Filed under: Uncategorized
For the past few weeks, my colleagues and I have been examining the issue of graffiti in the Chicagoland area. Specifically, I’ve been exploring the socioeconomic impacts of graffiti on business and communities. I’ve learned that the issue is highly controversial, and highly complex. There are political, social, legal and artistic angles to name a few. Expression clashes with private property and the lines between right and wrong become increasingly blurry the more that people try to define them. Last year, the city of Chicago budgeted $7.8 million for graffiti removal, while in the same year it budgeted a little more than $14.5 million to the Department of Cultural Affairs, which manages public art. The general consensus seems to be that public art is acceptable, but vandalism is not. Differentiating between the two is the problem, and graffiti seems to fall into both categories depending on its context, content and viewer. The two interviews contained in this posting present two different, but not necessarily opposed viewpoints on graffiti in Chicago. The interviews can be found here.
As a group, we agreed to answer a set of four questions at the conclusion of our research. My answers can be compared to those of my groupmates here:
http://abarrera4.wordpress.com
Does graffiti unite or divide a community?
From the interviews that I conducted, it seems pretty obvious that graffiti divides a community. When graffiti is an issue, people are forced to take sides in a hazy battle between artistic expression and the law. However, the issue of graffiti seems to cause people to come into contact with groups and individuals who they would normally not interact with. Despite causing an idealistic divide, graffiti forces people to attempt to understand and deal with foreign cultures and viewpoints.
This wall features graffiti as advertisement.
Is graffiti a good example of Alternative Media?
Most of the graffiti that I saw existed for a purpose. Some research that we did indicated that some graffiti existed for the exclusive purpose of destroying something, but in our trip around the city, we only found one example of graffiti that was not trying to communicate some message. To the contrary, as we got further south in the city, graffiti seemed to be used to convey the history and purpose of a place. In some places, graffiti was even used to advertise businesses. These instances of graffiti seem to be a textbook examples of guerrilla media. They represent decentralised, anti-commercial, semi-artistic, cause oriented communication.
Does graffiti add to the value of Alternative Media?
an example of graffiti that is harmful to a community
an example of culturally beneficial graffiti
I think that graffiti has the potential to be both a positive and a negative force depending on its usage. As an indicator of gang or drug territory, I think that graffiti has a tangibly negative effect on society. As public art, I believe that graffiti can enrich the cultural and artistic heritage of a place. Because graffiti is the work of an individual, usually a local artist, it speaks clearly about the flavor of the location where it is displayed. The intention of an artist, location of the graffiti and its content all factor into whether a particular work is beneficial or detrimental to a community, but ultimately, the judgement is subjective.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m feeling particularly uninspired this evening but, as there is a direct correlation between my writing and my grade, write I shall. I only mention this particular state of mind because it is responsible for my choice of topic. While I was lamenting audibly about my lack of inspiration my lady-friend recommended that I write about the plush toy that was part of her easter basket–the pancake bunny. Pancake Bunny, in and of itself, is relatively insignificant to the rest of the universe. It’s a toy that could be sewn by anyone with a couple of hours of practice and decorated by anyone with a relatively sophisticated embroidery machine. Even I could put the thing together. My first reaction to the thing is that it looks like a Hello Kitty knockoff. And that resemblance is what makes it pertinent to Loyola University Chicago’s CMUN 297 curriculum.
Allow me to explore. Hello Kitty is, by definition, a meme. It’s a stylized cartoon cat face that decorates websites, profile pictures, desktops and icons. It transcends the virtual world in the form of toys, clothes, and such trinkets as school s
upplies, license plate borders and innumerable other trivialities of daily life. Hello Kitty is not limited to any particular age-group or ethnicity. In Italy this summer, I came across a store that sold nothing but Hello Kitty merchandise!
Originally, the cat was a cartoon character in Japan. One particular fan site tells us:
In the real world, Hello Kitty was born in Japan in 1974, when a young Tokyo-based company called Sanrio asked designer Ikuko Shimizu to invent a cartoon animal who would appeal to the preteen girl in everyone. Sanrio, which already had a bear and a dog (and, curiously, a strawberry) in its growing cast of characters, needed the new critter to decorate a plastic coin purse it was planning to produce.
The character is the subject of widespread fandom. Fan art, extends far beyond traditional outlets into such abominations as the Hello Kitty AK-47.
But Hello Kitty spills into even more of the Communications curriculum. Hello Wars is a website dedicated to a Star Wars/Hello Kitty mashup product line. By using the stylized large-eye face style and applying them to Star Wars characters, Hello Kitty becomes a moviement that maintains popularity through a parasitic relationship with existing subcultures. Don’t see what I mean? Ask yourself whether it’s likely that George Lucas envisioned a cartoon kitten as a vehicle for promoting his work, or if the former Soviet Union would have approved of garishly pink automatic weaponry…
Which brings us back to Pancake Bunny. The success of a (possibly unintentional) viral marketing campaign that has lasted more than thirty years is demonstrated by the creation of a universally recognizable icon. For the most part, if I can recognize a pop-culture figure, especially one that lives in the realm of pre-teen girls, then it has become truly universal. Further, as Pancake Bunny is in no way associated with Hello Kitty, the resemblence denotes the creation of a style rather than a product. Finally, the way in which Hello Kitty navigates the various channels of guerilla media provides an interesting case study as well as cause for a sigh of relief that this degeneration marks the end of my graded blogging!
Filed under: Uncategorized
I tend to be a nonliniar thinker. I’ll hear something and file it away for later contemplation. This characteristic means that I have to periodically set some time aside for random musings. It so happened today that while I was shaving, I was replaying a conversation in which a friend asked me to take a look inside his iPhone to see if I couldn’t fix a nonworking button. I spent some time deliberating wheather I should take the opportunity to buy a new soldering tip that would be small enough for the job or whether I should just make one out of a paperclip, but what really got to me was when I remembered that he told me he needed the button fixed because it had to be held in order for him to hack the phone. I got to thinking about the phenomenon of “unlocked” phones that seem to have swarmed Craigslist for the last couple of years which got me to thinking about the marketing implications of deliberately limiting your target market for a cell phone to users of a particular carrier…
With my main goal being not-bleeding, I decided that Apple was probably making loads of money off of AT&T in exchange for the exclusive rights, while AT&T footed the bill for much of the iPhone’s advertising (which, by the way need only be minimal as the iPhone seems to have a massive cultural following anyway). On top of that, Apple need only create a shoddy firmware that lends itself to easy hacking, and they get all of the revenue that they would have gotten in an open market anyway. It was corporate guerrilla marketing. It was brilliant! It was also the kind of moral dubiousness you would expect from a company whose genesis is the copyrighting, nay, stealing of others’ work.
So, I sat down to blog about it and grab some grade, but needed to drop some specifics of the deal into the article to make it more interesting. After about a half-hour of research, I learned that the iPhone is currently only hack-able for use on the TMobile network with limited feature availability. As I expected, it is a firmware hack, but it’s not nearly as simple or effective as is nessecary to fulfill my evil plot, accordign to the PC World Article that discusses the hack. Also, it seems that Apple had to cajole AT&T into a deal and, while Apple is certainly not on the short end of the stick, the conspiracy theory brilliance just isn’t there.
In the end, I also turned up some information published by my favorite nerdy periodical, Wired, that reinforces my feelings of bitter disdain for Señor Jobs and his evil empire. I’m reminded that even when I set out to prove that Apple had a stroke of brillance, I can’t find anything that I like about the company!
Filed under: Uncategorized
I forsook class on Tuesday to sit in a small office and contact members of the Missouri House of Representatives. I’d been working all night on organizing a group to try to get the Missouri Schoars Academy back onto the FY 2010 budget, from which it had been completely omitted. Accordingly, I hadn’t given so much as a glance to my syllabus before asking permission to miss part of the class. So, when my professor told me to ‘get to it, sometimes important things come up… besides, you’ll be doing citizen journalism anyway,’ I didn’t give it much thought.
What happened next has kept me entranced for the last two days. I proceeded to make just under 100 phone calls to my friends from the Academy, Missouri Represetntatives, and supporters of the Academy from my immediate circle of friends. My goal was to get up-to-date information about the best way to lobby the inclusion of the program into as many people’s hands as possible. While the class was downstairs discussing citizen journalism, I was hard at work becoming a journalist. A little before 9:00 PM on Tuesday evening, a complete compilation of my findings were sent via Facebook to the 1180 members of the Missouri Scholars Academy group.
The group–pollitically active by nature–caught fire. by the estimates provided in return emails to the Scholars on the forum, more than a thousand letters were sent in a span of twelve hours. Many of the scholars sent emails to every committeeperson who would be voting on inclusion ammendments the following day. One started a forum thread on Jon Stewart’s website, which in activist format, recieved such a high number of postings, that moderators suspected that one person had made nearly 80 accounts and was spamming the site.
The group thus mobilized, we sat through the first vote which, as expected, failed. I sat down yesterday afternoon and outlined some suggestions for phase 2 of the game plan. At this point, we are waiting on the text of the failed amendments so that we can find the politically weak points and try to find a solution. The next few weeks are sure to be a gripping hands-on lesson in a field that is completely new to me.
Filed under: Readings
My decision to move to the city was largely motivated by a desire to experience cultures that I had no access to at home. Six months into the experiment, I need to think about the progress I have (or haven’t) made. On a philosophical level, I’ve found a new appreciation for my roots. I think that appreciation, in itself, would be sufficient to fill several entire postings, but I only bring it up to juxtapose the originality of semi-rural life with the horrible lack of originality in its pop-culture.
For most of the ’90’s, I was diametricaly opposed to all aspects of pop music and culture. I remember the summer that Fastball released The Way. It played incessently on the local Top 40 radio station, and I loathed it. Every single morning at swim practice, and every single afternoon on the way home, my feelings of complete loathing for the regurgitation that was pop culture were reinforced. I later (ten years or so) found an appreciation for Fastball, as well as for several other of the soft alt-rockers of that era.
For the most part, Blue Springs, MO was behind the pop culture curve. Kansas City is not really part of any culture scene, and the suburbs are pretty much off the map. The city itself has started to try to change this with the devolopment of the Power and Light District and the renovation of downtown, but it promises to be a long process. Frankly, I never really minded being out of the center of the universe. Although some of my peers certainly had the ‘get the hell outta here’ bug, my motivation to explore the big city was motivated by a combination of mild curiosity and a desire to check things out while I was only responsible to myself.
How does any of this relate to the analysis of meme culture? Well, it shows that I’m definitely not the right person to discuss the cutting edge and it allows me to identify myself with the ‘poser’ culture of kids who wear low-slung jeans despite the fact that the dirt underneath their newish pattern house was nourishing corn less than ten years ago. I think that memes go to the suburbs to die a slow and painful death. The proof of this theory lies in the video of the pair of middle-aged white school administrators dancing to Soulja Boy at a pep rally. (Thankfully, the clip has been taken off of Youtube) Because I’ve only witnessed the elderly memes, I think that the next few years will present me with quite a few spectacles.
Filed under: Readings
Normally, I ignore chainmail. I have a few people that send me more than normal, so I create mail filters to keep the jokes about married couples, pictures of kittens, and videos of lawnmower DUIs separate from those emails which will affect my credit score. To that end, it’s possible that somewhere in the backdated annals of my unread email, there’s a copy of Jonah Peretti’s crusading correspondence with Nike that I never read.
I didn’t consider chainmail to be a legitimate form of journalism before reading Peretti’s blog, and I’m not sure I do afterward. Although the reading was assigned, which lends it some credibility, and it eventually panned out to be true, my history as a debater still drove me to find the email transcript, and then to verify its accuracy. The blog and email chain was cool, but the credibility still came from the ESPN running of the story and a copy of a transcript from the TODAY show.
Couric-Palin jokes aside, I suppose that I’ve been trained into the class that inherently questions the legitimacy of less-than-major news sources, despite mass media’s blemished track record. There’s something radical about independent media that appeals to the young adult in me, though. Because it’s not motivated by the profit rush and it doesn’t fall into the humdrum of the daily news, it seems to eternally retain that edgy, inspired quality which makes it so attractive in the first place. Use it to mobilize 50,000 people and coordinate a protest and we can get at least a fleeting taste of the power that must have been present in the French Revolution. In addition to the political effects of this kind of communication, it’s just cool.
So, if this power, vaguely defined by the circulation of Peretti’s Nike letters, and the outcome of the ‘99 Seattle WTO protests is our starting point, we can add one part teenage angst, and dilute with a marketshare of a few million of Bimber’s Free Riders, and you create a Facebook group. Specifically, you create a very basic, formulaic and simplistic collective action movement. Specifically:
In short, there seems to be a tension between the ‘dangerously’ radical and the ‘boringly’ formulaic. I suppose that the same reasons keep me from vandalizing property in an act of protest that cause me to delete emails with the subject FW: Fw: FW: FW: BEst FrIEnds!
Filed under: Readings
When I think of ‘crafting’, I think of someone else’s grandmother. Actually, I think of doilies, which are quite possibly the most worthless things ever conceived by the human race. I suppose my relationship with the DIY community is fraught with sectarian loyalties; I tend to have a general contempt for anything that can be characterized as a “knick-knack”–maybe it stems from my fervent hatred for dusting. On the other hand, I’m all about any sort of ‘practical’ craft.
With this mindset, I found the case study of Heidi Kenney’s My Paper Crane less than interesting. I’m all for artistic expression, but I have absolutely no desire to purchase a handmade plush toilet. No, I tend to avoid the Crafster end of the DIY spectrum and gravitate toward Makzine and Instructables. I come from a family of engineers, which means that I am genetically programed to make projects far more complicated than they need to be. Whether it was the pully system designed to ring a bell when my little brother broke into my room to steal Legos, or the hovercraft we built in high school for a physics project, I’ve always had an inclination to build, break, tinker and examine. So the DIY community is something that I’m anxious to watch grow. 
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alternative, Boston, media, Rock and Roll
I seem to have run myself down over the weekend, which is hard to imagine considering I spent a massive eight hours of it in front of a television, drank something like twelve pots of tea, and only changed out of house shoes on about three occasions. Nonetheless, when copious amounts of sleep, vitamins, and herbal tea failed me last night, I decided to switch to caffeinated, stay up really late, and document my insanity by publishing something that will not only be subject to the scrutiny of anyone with an internet connection, but will also be graded! And so begins my career as a blogger.
For those of you (mostly family) who will be reading this as a first introduction to my more casual writing motif, as for my peers, these first few postings will contain some explanation of my methods. They’re really not intended for you, rather they will be an opportunity for me to figure out where I’m going with this whole ‘blogging’ business, but you may find them helpful nonetheless. Be advised that they may change as a result of the success of the notion that I can be casual in my analysis of these weighty matters. Should this mess turn into a series of ordered essays, know that you can ignore them at any time.
That being said, the purpose of this blog is to analyze and discuss relevant class readings and various other topics concerning alternate media. (Here begineth the word count.)
As a matter of introduction to the subject-matter, we looked at an interview with Robert McChesney, the first chapter of We the Media, and the introduction to Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. Class discussion focused on identifying a definition for “alternative media,” and indirectly identified issues surrounding the increasing public access to an ever-expanding array of tools which make it possible 
to create new and modify existing intelectual property. The basic idea is that once it took a monk to copy a book. Later, any Thomas Paine who happened to stumble into a printer’s shop could publish a pamphlet. In a few hundred more years, the mimeograph. Follow the Xerox. Next thing you know, you’ve got some MIT kid who happened to intern at Polaroid building a tape recorder out of tinfoil and electrical tape and recording Foreplay.
That’s where the process gets to be tricky. At what point does something that’s radical, small, independent, and personal turn into a major corporate entity? There is no definitive answer to this question. Chris Atton writes that a publisher need only identify his or her work as ‘independent’ to make it so. Some argue that independent art and media must necessarily be nonprofit, but any garage band is likely to refute that argument.
Further, is it a realistic goal to be independent? There seems to be a lot of desire to be associated with the ‘alt’, ‘independent’, ‘punk’, or ‘indy’ movement. I suppose that if one 
throws the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘inventive’ into the mix, it gets easier to understand this. Especially in music, there is a definite superiority to being the person that ‘discovers’ the ‘next big thing’. One front-row experience at a Regina Spektor concert will quickly affirm that. So, alternative media is a meritorious interest for a consumer. What about for the artist/publisher/innovator? Does anyone really ever start a band and dream of being a relatively-unknown-mediocre-home-town-artist? Must ‘innovative’ be synonymous with ‘indy’? Go listen to Juke Box Hero and then find a comperable song written about being an underground school newspaper hero. Or better yet, ask Ace Diamond and Phil Coley. (I don’t know them either, I just Googled “lost band of the 70’s”)
The point is that I’m as fascinated by the next movement in individual empowerment as the next guy. On the other hand, I’m not quite ready to completely condemn the entire system of traditional publishing yet; even if it does produce a Bill O’Rilly every now and then.
