a thaumaturgical compendium

hi, this is sarah washburn, co-director of the september project.

thanks to everyone, and especially Alex, for getting involved, connecting people, and talking about the september project. you’ve proven this project is for everyone.

public spaces are central to the september project. parks, beaches, squares… all sorts of activities can take place in these spaces, and all types of people can attend. discussions, performances, murals, music, anything.

Alex, you’re trying to get something started in buffalo. great! thank you. does anyone know Ani DiFranco? she lives and runs her business, Righteous Babes Records in buffalo, ny. she’s on tour in baltimore on september 11, but her label has other artists, and she knows other bands across the country. perhaps one of her bands would give a free performance on september 11. maybe they’d invite people to engage in ideas, or maybe direct people to free events in public spaces, libraries, and encourage people to VOTE.

who do YOU know?

anyone know other bands, arts organizations, or people interested in encouraging creative thought about issues that matter? link the community in public spaces. connect people. be creative!

-sarah

I wonder how far the Alabama ban extends.

Hey, did you hear? Apparently there are bloggers at the convention. Oh, you did hear? That’s good.

Went to a party last week and managed to correctly identify a guest’s accent as Georgian. She noted that such an ability, along with an academic study of blogging, meant I “should be appearing in an Us Magazine story any day now.” Ouch. I didn’t have the heart to admit that I showed up in Fitness Magazine recently. (Oh, the irony.)

Frankly, I’ve found that the convention makes for good television. Remember that old medium? I actually care that a politician can give a good televised speech—I think that sort of matters. And having Kerry speak at the end of the convention means we get to place bets as to who he will best (Gephart, Dean) and who he will be bested by (Carter, Gore, Clinton, his own wife and veep). I wonder how many people had the exact same thought David Weinberger and I did last night: Obama is a shoe-in for 2012. At least he’ll have my vote.

Oh, and I never understood why Hillary is so unpopular (among some) until last night. She is annoyingly smug. Maybe the camera just caught her at bad times, but she and her daughter sipping champagne and joking over Dean’s speech struck me as somehow just inappropriate. I wonder if the way she looked at Teresa Heinz-Kerry is any indication of how she feels about her.

Speaking of which, I’m happy to see the appellation “partner” winning out over husband or wife. For a long time I’ve introduced my wife, Jamie, as my partner. It’s because I have always thought of her as that, as “more” than my wife, but as someone with whom I work through things together as a friend and team-mate, as well as a mate-mate. “Partner” also allows me to share the same term that my non-breeder friends use, and provides them with a way to more comfortably distance their private lives from their professional lives. I’ve seen the term gain in popularity over the last few years, but had assumed it was only in academic circles. I am glad that the idea and use of “a partner in life” is showing up at a more public event like the convention.

For all the attention blogging has gotten at the convention, I haven’t found the actual reportage particularly useful or interesting. A lot of sound and fury and endless introspection. Some of that introspection, though, is outstanding. For those interested in studying blogging, the interview of Fafnir (& Giblets) by University at Buffalo grad Wolf Blitzer is an instant classic:

WB: But given that bloggers might be biased, or play “fast and loose with the truth,” and given the increased importance of blogs today, should Americans be concerned?

F: Yes they should be very concerned. We are an unchained force of nature Wolf Blitzer! You cannot stop us once we spin out of telecommunicontrol!

G: Bow before the power of blog Wolf Blitzer! Bow before the power of blog NOOOOOOW!

I’ve just checked my triplicate rankings (via Brake), and find that I actually do have more than six readers, which means I should post more often than once a week, I suppose. I will have to take Giblets’ approach from now on: “Blogs must be spontaneous intant [sic] reactions to the lightning events of the everyday! Giblets fires up a random news article, pounds his head against the keyboard several times, an hits the ‘publish’ button for the purest of pure blog posts!”

this is not alex, it’s david silver. alex: thank you for letting us in and thanks for lending your brains throughout.

michael berube rules. his blog entry, written with soul, got Chuck Tryon and E. David Morgen to organize something, offline, in atlanta, on saturday, september 11. beautiful. does anyone have a contact with the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum? how great would it be have events on september 11 at a library named for an ex-president, a humanitarian, and a Nobel PEACE PRIZE winner?

a lot of people from a lot of places have blogged the project: Network-Centric Advocacy, smart mobs, kellyfaboo, librarian.net, george williams, Confessions of a Mad Librarian, Peter Levine, commons-blog, TechnoBiblio, Doctor Daisy, miscellany is the largest category, crooked timber, snark market, IDblog, Planned Obsolescence, hegemony rules, Alex Halavais, Blogalization, eskimo sandwich eaters, Kairosnews, Politicaonline.it, mediaTIC blog, Sapper’s (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves, Scrivenings, BreyLog, Library Stories: Libraries & Librarians in the News, Community Communication Project, what i saw today, Bitacora de las Indias, Aaron Delwiche, Dull Cutlery, Reconsidered, I’m Nobody—Who are you?, giorgious, Deliberative Democracy, Librarian Activist, too many topics, too little time, welcome to my world, Jenny’s Jesus Club, h20boro lib blog, Tech Soma, a crank’s progress, netbib weblog, Octeto – Tecnologia educativa, Langemarks Cafe, Weblogs in Higher Education, LibraryTechtonics, DrWeb’s Domain, Postmodern Hegemon, and eyeteeth.

i hope trackbacks work somehow, because there are great ideas out there.

michael’s post is great, especially in the way that he sees how we all can get involved. i want to add 3 things:

1. i think it’s important to note the types of libraries participating. they include: urban, small, and rural public libraries; primary and secondary school libraries; college, community college, and university libraries; bookmobiles; libraries for people with hearing and visual disabilities; seminary libraries; juvenile hall libraries; and domestic and overseas US military base libraries. can you imagine the kinds of exchanges they’ll have about citizenship at the Alameda County Library Youth Literacy Program at Juvenile Hall? or the kinds of exchanges they’ll have about democracy at the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan?

2. important: all events are free.

3. libraries are the core. but there’s a lot of other public spaces around us. (they’re shrinking, i know! and they’re getting less inspired. but they still exist, especially if you look for them.) so: anyone know any academics, activists, artists, youth (friends of michael’s sons: what are YOU doing on saturday, september 11?) who many want to get involved? anyone willing to post a message to any list for such folks? are interesting exchanges even happening on mailing lists these days?

sarah washburn’s jumping in too. i hope all of you will. one thing: if you have a critique of the project, post them. suggestions, post. question, post and maybe all of us can answer them. alex and frederick gave us some good critiques, and they made the project stronger.

david

Just a quick heads up for my six regular readers. I have not developed a multiple personality disorder. I’ve invited David Silver and Sarah Washburn of The September Project to make use of this blog in whatever way they see fit. I’ve posted on the September Project before, but an overview may also be found in this Seattle Times writeup or a recent article in the Chronicle (subscription required, for now).

I’ve also set up an ongoing search for blog feeds that mention the project, available on the via the public bloglines page.

Last weekend, I had the chance to see a Broadway show in the guise of a movie and a movie that cries out to be made into a Broadway show.

On Friday, after a visit to a local churrascaria, Jamie and I went to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new Bombay Dreams. The premise is simple enough: take a Bollywood movie and put it on stage. It was largely a successful effort. Yes, as others have noted, the lyrics are at times tortured. And in comparison with the last show I saw (a production of Rent in London), this was very much B-movie material. Where it excelled was the “show,” a rotating fountain on stage (which caused three slip-and-falls—I hope they are well insured) and elaborate dance numbers energized the audience. In all, it was an enjoyable show, though it felt more like a movie than anything I’ve seen on stage in a while, and I can see why the reviewers might not have loved it. (The word “bland” came up often, as in the NYT review.)

I also got to see the new Beat Takeshi-led revamp of the Zatoichi franchise, which was as bizarre as it was entertaining. With the grande finale, an ensemble tap-dance, the film cries out to be made into a Broadway show. Mind you, if conservative Broadway thinks Bombay Dreams is risky (it was simplified for American audiences), creating a show that has enough hacked limbs to put Kill Bill to shame might be a bit much. And the surreal touches that come off as quirky in a film might be just plain weird on stage. Nonetheless, I would love to have the chance to see this in live theater.

So, although I very much enjoyed Bombay Dreams, and it was worth seeing, you might want to wait to see it on video. On the other hand, if Zatoichi appears on a screen near you, I would recommend you go out and see it, and relish the engaging weirdness of Beat Takeshi, perfectly choreographed swordplay, and tapping in geta.

I have a love-hate relationship with syllabi. I am envious of teachers who feel comfortable assigning a single text and “teaching the text.” In some ways I wish I could do this without being bored to death. I have a feeling at least some students would thank me for doing so.

I am charged with providing an overview of communication theory to new graduate students. This should not be too difficult, right? I mean, we’re not talking the cutting edge, here. This should be a course that looks similar to courses at other, similar communication programs.

The thing is, there is no such thing as a common understanding of what the field of communication considers to be its core. Moreover, one cannot assume that most graduate students come in with an understanding of the history of communication research, with that broad survey. Indeed, many of them don’t even have a strong grounding in basic social theory, even when they are coming from universities and programs that have a reputation in this area.

Add to this that we are communication with a dash of “informatics,” and you have a lot of demands.

This year, I agreed with my colleague, Tom Feeley, to split the two core theory courses roughly into social and psychological approaches (not that this is a clean split, of course, but it’s a starting point). So I start to map out some good things to read. Very soon, I’m up to nearly a hundred items that students should definitely read, and I realize I have to start cutting.

Out goes any real discussion of globalization, development, or intercultural communication. Gone are cultural studies, feminist approaches, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. Any cultural or ethnographic approaches are off the map. Hermeneutics, the bane of last years’ students, has been excised. Despite the hope to start talking about a relationship of society to technology, any concept of social construction of science or technology is left aside. No chance to really talk about concepts like the body, space, or design. Institutional and economic treatments are gone, leaving only the core critique from Bagdikian, sort of in a vacuum. And I end up with what to me seems like the bare minimums, yet I know from experience will seem like a serious reading load—especially to students for whom English is a second language.

From this paucity I start to think that maybe a textbook is not such a horrible idea. The point of the class, however, is not so much familiarity with the ideas that have come before (though this is important), but an ability to process, analyze, make sense of, and make use of theory. As such, reading a preprocessed version doesn’t really do much for the student.

And so, the final version of the class is likely to look a lot like the draft syllabus I have now. Here is the overview:

This course aims to provide a set of maps for understanding the social forces and effects related to two recent communication “revolutions”: the mass communication revolution and the information revolution. The focus will remain heavily on social explanations for the phenomena grouped roughly under the term “communication,” and will deal largely with communication that is mediated through communication technologies.

We will not be reading a core canon of communication theory, since no such canon exists. Instead, we will be reading through a variety of work that in some way touches on issues of communication in a social setting. One of the primary tasks of the semester will be to collectively arrive at a story about how communication theory fits together, and how various models and theories map out a field of communication.

Now it’s time to whip the blogging class syllabus into order. If you’ve read this far, you’ll probably be getting an email from me some time in the next couple of weeks asking if you would be willing to guest blog :).