Last week on Earshot we did a show about the Solomon Amendment and the recent Supreme Court judgement ruling it to be Constitutional. Our very first Earshot last year (and pilot!) was about this issue, so it was great to be able to do a follow up.
Mar 292006
Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?
This is a great super-long blog entry cum essay by the super-smart Danah Boyd. She’s insightful on social software stuff. Heart.
Mar 242006
Asia, Far East, news and analysis Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times
Some unusual Chinese characters will be banned from people’s names due to technological restrictions.
Mar 222006
This was my first ever videoblog that I made over a year ago with Sonali. I love it, it really makes me laugh and gives a good impression of my friend Eric.
Mar 222006
This is some footage I shot at Glastonbury last year. On the Friday there was an almighty downpour that lasted for seven or eight hours and turned the site into a mudding hellhole. It was still kind of fun though.
Mar 222006
Just before Spring Break we did a Earshot episode about Fair Trade. This show idea was Annie Myers’s and she made the package, which was her first time editing. She did a great job.
Mar 222006
This is a movie I made for Experimental Approaches to Non-Fiction Media class. Making it was a lot of fun. I should have cut down on the dancing, but I really enjoyed making this movie. It’s an autoethnographic piece.
Mar 222006
A couple of weeks ago on Earshot I spoke to Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre about the threats to our privacy posed by databases that store information about us without our explicit knowledge or consent.
Mar 222006
I recently read an article by Michael Renov called “Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist” where he discusses Jonas Mekas’s film in relation to the idea of the essay – a piece of work that is not definable, that deals with the word but more importantly with the seeing of the world.
He points to a tradition of essay writing stretching from Montaigne through Nietzsche and Adorno, to Barthes. I am a big admirer of the essays of Roland Barthes and the idea of using video to address the world in an essayistic style appeals to me. Renov describes it as a process where you are looking at the world and judging it, but it’s the process of judging rather than the verdict that counts. This is a style I think would work extremely well with audio. Doing something similar with video would be more challenging, but I’m intrigued to try.
The essay is a creative act that makes a lot of sense to me.
I also read Catherine Russell’s article “Autoethnography: Journeys of the self”. I have just finished an autoethnographic video myself. It’s a funny and silly piece, but I made it with the idea of an autoethnography in mind.
She talks about the potential of autoethnography to challenge the idea of ethnicity itself, as it focuses on the contingency of experience and location.
She also talks about how the move to video encouraged a “diary mode” and the ability to record huge amounts of footage cheaply. She refers to the “the futuristic medium of video, which promises total instant recall of all history”. This is a fascinating to me – the idea of video as a promise of having everything recorded from now on. Everything becomes footage. The videoblogging dream (nightmare?) in some ways.
