new social media

Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

Image Credit: minted.com

Choosing a holiday card is apparently a big deal. I was not aware of this until my sister (married with two children) called me in distress over designing her card. As we talked and I pressed her to explain how this could possibly be stressful, I learned that the tradition of sending out greeting cards around the holidays isn't just about spreading good cheer. The rise of the photocard has made holiday salutations into an important opportunity for families to make a positive visual impression on friends and relatives.  This surprised me a little because I had naively assumed the intent was to express one's hot-cocoa-induced feelings for the cards' recipients. But considering that media today is increasingly social, targeted, and customizable, the practice of creating a visual brand for one's family and sharing it with others should come as no surprise at all.

Everyone's an Activist, All 99% of Us. Right?

OWS Protester

Image Credit: Screenshot capture of photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The photograph above was featured this week in The L.A. Times' coverage of the Occupy Wall Steet movement's one-year anniversary. The caption provided beneath the photo states, "A man wanting to join the Occupy protesters on Monday is told to leave Wall Street." The image gives pause, not because a policeman is pictured confronting a protester, but because the man's ethos seems incongruous with that of the anarchist-inspired OWS movement. My recollection of the "Occupied" zone in downtown Austin last winter calls to mind the image of a different kind of a protester, one who looks as committed to battling the elements as he is to changing the status quo.  This unidentified man, however, does not look prepared for the scene of mayhem he is allegedly trying to enter. With a cigarette balanced precariously atop his coffee cup, he looks like he's just popped down from the 20th floor to grab some more uppers. It's amusing (or disheartening, depending on your outlook) to imagine him scrawling "99%>1%" on a scrap of paper before venturing into the mob that separates him from the nearest Starbucks. But this is pure speculation. It's equally likely that the man in the photograph is an overworked reporter, or an analyst who has thousands of dollars of debt from student loans. Perhaps he was walking by the OWS demonstration, got inspired, and decided to join on a whim.  Either way, the photographer caught him looking weary, unimpassioned, and in a moment of half-hearted negotiation with the police, which is why this photo provides a useful illustration of the phenomenon known as slacktivism.

Gifs, gags, and digital nostalgia--the long wait for Breaking Bad season 5.2

breaking bad art project

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

I simply cannot resist a good topical tumblr. Of course, the orienting rhetorical principle of tumblrs like textsfromhillary (inspired by a single Reuters photo of the Secretary of State checking her smartphone on a C-17) or geraldoinahoodie (created in response to Geraldo Rivera's comments on the Trayvon Martin case) is undoubtedly kairos, and, as we might expect, these sites are often abandoned as quickly as they are generated, leaving nothing but a flurry of self-referential entries that lose their meaning the further they become removed from their rhetorical moment. As the creators of textsfromhillary assert in their final post, "As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself?"

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation

Leviathan Frontispiece including Pinterest Content                  Hacked Leviathan Frontispiece. Image Credit: David A. Harper

In the coffee shop where I ‘m writing, there are two large bulletin boards in a high-traffic area (the hallway leading to the restrooms). We all know how bulletin boards and advertising work: once a provocative image draws you in, the text informs you, proselytizes you, or sells something to you. On a well-used board layers upon layers of images vie for attention, each individual post contributing to an unintentional artistic whole.  Gathered on the same bulletin board, even the most antagonistic images are put into dialog as the physical wooden frame becomes a conceptual one. We find patterns in the noise. These old-fashioned bulletin boards have been on my mind this week while I explored the high-tech virtual pinboards of Pinterest.

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

Early-modern Bear Baiting

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

Imaging the Republican Party

screen capture gop.com

Screen shot of gop.com

This past week the Republican National Committee launched its new websiteand found itself mired in technical difficulties and contending with several scathing reviews.  The website features a blog by chairman Michael Steele and several links to other forms of new social media as part of the GOP's most recent attempt to revamp its image.  I, however, was drawn to two different galleries of photographs featured on the website: the "Patriots: American Heroes and Famous Republicans" page which seems to tell a particular history of the party through the several black and white photographs it features and the "Republican Faces" page which features the personal photographs and testimonials uploaded by visitors to the site.

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