Are you a racist?

This game was meant to test reaction times to suspects who might be carrying a gun. I apparently am a racist accord to the test, as my reaction time to white people holding guns was longer than my reaction time to black people holding guns. I'd like to note that "black" also appeared to include Latinos and possibly other "dark skinned" minorities. I could be wrong because I was too busy trying to tell if these guys were holding guns or not. The other thing was it wasn't really controlled at all, there were many backgrounds used in the game, and I don't know if the researcher is collecting information on this, but on some backgrounds it was harder to see a gun than others. Oddly enough, there's lots of images from Denver, so I was also a bit distracted by that. Anyway, my armed reaction times reverse it: I spent a longer time checking to see if Blacks were unarmed rather than whites. Pretty interesting study! I wish I could compare myself to other people. Feel free to post your scores in the comments.

Try it out here: http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/

Via Poplicks

Hurricane Katrina video tribute - with Anime!

While doing some research on a YouTube user that commented on one of the videos I'm examining in my thesis, I came across this video posted by a user that makes anime music videos. The producer created this as a tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This one uses images from Naruto, which I haven't seen so I'm not sure if there's some meta-textual story telling going on. Anyone familiar with the series?




Compare it to the one I'm looking at that uses the same song by U2 and Green Day:


They both use methods of production that are hot topics among scholars studying fan-created media - but they're both dedicated to the memory of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and not about extending the fan-object's narrative.

(ps. Just a side note, but I'll be anxious to be done with this chapter and listening to music that I don't associate with Katrina. I treat myself to other tunes when I can right now, but man, I'm anxious to listen to a wider range! I think I could recite the lyrics to nearly every song in the videos I'm examining.)

Maya Lin's last memorial is a piece of activist art.

Maya Lin, the architect of the highly influential Vietnam Veterans Memorial is producing only one more memorial during her career. This time it'll be to the growing number of endangered and extinct species with the purpose of educating and motivating the public to take action:

Lin would like her new memorial to have global reach. She wants to use the Internet, interactive media and a book to tell people specific steps they can take to spare the environment, like avoiding plastic bags, insisting on shade-grown coffee or joining a program to "adopt" an endangered species and help protect it. She wants to unveil donated corporate billboards in locations such as Times Square, with 20-minute videos with images of endangered species and places.

Does this mean she is crossing the line from artist to advocate?

Lin paused for a thoughtful moment. As a child, the burning of toxic contaminants on Lake Erie did spur her to environmental activism. She petitioned the Kroger Co., owner of Ralphs and Food4Less, to ban animal traps and advocated for Greenpeace.

"I've always said I present history. I don't dictate what people think," she began carefully. "I don't try to preach. This one, like the others, makes you aware of it: 'Did you know the sound of the songbirds, as we knew it when we were little, are gone?' But yeah," she added with a shrug, "Definitely, I will be giving groups and people things they can do in their everyday lives."

While I believe that most of Maya Lin's work is activist media in the way challenges the public's normal engagement with memorials; her reshaping of the memorial landscape into spaces of activist art will be very overt in this memorial. I'm anxious to see it come fruition and what sort of new media applications she'll be using.

Read more at the LA Times.

PS. This really just makes me justified in what I'm studying - Hopefully one day I'll be able to incorporate Lin's final memorial into an extended essay on how the public used networked on-line spaces to memorialize and as activist media and how the memorial institutions have incorporated this behavior. Exciting!

Whirlwind writing

Wow, I can't believe I haven't posted in so long! I've been hiding out, writing a bunch on other chapters of my thesis, and in general being an overworked grad student. I'm loving it, but I'm also looking forward to June 7th, when I finally get to wear that awesome hood and get a little piece of paper proclaiming me as a Master of the Arts.

Here's a small update on what I'm working on thesis wise. I'm taking a close look at two forms of video tributes, the very unorganized efforts on YouTube related to Hurricane Katrina and the very organized efforts of http://iraqmemorial.org. The reason I'm looking so closely at just two memorial efforts is because of the way both events are critical pieces at revising American national identity and collective memory. They also vary much in aesthetic and organizing - but both have ties to activist media in that they challenge the forgetting of these people/events. I'm excited to be drawing on resources from Pierre Nora to the fan vidding and vlogging community. I'm attempting to not just look at literature produced by academics, but also by new media producers and their respective communities.

Check out the memorials I'm looking at:
Videos from iraqmemorial.org:


Video tributes on YouTube to the victims of Hurricane Katrina:


For now its back to work for me, but I'm hoping to keep blogging a bit more about my thesis as time goes on. I'm also working with Joomla! quite a bit right now, learning templating and doing some customization for a pretty rad organization in Shreveport. You guess who. Anyway, I want to share a little review of what its like learning and working with an open source community from a designer/developer stand point - so keep your eyes out for that! Aaaaand a new portfolio layout! Productivity!

Presenting Thesis Chapter on the NIU Shootings and Online Responses

Today I'm presenting a newly finished draft of a chapter of my master's thesis on Social Networking Sites responses to the NIU Shootings.  Here's my fancy Google Presentation if you'd like to check it out:

There's also a preliminary investigation of the topic over at Pop + Politics. A longer draft is coming on Monday as well.

Shreveport's Chimp Haven on This American Life

Shreveport has a chimp rehabilitation center that opened while I was in college there. I hadn't ever heard what it was like for the chimps there and it is fascinating. I haven't visited either, but now I want to. Check it out on This American Life's third act "Almost Human Resources":

Reporter Charles Siebert talks with Ira about retirement homes for Chimpanzees. Yes, retirement homes for Chimpanzees. There are thousands of aging chimps in the US: retired chimp actors, ex-research subjects, abandoned pets. They can't be put back in the wild since they don't know how to survive there. Charles Siebert visited many of the facilities where they're housed, often in rooms, with TV's and 3 meals a day. He's writing a book about his experiences called Humanzee. (11 minutes)

And the section on NY's Rubber Room is fascinating too.

Mediated Mourning?

I've been collecting all my notes on various academic works I'll be working with in my thesis, but in particular I love the complexity of Harriet F. Senie's "Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space." She deals with identity and the collective at the spaces of violent events in the article and it is fantastic. Here's a short quote:

Although, perhaps even because, public experience in our culture has been rendered private by television and the internet, many of us feel an overwhelming need to make real what is increasingly mediated - to recapture the here and now. To stand on the ground where something happened is to feel the reality of the event - to feel meaningfully linked to others and to history.

To some degree, Senie is correct - when these events are mediated the public reaches out and tries to connect somehow whether that's through donating money, collecting goods, making a pilgrimage, leaving an object at the physical site, etc. We experiencing mourning as something to act upon: we need to take action and just do something. However, I believe Senie alludes to the idea that media remove us from mourning and make it private. In my research, particularly with the online mourning community surrounding the NIU shootings, I see the complete opposite where people are finding online publics like Facebook to connect with other mourners without actually interacting in a physical space. However, they are making "real" what is increasingly mediated - but through the means of mediation. The profile picture changing, the mourning group joining, all the other new media production around the tragedy signals that the public is using the mediating technologies to become meaningfully linked to one another and to the history of this event. After all, isn't the Internet one big database with lots of joined tables?