Since the onslaught of the Gangnam Style parody, I’ve been dying to curate a nifty collection of the more unusual versions. So many cultural manifestations, so much universal humor and cleverness–it’s been one delightful, zany, amateur ride.
This is by no means a collection, but let’s say it’s a start.
Lungi Style
In this version, Bangladeshis in NYC come together for a flashmob featuring young guys in lungis, a traditional casual long skirt worn by men in Suth Asia.
Tibetans vs China’s Xi Jinping: Gangnam Style
Here a Tibetan community protests Xi Jinping a la Gangam.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter are today’s giants in the land of social media platforms. And yes, blogging is like a stodgy grandfather in the incessant lightening-rounds of technology development and disruption. All the same, blogging continues to be a mighty tool for developing an audience and building brand (even the New York Timessays so).
Numerous well-established and robust blogging platforms are available, including WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. But one up-and-coming service is getting all the buzz these days: Squarespace. A proprietary, subscription-based blogging platform, Squarespace has adopted all the best of older blog services and gussied the blogging interface up with a slick, clean design and flexible, simple-to-use functionality.
The elegant and simple user dashboard makes tweaking settings and adding content a breeze.
For individuals looking for a new blogging platform, Squarespace presents an absurdly low barrier to entry. For starters, a generous trial period (no credit-card required) allows one to do a lot more than kick the tires before committing—you can go as far as setting up a whole blog. Users have the choice of many lovely ready-made design themes, some that emphasize images and portfolios and others that spotlight text and traditional blogging. Customization of themes is made easy through “code injections,” simple forms that allow users to tweak CSS or add scripts without having to plod through code files. Advanced users can make use of Squarespace’s developer platform to perform more serious customization of templates and overall design. Customizing other elements of the site’s appearance and functionality is not difficult, thanks to an absurdly simple dashboard and settings design. Anyone with computer experience should have no problem getting a blog up and running.
Making the most of social sharing is quite simple with Squarespace. The platform offers a few different share settings. One allows users to embed Squarespace slideshows in Facebook business accounts; another allows users to enable share buttons on each post. In addition, the service comes with a decent, if basic, Web analytics toolbox to help users optimize site traffic.
All in all, Squarespace is a blogging platform both an easy start for the beginning blogger and robust and customizable service for the commercial blogger, offering all the best of today’s blogging and social media tools.
What is it to be part of the public? What is a public, anyway? And what is public in socially-mediated online environments? Nancy K. Baym and danah boyd feel out some answers to these questions in their scholarly article, “Socially Mediated Publicness.”
Networked media afford more layers of publicness than ever before, providing far more than the single-channel, limited-audience broadcasting of content that we were accustomed to à la traditional media. People can post 24/7 to media that makes their content imminently and immediately “spreadable”; these new channels that raise the likelihood of being heard, cut across multiple audiences, and are quickly reshaping people’s relationship to public life in dramatic ways—ways that are not yet fully understood.
“Social media mirror, magnify, and complicate countless aspects of everyday life, bringing into question practices that are presumed stable and shedding light on contested social phenomena.”
One way that social media complicates of daily life is its blurring of visibility and obscurity. When a teenager posts a video on YouTube of herself playing a sea chanty on the accordion, how public is it? Ostensibly, she has made the video public; anyone who finds it can view it. Unless she has robust social connectedness, musical savvy, and possibly some luck, her video may go mostly unviewed: Although there’s no doubt social media have heightened the possibility for visibility, we know that many online posts receive little to no attention. On the other hand, Baym and boyd point out that,
“[w]hat’s more astonishing [than videos going viral] is how common it is for a typical teenager to achieve hundreds of views for an ad hoc music video. That level of moderate, widespread publicness is unprecedented.”
They describe this phenomenon as a “conundrum of visibility,” i.e, the inscrutable blur between what is public and what is invisible in mediated, networked sphere.
“Having to imagine one’s audience is a fundamental human problem rather than one distinctive to social media. But social media make it particularly challenging to understand ‘who is out thereand when’ and raises the potential for greater misalignment between imagined and actual audience.”
The notion of “audience” also is complicated in the networked environment. In the age of mass media, communication was unidirectional; although part of the public, audiences were characterized by their separation from performers and content creators and their concomitant passive roles. With the emergence of social media, that distinction has been washed away, and now the audience now has greater agency—they may be active, participatory, more visible.
Recommended related viewing: danah boyd’s keynote at SXSW 2010 on privacy and publicity.
It comes probably as no surprise, but the organizing and engagement potential of social media has not been lost on the labor movement. Just look at Pinterest: in a quick scan this afternoon, I was able to find more than dozens of different labor organizations with active accounts. Content prevalent on these pinboards is political posters and graphics, photos of protests, and infographics on issues affecting workers around the world.
As common as labor organizations’ presence is on Pinterest, degree of engagement varies considerably. The AFL-CIO, an enormous national confederation of labor unions, for example is very active on Pinterest. With more than thirty boards and 389 pins, ranging topically from “good reads” to job safety, plus several hundred followers, the AFL-CIO exhibits a relatively high level of engagement.
The AFL-CIO’s Pinterest page, with more than 30 boards and 400+ followers.
The Teamsters, one of the United States biggest and best-known unions, on the other hand, has an astonishingly limited presence on Pinterest. Two pinboards, 40 pins, and19 followers are the current extent of its activity.
The Teamsters modest Pinterest activity: only two boards!
Less surprising is the small presence of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights—a far smaller and lesser-known organization than either the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters. Its engagement on Pinterest is limited to only three boards with 37 pins of images on labor rights, infographics, and photos of union-made goods; it has 26 followers.
IGLHR’s Pinterest page, with pins for union-made goods, infographics, and iconic images in support of labor.
All in all, my anecdotal observations of the activities of unions and other labor organizations on Pinterest suggest that they are still building momentum; most had less than 100 followers and none had reached the degree of activity and participation that we see in some other social and political causes. For a good general overview of union use of social media, see this blog post by Jessica Miller-Merrell.
Listened recently to a talk by Cory Doctorow at SIGGRAPH last year in Vancouver about current intellectual property regulations in the digital environment and their absurd effects: disenfranchising authors, musicians, and other creators and overarming technical content intermediaries such as Viacom and Apple. He speaks both as highly successful writer/copyright beneficiary and as passionate defender of copyright’s use to defend and support individual creativity and autonomy. Highly recommended.
“Describing the world in terms of hierarchies (i.e., a plant is an example of a living thing, has characteristics including leaves, roots and flowers, requires light and water to produce food, etc.) is, says Srinivasan, a western construct”
One of the key tools in Srinivasan’s toolkit is the ontology, which he describes as a structured way to examine “theories of what exist”. Describing the world in terms of hierarchies (i.e., a plant is an example of a living thing, has characteristics including leaves, roots and flowers, requires light and water to produce food, etc.) is, says Srinivasan, a western construct that’s not always how a community considers local knowledge. But Srinivasan believes we can learn a great deal about how communities think about knowledge both by trying to structure their knowledge into ontologies and by understanding how they traditionally structure their knowledge.
To illustrate this idea, Srinivasan shows us some alternative ways to map physical space. A map from the Qiche tribe in Peru is
radial, not Cartesian. The image of a crocodile is an Aboriginal map, a visualization of the song lines that criss-cross an area in rural Australia, a drawing of a God as well as a practical map of the landscape. Srinivasan wonders if we’re creating technologies that are this diverse, or whether we’re facing a world where most technologies are produced within one conceptual and value system and exported.
Beyond these ideas, Zuckerman
discusses Srinivasan’s efforts to document and map out different knowledge systems around the world–from Kyrgyzstan to native communities in southern California–so that technology design can move beyond a few-sizes-fit-all approach to more responsive and culturally relevant models.
For folks (like me) who were too busy this past week biting nails over the full-throttle presidential race and ground-breaking state ballot issues this past week, here’s a quick round-up of state election results relating to the less scintillating—but important—topics of organized labor and education.
This quote from Jennie Drage Browser at the National Conference of State Legislatures sums up the results pretty well:
“There was strong pushback across the country [Tuesday] night against efforts to rein in public employees unions.”
Michigan: A union-backed effort to amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to collective bargaining failed by a significant margin, 58 to 42 percent. • Voters rejected a law giving state-appointed emergency managers sweeping powers over financially troubled local governments, including rights to end collective bargaining, undo labor contracts, and privatize.
California: Voters rejected Proposition 32, an initiative that aimed to stymie labor-union fundraising by preventing use of funds automatically deducted from employee accounts (such as union dues) for political purposes; it was the third such measure to be rejected in the state in recent years. • The state’s sales tax and, for the state’s highest earners, income tax will be temporarily increased thanks to the passage of Proposition 3o, a measure that will ultimately restore more than $6 million in funding to the state’s ailing public education systems.
Maryland: A ballot initiative was passed allowing children of undocumented immigrants to qualify for in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities.
Washington and Georgia: A Georgia ballot measures establishing charter schools has passed; another in Washington state will also likely win.
South Dakota and Idaho: Both states overturned laws that tied public school teacher pay to performance and did away with tenure.
As we hear in frequent news reports these days, tuition costs are rising sharply and more and more families are struggling to meet them. Many explanations are offered for the increases, from deep cuts in national and state support for higher education in public institutions to competition among elite schools for students. But what you won’t usually hear in these calculations are staffing costs. Excepting high-paid administrative units and, often, tenured faculty, pay and working conditions for college and university employees—from adjunct professors to food-service workers—have been put under increasing pressure as institutions push harder to trim costs (see, for example, here and here).
On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, this blog is born to pass on news, information, and different perspectives on the issue relating to workplace fairness in our colleges and universities. Please join the conversation, share your perspectives, and alert us to what’s happening in your neck of the woods!
