Neuromancer: Do a double take.

I'm a fan of dystopias. I love them. And what generally strikes me about them while I'm reading them is exactly how much different the world is from ours, and how much it's really not so different. As a political junkie, I enjoy considering the types of legislation and other policies that would/could be put in place that would make our society more like the one in the book. In general, the author of books like this have to spend a good chunk of the book explaining what the world is like around the characters. How exactly the government keeps up certain lies, how things have changed, etc. In Neuromancer, however, the book takes no time to help the reader adjust. The world is very different, we can tell that right away, but Gibson essentially makes the reader figure out what is going on in the world. Gibson gives vivid descriptions, but generally only as the characters in the novel run by them or consider them as a normal part of the scenery (ex: octagon, joeboy, coffins, etc).

Another thing that hit me was the subtle ways that the society is different from ours. There are very obvious things that are different from the beginning: there's a lot of cosmetic surgery (so much that it's weird, and a choice, to be ugly), people have extra metal and silicon parts attached to their bodies to help them do things (though this may be closer to reality than it seems), and the idea that one could lose their job by being unable to become "linked in" to cyberspace is foreign to us. There are points that are less obvious, though. At the beginning of Chapter 3, Case "watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn." In that one sentence, which doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, especially knowing Case at the beginning of this book, there are a lot of things that simply feel off if one thinks about it.
1. I had to Google search "Danish vodka" to find out if there was such a thing. Granted, I'm not a connoisseur of alcohol by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think of the Danes when I think of vodka.
2. Case bought vodka at a kiosk. Hard liquor is kept behind a counter, generally, even in more liquor-friendly states than Texas. One tends to think of a liquor store as a place you go, not a booth you might stumble upon in the aisles of the mall or something like that.
3. What caught my eye about this sentence originally was the words "an hour before dawn." As dawn is the time just before sunrise, we generally think of dawn as one of the only times of day, with the exception of Sundays, that pretty much no one can purchase alcohol, and more especially liquor. After glancing quickly over Wikipedia, only in Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, Atlantic City (NJ), and Cicero (IL) can one purchase alcohol 24 hours a day.

So why the digression into alcohol laws? This quick, short sentence, all by itself, brought up the fact that the laws where Case is purchasing Danish vodka at 4 or 5 a.m. must be quite different than the ones we're used to. I suspect that Neuromancer will be packed subtle suggestions like this, and I'm sure I will not catch them all, but this one really got me thinking. The world doesn't have to involve weird fake food and people with metal and plastic parts for it to be a very different setting than we're used to.

My high school is 112% Mexican

One other thing.

This week, I was messing around on Qwiki, trying to think of things to try that were well-known enough to have a page but sort of harder than cities and such to find (reliable) info on. So I looked up my high school. Now, it's funny: They got the "goose" from the name of the school district, but the mascot really is the "ganders". They also got some of the words to the alma mater, but I really wasn't expecting the thing to break into song. And most glaringly, I graduated in 2008, and while at the time the school is predominately hispanic (about 43%, according to Wikipedia), I'm not sure where they came up with "The school is 112% Mexican".

Qwiki is really neat, but it seems that (for now, at least) we have to take the things it says with a bit of skepticism and maybe do our own research to supplement what it says.

You mean you tell people where you are...all the time?

Over the past month, as I've been checking in everywhere I go (Jenna White is currently at the PCL with 4 other people. David C. is the Mayor), I've felt that if my friends really liked checking in wherever they go, this would sure be a lot of fun. Because of my relatively competitive nature, I've been enjoying it anyway, because stealing mayorships and earning badges is appealing to Competitive Jenna. On the other hand, though, I really can't see too many of my friends getting into this anytime soon.

One of my friends is a social media coordinator for a U.S. Senate candidate and has previously worked for a social media campaign coordinating company, and is the only person (not in our class) I know who checks in regularly on Foursquare. He also has his account linked to Twitter, all that jazz. At dinner with a group of friends, including my social media-loving friend, a few of the others started picking on him: "If you go on Twitter right now, you'll see that Josh is at Pei Wei"..."Yeah, Josh, aren't you the mayor of Thundercloud Subs yet? You eat there everyday." And so it went for a few minutes as they picked on him about (only) his check ins. There was no mention of the fact that he suddenly started tweeting (we understand that this is linked to his jobs) or that he tweets ALL THE TIME, often asking us to RT (retweet) links to his boss' website and such (a few of my friends do this. They "get paid for tweeting," as another friend said once). There's something different in the minds of my friends, it seems, about answering "What's happening?" and "Where are you?"

Why is this, do you think? Given, Josh really does check in at Thundercloud Subs on a pretty regular basis, but I think what they were really picking on him about was that he checks in anywhere. Maybe I'm wrong? As for my friends, they're relatively integrated into social networking sites. They nearly all use Twitter regularly for both telling the world what they're up to and to comment on politics (pretty much all of my friends are politically savvy and have worked for campaigns or in the Legislature). For this reason, I was surprised to see them find Foursquare check ins so foreign and laughable.

Do you all think it's really odd to check in everywhere you go? I sort of do, to be honest, but I feel like I shouldn't, as someone who has, in fact, been accused of over-tweeting.

The problem with "Funny"

In reading Brown's article, "Evil Bert Laden: ViRaL Texts, Community, and Collision," I thought his larger topics were very interesting: Can there be a planetary culture? What would one involve? How are we supposed to/can we interpret these ViRaL texts? All of these were well researched and even included input from Convergence Culture's Jenkins. But what struck me about this whole situation, though, was just how funny it is.

Like the picture we looked at in class Thursday, combining John Kerry and President Obama in a funny verge-of-political sort of way, the "Bert Laden" image is sort of funny and something that most Americans, if seeing it on their friends' facebook, for example, would have likely chuckled a little to themselves and moved on. In a different context (a rally people don't agree with), the image suddenly seemed to take on a new meaning. No longer was it remotely funny, it was a possible detriment to children, and on and on.

In a way this is an understandable reaction. I imagine people felt like something that is used for good (educating children) in the United States was tainted somehow by being put on a poster like these. All of this, to me, though, just make the situation seem even funnier. The evil Bert website and its accompanying photos are funny because though Bert is a puppet on a children's show, it's true that he's not really a nice guy. And a puppet from Sesame Street being caught in these compromising situations just seems clever.
Another layer of misunderstanding/hilarity was added when a foreign printing company didn't realize that an American children's puppet had made its way into a picture of Bin Laden. This brings up some questions about exactly how connected we really are to the rest of the world and how connected it wants to be to us, to be sure. But this sort of real life miscommunication seems like something that could only happen in a movie. And it's kind of funny.

On top of all this, apparently news stations and Sesame Street and parents were appalled by the idea that a character could be taken in a bad light. I don't think it would have affected my worldview as a child if someone had told me Bert was a terrorism activist on the side. I remember thinking he was mean and Ernie was nice. Kids learning their ABC's don't automatically go for worldwide implications. Terrorist = Mean Guy. And to take it a step further, why can't we teach kids that terrorist = mean guy? The threat of terrorism, since I was 11, has been a real part of my life, but on September 11th, 2001, I didn't understand who the terrorists were.

There are reasons that it's easy to define comedy and hard to define funny. To some people, certain things are funny, and to others, they're not. To me, this whole story of miscommunication is funny. A puppet in a compromising position on CNN is funny. A puppet making it onto a poster in support of Bin Laden is funny. And the guy's likely original motive for making the picture? A few laughs.

S/R 1: Convergence Culture

In his book, Convergence Culture, Professor Henry Jenkins postulates about the implications of a culture of convergence, “a paradigm shift … toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture” (254). As Jenkins explains throughout the book, this new, complex relationship has many implications. In the case of a devoted base of fan “spoilers,” the Producer of a television show, Survivor, was forced to try to stay just ahead of the group in order to keep the secrets of his show. He pushed back, though, planting fake evidence for spoilers to find and creating clues within the show (47). Jenkins notes that this new culture of the bottom-up pushing against more traditional forms of media can move from these niche communities toward politics. We can, he argues, be involved not only in communities of collective intelligence for purposes of entertainment, but also to “push back” and exert political power. He mentions and ponders Pierre Lévy and his ideas about democratization and the power of the people leading toward a sort of utopia (246). The idea that the meaning of “literacy” is changing is also a theme in Convergence Culture. In order to be an informed viewer of the movie The Matrix, one would have had to cross media platforms to anime, video games, and blogs in order get the whole story (96). This involves a new demand for participation by the consumer. In order to be involved in online chat rooms and in discussions, one is expected to know what they can say and do and how to find information that is collected online. In addition to all this, consumers are now being marketed to more efficiently than ever before, because in participating (and gaining power) through participation, we are also opening ourselves to easy access for those who would use our enthusiasm to advertise to us (60). This is all a part of the ebb and flow that comes with the “push back” from each group.

The most interesting and widely applicable question Jenkins posed was about the democratization for which this “convergence culture” allows. He considered to what degree the powers-that-be could be using people and their imagined sense of power and to what degree participatory culture truly allows power to be had. In a way, Jenkins bought in, referring repeatedly to Pierre Lévy, whose idea of an “achievable utopia” seems to fascinate Jenkins and shape his thinking throughout the book. The idea is that we can achieve a sense of perfect participation that transcends not only from a niche talking to members of its own group about the chances of someone getting “kicked off the island,” but into the political realm, including both the governed and those who govern. A key example of why this would be beneficial (whether or not it’s what Lévy or Jenkins really mean by utopia) is the story of the “Snowman” from YouTube taking on political candidates. A human, a person who would be a constituent, of sorts, of the President of the United States, made this video, but if he had done the video in his normal voice, as himself, it would not have been nearly as successful. As it turned out, Snowman scared politicians to death. All of a sudden, in a political debate for all the world to see, they were having to answer questions directly from citizens -- not only questions posed by citizens, but those linked with a face (only in one case was it a snowman) and a voice, and a YouTube profile.
To me, this is an excellent example of convergence culture allowing the masses to “push-back,” as Jenkins mentions. A utopia is not when all citizens have information and then end up believing in and asking the government to do all the same thing. Rather, from what I can tell, convergence and participation work best when users bring in the information they have already gathered, take in a little of what the collective has to offer, and begin to engage in the conversation for themselves. Perfection, then, isn’t clear cut. It’s messy. But in a way, it’s beautiful. We haven’t achieved this utopia -- some groups and voices still aren’t part of the conversation -- but in a way (and I’m really glad of this) we’re much closer to this ending than to one of a homogenous, powerful citizenry.

Convergence: The final frontier?

Early in the conclusion, page 257, Jenkins asks what is meant to be a relatively simple question: "Have I gone too far? Am I granting too much power here to these consumption communities?" He gives a simple-sounding answer: "Perhaps." Except "perhaps" is hardly a simple answer to a question like this. What it makes me think he's really saying is "I don't really think so" or "We'll see...".
Well, as soon as I read that, I thought to myself: Hmm... Maybe we can answer this.

We've seen since the beginning of the book that 2007 was, believe it or not, sort of a long time ago. Jenkins calls himself an "early adapter" and mentions that his pile of black boxes includes a VCR, separate from his DVD player (rather than a Playstation 3 with blu-ray, combination VCR/DVD player, XBOX 360, iPhone...). He mentions that people have been relatively skeptical about texting, and today my grandma has learned to text (she actually just got unlimited texting) so that she can have an easy way to communicate with her grandchildren. And she's been telling her friends that it's a brilliant idea! Come to think of it, my grandma's a good example for another reason: She's an avid The Bachelor fan, and she reads the forums for the show online. I watch it so that we have a reason to chat every week or so, and for the past three or four seasons, she's ruined the ending for me by telling me what the forums say will happen. She's a rewinder and rewatcher, too. As far as I know, she doesn't contribute, yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if she started at some point.

So what does all this, and my little rant about Gma, have to do with convergence culture? Three years ago, Jenkins was right. His DVD player was cool, texting was something the cool kids did that people over the age of 40 didn't really understand, lots fewer people had Twitter, Facebook, and on and on.
But the question remains: Is he giving "consumption communities" too much power?
He says "Perhaps." I say "No."
Maybe that seems a little bold, but I'll explain.

I think Jenkins is right to say that this participatory culture is powerful.
These days, big media corporations aren't completely crumbling, but they're having to work to find ways to keep their audiences. Just today, I was watching CNN and was given the opportunity to text in my vote on the story, of three news stories, that they'd show later on in the hour. Now, we're not just demanding that we have access to all the news through the web, but we expect television news to respond to our demands. People on Twitter ranted Saturday that news stations were covering the Super Bowl when they could have been getting that news on ESPN. In a way, our participation forces outlets to be at once more general and more specific than ever before.

Speaking of Twitter, that's where I get most of my news. I read the updates of BreakingNews, CNN, Time, BBCNews, etc, and I usually feel like I'm generally well informed. In fact sometimes, I'm one of the first to know certain bits of the news. I can also be one of the first to comment on a given news story if I happen to pick up on it in time.
Not only can I get my news and share the news and comment on the news on Twitter, but I can contact the people who write the stories, are famous for commenting on the news, and those whom the news references.
John Cornyn, a U.S. Senator from Texas often tweets and replies to tweets. Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, pretty much every CNN anchor, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post all have Twitter accounts. Some celebrities, politicians, and pundits are known for saying TOO MUCH on their Twitter pages. And they're not kidding around about caring what you say, either. I've had a few interesting interactions with people on twitter, but a recent example:
I got an email from a politician I support (because I'm on his email list) saying to please RT his most recent tweet or to link his facebook page and put the tweet in my own words. I was about to go to my first class of the day, so I decided I'd do it later. When I got out of class, I had a text from a guy who's working as social media director for the campaign asking me to RT or paraphrase the tweet. Now, I thought about three of my friends actually cared (or pretended to care) about my Twitter, but apparently this guy had noticed that my tweets are often political and asked me for help. Friday, I woke up to find that I had been mentioned in this politician's list of "Follow Friday" Twitter pages. While he makes a lot of his own updates, I have a feeling that the media director guy included me in that tweet. Still, I felt I had come full circle. I'd been commenting on the news and the politics/politicians I observed. I'd been noticed, to a degree, and was encouraged to participate. I had a debate about this politician with a friend on Twitter because he disagreed. And finally, the politician responded to me by showing his appreciation that I helped him out.

I rambled again. But all of this is to say that I think we are democratizing the media, bit by bit, and that we're making opportunities for better political culture, as well. When information about what is happening in Washington or in the Capitol in Austin, or in Tahrir Square in Egypt is nearly instantly available to my black box of choice, day or night, politicians and higher-ups of that nature are forced to be responsive and accountable.