In this context, I have observed that emerging scholars, in the process of constructing ourselves as commodities on the job market, are often pressured to fulfill contradictory imperatives. We must cleave to the strictures of a conservative academy, ratify systems of distinction, participate in traditional forms of knowledge production, appear and behave appropriately, and generally build a CV that manifests orthodox standards. At the same time, we must smack of the cutting edge, continually reproduce the new, incorporate digital media into our pedagogy and scholarship, assert our relevance, and generally “innovate” according to the neoliberal schema. On the surface, this simply entails doing more work — all the old kinds of academic work PLUS all the new kinds of academic work. But the paradox can’t always be resolved additively.

I think the obligation to create and manage an online persona is a paradigmatic example of this double-bind. First, there is the demand to be publicly visible — at the most basic level, to show up legibly in search as a singular entity (we had a few laughs exploring some of Rebecca Schneider‘s googlegangers). In Google’s help post about managing your online reputation, they oh so helpfully suggest creating a G+ profile as a means to gain more control over search results. The recommended course is always to produce MORE — more pages and profiles under your proper name — in order to push any secondhand or incriminating content off the first page or two. But this of course creates further problems of identity (and time) management, not least because each social network you might join is a corporate platform with its own privacy settings and personal connections to navigate.

Thus beyond search visibility, there is the question of HOW you appear online, which entails constantly negotiating the contradiction I outlined above. Let me take the redesign of my website as an example. In grad school, I approached j-l-r.org as an active archive of my ongoing work. I posted term papers, compiled conference materials, chronicled my comprehensive exams, and let stand the occasional weird or belligerent comments.

Even when I pulled things down from an index post like this one, I sometimes tracked older versions or left them commented out in the html.

This year I decided that it felt unruly and vulnerable to expose so much of my intellectual history (call it a lesson from last year’s job market). I relaunched the site in a stylish WordPress package, stripped of most of its previous content. I imported only more recent blog posts, and hid the blog behind a link. The front page is now a “lifestream” which gives the impression of constant activity by aggregating my incidental clicks and tweets across various social media sites. The tradeoff here is that all the included profiles become more or less professional spaces (after five years on Twitter, I finally caved and made a second locked personal account). I should add that I concurrently deleted my Facebook profile. These are some of my own responses to a job market culture of risk and fear, particularly for those who may aspire to be personally and/or professionally radical.

Presuming that you, like me, aren’t prepared to stage an intervention by dismantling boundaries around the professional professorial self, I see two options. One is to compartmentalize by maintaining several separate online identities. Folks in fandom and other online subcultures have long used pseudonyms to engage meaningfully in communities insulated from one’s “real life” persona. The practice of pseudonymity is under siege from Facebook and Google Plus in its wake which encourage or enforce real name policies because their advertising revenue depends on data mining singular and static individuals. While there is radical potential in refusing anxieties around privacy and insisting on a fully integrated self-presentation (“the personal is political” after all), pseudonyms can also be empowering as a tactic for code-shifting between different performances of identity.

The other option is anonymity, which we can see in full flower on the infamous Academic Jobs Wiki. Denied any other outlet where we can speak openly about searches or the darker side of the job market experience, the wiki acts as a release valve for coveted information, questions, arguments, trolling, trivialities, polemics, and every minute neurosis. Comments can get ugly, but I maintain that anonymous exchange can be a valuable conduit for what was called in our discussion the “excess affect” of academic labor.

But can we envision other possibilities?

This is a macro from Academic Coach Taylor (h/t Hans Vermy), a tumblr curated by a self-styled “charming queer phd student” that iterates the advice meme format to dole out words of wisdom and encouragement from the Friday Night Lights character. The reference is to a book that is something of an intellectual meme in theory circles right now: Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. It comes up a lot in reflexive discussions of the present and future of academia, I think with good reason. Faced with all the contradictions and overdeterminations of our existence as immaterial laborers most of us can hardly help but fail. There’s some hope in the idea that failure might open up lives beyond the neoliberal narrative of career success. Is there a way we could ask not “how do I get a job?” but “how do I want to work?”

Fan/Remix Video – Contents

The issue adds to what I have experienced as an ongoing conversation over the past five years amongst academics, artists, and activists working on/in various spheres of vernacular video. Vidders, for example, have become increasingly attuned to the relationship of their creations and community to more male-dominated genres of fanworks and to YouTube’s spreadable culture of memes and mashups — a trend documented in certain vids that have attained critical or “viral” acclaim, remixers’ stylistic influence by vidders (and vice versa), and “meta” vids that comment on this larger context. In our introduction, I wanted to embody the spirit of remix as much as possible by incorporating references and artifacts from these networked discourses. This culminated, for my part, in a critical video component — a vid I’m calling “Oh Internet (A Vidding/Remix Romance)”:

Audio: Oh, Internet by Harto (Hannah Hart) and Creator&Distractor

By drawing on the excellent selection of citations and authors in the issue as my video sources, I hoped to evoke visually the fertility and unruliness of collisions between forms and cultures that we’re witnessing in remix today. The tone of this work is largely set by the song, a tender (if tongue-in-cheek) ode to geeky internet technologies and communities. It’s a recent slightly viral hit from the YouTube-famous creator of the vlog My Drunk Kitchen, inspired by anti-SOPA campaigns. Editing a music video to this song mingles vidding conventions of format and female “voice” with references to mainstream cyberculture. Styling the story as an anthropomorphic romance (evidently a “het” one, although marked by a /) between Vidding and Remix also invokes both feminine/feminist themes of intimacy and desire and some of the parodic critical distance more common to political remix. So the song choice establishes themes of hybridity within the frame of a love ballad — sweet and harmonious, but not without fear of loss.

The video consists of a remix of remixes that I expect rewards greater familiarity with the footage in terms of parsing its narrative structure (e.g. Vidding sings to Remix in the first verse; Remix sings to Vidding in the second verse). I intended for at least some of the complex connections and contestations between heterogenous artists and art forms to come across. The visual sophistication of my source material necessitated using longer clips, so I employed a simple digital technique called “datamoshing” on many of the transitions (this tutorial from Bob Weisz taught me how). Basically: by manually deleting a keyframe, you generate a distortion that makes the moving parts of a new clip emerge out of the image in the previous clip. The juxtapositions and moshed pixels celebrate the capacity of remix to generate collective and passionate interventions but equally suggest that its appropriations can be misrepresentative and violent.

Let me know what you think! You should also check out a series of trailers created for the issue by Kevin Tomasura — they appear in the introduction and OTW’s announcement.

Blog entries earlier than 2012 were imported from my previous website (comments are disabled).

• my research is tied to my identity, my passions, and my social context
• my academic work should reach multiple audiences
• intellectual production is collaborative and non-rivalrous -- it's more productive the more it's shared
• my teaching should continually adapt to incorporate my students' concerns, investments, and knowledges
• critical and cultural theory are key 21st century literacies
• media theory and practice mutually enrich each other
• my reason for being a professor is to cultivate critical media users
• my reason for being in academia is to participate in changing it
• my job is to experiment and innovate

• teaching (the vast majority): developing seven courses that experiment with multimedia pedagogy
• posting and writing about my teaching
• learning (the hard way) about the conceptual and institutional challenges of media studies programs
• cultivating scholarly connections at Stanford and online
• participating in conferences and more unusual events like THATCamp and DIY 2011
• co-editing a special issue of an online journal
• keeping up with news and happenings in my field via twitter

• a book proposal under contract with an academic press

I wrote this piece for my department's Autumn 2010 Almanac, an internal publication organized by grad students. I'm happy I can also share it here. Coming soon: a more pragmatic report on using elgg for my course website.

Going Native

Last February, the first annual Digital Media and Learning conference convened at UC San Diego. Sponsored by the Digital Media and Learning Hub (a project of the Irvine-based University of California Humanities Research Institute) with major funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, this event marked an influential intervention into current discourses on education. With doomsayers proclaiming that 21st century technology poisons our children and idealists touting the potential of today's "digital natives", the debate over media literacies demands sustained critique. At its best, the DML conference, through a serious engagement in its theme of "diversifying participation," stimulated nuanced and pragmatic conversations about productive places for technology in the classroom. But in my opinion, the role of higher education in this enterprise remained ambivalent and indistinct, no doubt in part due to MacArthur's emphasis on childhood. While many projects in the orbit of instructional technology and the digital humanities (including HASTAC, the Duke-based Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, also funded by MacArthur) build bridges between educators in different milieus, there are important institutional disjunctures that strain these alliances.

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Not least of which is the university's equivocal relationship to humanities pedagogy -- especially now, while the field tries to weather a crisis of legitimacy. Is it humanities research or liberal arts teaching that is most valuable, and how do we make a case for either when privatization drives higher learning toward IP and professional training? Our cultural and economic mania for technology renders new media central to these negotiations, as every interested party struggles to incorporate the possibilities of digital platforms (or, more cynically, to cash in on the hype). Accordingly, the discipline of media studies is in a unique position to mediate (so to speak) the conflicting investments and imperatives converging on the scene of higher education. master tea original flavor low prices We have an opportunity to demonstrate the merits of a critical approach and contribute to emerging praxis in creating, transmitting, archiving, and representing cultural production -- and yes, teaching it to college students.

You Got Production in My Studies!

This commitment to the stakes of media literacy animates my development as a teacher. Now, the discourse of literacies is not without its problems, and the dispute rages on about whether (or, more realistically, how) computers, video, and mobile devices belong in the classroom (and in young people's lives overall). Technology is certainly not a magic bullet that revolutionizes education by its mere presence, nor are today's students impossible to engage without internets and gadgetry. But judicious deployment of digital tools can support old-fashioned pedagogical principles like participation and assessment, as well as connect learning to our contemporary milieu. 2 step coc/cocaine detox program for persons over 200 lbs I would argue that the humanities do have a responsibility to demonstrate relevance, and that it is my job to help students make meaningful links between the theoretical traditions of my field and their own personal and social experiences.

Most of my courses cover topics related to television and cyberculture, formations with particular ubiquity in these life experiences. Here, a reflexive approach that facilitates learning through and not just about these media seems essential. Experiential pedagogy involves students in using the artifacts that we're studying and in thinking critically about this use. I would not teach online community, for example, without a course website that allows us to explore and evaluate representative systems in a structured way. Moreover, I encourage students to engage with media form, aesthetics, and infrastructure as creators, not just as users. Written composition is no longer the professional world's primary skill, and competence in multimedia rhetorics is something I would like students to take from my discipline, as communicators as well as critics. buy single panel coc/cocaine home urine test kit For these reasons, I often incorporate at least one visual or multimodal project into my classes.

Of course, non-traditional assignments bring specific challenges. It can already be hard to cover adequate topical material in a quarter, much less master technical capabilities within a studies course. Budgeting scarce resources, from time to expertise to equipment, is often difficult. I have found that offering students individualized guidance plus a suite of resources appropriate for various levels is more effective than attempting to systematically teach aptitude. With this launchpad plus guidelines emphasizing the recommended steps in the process of completing a project, Stanford undergrads seem more than capable of self-directed and innovative problem-solving. Most importantly, I stress that creative work in a studies course is evaluated based on its rigor, originality, and intelligibility and not on its technical polish. zydot ultimate blend orange flavor buy. With today's vernacular tools, it is eminently possible to devise a compelling online artwork using only simple interfaces. In fact, the changing landscape of today's media industries and social web depends on facilitating this sort of "user-generated content".

The Medium is the Message

Much credit goes to my students for excelling at synthesizing their talents and viewpoints with critical texts in inventive art-making. In Introduction to Digital Media, I asked them to collaborate in groups to "create a multimedia web-based work that engages with the theoretical perspectives we have studied." As an example of the provocations that are feasible through accessible platforms, I would like to highlight "Novus Reproba Verum" by James Johnson, Patrick Kelly, Stephanie Ogonor, Mandy Sa, and Alfredo Sabillón. This experimental, parodic "un-art movement" has as its nucleus a basic html web page built in Google Sites, comprising a manifesto, artist bios, and links. The bulk of the project expands hypertextually in a distributed, ephemeral network of sites and interventions by these ficticious artists, levaraging Blogger, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook, YouTube, and more to embody the collective's mandate to be "the only reputable source of digital misinformation." The personas imagined by individual group members include Chevo Mnomno, a retired priest who copies film reviews and blogs them with a different title swapped in; Stacy O’Keefe, a poet whose works are generated by computer code; Mitch Paxton, a radical who defaces famous images and texts and promulgates a YouTube hoax about the death of Susan Boyle; Oni and Ur, lesbian lovers who sell realistic sculptures of bombs (actually found photos of real bombs) on Ebay; and a pro-art heckler named Joan Chebert.

The dispersed, parasitic, and dynamic form of "Novus Reproba Verum" elaborates course questions about online identity, authorship, archiving, and agency in ways that are both entertaining and critical. Performative stunts like the fake Susan Boyle memorial video and Oni and Ur's militant feminist feuds in YouTube comments mobilize familiar web destinations for unpredictable interactivity, manifesting rather than just describing the implications of digital architecture. This ambitious accretion of appropriations and incitements intersects many of the internet's compromised binaries, including real vs. fake information, human vs. computer intelligence, art vs. nonsense production, legal vs. illicit creativity, and publishing vs. filtering content. The project is thus exemplary of how multimedia work can give students the opportunity to experience and manipulate the characteristic constraints of media as a means to learn about and critique them.

In Transmedia TV, my students were equally adept at appropriating media footage and techniques to create video projects. Even beginners were game to use consumer tools like iMovie and the department's dedicated Kodak cameras to produce thoughtful and thought-provoking visual essays on topics ranging from television's product placement to YouTube's spreadable memes. In the coming academic year, I hope that connections with campus groups like the Stanford Cardinal Broadcasting Network and alliances within our department will further support my development of experiential curriculum in media studies. In particular, I have plans to incorporate video commentaries leading to a TV presentation into Introduction to Television Studies and experiment with pedagogy structured around remix in spring's Copy This Class. I believe that Art & Art History's unique interchange of approaches and resources offers opportunities for teaching media through media that are invaluable to my growth as an educator. With its theoretical, aesthetic, and historical orientation and contact with active art-making, the Film & Media Studies program makes possible a distinctive response to humanities challenges in the context of Stanford and academia at large.

TwitterTube

Once regarded as a microblogging status update platform, Twitter is evolving into an increasingly complex social and mobile media experience. Twitter’s implications for three distinct but interrelated domains in television–industry, celebrity, and fan community–are real, yet unclear. For example, how are the networks strategically using Twitter to encourage fan loyalty, engagement, and viewership? How does the use of Twitter by celebrities represent the next moment in how we produce, consume, and participate in reality television? Also, how are celebrity "tweets" blurring the lines between public persona and private person? Finally, what role is Twitter playing in the transformation of how distinct audiences/publics "watch" television and participate in the virtual water cooler?

In 2007, not long after its launch, Twitter made a splash on the social media scene by providing a deceptively simple interface that allowed for a variety of emergent users. Nothing more than a series of 140-character status updates with no provisions for organizing, filtering, grouping, verifying, or multimedia (to list some common features of competing platforms), Twitter captured imaginations with the idea of a real-time stream of bite-sized information and dovetailed with interest in a more lightweight and mobile internet (in contrast to bloated broadband destinations like Facebook). The site's developers adopted user-generated behaviors like @replies and #hashtags, and its open API represented a philosophy that invited innovation and extensibility rather than a "walled garden" approach. More recently, however, Twitter has chosen to prioritize new features that simplify and enhance the process of building and maintaining reputation, such as: Verified Accounts (June 2009); Lists (October 2009); the Retweet button (November 2009), which tried to trump established conventions; an ad platform based on Promoted Tweets (April 2010) and Promoted Trending Topics (July 2010); and an official Tweet Button for blogs and websites (August 2010).

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The changes go hand in hand with increasing interest by companies and public figures in mobilizing this new online sensation to promote their visibility and brand, a trend that includes both mass media marketers and a more informal coterie of TV industry insiders. This gradual shift toward accommodating and soliciting corporations and advertisers seems to mirror the trajectory of many social media startups (from LiveJournal to YouTube) as they attempt to begin turning a profit. I'd like to explore its implications for fans and fandom on Twitter. single panel cotinine (cot) home urine test kit online As such, I'm largely setting aside the domain of celebrity from this roundtable's prompt and focusing on the interactions between industry and fan community. I'd like to propose that the mutually constitutive developments in Twitter's architecture, cultural zeitgeist, and commercial imperatives privilege affirmative over transformative modes of fandom.

Affirmative and transformative are terms for a widely recognized if coarse distinction between two dominant styles of fan participation (also identified by the telling but problematic fanboy vs. fangirl binary and by Anne Kustritz with the labels "as is" vs. creative fandom). According to fan obsession_inc, "affirmational fandom" is characterized by seeking "the author's purpose... rules... [and] details" in the "source material" whose producers are "always the last word on their own works" – thus "these are the sanctioned fans." order zydot ultimate-24 plus starfruit flavor "Transformational fandom," by contrast, values fanon over canon, appropriation over documentation, and multiple interpretations over hierarchical authority. The transformational practice of "fakers," or, unauthorized accounts that role-play public figures or fictional characters, has been notable among creative deployments of Twitter. While some of these personas are relatively free-standing caricatures, others congregate in interactive networks based on the ensemble of a TV show or movie.

In comparison to other common platforms utilized in play-by-post RPGs, Twitter is functionally anarchic, since the site's stripped-down interface lacks provisions for communicating, posting, and archiving in groups. Collaborators who want to organize out-of-character must use (or build) outside websites for this purpose. But in an overarching sense, Twitter's success is founded on the capacity for simplicity to operate as a feature not a bug, and I experienced firsthand how this principle applies to interactive storytelling when I played a character from Battlestar Galactica on Twitter (largely at the end of season 4.0 and over the following hiatus). zydot ultimate blend wild cherry flavor order While I recruited some friends to portray a subset of characters (joining a handful that already existed), the anonymity of many of the participants was an opportunity for unpredictable and generative intersections between fans with very different contexts and perspectives – all rendered within our alternate universe. At the same time, I struggled with the challenges of tracking and documenting our engagements (my attempts at hacked solutions included favorites, screen-captures, and Yahoo!Pipes).

While Twitter can serve as a nexus for opening up (that is, transforming) television narrative (and even fandom itself), it is equally amenable to closing down (that is, affirming) mass media authorship. This crossroads seems to mirror tension within the corporate ethos of Twitter over whether it aims to be a grassroots or a commercial system. Whether the company can effectively carry out both functions remains to be seen. We might map Twitter accounts tied to TV shows onto a continuum from transformative to affirmative – in the case of Battlestar Galactica: my RP collaborators via LiveJournal > characters written anonymously from other corners of fandom > Big Name Fans like @proggrrl > influential fan sites like @galacticasitrep and @bsgfodder > creative professionals like @JaneEspenson and @bearmccreary > executive/marketing accounts like @Syfy (Craig Engler) and @Syfy_Caprica. price fiber boost (capsules) While Twitter's creative possibilities will most likely remain viable (more on this in my roundtable presentation), my concern is that practical and ideological attention to authenticity on Twitter will ultimately lend greater legitimacy to fans who wish to consume an authoritative, sanctioned version of the show. Twitter brings affirmative fandom closer to its objects of adoration, and I suggest that we need be aware of how this unprecedented access is intertwined with the dynamics and objectives of the corporate media.

Presentation topic: Overtures by industry to endorse rather than embargo creative fan activity in the form of character role-playing (Mad Men and True Blood).

See also: some TV shows on Twitter and some TV writers on Twitter

• BSG twitter archive (6/13/08-8/03/08)
• BSG twitter archive (8/03/08-2/17/09) [backwards]
• my video commentary
• my blog commentary

Rethinking the Audience/Producer Relationship

Given the increased visibility of audiences online, how might we understand the shifts in the relationship between audiences and producers? How have producers’ perceptions of audiences and fans transformed over the past decade? How have audience/producer interactions changed because of fans’ increasing knowledge of and access to a range of producers, from showrunners to writers to performers? As TV and new media scholars enter into dialogue with both producers and fans, how do we negotiate our positions as scholars invested in both sides? Can and should we try to bridge gaps between fan- and producer-created fan engagement?

As the portmanteau "acafan" (meaning a self-identified academic plus fan) suggests, the academic legitimacy of fan studies has gotten a boost from the entertainment industry's escalating interest in mainstreaming fan engagement. During an industrial transformation that both breaks down and props up the boundary between professional and amateur creatives, both producers and audiences have tuned in to fans' labors of love. As we debate the consequences of the corporate media's ever more direct expropriation of fans' work, we should ask how this conjuncture links to our own work as media scholars. The acafan's emerging role as interpreter and mediator of the courtship between fans and industry professionals is intertwined with the increasing commodification of both online entertainment and university learning. saliva 6 drug test kit (amp/mamp/coc/opi/thc/pcp) price For both fans and academics, then, visibility and validation seem to go hand in hand with a willingness to inhabit and promote capitalist models and values. In my contribution, I will explore these issues through the nexus of the "Lost" finale, as represented in the discourses of producerly authority, fan discontent, transmedia marketing, and academic scrutiny (prefigured at the 2010 SCMS conference).

cast of characters: (in order of appearance)
@lizlosh = Elizabeth Losh (alongside fellow panelists Jonathan Alexander and Alexandra Juhasz via YouTube)
@alothian = Alexis Lothian (part of my workshop along with @l_e_s Louisa Stein, Melanie Kohnen, Tisha Turk, and Francesca Coppa via skype)

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• starting day2 at #dml2010 w/ Queer You(th)Tube - awesome intro on the importance of the internet in building identity + community for queers
  
  
• srsly Jonathan Alexander should post this text somewhere - it's beautiful. pls? coming out stories vs. commercial identity menus. [if I understood him correctly, the material was from his article (with Liz Losh) in LGBT Identity and Online New Media]
  
  
• value of extending discussion of digital media + learning to "adult" topics - visibility + blindness of www queer cliche @lizlosh
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• videos borrowing from TV genres (PSA + reality shows) vs. emerging YouTube genres. http://sexualityvideos.tumblr.com @lizlosh
  
  
• youth make multiple coming out videos - which is the "real" story? coming out to YouTube before parents or others IRL @lizlosh
  
  
• question of moderating responses, kinds of responses, lack of responses to coming out videos. + parodies @lizlosh --> Juhasz
  
  
• pessimistic Juhasz argues that YouTube has escalated irony so far as to ruin it for queer camp + make it straight un-critique
  
  
• LOL Juhasz (via YouTube) showing her 9-year-old son's YouTube art/irony video of him eating a sandwich - I don't think she approves
  
  
• Re: Juhasz, I maintain that there are different contexts + literacies of irony - YouTube is not a uniform interpretive community.
  
  
• I think Juhasz takes perverse pleasure in putting all her work hating on YouTube on YouTube - the reflexivity is fruitful.
  
  
• @alothian - 2 notions of queer at stake: disruptive/non-normative (if parody is everywhere we're against it) vs. queer as community
  
  
• Alexander: what kinds of identities get valorized? white boys get more comments on coming out videos than women + people of color.
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• I can reference content + themes from Queer You(th)Tube when I teach YouTube + publics @Stanford Monday - thanks @lizlosh et al!
  
  
• post-panel rap w/ @lizlosh @alothian about the problems of romanticizing the child as digital "noble savage" - youth =/= utopia
  
  
• fascinating! Heather Horst on raced videos of Jamaican Dutty Wine dance - what's normative changes as it circulates transnationally
  
  
• @lnakamur closing @zephoria panel on race. hell yes call Warcraft racist! we need to learn that critique + pleasure can coexist.
  
  
• as video games become increasingly networked, research needs to go beyond textual/interface analysis --> social platforms @lnakamur
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• @lnakamur games as paid labor: contrast b/t professional competitive gamers + Chinese gold farmers. I'd buy "fair trade" WoW gold!
  
  
• my interpretation of this pointed Q&A silence: why is nobody discussing CAPITALISM at this conference on digital media tech?
  
  
• another great ?: how to deal w/ problematic participations? all participatory culture is not "good" culture (relates to queer YT)
  
  
• few at #dml2010 interested in higher ed? post-university panel w/ @halavais @kfitz & Hunsinger. academics should learn digitally too.
  
  
• they vow not to mention any higher ed institution in this panel! @kfitz works on open access publishing & changing peer review.
  
  
• @buridan humans don't stop learning; field is not new; hidden curriculum of university no longer working - need directed learning
  

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• closed, hierarchical beaurocratic structures vs. post-university: hack-labs, p2pu.org, studios, community-based, mobile. @buridan
  
  
• we know that real learning happens informally! so let's get together at a conference to present, publish formal papers. @halavais
  
  
• there's a place for labor ?s here, both re: academics (work any 18 hours) & re: students (is school job training?) @halavais
  
  
• @reneehobbs got to raise question about role of MacArthur Foundation as knowledge gatekeeper for this field. what about debate?
  
  
• reply by @buridan - & what happens when the funding dies? capitalism makes knowledge into competition for resources.
  
  
• new living wage careers in research & teaching need to be created outside the university, including for PhD grads. DML can help. [that should probably end ? rather than .]
  
  
• frustration with no virtual access (e.g. livestream) to #dml2010 sessions. open learning through digital media, people!
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• from post-university panel: @alothian dont forget the collab notes, too. http://etherpad.com/eSPRnZTy9d #dml2010 (via @mcdanger)
  
  
• applause for critical keynote! boo on cancelling later #dml2010 shuttle! I needed more time for hi's & bye's.

These selections say a lot about me as a vid-watcher. For starters, none of them feature the wildly popular shows Supernatural or Merlin (and boys are kept to an absolute minimum overall). But more importantly, almost all of them deviate from the standard conventions of a vid in some significant way. There's certainly much to be said for an excellent execution of the established format, but to me, it's pushing the limits that really highlights what's unique about the form, as well as the possibilities of vidding as an art.

With no further ado my VVC09 top 20 (19 vids and 1 meta post):

• terrified by impending flood of #vvc vid premieres. first #rec - Hard Sun, on firefly fandom w/ live-action footage WOW http://tr.im/wvHf Aug 17th [Hard Sun by laurashapiro + bradcpu]




• today's #vvc #rec - Dollhouse vid by @kiki_miserychic to a mashup of the Bale rant: oh the layers of crack/meta/metacrack! http://tr.im/wA3a Aug 18th [Bale Out by kiki_miserychic]




• a #vvc #rec for John Hughes lovers: jarrow's dancevid of 80s high school movies (selected for in-depth vid review) http://tr.im/wE3Z Aug 19th [Give It Up by jarrow]




• #rec the other #vvc in-depth vid review selection: hollywoodgrrl's Doctor Who vid incorporates text + archival war footage http://tr.im/wIIL Aug 20th [Marble House by hollywoodgrrl]




• today's #vvc #rec is this important post-mortem by bop_radar: "on inclusion and exclusion in vidding fandom" http://tr.im/wN6n Aug 21st




• a more traditional #vvc #rec - obsessive24's "Bachelorette" is Buffy vs. patriarchy http://tr.im/wRcx Aug 22nd [Bachelorette by obsessive24]




• 2fer friday: sweetestdrain's "Land" is an epic 10 min. tribute to the Terminator franchise http://tr.im/wRdg #vvc #rec Aug 22nd [Land by sweetestdrain]




• EMOBOT <# - sisabet's Cameron character study (Cameron/John) to Dar Williams w/ splitscreens is today's #vvc #rec http://tr.im/wU3c Aug 23rd [Comfortably Numb by sisabet]




• deejay's Tropic Thunder vid was controversial at #vvc on the race front, but I think it's interesting. an anti-vid? #rec http://tr.im/wUrn Aug 23rd [Fight the Power by deejay]




• the Wicked Witch (Elphaba) is the Radio Star in this genius Wizard of Oz vid by dualbunny http://tr.im/wX2A - #vvc #rec SQUEE Aug 24th [Video Killed the Radio Star by dualbunny]




• ROBOTS R <# #vvc #rec - awesome multifandom action vid by charmax http://tr.im/x2aR Aug 25th [Seven Nation Army by charmax




• OK I hate all things pop, boys, + reality. but I still #rec this #vvc vid about @adamlambert by @intimations + merryish http://tr.im/x5CB Aug 25th [beautiful dirty rich by astolat + merryish]




• no, not done with the #vvc #rec project! today I have the epic Star Trek vid that you've been awaiting (K/S thru the ages) http://tr.im/yZxm Sep 18th [The Long Spear by jmtorres + niqaeli et al]




• almost forgot today's #vvc #rec - an innovative and hilarious Buffy vid by Milly http://tr.im/z6JZ Sep 19th [Lucky Me by millylicious]




• BSG nite in #vvc #rec land! this haunting FAILNALE vid relies on dissonance for its message: http://tr.im/zfWq Sep 21st [When You Wish by keewick]




• & a feel-good #vvc #rec - this virtuosic Kara/Kat by jarrow is classic shipper vidding at its best: http://tr.im/zfXA Sep 21st [Learn to Crawl by jarrow]




• "Can Delight" is an AMV-style multifandom vid by jescaflowne about cheerleaders kicking ass! #vvc #rec http://tr.im/zmeh Sep 22nd [Can Delight by jescaflowne]




• finally finished the DVDs, so this is my last #vvc #rec - yes, it's a Barack/Michelle Obama fanvid! spoiler alert: HE WON http://tr.im/zsse Sep 22nd [Say Hey (I Love You) by sdwolfpup]




• to make it an even 20 #vvc #rec let me add Star Trek by Llamas (animated) http://tr.im/zyUy + Metaphor by ces + flummery http://tr.im/zyTS Sep 23rd [Star Trek In 60 Seconds (Re-enacted by Llamas) by halcyon_shift] & [Metaphor by cesperanza + flummery]

• Sex detectives: Law & Order: SVU's fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire is the five-year-old "My Girlfriend Olivia" paper, finally ready for prime time in Transformative Works and Cultures.

• My essay "User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence" is part of the fabulous In Focus: Fandom and Feminism [right-click to download PDF] feature in the most recent Cinema Journal (it comes from my Battlestar Galactica chapter).

• You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor is an In Media Res post about fan-written scripts that teases the chapter to come. Check out more lively contributions to L Word week through Friday!

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For an article that's completely unrelated to my dissertation, watch for "Show Me Yours: Cyber-Exhibitionism from Perversion to Politics" in Camera Obscura #73 (spring 2010).

Melanie E.S. Kohnen

Anne Kustritz

Louisa Stein

Sarah Toton