Warhol and McLuhan?

The connection seems obvious, but hard to track down. Found a few blog posts with casual references, one pretty good post on the place of Warhol and the Velvet Underground in The Medium is the Massage.

Saw about an hour and 15 minutes of Ric Burn's documentary on Warhol tonight, and Burns came straight from the airport to talk with the 60 or so of us who had gathered. Apparently the whole work is 4 hours--worth checking out.

The McLuhan-Warhol connection that seemed potentially surprising was Warhol's "return to business" after he was shot. He had started out as a commercial artist, abandoned the commercial for the Factory and the art scene, then came back from his near death experience to recognize that "Culture is Our Business," the McLuhan book title from 1970.

Geoff Sirc at Grad Student Conference

The NDSU graduate students put on their annual conference this weekend, and invited Geoff Sirc to to deliver the keynote. He provided his usual fascinating reading of contemporary composition (iTunes reviews) in the context of classical rhetoric and engaged education. I'm terribly aware that this little post has none of the rhythm or groove displayed by the iTunes reviewers.

I used to have students write Amazon reviews, but it was always interesting to see how much the classroom assignment interfered with the nature of online writing. I also suspect that many of the fine and interesting examples Sirc showed us come from people who enjoy playing with language, people who are comfortable playing with language. When I give my students an opportunity like this, I find out that many struggle with those notions of play, voice, creativity. Heck, I struggle with playfulness, as much as enjoy it. Lots of good reasons to use an itunes / amazon review assignment, but it needs to be supported by the teaching of creativity (possible!?) and probably some of the kinds of voice / sound pedagogies suggested by TR Johnson.

Virtual Peace Garden in Second Life

This post comes from my short-lived Word Press Blog. I thought I had copied it to Ten a Day, but I can't seem to find it in the archives. I've also added some material since that initial post.

I've been imagining a "Virtual Peace Garden" for Second Life as MEmorial to civilian harm and loss in global conflict. My site would be a "peripheral" MEmorial, attached to the physical International Peace Gardens located on the Manitoba-North Dakota border. I decided I had better do a bit more research on the IPG first, however. Here are some things I found out.

1. The garden just celebrated its 75 anniversary, July 14, 2007.
2. The IPG has been under-funded for a number of years now, but during the last legislative session in ND, the state decided to increase its commitment to the gardens--5 million for this year, $32 million total (although the Canadians are going to chip in half, as I understand the agreement).
3. A 9/11 memoiral was erected in 2001, with beams from the WTC transported to the IPG by Canadians, erected on the US side.

I found out a variety of other facts, but in general, I was impressed with the vision the Director and the governments have for the IPG. My own plans for the Virtual Peace Garden seem, in fact, parallel to their vision of increasing the traffic and function of the site. A new interpretive center and conflict resolution center (Camp David style) are in the plans for the IPG. The park is currently open only 3 months of the year, but the goal is 12 months. The IPG plan probably isn't quite as ambitious as my own vision: turning both the physical and virtual IPG into a kind of mecca, a pilgrimage site for peace activists from around the world. By building in Second Life, I would make the Virtual Peace Garden more accessible than the IPG, but with any luck, a community forming around the virtual PG might be inspired to visit the physical PG.

What would a visitor to a Virtual Peace Garden do? Leave notes and objects, meet and talk with others interested in peace and justice issues, perhaps someday visit "rooms" within the virtual museum. I have been working on a MEmorial for the Lost Boys of Sudan*; I could envision a virtual room for southern Sudan, for Darfur, for Rwanda, for The Democratic Republic of Congo, for Somalia, etc., rooms that might collect video, photos, and text. Audio tours could be recorded. I don't know how to build anything in SL, so I would need to find good technical support for this kind of project. I'd also need to find a job that would give me the time to do this kind of work. The VPG could also host Rallies and other events. Conflict negotiation students welcome!

Greg Ulmer, primary theorist of Electronic Monuments / MEmorials, talks about the work of virtual memorialists as the work of "consultants without portfolio" and "unsolicited consultations." I do wonder how the IPG board of directors would respond to my "unsolicited consultation" and I wonder what compromises I would need to make if I functioned as a consultant with portfolio? Seems like I need to keep pushing my project further, define it more clearly, and then see about contacting the Director.

Clinton Global Initiative University

I just read about the in The Clinton Global Initiative University in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and then checked out the website. I was particularly interested in the idea that universities might start scholarship funds for refugees, but was disappointed when I got to the website and found no real help or means for doing so. They offer some Tips for Universities but those are pretty vague and general.

Mash-up Ideas for ASAH

I submitted some ASAH ideas to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. The Mash-up contests asks non-profits like ours to identify various data sources and web applications relevant to our project, and then envision how the data and the interactivity of the web might be brought together in compelling ways. In a nutshell, I envision an old-school mash-up of data that might simply constitute a montage for the documentary, but also an interactive component on the website where people might be able to interact with photos, videos, and maps to get a better feel for the history, geography, and current humanitarian needs of the region.

Please take a look and see what suggestions for improving this mash-up you might have.

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

I read a very short but positive review of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody in Wired, so I thought I should check it out. Seems to be available now, but more importantly, perhaps, I found this video of his book talk at Harvard. My immediate reaction upon listening was "This is plagiarism!!" Talk about fully absorbing McLuhan but not citing him! Maybe the book does, and I checked around--he cited McLuhan in an essay from 2000--but I really haven't heard anybody else evoke things like the communications epochs and communication as prosthetic / extension without at least dropping McLuhan's name.

Of course Shirky has moved into analysis and details well beyond what McLuhan was able to do in the 1960s through 80s, so I will need to check out the book this summer. A trend that continues to strike me as interesting is the appropriation of McLuhan by the popular press commentators (Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky, Chuck Klosterman) but general dismissal among scholars. I have some ideas as to why this happens, but I'll need to come back to those later.

Watch the video, and leave a comment--come here, everybody!

Rice on McLuhan on Wired

I can't pass up responding to Jeff Rice's post about McLuhan as the patron saint of Wired, appearing on the cover in of 4.01 in 1993. That issue of Wired was undoubtedly a turning point in my academic career, although it took me a long time to accept and realize that.

4.01 was the first issue of Wired I bought. I remember having a physical reaction not unlike purchasing pornography--I was in the last semester of my MA literature program, living in a palpably anti-technology environment, so purchasing Wired, with Canada's infamous Philosopher of Pop on the cover, was definitely a challenge to my moral and ideological environment, yet titillating. I didn't do any McLuhan scholarship for a few years, but my first academic presentation on hypertext was well received, McLuhan makes a few cameos in my dissertation on writing instruction in western Canadian universities (that was an exciting project!), I more or less sketched out a book I still haven't written about McLuhan for Compositionist in 1997, I finally told myself I had to commit to computers and composition as "my field" in 2003 or 2004, I had a dream about Jeff in 2004, and 15 years, I have more or less absorbed McLuhan, but still haven't written the damn book. : (

As for Wired, the once-pornographic has reversed to the common-place, so much so that my 9 year old often reads it, or at least looks through it. It certainly covers his world (video games, manga) more than it covers my world. The mag may have flattened out, as Jeff notes, but I feel more like McLuhan reading it now, noticing all the little stories that re-enforce "the medium is the massage" over and over again without the authors even noticing.

African Soul, American Heart Sample

About two weeks ago, Matt McGregor, the ASAH camera man and now editor put together this succinct, beautiful, little sample of our documentary project, African Soul, American Heart.

Friends of the Congo

I wrote about the Congo a few posts ago, and I have continued to correspond with the young Congolese man I met in December at Kakuma. I spent some time this afternoon looking for possible scholarships (Peterson's has a surprisingly large collection of scholarship for non-US citizens attending non-US schools), but I also came across an interesting projectFriends of the Congo. This 501.c.3 based in Washington DC is trying to do things like raise money to send kids to school (primary and secondary, but not post-secondary), build an Internet Learning Center in Kinshasa, support a health clinic, etc..

For any professorati reading, they also have a speakers bureau--invite a Congolese speaker to your campus. They suggest starting a blog to follow news about the Congo; first-year comp classes with an inquiry-based focus could sure learn a lot about research and the Congo (or Africa more generally) by taking up a task like this.

Remixing for Social Change

Just saw an announcement for the Remixing for Social Change contest. This has me thinking about a Lost Boys of Sudan Mash-up, a consciousness raising, nation building, social change project:

Mash-up the various Lost Boys projects and foundations--lots of video footage to work with.
Mash-up the data, e.g. 16,000 orphans in Duk County + X in other counties, because the call asks for real data.
Mash-up some of the health data, the school data. Need to track this down.
Mash-up the costs--the costs of building, the costs of maintaining, these infrastructure projects.
Mash-up people like John and Joseph and other others talking about what needs to be done in. Joseph has a great line about raising this generation to be equal to the rest of the world.
Mash-up some of the others we have on film: commissioner, Gideon Dau, footage from others?
Mash-up some of the great music we have, some of the children and women singing.

I'll have to see what the team thinks.

Chuck Klosterman Live!

I heard Chuck Klosterman perform tonight at MSUM. Long time readers of 10 A Day might remember that I occasionally get obsessed with Klosterman's writings, his application of McLuhan without acknowledging his source, and the mystorical elements of his first memoir, Fargo Rock City.

His performance was okay, and he was self-aware enough to acknowledge that it wasn't great. He more or less told the story of his unlikely rise to stardom from his humble beginnings in Wyndmere, ND to NYC darling (or love-able goof ball?). The first twenty-or-thirty minutes were nicely delivered and he spoke eloquently, flawlessly, but he began to tire, I suspect, and the Q&A didn't really have much zing to it. I left after he talked about an essay he just finished (not yet published) on bloggers and their sense of fame, their sense of being public figures. Clearly he isn't a blogger, or he knows different bloggers than I do.

He made a couple of other sociological-type arguments that seemed pretty weak--i.e. people under forty are unhappy in their relationships because of idealized relationships they see on TV and movies. Like most writers/thinkers, he really is much more convincing and interesting when he writes about his own life and things he knows a lot about (hair metal).

I do applaud him for not just reading from his work; more engaging than the average book reading.

Notes on Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment

I had on my to-do list "Rickert Notes" b/c I have been reading Acts of Enjoyment, but being the social media scholar that I am (cough cough), I thought I should see what notes others have written first. Saves a lot of typing.

Jim Brown has an extended entry comparing Rickert and Rice.

Everything else I found gave Rickert a mention, but no notes to steal / borrow. Too bad. Lots of "go read it" recommendations, but no notes.

I'll post my notes here if I ever get 'em finished.

Following up on WUSC

The World University of Canada is doing exactly the kind of work I saw the need for while I was in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in December. They linked to a story that ran on CBC--it focuses on 2 Somali students from the Dabeeb refugee camp in Kenya; apparently they selected 11 students from Dabeeb last year. I am sure they must go to Kakuma as well, but I will try to find that out.

I wonder if there is any equivalent program in the US?

Some Canadian universities do have refugee scholarships

I just found this article about the World University Service of Canada which has been sponsoring refugees since 1978. The article is actually about the University of Victoria, where students contribute $.50 per semester to a scholarship that is offered every two years by UVic; a raise to $1.00 per semester would allow them to offer the scholarship each year.

Sounds like a model I should try and take to my university. I would also like to see faculty contribute $1-5, maybe $10-20, per year to such a scholarship fund. I wonder how such a proposal would be received?

Paying attention to Congo

NPR ran a story this morning about the 5.4 million deaths in Congo since 1998, 2 million of those deaths since 2002 when the war in Congo more or less stopped. The deaths are occurring because of the failure of the infrastructure and health care in the Congo. The number of deaths exceed Darfur substantially, and even outstrip the 2 million deaths in southern Sudan over the 22 years or the civil war in that region (1983-2005). The story does a nice job of pointing out that global economic and political interest in The DRC is low (unlike oil rich Sudan), and the cause has not yet been championed by celebrities or high profile politicians (no names were used, but we all know who they were talking about).

These stories mean so much more to me now that I have been to Africa. I met, and continue to correspond with, a Congolese refugee who left the DRC for Kakuma in 1998; he desperately wants to continue his education and make a difference in his country, but his family has few resources to aid him--they have been refugees for the last 9 years. He is going to a university in Nairobi this semester; I hope to be able to help him continue his education there or help him get to the US or Canada to continue his education. I don't know the the ins-ands-outs of bringing students to American universities, but Kakuma graduates about 300 students a year from the high school in the refugee camp, and it seems (to my naive eyes) like a very easy thing for American universities to be offering scholarships to those who might be interested. I know universities in this day and age don't recruit for humanitarian purposes, but maybe that trend needs to get started.

If anybody reading this is working at / attending a university with a humanitarian mission, please contact me!

Avoiding technological determinism

John Walters makes a nice distinction between strong and weak technological determinism:

"When someone like McLuhan or Ong describes what happened in the past to get us where we are now, they can appear to be engaging in a strong deterministic model because they don’t focus on the branches we could have followed but one the path we did follow.3 We need to make sure that when we read someone who explains that X lead to Y we recognize that this does not necessarily mean that they are arguing that X had to lead to Y (strong determinism), but that Y was one of the possible futures resulting from X and just happens to be part of the future we followed. Likewise, when providing accounts of technological development, we need to remember to not fall into the strong model fallacy, even when there really was only one possible future."

I'll have to see if this helps my students make sense of the technological determinism debate.

The Medium IS the Message

NPR reported on a study that violent films pacified, rather than incited, the most violent segment of our culture (young men) because films (shown in theaters) required these young men to sit passively for 90+ minutes, generally free of alcohol and other drugs.

CW 2008--thinking aloud

I'm still interested in presenting at Computers and Writing 2008, but with the ASAH project taking over my life, I am not sure if I will be in much of a position to present. I have been thinking about and blogging about my "virtual peace garden" project a few times, but I haven't been able to make any real progress with that piece. I have been thinking the last day or two that I could just try to get more theoretical--it is less time consuming to "think about stuff" than "do stuff." I am generally an application kind of guy, but maybe I could "invent" a new genre, a la Ulmer, a "Peace Pilgrimage" as genre, a new kind of action writing in Second Life. I have never known what I would do in SL, but if I theorized (and maybe actually tried out) traveling in SL, delivering a message of global peace, I might have something to present.

I have also long been wanting to check out Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. I'm such an antiquarian.

Teacher education in Kakuma

One of my follow-up tasks from my trip to Africa involves me trying to figure out how my university might offer appropriate scholarships for refugees in the UNHCR Kakuma Camp. This story isn't about scholarships, but it is about the quality of the secondary schooling at Kakuma, and it is about training teachers for Southern Sudan.

My wife gets her dissertation cited in the NY Times

Most of us academics assume that our dissertations go un-read beyond our committees unless they get published in book form. My wife's dissertation, however, just got cited in a New York Times article about the re-emerging reputation of Marion Mahony Griffin, an early 20th Century architect who worked with FLW and her husand, Walter Burley Griffin.

"Among Mahony’s champions is Elizabeth Birmingham, an assistant professor of English at North Dakota State University in Fargo. “The specifics of Marion’s life fell victim to the primary scholarly effort to establish and fix the canon of ‘great men’ whose genius-personalities, buildings and texts would become central to the story of architecture,” she wrote in a dissertation.

Ms. Birmingham points out that architectural historians who acknowledge Mahony have tended to focus on her relationships with men and on her physical appearance, often in unflattering terms. (She was frequently described as homely, though Brendan Gill, in “Many Masks,” his 1987 biography of Wright, called her a “gaunt, beaky beauty.”) "

The article will be available until ????