Is the old media sustaining the old politics?

Somehow I found this link to a really interesting video from the Bill Moyers Journal program. I think it was on Twitter, but I can't remember. Too many RSS and Twitter feeds anymore to keep them straight, really.

The video isn't embeddable, regrettably. But it features NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald discussing how the media and the politics of Washington are still going to be the same old game, despite the hopes of "change" from a new administration. There is some great insight and explainations of how much of a fixture the Washington Press Corps is and how they maintain the direction of the narrative.

I really reccomend watching this half-hour show.

Contested Spaces -- Peachez vs. Oil

As I mentioned in class, about a year and a half ago I was in production on a documentary about a rapper named Ms. Peachez when the Jena 6 incident occurred. As a result of that injustice the hip hop community around the world spoke up. I wanted to post a few interesting, nearly simultaneous situations.

The Shreveport, LA rapper Ms. Peachez reaches the height of her popularity in the local hip hop community. Peachez was fascinating to me because she in and of herself represented a tangle of contested spaces. Despite Shreveport's/the South's tendency for homophobia, she always performs in drag. At the time I was on an assignment to make a documentary, so I was wildly interested in the GLBT issues that this persona brought up. Also, Ms. Peachez had a unique way of playing on/reifying southern black stereotypes. This infuriated some people, but others seemingly faced the reality that many of these stereotypes were often found/confirmed within our region due to poverty, policies of inequality and general racism. Personally, I viewed the stereotype exploitation as a desperate attempt to make brevity of a bad situation, to celebrate a continuing cultural phenomena, which in many instances was born in oppression. When I interviewed Peachez' producer several things made the picture even more interesting. My first question of real value to him was, "What impact do you think Ms. Peachez is having on the view of the local GLBT community?" Of course, I was somewhat naive, expecting some great answer about uniting oppressed individuals in their own struggles. I had actually insulted the producer, who had never intended to even bring up such questions. Peachez then moved into a ground of spectacle for good or bad. I had mixed feelings for the rest of the documentary and eventually lost touch with the contacts. The other thing I found interesting about interviewing this producer was the grass roots authorship, which he employed. These same ideas of cheaper/lower learning curve/faster technologies allows a large hip hop community to flourish, even in a small town in North West Louisiana. This in turn empowers a community, which would otherwise get very little positive media attention.

Here is one of Ms. Peachez most popular videos (sorry embedding has been disabled):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGrqW3nx5HM

If you have a chance check out the comments. They are really interesting.

At the same time Staten Island rapper NY Oil picks up on Peachez and her following. He releases the video "Ya'll Should All Get Lynched". The song explicitly targets Peachez in several points (including the chorus line at one point) saying she should be lynched. Once again, his message of hate is produced by the sam grass roots authorship in a different region entirely. He was obviously made angry by the persona and the stereotypes. Check this out (make sure you watch the Peachez vid. first):



Not long after, in the majority white town of Jena, Louisiana some two to three hours south of Shreveport, several race based instances of violence/hate occurred. White students hung nooses on trees in the lunch yard of Jena Highschool. The violence that ensued lead to the arresting of six black students, and zero white. In the weeks that would come a time of tremendous hope and fear, as well as new personal experiences would come to pass. By social web/grassroots means, the Free the Jena Six Rally was arranged. Between fifteen and twenty thousand people descended on the town of fourteen thousand. The media swarmed on the event.

I couldn't find any of the original organizational sites (perhaps the temporal nature of Tactical Media), but here is one of the remanence:

http://colorofchange.org/jena/

Finally, at the same time NY Oil releases his song "Jena 6". I think that this is an interesting instance of tactical media, because of its reactive nature and usage of noose imagery, yet again. Also, it's important to note that this song is created with the same web 2.0 era production tools and relied on the internet for distribution. For me his cry to, "...make the Jena 6 a Genesis" was somewhat tainted after his previous messages of hate. Here is a link to the song (it's the last one in the myspace player):

http://www.myspace.com/nyoil

I don't claim that any of these instances are truly related in any deep way, but I did (and still do) find the coincidence of their occurrence pretty interesting. All are moments that employ alternative media to mobilize and empower but also generate hate. In light of our recent class discussions, I'm trying to figure out which instances are truly tactical and which are simply alternatives linked to a specific time and place. Sorry, if this is not entirely coherent I think I'm getting sick and I'm a little loopy. I just felt I had to get this out of my system.

Wikimedia from Wikipedia

Looks like Wikipedia is installing terabytes of server space to allow for more audio, video and other media files to be added to the growing resource site.

How will this effect the "communal construction" of reference information?

NIN/Trek Fan Video and Participatory Culture

Since we are reading about participatory culture and fan vids. I thought I'd share one of my personal favorites. As both a Nine Inch Nails and Star Trek fan, this really hits a special spot for me. 

In many ways it exemplifies a lot of the elements of participatory culture that Chapter 2 of Networked Cultures discusses. Specifically the paring, which is pulled from sexual tension found in the canon itself. It seems like one way fans can stick mainstream corporate production. Interestingly, the owners of the copyright frequently have big problems with parings their fans come up with. That said, this is a great song-vid.

Shrinking Cities, Dead Space and Green Space

Before we leave the topic of place and public space behind, I thought I would share one of my favorite topics/initiatives. I think I briefly talked about the Shrinking Cities Project last quarter. It is an attempt by academics and industrial professionals world wide to consider the causes, ramifications and opportunities created by the shrinking of nearly one fourth of the planet's major urban settings. Since 2006, they have released three free standing case studies on different regions of the world. From Detroit, Manchester, Liverpool, Leipzig and Halle to Tokyo and Osaka, cities are losing population. In the the first section of their third case study, Philipp Oswalt writes, 

"...even though urban growth will continue to dominate in coming decades. An end is in sight, around 2070-2100, the world population will reach its zenith and the process of urbanization will largely come to an end. Then processes of growth and shrinkage will reach a balance and urban shrinkage will be a process as common as it was before industrialization began."₁

To a large extent they blame four processes for contemporary shrinkage. The first is suburbanization. This is a largely American phenomena, perhaps tied to residual westward expansionist mindsets, where large chunks of the urban population continually move outward.

The second is deindustrialization, which is exemplified by Detroit and Manchester. This process occurs when an industry dies and the former laborers are forced to move elsewhere for work.  The third is demographic shrinkage. Population loss on this level occurs when entire demographics have aged with low rates of reproduction and high rates of brain drain/deindustrialization. The result is a massive swathe of the population simply disappearing. The final process is post socialist change. This process is evident in Russia and many Eastern European countries.  It occurs when the shift of regime creates an economic, technological and cultural vacuum within a country. ₂ The result is once again massive exodus. 

These changes certainly do not affect all urban centers around the world, but this trend has been going on for long enough to grant serious consideration. The simple fact is that around the world there are former urban locations, which are now empty. Imagine entire blocks of vacant housing projects, homes, stores, factories and warehouses. The real question that I find interesting is not whether this phenomena is threatening or what its far reaching socio-economic implications are, but what populations around the world will do with this empty space. Furthermore, I am curious what possibilities these vacant places will grant for artists, critical thinkers and practitioners of digital media. Also, I wonder what this will mean for public space, the public sphere and urban green space.

One project has already responded to the writings of the Shrinking Cities group, with Fiber Cities Tokyo 2050. This project hails from some of the very brightest interdisciplinary minds Japan. They have a four fold plan to convert the empty/dead spaces of the city into public green spaces. They include "green finger", which converts locations further than walking distance of public transportation into a green belt, "green web", a strategy that turns redundant sections of highway into green space, "green partition", a design strategy that uses green space to ameliorate natural disasters (i.e. in earthquake prone regions) and "urban wrinkle", a plan to develop and upkeep linear regions of city.

The question I have is how this could be applied to most any American setting and how these once dead, newly greened spaces will thrive in the ubiquitously connected contemporary city.

Notes

1. "Complete Works 3: Case Study: Japan" (2008) shrinkingcities.com (accessed January 11, 2009).

2. Ibid.

3."Four Strategies" fibercity2050.com (accessed January 11, 2009).