viz. - internet

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 1

Laura Thain — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:30:10 +0000

Image Source: Gorgonetta

As gifs begin to occupy more and more space in internet discourse, I’ve been contemplating the various ways they reinvent older media forms. New media theory tells us this is an inevitable historical trajectory; it is not just a characteristic of post-broadcast media but embedded in mediation as an ideological concept. What I find particularly interesting about gifs is not just how they remediate the television shows, films, Youtube videos, and memes from which they derive meaning, but also how they relate to a much older form of media: silent film. And in such a reading, the overlap between the production of fame and celebrity in the silent film tradition and in current gif discourse is remarkable—and worth discussing.

In order to describe such a relationship, we might first turn to scholarship on the production of celebrity in the realm of silent film. A problem we must account for in exploring this topic is that, while mass-produced and marketed motion pictures begin at the turn of the 20^th century, no form of cinema stardom existed in mass media until at least 1910, if not later. One common historical narrative argues that celebrity resulted from the battle between actors/actresses and film production companies. Although audiences wanted to know the names of performers, production companies resisted billing their actors and actresses in order to maximize their profit margins. It was not until the breakup of Edison’s Patents Trust by anti-trust legislation and the victory of independent film studios that the “star system” emerged as the direct result of specific shifts in production.

Clippings of Florence Lawrence, Biograph Picture's first leading lady, "obituaries" after her death was faked as a pubicity stunt by her agent, Carl Laemmle. Note the anonymous poem referring to her as the actress "whose name we've never known"--before her fake death, Lawrence was known only as "Biograph Girl." Image Source: 11e14thstreet

Richard DeCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Illinois, 2001) provides a productive counter-narrative. De Cordova argues that celebrity cannot be accounted for by examining shifts in production alone—we must understand its development as a discursive category. “The star system,” he argues compellingly, “is not simply the creation of one person or even one company; nor is the desire for movie stars something that arose unsolicited [among audiences].”

Instead of focusing solely on the development of film production, DeCordova describes a larger phenomenon: the emergence of a “discourse on acting.” A precondition of this discourse was the separation of the actor from the film itself. As the public began to understand moving pictures as a remediation of theatre, conceptions of the actor in the filmic space developed to account for the role of the actor and the actor him or herself. A difference between on-screen and off-screen presence was established. The result of such a distinction is what DeCordova calls a “picture personality.” Audiences traced these “personalities” across films, producing a discursive space in which actors and actresses were recognized intertextually and the role of an actor in one film was associated with the character he played in others. (In this sense, all actors and actresses of early film became recognizable to the public as “character” actors and brought with them from film to film assumptions about the dramatic space they inhabited. Mary Pickford was the ingénue, Douglas Fairbanks the swashbuckling hero, Charlie Chaplin the tramp, etc.) Still, picture personalities were associated with the films in which they appeared, not their private lives.

Mary Pickford in a 1920 publicity still. Image Source: Library of Congress

DeCordova concludes by arguing that the term “star” (a true film celebrity) can only be applied when an actor’s personal life is available for public consumption. The personal (“off-screen”) life of the actor becomes the new center of truth and authenticity. Only then can we consider actors in films true “celebrities.”

What does any of this have to do with gifs as a medium? Like early film, gif fame depends on intertextuality. The discursive space occupied by the gif strongly resembles the discursive space DeCordova gives to the “picture personality.” Gif fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning. Like silent film, gifs have an embedded “meme” function. If we read memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation” (OED) we can see the meme in silent film—how it communicates cultural concepts through characterized gesture and intertextual association, through the actor, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The gif accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, gifs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity created after the “picture personalities” of early silent film, even as they rely on that celebrity to creative enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. One need not, for instance, be familiar with the TV show or film from which a gif is extracted if one is familiar with other intertextual applications of the gif as an ideological concept (its embedded function as “meme”). For example:

Audiences need not watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta to interpret the signature gesture of Nene Leakes here.

Image Sources: RealityTVGifs

This Harry Potter-inspired gif can be coupled with a variety of captions--it captures an emotion, rather than a specific narrative.

Image Source: WhatShouldWeCallMe

This happens in terms of both a gifs adherence to and defiance of its own “meme” function. In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore the “meme” function of both silent film and gif culture, drawing parallels between the two in order to further demonstrate how gifs reinvent old media not only in terms of discursive space, but in the formal characteristics of the medium itself.

For Part 2 of this post, click here.

Google's "Sea View" and Marine Metaphors for the Web

Calliope — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:31:25 +0000

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Google Maps has a remarkable new feature called Sea View that spotlights oceanic life and space. Sea View is essentially the marine version of Street View, a layer of Google Maps that allows users to navigate though 360-degree panoramic images of the Earth's surface. By extending the concept of Street View to the ocean floor, Google has added six coral reefs to the long list of cities, landmarks and parks users can currently explore remotely, from the comfort of their digital devices. The fascinating images captured so far by Google and its partner, Catlin Seaview Survey, bear out the imaginative quality of the overarching project. It's almost as if Sea View is Google's attempt to fulfill a common childhood fantasy: to experience what it would be like to live under the sea. With its zoomable and virtually traversable underwater imagery, Sea View enables adults and children alike to realize this wish (without having to worry about oxygen supply or the expense of travelling to distant coral reefs).

The look and purpose of these new images disinguish them markedly from the aerial and street views that we normally interact with in Google Maps. Catlin's director told CNN that the goal of the Sea View project is to generate interest in underwater ecosystems and spur the general public to preserve them. The public may have initially used the traditional Street View in a similar vein--out of a sense of curiosity or wonder. But since its debut, Street View's main purpose has shifted to utility; people use the tool because it helps them to recognize the destination they are trying to reach. How pictures of an underwater seascape could ever offer this kind of utility to the ordinary person is difficult to figure.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Thus the juxtaposition of the two environments--terra firma and the ocean floor--within the same, searchable platform (Google Maps) is both striking and a bit puzzling. The screenshot above, showing a bird's-eye view of downtown Austin with its traffic patterns highlighted and sushi restaurants pinpointed, contains a map that is deliberately designed to organize and communicate information. Every pixel is laden with navigational data which may ultimately be converted into cash via ads and sales. The networked surface of the place--stamped with symbols, labels and outlines of the city's infrastructure--looks nothing like the surface of the sea just off of Heron Island, a cay east of the Australian coast. The vista (below) overlooks the water surrounding the island, which is now penetrable to the online world thanks to Sea View. When compared with Google's land maps, the unmarked appearance of this stretch of blue suggests one or both of the following: that something about the ocean actually resists tidy quantification, or, that (at least so far) Google has nobly refused to parcel it up.

Image Credit: Google Maps

Much of the available underwater imagery supports the first conclusion, that marine worlds do not readily lend themselves to virtual mapping and, in general, are difficult to gain one's "footing" in. Take for instance the murky water (below) surrounding Lady Elliot Island, another reef-fringed habitat east of the Australian mainland. The navigational arrows at the center of the viewfinder denote a pathway through the haze, but they do not give the user a sense of where she is going, or even which cardinal direction she is facing. The lurching action that occurs between frames further displaces her in the fog. She feels a bit like Satan tumbling through Milton's Chaos, an "Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / and time and place are lost" (PL II. 892-94).

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Perhaps this is the point of the technology. It seems ironic, but Google might actually be encouraging us to get "lost at sea" through the unlikely medium of a mapping program. As it turns out, the underlying idea that Internet maps and browsers can facilitate tidal drift is not as new or outlandish as one would think. Recall, for instance, the mother of all Internet browsers, Netscape Navigator, whose trademark icon was the helm of a ship. The Netscape wheel was an apt synecdoche for a vessel-like piece of software that allowed users to rove freely around the web. (It was also a tribute to the company's founder, Jim Clark, whose obsession with computerizing a giant sail boat is wittily documented in The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.) Thus, it's possible that Google's dive beneath the waves is part of a bid to take us back to the good old days of internet surfing, which were arguably less about fixing our location--tagging and marking the virtual space around us--and more about exploration and immersion: floating weightlessly like a sea turtle through a vast expanse of images and texts.

Image Credit: Google Streetview Gallery

Startup Channels Candy Land to Explain Itself to the World

Calliope — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:10:56 +0000

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

Scrolling through the online list of startups launched this week at Disrupt SF, an annual technology conference hosted by TechCrunch, feels a bit like peering into the future the Web. The catchy slogans and names of companies like Hop.in, Oogababy, and Okdo.it proclaim a new kind of Internet experience, one that is better, faster and more seamless than ever. The only caveat is that many of these startups will not get the chance to impact the Web. Almost half of new businesses fail before they hit their five year mark.

Nevertheless, the roster of aspiring and early stage companies at Disrupt offers a snapshot of where entrepreneurs and app developers think the Internet is headed. Strangely, the success of YourMechanic--which won Disrupt's equivalent of the battle of the bands--suggests that the future may favor internet companies that are simply better than brick-and-mortars at providing access to basic services, like quality auto repair. Yet many of the startups featured at the conference don't bother with the real world at all. A sizeable number are devoted to allowing users to filter, personalize, or simply digest the seething contents of the ever-expanding Web.

Some of these aspiring businesses are strikingly abstract. Take for instance, Appidemia, a not-yet-live social-networking website for sharing and learning about--you guessed it--apps. If you're like me, you might wonder how this process works and how it could possibly be useful to anyone. It seems the founders anticipated utter--excuse me--user confusion since they dedicated the entire background of their "coming soon" page to illustrating--in bizarre, childlike iconography--the platform's central concept. The image below, which appears on the left side of Appidemia's site, seems to portray the mysterious processes of app creation, discovery and bundling, while the segment above (from the right side of the website) pertains to the sharing of said apps with the rest of the world.

Image Credit: Appidemia.com

There are many things to marvel at here: the extra-terrestial setting and its Candy Land-inspired trees, the oozing purple river (or is it an oil spill?), the app-showering hole in the sky, fuzzy cube creatures, and last but not least, the friendly pack of flying fish. The combined effect of these variously endearing, alien, and ominous elements is ambiguous. It seems to hinge on how comfortable the viewer is picturing herself in an otherworldly, inhuman place, and how willing she is to imagine herself engaging--as a prospective user of the site--in the work of manufacturing and re-packaging digital things. Comfort levels, and thus, the picture's appeal would seem to vary with the viewer's prior and/or simultaneous involvement in similar hyper-artificial web environments.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this image is that its purpose--to inform visitors of what the site does by literalizing its procedures--has the secondary, unintended effect of trivializing the whole enterprise of building, investing in, and subscribing to internet services whose sole function is to perpetuate further virtual experience. I would argue that Appidemia undermines its own service, and other narrowly self-reinforcing web services, through a few highly literal aspects of its banner. For one, the apps undergo a very slight change after passing through a giant robot machine; they get slapped together with a few other apps and tied up with a ribbon. So, essentially the site's functionality gets compared to that of a gift-wrapping station. Secondly, the viewer almost immediately transfers sympathy from the fuzzy dice characters to the pictured planet Earth. Not only do we prefer its inviting, serene appearance to the loud colors of the foreground's virtual landscape, but also, we worry that Earth is being assaulted with an app-loaded slingshot! In the end, Appidemia comes off as a factory that doesn't make much, and I want to shout, "Watch out, Earth! The Internet of the future is foisting on you all the apps you never knew you needed."

The Image of the City, Revisited: MIT’s Place Pulse Project

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: MIT's Macro Connections Group

Last week, as my students in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class presented their final movie projects, I was reminded of how we often judge a place after only a cursory glance. One group project especially got me thinking: “The Divide,” a student-made film that explored the differences between East and West Austin, included many images from East and West Austin along with candid interviews of residents from both sides of the divide. My students’ video reminded me of MIT’s Place Pulse project, which in turn reminded me of Kevin Lynch’s seminal urban planning book from 1960, The Image of the City. As a culmination of my time blogging about cities the last few months on viz., I’m going to talk about “imageability” and intimacy in Austin (and beyond).

As coined by Kevin Lynch, “imageability” is “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.” An “imageable” city is one that is readily identifiable by its landmarks and landscape. Connecting “imageability” to our daily lives, we make decisions on where to go if we’re unfamiliar with a city by judging what we see in the moment we see it.

East Austin Fence — Image Credit: karenjeanette's flickr

In their video, my students interviewed West Campus residents about their views on East Austin. Many of the interview subjects mentioned “chain-link fences” and “refuse” as they were describing East Austin. My students then asked their interviewees if they’d spent much time in East Austin—their answers were often phrased as “No, because it’s unsafe.” Seeing chain-link fences and trash was a deterrent for these West Campus students to venture across I-35 (no matter that the city’s most dangerous areas—in terms of the highest occurrence of murders, aggravated assaults, and rapes—aren’t even on the east side of town!).

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

But are these visual cues universal? A group of researchers at MIT’s Macro Connections Group has made it their goal to find out with Place Pulse. The group describes the project as “an attempt to generate quantitative data on aspects of cities that are hard to quantify, such as the effect that urban looks have on our perception of a city’s safety or our own perceived level of prosperity. To answer these questions we crowdsource the comparison of pairs of images that show randomly chosen urban landscapes.” When you visit the site, you see two images side by side, then are asked questions like “Which place looks more safe?” or “Which place looks more touristy?” or “Which place looks more livable?” The site is meant to emulate our experiences in unfamiliar places. A chain-link fence on an unknown city street might make us vote for the other place as “more safe.” Or an outcropping of flowers in someone’s front lawn might make us deem it “more livable” than its partner picture. An initial visual cue affects our opinion of a place, and Place Pulse helps track what kinds of cues stimulate specific reactions in urban environments.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

The researchers at Place Pulse have been collecting visual cue data for a little less than a year now. They’ve even started to open up their data set (and their site’s visitors) to independent researchers around the world. Now, you can set up a question, along with the types and locations of Google Maps images, to get answered by anyone on the internet.

Image Credit: Corbo E. on yelp

I’m curious to see what would happen if I were to ask “Which place looks more safe?” for two images of Austin—one of the Drag in West Campus, one of East Sixth Street on the East Side. To those not as intimately familiar with the wonderful trailers, bars, and artists’ studios on Austin’s East Side, the chain-link fence might signal “danger.” To me, that same chain-link fence signals “a perfect place to lock my bike (if the bike racks are already full) while I eat beet fries at the Liberty Bar.” The images of a city are key, but so are our intimate experiences of a place. As Kevin Lynch says: “We are not simply observers of this spectacle [of the city], but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with the other participants. Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.” At first glance, “image is everything.” But with a closer look, it’s not the whole story.

Hey Girl, I Made This Meme For You

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark. Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image Credit: Poli Sci Ryan Gosling

In case you don’t know what a meme is, Richard Dawkins first defined it in The Selfish Gene (1976) as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Internet has lead to the proliferation of memes, from "all your base are belong to us,” to Xzibit Yo Dawg, to the most prolific of them all, the LOLcat. What many memes share is a consistent form: a picture with humorous text superimposed over it. Frequently the memes—like the LOLcat—even use the same fonts to create a visually consistent appearance. What these memes do is to create communities through the shared humor and enjoyment of the same structure. Thus, the LOLcat meme developed certainly consistent cat characters like Ceiling Cat, and further iterations would feature new references to Ceiling Cat.

Image Credit: Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling

The earliest Ryan Gosling meme started with a humble blog named Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling, which gained notoriety when Ryan Gosling read several posts from it during two separate MTV interviews. What followed were numerous other Tumblr blogs, including Feminist Ryan Gosling, Typography Ryan Gosling, Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling, Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling, and of course Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling. The Goslimania culminated in protests against Bradley Cooper when People declared him the Sexiest Man Alive over Ryan. While People will go on to find more sexy men and Gosling more work, I’m left wondering what this decidedly symbolic protest represents.

Image Credit: Feminist Ryan Gosling

Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent post on the topic argues that the Gosling meme only works as long as the pictures support what he says. When it came to versions like Feminist Ryan Gosling, “you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.” However, she argues that versions like Biostatistics Ryan Gosling go too far because they don’t fit the meme. She reads the meme’s appeal in the juxtaposition of star and text, creating connections between Gosling and his fans:

Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.

I agree with Peterson that the attraction lies in projecting shared values onto Gosling, particularly feminist ones. We female academics would like to think (and perhaps have reason to suspect) that Gosling shares our values, and that we could talk Laura Mulvey with him—or Susan Jarrett, or any other topic we enjoy. However, I also suspect that the Gosling meme works best on women of this type: political liberal, feminist, and educated. These viewers appreciates how Gosling’s mild, non-threatening appearance can be endlessly appropriated to fit their desires—which is why the meme’s life has extended so far beyond its original appearance. The Ryan Gosling meme's core lies not in Ryan Gosling, but in his audience.

Image Credit: Hey girl. I like the library too.

Thus, Steve Kolowich’s suggestion that “it is unclear whether the blogs are intended as pure irony or as a genuine experiment to test whether the following gambits stand a chance of working even under optimal conditions” is a complete misreading. None of these women are suggesting that the pickup lines attributed to Gosling in the images would work. Rather, Gosling is a space in which women can vocalize desire. I think this is why the meme has been adapted to include variants like Gael García-Bernal Feminista, Academic Coach Taylor and Fuck No Rick Santorum. If Gael García-Bernal Feminista adds social justice overtones and sensitive floppy hair, Academic Coach Taylor embodies a more authoritative—though equally feminist—intellectual male. Fuck No Rick Santorum explicitly flips Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling to protest Santorum's sexist political policies. When so much Internet culture is explicitly sexist, the Ryan Gosling Tumblr memes constitute a safe space for feminist—and female heterosexual—discourse.

SOPA and PIPA; Or, If It Weren't For The Internet, We Would Have No Idea What Was Going On

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:31:47 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

If you didn't see this image last week, you may have been hiding under a rock. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed this image on January 18 as a result of their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which involved blocking all English-language content on the website. As a result of the blackout, 8 million people looked up their representatives in Congress, and a unknown number of people tweeted amusing and seeemingly illiterate things. (Mildly NSFW content in full post.)

Image Credit: Twitter

One collection of these amusing tweets can be found at herpderpedia, where one can read tweeted criticisms of the Wikipedia blackout, many of which profess to know absolutely nothing about the reasons behind the protest, even though users have just visited the site, which explained the reasoning behind blocking content. If one thing is clear from all these tweets, it's that students don't know how to function without Wikipedia. And, I confess, it was a tough day for me, too. There are just so many things to look up!

Criticisms of online protests by Wikipedia and other major websites like Google and Reddit were not just limited to the herpderps of high school and college students trying to complete their homework. A particularly nasty editorial from the Boston Herald describes the protests as a "hissy fit" that would only effect college students who should really be doing their research elsewhere. The Herald is among a reduced number of papers that still supports SOPA, that reduction being a direct result of internet protests.

Image Credit: caffpowered via reddit.com

And, as is usually the case when the internet gets something done, those involved were pretty proud of themselves. One Reddit user celebrated the sea change with this Photoshopped image of a still from 300 (making the image an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation), which likens himself and other users to a few Spartans defending their homeland against invasion by a vast number of evil forces. While from the outside, the image may seem pretentious (you might notice that the shields, made from web browser logos, exclude Internet Explorer, which only a rube would use), the celebration and self-congratulation are not unfounded.

Image Credit: Google

This infographic from Google shows how the internet response triggered mass protest in the forms of 887,000 telephone calls to Congress and telephone and 3,000,000 signatures on anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA petitions, and this image is a few days old already. Opposition to the bill is credited to the availability of information on the internet, and many news sources and protest websites credit their actions with educating the American public about SOPA and PIPA, even if herpderpedia shows that many Americans still did not understand the protests.

Image Credit: ProPublica.org

The most telling image comes from ProPublica, a non-profit internet news publication that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011, the first time that a non-print publication won. The infographic details who supported and opposed SOPA and PIPA prior to and following the January 18th protest, showing just how effective the January 18 actions were.

New Media, Old-school Agriculture

fc — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:31:42 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from CookingUpAStory.com

I sat down in front of the television this Tuesday to watch the PBS premier of Dirt! The Movie on Independent Lens. I had been looking forward to seeing this documentary about the soil cylce and its importance on agriculture, health and geopolitics, and I had even planned to write about it for this week's post. As you can see, that plan fell through: I went in expecting a dirt-y movie, but mostly what I got was a mess. While there was plenty of titular soil in Dirt!, the film came across as a random collection of dirt-related vignettes that were either purely repetitive or entirely unrelated. In all fairness, cutting the film down to fit a one-hour running time may be responsible for the disjointed presentation, but most reviews of its Sundance screening agree that it is an unnecessarily rambling documentary. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I had spent that morning talking to David Parry about the effects of internet technology and networked space on the established institutions of democracy, and as POV took over my television screen with its adapted running of Food, Inc., I began to think about documentary films-- and, in particular, films that intend to effect social and democratic change-- in the online time and space of the internet. Thinking about documentary film within a networked social space reminded me, fortuitously, of Cooking Up A Story, an internet hybrid that bills itself rather oddly as "an online television show and blog about people, food, and sustainable living." More about soil, sardines and the web-lives of food-docs (including video) after the break.

While the creators of Cooking Up A Story ("CUpS" for short) consistently refer to their site as a "television show," CUpS is much more sophisticated and interesting than television on the internet. Thanks to Hulu, most of us are by now familiar with what television looks like on the internet: it plays on demand and works with a different advertising model, but otherwise it remains remarkably faithful to its broadcast incarnation. By contrast, CUpS is a multi-format, multi-media collection of documentaries, lectures, interviews, opinion journalism and more; they offer, by their own account, "Doc Shorts," "Video Interviews," "Essays," "How-to Cooking Videos," "Family Recipes," "Video Shorts," and "News Around the Web."

Clearly, this is something other than a television show. The content and even format of CUpS have a lot in common with websites like Zester Daily, Civil Eats and even Chow, but the emphasis on micro-documentary films sets CUpS apart from those sites as well (and is, I am guessing, why they call it a "show"). Most of the other food-issue sites online follow more of a "print" model and use video primarily as supplementary material. Along with an emphasis on food, all of the videos and articles on CUpS comes pre-packaged for online networking: everything is eminently bloggable, embeddable and, in a word, share-able. As online space becomes as much about connection as it is about communication, CUpS model might have some substantial advantages over web-based mirrors of magazine and television formats.

A brief, somewhat representative sample of their video content might include 1) a conference presentation from the Senior Science Manager of the Monterey Bay Acquarium's Sustainable Seafood Initiative (the publishers of the Seafood Watch guide to sustainable seafood):

2) a continuing-ed style video from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education funded by USDA) discussing the benefits of no-till commercial farming:

3) a short-form documentary about an organic dariy farmer:

4) and an interesting interview with Mark Bittman about his new book Food Matters:

The collection is ecclectic, but the format is of, by and for the internet and won't run into cross-media problems like the re-editing of Dirt! for television. In fact, the episodic, semi-related, often interchangeable segments of Dirt! would probably have worked better broken down and dispersed as smaller docs, and a web-friendly sharable format would almost certainly work better for community building than the "screening toolkits" posted on Dirt! The Movie's website. Rather than generating community activity and espirit d'corp from scratch, socially concerned docs ought to consider utilizing the communities people already inhabit online by generating material that is web-friendly from its inception.

Food History, Family History

fc — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:13:03 +0000

Image Credit: Screen shot from whatscookinggrandma.humanbeans.net

I first noticed the phenomenon of grandmothers cooking online when I came across Chow's "Cooking with Grandma" series. The first episode featured "Grandma Alvina" who shows her granddaughter how to cook prawn curry and coconut rice while telling the story of her 1972 move to the US from Burma. Chow has since added several more episodes in the series, and matriarchal kitchens seem to be sprouting up all over the internet and all around the world, offering their grandchildren and Youtube fans lessons in cooking and living history. More about culinary octogenarians, including video, after the jump.

A quick search of the internets will turn up, along with Chow's occasional series, a suprising variety of grandmothers holding court in their kitchens. The image above is a screen shot from "What's Cooking Grandma" a British effort at collecting international culinary wisdom and one my favorite efforts in this emerging genre (this video features Brazillian Grandma Sulzy). There are also several sites and video streams dedicated to individual women including a Youtube channel on Depression-era cooking with Clara (who is billed as a "94 year old cook author and great grandmother") and the always entertaining Feed Me Bubbe where Bayla Sher (possibly the most charismatic grandmother on the web) prepares kosher meals and teaches the Yiddish word of the day.

While all of these venues make use of different formats in different languages and on different continents, they have several characteristics in common: as with Alvina's Burmesse curry and Bubbe's latkes, these online grandmothers tend to prepare traditional recipes and narrate some amount of family or cultural history. Grandma Martha on Chow cooks candied yams for Kwanzaa with her grandson; Nana Ruth in Lancaster makes scones and blackcurrent jam (even if her canning technique isn't up to modern saftey standards); Ana Fadul shows her Brazillian grandchildren her Turkish mother's traditional recipe for kibe; and Welsh Grandma Betty, for your viewing pleasure, bakes traditional welsh cakes on her grandmother's cast iron baking stone:

I can see at least three realated impulses behind this trend in webcasting kitchen matrons. First, the contemporary wave of interest in cooking (and particularly in traditional, non-industrial foodways) helps drive interest in recipes and techniques that were perfected before the post-war rise of mass-produced convenience foods. If foodies get tired of taking advice from Alice Waters, they can turn to their own grandmothers or borrow someone else's online. Second, with the rise of restaraunts and convenience foods, many home cooking techiniques are being lost. It only takes a single generation for skills like home baking, canning, etc. to disapear from a culture's collective skill set, and webisodes of grandmothers in the kitchen are attempting to some degree to curate the knowledge of past generations. Third, since foodways are deeply personal components of human cultures, these efforts bear some resemblence to nineteenth century efforts in collecting folklore (practices that early anthropologists assumed would be destroyed by advances in science and technology). Unlike the efforts by nineteenth century folklorists, contemporary recipe collectors aren't interested in preserving a museum record of past culture. They are attempting to keep family traditions alive by passing traditional foodways on to new generations, and they are using technological advances to keep those traditions from becoming history.

Story of Stuff Part Deux

Sarah Wagner — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:22:18 +0000

Well. So much for being technologically savvy. After telling my students that I couldn’t find her bio anywhere, they hopped on the computer and found it within seconds. “Uh, Mrs. Wagner? I googled Annie Leonard and found her bio, right here on the Story of Stuff site.” In my head I thanked my years of teaching experience for my ability to not know something in front of my class. But anyhow, let me describe this class to you because it really worked well.

As I wrote in the last post, I showed the Story of Stuff in my class because it’s an engaging video with some problems. When we got back to class this past Tuesday, I asked the class to recap the video and then to continue the discussion of its weaker points. The first part of the discussion was more on audience. Because, as they’d pointed out, the narrator’s tone of voice is a bit condescending to them, the students thought maybe the audience could be younger, maybe in middle or high school. But then the vocabulary she used and the nature of the topic led them to dismiss that as an audience. One student suggested that Leonard would want her audience to be those who can make a difference, and he believed that would be people with financial resources at their disposal. A debate ensued over whether those with the luxury of financial security really are the only ones who can create political and social change.

Then another student wondered whether Leonard had really argued a proposal or just a position in this video. Was her intention just education and awareness, or did she want us to do something? We watched the end again and found that she’d proposed that we “unite” and that to find other ways of making changes, we can “click around” on the Story of Stuff website. All proposals. This student agreed that there were proposals but held to his belief that Leonard’s political standpoint might be down the road of “ecosocialism” (a term he used that I haven’t heard before) or even violent revolution.

I asked the class to pair up and discuss how they were going to write a rhetorical analysis on the video, and all of them immediately got online and started looking around. Their level of engagement was higher than I’d seen for any subject. They were on a mission to find out what this woman was doing. In their searches, they found not only her bio, but Leonard’s list of proposals and a Daily Kos article reviewing the video. One of the students looking at her proposals was Mr. Ecosocialism, and he pointed out that two of them confirmed his suspicions about Leonard’s politics. The first was “7. Park your car and walk…and when necessary MARCH!” Yes, it sounds radical, but when reading the subsequent description, we found that she’s suggesting peaceful protests. So much for violent revolution. The second was “9. Recycle your trash…and, recycle your elected officials.” Well, maybe a little peaceful revolution is what she’s going for.

Thursday, the class turned in their rhetorical analyses, and to a person they said that two pages was too short. This, from students who normally were hitting just over a page long on their other ones. I wished I’d used the video earlier as they were just starting in the class. This generation is so visually oriented that it makes sense to use a visual text first. That way, they can draw on what they know already—what makes a good video, a good cartoon, a good internet site? They have something to say at the start, and then they can learn the technical rhetorical terms for their thoughts and ideas rather than assuming it’s all new information. Give them a reason or a connection to calling something “ethos” or “pathos” and its relevance might be just that clearer to them.