Digital Culture Studies

Well, that was a bit of a blog-pause, wasn’t it?

Watch for the relaunch in January 09.

Book A Minute has got you covered! On my favourite books of all times list, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Ethan Frome.

I sometimes feel like I have a front-row seat to the race battles in the US, in part because I am not from here, and in part because I have a partner whose racial history is … complicated. White people see a white man. Several African-American women have joked to me that they think he has what they called, “the tint”. My Mexican neighbors think he is Hispanic. I think he is just ‘American’ - a big mix of lots of stuff, genetically, that came out handsome.

My own life is like a textbook example of what it means to benefit from white privilege, because there is no question, looking at me, where my racial orgins lie - in frosty, northern countries with no sun and terrible cuisine, but I do get a glimpse of what it might be like sometimes not to benefit that way, which is why I enjoyed this op-ed piece so much: This is Your Nation on White Privilege.

A few of my faves:

• White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen as just an average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then to Harvard Law, makes you “uppity,” and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.
• White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
• White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps.”

The image below is a screen shot of the top two stories on MTV.com this afternoon. No editing here - this is how the top two stories of the day look on their front page.

It all makes sense now. Including Zac Efron.

Has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet (dotcom)?

I suspended all housework-related activities this week, in honour of all the emails I have received warning me of the imminent destruction of the planet on the eve of CERN’s LHD launch. It takes a planet blowing up to keep my OCD cleaning tendencies in check. Who knew that’s all it would take! On the bright side, if we do implode into a black hole, all those dustbunnies under the credenza are as annihilated as I am, which is why I support Big Science!

This video is making the rounds, and I think if I taught high school physics, I would be showing it to my class because, underneath the general humor they do a great job of explaining matter, anti-matter, and why gravity is weak.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, I found this on another site, with a brief accompanying paragraph asking the question, “how did those scientists guys convince that girl to be in *their* video?” She is the main character, the rapper - why isn’t the automatic assumption that this is her video, and she convinced the men to be in it? Why assume that men conceptualized, wrote and created the video, and then ‘convinced’ a woman to be be in it?

• Via Spiral Scratch, a discussion of ‘persona blogging‘. See also here. Would people be as upset if the persona blogging being discussed was not a business model?
• How have I never heard of the Bechdel rule before today? Thanks, Anomie, for pointing the way.
• Garfield, minus Garfield. Its astonishingly bleak and disturbing.

I watched the opening ceremony, and like everyone else, was stunned at the visual effects, but I was also amazed at how poised the little singer was when she walked out. But maybe that poise was because she wasn’t singing at all - the singer was removed for the offense of ‘not being flawless’. She got the dubious honor being allowed to be the voice of the pretty girl, recording her song behind the scenes for another, prettier girl to get credit for. how lucky for her!