YouTube really is engaging; like when a student is trying to research a column and ends up getting sucked in for an hour and a half watching the “don’t tase me, bro!” video (again) and a bunch of footage of Brand New’s recent tours (Jesse Lacey and Kevin Devine together is like Jesus handing you a huge, delightful cake frosted with glorious music and silly banter).
The site, whose tag line is “Broadcast Yourself,” is a video-sharing page where people can upload, view, and share different clips. Everything from commercials to tv and movie clips to documentaries to video-blogs to dubbed versions of the movie 300 with voice-over describing why “Steve” can’t come to the party (something the aforementioned student’s roommate made her watch).
The site does have time and content restrictions on what can be posted: potentially offensive materials, like pornography, are not allowed. However, there is the similar, tactfully named PornoTube. References to this before class will make you lots of friends and ensure you will always have someone to sit with. Allegedly.
Wikipedia offers a motherload of information about the site. Everything from basic background info (formed by three former PayPal employees, originally based out of a garage) to stats on users (20 million visitors a month- 44% female, 56% male; most commonly 12-17 age range) to how much it was acquired for by Google in November of last year ($1.65 billion in Google stock) to the copyright struggles endured (which were vastly prevalent and inspired the time limits).
Also, there is discussion of YouTube’s role in the worlds of both music and politics: its goal of offering every music video ever made while still remaining free (in 18 months from announcement in August 06), as well as the vast role it has in band promotion, as experienced by OK Go, who got an MTV Movie Awards performance out of their radio hit, “Here it Goes Again” (you’ve seen it, it’s the one with the treadmills).
As for politics, it’s really remarkable; the internet has such an incredible capacity to reach people, which aids to inform and involve them in matters of consequence. The power of the internet is really being taken advantage of in the political arena. Because it offers immediate accessibility to information and the ever-changing political forum, it is being used to do everything from give widespread access to campaign videos put out by both politicians and supporters, to engaging people, especially the youth, who are the least prevalent voters, by involving them in the political process. On July 23, CNN aired a debate among the Democratic candidates for president in which the questions fielded were picked from a pool submitted through YouTube. "Because of the use of technology to aggregate questions from a wide range of constituents, the forum has been referred to as the 'the most democratic Presidential Debate ever.'"
YouTube is one of the greatest things about the internet (Wikipedia, Facebook, and Moveon.org also falling in the category). It not only provides an outlet for social expression, but it is working to mobilize and inform the masses. It is taking advantage of the vast power of the interweb and, at its best, using it to bring about positive, tangible action and change. Or at least keeping us in the know with lonelygirl15.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
The Ones We Aspire to Be Like: Profile of a Columnist
Mary “Mhaire” Fraser is, undoubtedly, a badass. Eloquent, sharp, and outrageously educated, she not only has her own blog/ zine, Debutante Gone Wrong (http://www.debutantegonewrong.com) and writes a regular column for Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies (http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/fcmain.htm), but she is a professor of psychology and women’s studies at DeAnza, a community college in Cupertino (a suburb of San Jose), and Stanford University. Her research examines social identity and gender issues, and focuses on leadership issues and spirituality, adolescent women, and attitudes about dating, with Third Wave feminist identity and pop culture as special interests. She is a columnist, a feminist, an activist, and a truly excellent thinker of our time.
Having grown up in North Carolina, Mhaire attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she received her first undergraduate degree; she moved back home upon graduation and realized that she wanted to know more (of both academics and the world) and so she decided upon coming to California for grad school at the University of Southern California (USC), from which she received two masters and her PhD. She also has another undergraduate degree, as well as other masters from CSU Sonoma. All the while in her course of study, and well after, she up kept her interest and activity in the zine world, helping to put together everything from art shows to poetry slams, and music venues, and organized a number of feminist gatherings in which a "Zine Trade" was a key event. Clearly glorious and utterly cool, but even more extraordinary (in my own opinion), she teaches a class called the Fundamentals of Social Activism (how effing cool!!!).
I was directed to Mhaire’s faculty web page by my best friend, who is majoring in psychology and has taken a few of her courses, one of which he is currently enrolled in (he adores her). He had told me of her inclusions of everything from activism to zines in her social psych curriculum, a class he took last quarter, and upon looking at her page, I saw that she was a regular columnist. I was more than interested. I looked into the publication she writes for, Feminist Collections, which is put out four times a year (thus, a quarterly) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison; from the above link, I learned that the publication offers “news of the latest print and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies,” everything from book and film reviews to hard-to-find materials like pamphlets and reports. It contains “thoughtful articles by experts explor[ing] women's publishing, Internet resources, library organization, archives, and other tools for feminist scholarship.”
The site also linked several of Mhaire’s articles, a series of well-written, insightful zine reviews, ranging everywhere from "Zine and Heard: Fringe Feminism and the Zines of the Third Wave," a three part series in which she reviewed not only better funded, consistent zines, but many of the cut and paste, do-it-yourself ones that people had sent her and that she’d acquired over time, to "Rebel Song: Feminist Zines from the (Southern) Third Wave," in which she exemplifies some of the ideal zines from her own rooted region, to "Queens of the Zine Scene: Best Lines," in which she picked some of the best lines from various zines that she has been reading; everything from a journal entry to a physically present but mentally father, reading "bye. I love you. Call me. I'll write;" to "If I am made in God's image, then God has a fat ass;" to "Why, if I am so young, do I feel as if my life has passed me by?"
I, myself, having dabbled with interest in the zine and underground writing and music scenes, had actively sought out great reads both in print and online over the past six or seven years, and have come across a fair few that I truly adore and keep up with. So you can imagine my overwhelming and mind-blowing surprise when I found Mhaire’s name attached to a site that I’ve been reading for far longer than I’ve known that she’s my best friend’s professor (!!!). The aforementioned Debutante Gone Wrong is a witty, charming, smart blog that I’ve long loved, and come to find that it is, in fact, actually a product of a paper zine that Mhaire started long ago in North Carolina, which she developed online. I have long, unknowingly, been a fan, and have genuinely respected and enjoyed her musings and writings. Small world doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Mhaire Fraser is exactly the kind of writer that you want your daughter, sister, mother, friends, and self to read. She is self and otherwise utterly aware, and engaging in her writing. In speaking of herself, she wrote, “I discovered that when all is said and done, ideas are my addiction. The new ones and the ones to which there will never be solid answers even after endless nights of wine and Blues.” Mhaire is (presumably) in her early to mid-thirties, and still very much alive and operative with the glory of ideas, good writing, the spread of knowledge, and impactual activism.
Having grown up in North Carolina, Mhaire attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she received her first undergraduate degree; she moved back home upon graduation and realized that she wanted to know more (of both academics and the world) and so she decided upon coming to California for grad school at the University of Southern California (USC), from which she received two masters and her PhD. She also has another undergraduate degree, as well as other masters from CSU Sonoma. All the while in her course of study, and well after, she up kept her interest and activity in the zine world, helping to put together everything from art shows to poetry slams, and music venues, and organized a number of feminist gatherings in which a "Zine Trade" was a key event. Clearly glorious and utterly cool, but even more extraordinary (in my own opinion), she teaches a class called the Fundamentals of Social Activism (how effing cool!!!).
I was directed to Mhaire’s faculty web page by my best friend, who is majoring in psychology and has taken a few of her courses, one of which he is currently enrolled in (he adores her). He had told me of her inclusions of everything from activism to zines in her social psych curriculum, a class he took last quarter, and upon looking at her page, I saw that she was a regular columnist. I was more than interested. I looked into the publication she writes for, Feminist Collections, which is put out four times a year (thus, a quarterly) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison; from the above link, I learned that the publication offers “news of the latest print and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies,” everything from book and film reviews to hard-to-find materials like pamphlets and reports. It contains “thoughtful articles by experts explor[ing] women's publishing, Internet resources, library organization, archives, and other tools for feminist scholarship.”
The site also linked several of Mhaire’s articles, a series of well-written, insightful zine reviews, ranging everywhere from "Zine and Heard: Fringe Feminism and the Zines of the Third Wave," a three part series in which she reviewed not only better funded, consistent zines, but many of the cut and paste, do-it-yourself ones that people had sent her and that she’d acquired over time, to "Rebel Song: Feminist Zines from the (Southern) Third Wave," in which she exemplifies some of the ideal zines from her own rooted region, to "Queens of the Zine Scene: Best Lines," in which she picked some of the best lines from various zines that she has been reading; everything from a journal entry to a physically present but mentally father, reading "bye. I love you. Call me. I'll write;" to "If I am made in God's image, then God has a fat ass;" to "Why, if I am so young, do I feel as if my life has passed me by?"
I, myself, having dabbled with interest in the zine and underground writing and music scenes, had actively sought out great reads both in print and online over the past six or seven years, and have come across a fair few that I truly adore and keep up with. So you can imagine my overwhelming and mind-blowing surprise when I found Mhaire’s name attached to a site that I’ve been reading for far longer than I’ve known that she’s my best friend’s professor (!!!). The aforementioned Debutante Gone Wrong is a witty, charming, smart blog that I’ve long loved, and come to find that it is, in fact, actually a product of a paper zine that Mhaire started long ago in North Carolina, which she developed online. I have long, unknowingly, been a fan, and have genuinely respected and enjoyed her musings and writings. Small world doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Mhaire Fraser is exactly the kind of writer that you want your daughter, sister, mother, friends, and self to read. She is self and otherwise utterly aware, and engaging in her writing. In speaking of herself, she wrote, “I discovered that when all is said and done, ideas are my addiction. The new ones and the ones to which there will never be solid answers even after endless nights of wine and Blues.” Mhaire is (presumably) in her early to mid-thirties, and still very much alive and operative with the glory of ideas, good writing, the spread of knowledge, and impactual activism.
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