-conforming)
  • Amount of Voting Claims: $180.5 million
  • Percentage in Favor (by number): 90%
  • Percentage in Favor (by dollar amount): 82.15%
• Class 3 (Second Lien Term Loan Claims):
  • Number of Valid Votes: 64 (none rejected as non-conforming)
  • Amount of Voting Claims: $255 million
  • Percentage in Favor (by number): 81.25%
  • Percentage in Favor (by dollar amount): 83.29%
• Class 4 (General Unsecured Claims:
  • Number of Valid Votes: 224 (11 rejected as non-conforming)
  • Amount of Voting Claims: $42.6 million
  • Percentage in Favor (by number): 94.64%
  • Percentage in Favor (by dollar amount): 99.01%

Download a copy of the certification of voting, which explains the tabulation procedures used, Wellman’s proposed plan of reorganization, and every other document filed in Wellman’s bankruptcy case using netDockets.  Sign up for a free trial account today.

]]> http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/the-field-affordances-of-personal-media/ Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:20:18 +0000 John Postill http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/the-field-affordances-of-personal-media/

This is the fifth in a series of posts on my working paper “Local leadership and personal media: a practice-theoretical approach”. See previous post here  and first post here.

Personal media (email, MySpace, mobile phones, digital cameras, etc.) provide their users with a range of communicative possibilities as well as constraints. In other words, these technologies have certain communicative affordances. These affordances, however, cannot be assumed to operate in a sociocultural or historical vaccum – they must be understood in context. For example, although it is technically possible to speak on a mobile phone in a university library’s silent study area, this activity is normally discouraged by means of prominently displayed notices and, sometimes, through verbal and other means. That is, the technical affordances of this particular personal medium are being curtailed by context-specific normative restrictions.

Similarly, in the field of residential affairs the use of personal media is shaped by the field’s pervasive collectivist (or communitarian) ethos. Although local leaders nowadays – certainly in most urban areas around the globe - are expected to own and know how to use different personal media, they are compelled to use these technologies for the greater good of ‘the community’ or face the consequences. The field of residential affairs is not fertile ground, therefore, for the growth of  ‘networked individualism’ – the reconfiguration of social relations around individuals rather than groups that some influential scholars regard as a key feature of the present era (Castells 2001: 128-9, Wellman 2002). If anything, personal media reinforce the field’s staunch collectivism in tandem with collective media such as local Web forums, mailing lists, newspapers, radio stations, and so on. Think, for instance, of a leading resident using her mobilephone camera to denounce, via a local Web forum, local council inaction over an unkempt public park or unrepaired footbridge. That same grassroots leader would be ill advised to use her personal blog to extol the virtues of individualism or the personal financial gains to be made from community projects. In fact, in this era of fast-moving Web and mobile content, leading residents must be prepared to swiftly counter any such insinuations or accusations made about them in the public domain.

Continued here

References

Castells, M. (2001). The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wellman, B. (2002). Little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. In M. Tanabe, P. van den Besselaar & T. Ishida (Eds.), Digital cities II: Computational and sociological approaches (pp. 10-25). Berlin: Springer.

]]> http://juliebcreative.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/ambera-wellmann-is-super-fantastic/ Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:35:13 +0000 juliebcreative http://juliebcreative.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/ambera-wellmann-is-super-fantastic/

Ambera Wellmann’s paintings/drawings rock my socks off. First off, what a cool name, right?!?!  Secondly I’m totally jealous of her clouds:

   

Droooool. I should take some cloud lessons from her. Besides her clouds and amazing landscape pastel, charcoal, and conte drawings…her still life(s) are eye popping. Painting red apples is like the hardest thing ever…and if you don;t believe me…TRY IT. Granny Smith apples? Easy? Grapefruit? Kind of hard. Red Apples? IMPOSSIBLE! Yet take a look at Amberas:



She is located in Halifax, which is where I was stranded for a week on 9/11. i was flying back from France and was mid flight when the attack occurred. i was fortunate enough to be stranded in such a beautiful place was so many amazingly generous people.

Check out Amberas shop!

]]> http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/bankruptcy-and-corporate-restructuring-news-headlines-november-11-2008/ Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:34:16 +0000 Randall Reese http://netdockets.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/bankruptcy-and-corporate-restructuring-news-headlines-november-11-2008/
• From Bloomberg:  GM’s Best Option Is Bankruptcy Filing, Ackman Says
• From Bloomberg:  Circuit City’s $1.1 Billion Bankruptcy Loan Buys It More Time
• From Bloomberg:  National Wholesale Liquidators Files for Bankruptcy
• From Bloomberg:  Circuit City Plans to Reorganize, Leave Bankruptcy
• From Bloomberg:  Macau Will Take Over Any Bankrupt Casino, Ho Says
• From Bloomberg:  Wellman Gives Choice of Reorganization or Liquidation
• From Bloomberg:  RBC Capital Seeks Bankruptcy for Energy Trader 1.618 Group
• From Bloomberg:  General Growth Falls on Talk of Bankruptcy Protection
• From Bloomberg:  Las Vegas Sands Gets $525 Million From Adelson Family
• From Bloomberg:  China Eastern Parks 10% of Planes as Demand Declines
• From Bloomberg:  Goldman `Well-Positioned’ Amid Challenges, Chief Says
• From Bloomberg:  Brick Group May Buy Canadian Circuit City Stores, Post Says
• From Bloomberg:  Fuld Sought Buffett Offer He Refused as Lehman Sank

News Headlines Provided By:



]]> http://61cygni.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/stonehenge-italia/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:09:08 +0000 61cygni http://61cygni.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/stonehenge-italia/

La Puglia vanta un ricco complesso di Dolmen e Menhir (sono 125 i siti megalitici censiti), una presenza tanto importante da meritare anche l’intitolazione di un’area di servizio sulla A14

Per la serie “Vacanze Salento” vi segnalo l’iniziativa del Comune di Giurdignano che per valorizzare il suo “Giardino Megalitico”, un ricco complesso forte di 25 fra dolmen e menhir, ha messo a punto un progetto di illuminazione dei megaliti.

Domenica scorsa l’inaugurazione di questi percorsi “notturni” che rendono l’atmosfera della visita più suggestiva e misteriosa, quasi surreale.

link consigliati:

Comune di Giurdignano Associazione Amici dei Menhir

consigli per le letture estive: “Non svegliare il Gram che dorme” di Manly Wade Wellman (già Urania nr. 1005). tratta di dolmen e menhir … tanto per rimanere in tema

]]> http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/postill-j-forthcoming-personal-networks-social-fields/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:49:27 +0000 John Postill http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/postill-j-forthcoming-personal-networks-social-fields/

Postill, J. (in progress) Personal networks, social fields: grassroots leadership and digital media in a Malaysian suburb, to be submitted to Ethnos



The author (right) at a youth basketball tournament in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Subang Jaya-USJ with Dato’ Lee Hwa Beng, a local politician who has just presented him with a photographic memento of the occasion.

Draft abstract (last revised 24 July 2008):

After long years of neglect, anthropologists have in recent times rediscovered an interest in networks (Riles 2000, Knox, Savage and Harvey 2006). This article joins ongoing efforts at critically rethinking and experimenting with the notion of network from an anthropological perspective. It does so in the context of internet research but seeking to avoid both the community/network trap lying at the heart of Internet Studies (Postill 2008) and the reductionism of the ’networked individualism’ model (Wellman and Lee 2008, see also Foth and Hearn 2007). It draws from recent ethnographic research on internet activism in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) as well as from conceptual work on the field and practice theories of both Bourdieu and the Manchester School of anthropology. The ethnography tracks the networking practices of three grassroots leaders as they traverse – both online and offline – different fields of practices, including the fields of local government, party politics, policing, blogging and journalism. The analysis shows that although a range of internet and mobile technologies affords these practitioners an historically unprecedented ability to cultivate vast personal networks, like all other forms of personal networking theirs is still highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the life course (Amit 2002, Bidart and Lavenu 2005) and strongly shaped by the specific ‘logics’ of the social fields (Bourdieu 1996, Turner 1974) in which it takes place. Thus a local politician seeking re-election is compelled to use every networking opportunity to digitally document (esp. photographically) his ability to understand and solve local problems – an indexical rather than symbolic imperative (Knappett 2002, cf. Turner 1974) that defines his way of ‘networking the fields’. In conclusion, there is no evidence to suggest a shift towards an overriding logic of ’networked individualism’ among grassroots leaders in the suburb (pace Wellman and Lee 2008), a finding that echoes Horst and Miller’s (2006: 81) ethnographic research on mobile phones and social relations in Jamaica. Instead, what we find in the Kuala Lumpur suburb is networked collectivism, i.e. individual leaders with an ‘interest in disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu).

]]> http://indiabriefingcentre.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/entrepreneurship-families/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:42:52 +0000 vikaspota http://indiabriefingcentre.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/entrepreneurship-families/

Amongst the vast number of claims that India and Indians make, the one that stands out for me is that India is truly the land of entrepreneurship. There are several examples of individuals who have gone from rags to riches in one generation.

For this reason, I was delighted to have attended the Ernst & Young Entrepreneuship Awards in London last week and found that in their main category of Master Entrepreneur, two out of five finalists were Indian. One of them, Dr Lalvani, of Wellman fame, went on to be specially recognised for his successes.

Both Indian finalists – Dr Lalvani and Rami Ranger place a huge emphasis on family support. It’s not unusual for winners to namecheck their family in their speeches, but Dr Lalvani’s was exceptional as he, in his very humble manner, made a simple point – he thanked his wife and family for allowing him to work every hour that he could.

I’m not claiming that Indian’s have a monopoly on family support – but as part of our cultural upbringing, families play a huge role in defining identities.

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