voxygen.net » Politics

Self-storage

~LS~ — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:34:23 +0000

Usually when I pass the self-storage places in the strip malls as I drive to work, I ignore them. They are part of the mundane aspects of my daily life that blend in with the roadside trivia like payday loan shops, Payless shoes, the Mall, and Office Depot, McDonalds, the homeless panhandler, the gas station, and people waiting for the bus. None of these things stand out until I need them or they disrupt me. Selective perception, and all.

Lately I’ve observed the large amount of self-storage places all around me. I started tracking them during my trip to New York City, where they seemed out of place because the city has no strip malls. Given that space is a premium in the city, they make more sense there than in suburbia.

With occupy Wall Street dominating the discursive and political field, the need for somewhere to store our [...]

A bare etching and the intimacy of touch

~LS~ — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:58:02 +0000

I bought several Jack Bilander etchings lately. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. I don’t know why I became obsessed with Jack Bilander, but when I found his suite of pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them I remembered vividly. So indelible and powerful. Clearly it’s a need formed because of where I am in my life at this precise moment. But precise moments are the entire point.

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Outside the interface

~LS~ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:10:23 +0000

Today I opened something somewhere and got another nag message from Google about its new privacy policy. The nag message invited me to “dismiss” it, a language choice that reflects a mildly amusing and disturbing political and interpersonal frame that we’ve developed with internet computing. Perhaps my amusement about being nagged over privacy derives from my almost-divorced status, but that is neither here nor there.

I’m not going to waste time knifing through the current policy change. The short version: it will consolidate the privacy options for multiple Google services into one statement to accept or reject with one click of a button, all for the sake of clarity and simplicity. Bundled privacy, in other words. I’ll get back to Google first, but I want to talk about the issue of interface. This will be a branching, circuitous route, so bear with me.

Sherry Turkle’s [...]

Cut and paste for your troops

~LS~ — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:34:33 +0000

On this Veteran’s Day, stop fake support of your troops.

Today is Veteran’s Day, a day that spawns a number of cut and paste micro-memes on Facebook. After last month’s screed on pinkwashing, I feel compelled to repeat my rant pre-emptively as the first posts start to trickle in.

People see the “Support our Troops Cut and Paste” and they dutifully follow directions without taking a moment to honor the sentiment, and without admitting that they’ve accomplished absolutely nothing meaningful in any way.

I find flag waving “support your veteran” statuses on Facebook amusing. They’re pointless. I might as well cut and paste a status from a status generator app (they do exist) – that’s about how interesting and meaningful those memes are.

Last year when this sort of thing went around, a lot of posts falsely claimed that Obama was cutting Veterans’ benefits, giving more money to welfare, [...]

I like it without pinkwashing

~LS~ — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:53:20 +0000

This week I received many Facebook messages urging me to tell my friends “where I like it” in my Facebook status. I’ve seen my friends post such mysterious statuses as “I like it on the chandelier” and “I like it on my car seat.” This morning I posted, “I like mine without pinkwashing.” Many people didn’t understand my status or why the meme makes me so angry. I have two simple answers:

1. I hate pinkwashing.

2. This is nothing but Facebook slactivism.

Put differently, I do not believe that if I post an “I like it…” status on Facebook, I have done something significant to advance women’s health.

Instead of pinkwashing, send a $5.00 check to the YWCA who will spend it helping poor women, primarily women of color, get free mammograms.

What is pinkwashing?

pinkwashing is the commodification breast cancer. I’ll let Wikipedia explain (quoting the [...]

Another reason to like Hillary

~LS~ — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:27:17 +0000

Nonverbal communication expresses power and dominance. In public, professional settings, who gets to touch whom and the nature of that touch plays out and defines gender relations. Because it’s typically subtle, people are often unaware of this dynamic. When it’s more obvious, those who are in the “one down” position see it clearly and those in the position of power remain oblivious as part of their sense of entitlement. The stereotypical male boss/female secretary and male customer/female waitress interactions illustrate this over and over again. However, as gender roles change, the accompanying nonverbal behaviors change with them. Hillary is the perfect example.

This clip from Mad Men illustrates my point (see :40 – :50). Mad Men is a wonderful show to use for examples like this because it does such a good job of capturing the cultural milieu of the 50s and 60s [...]

Cultural Identity Activity

~LS~ — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:56:32 +0000

Since teaching at BRCC I have struggled with introducing issues of racism and other identity categories into the classroom. Given the diversity of the campus population, I’m not sure why. As I posted previously, the responses to racial topics are completely unpredictable.

Last semester, for instance, my students claimed that black people really do like fried chicken. Although part of that discussion was intentional provocation on some of the students’ part, I think many genuinely bought into the stereotype.

Perhaps my difficulties derive from the increasing hostility in conservative rhetoric toward people of color. The “love it or leave it,” English-only mentality is surprisingly prevalent. Although many, many white students don’t fall into this category, there are enough of them to make conversations tense and uncomfortable.

If the students of color (predominantly black, though we’re seeing a rise in other minorities) aren’t comfortable enough to [...]

I heart Al Franken

~LS~ — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:08:58 +0000

I’m entirely jealous of the people of Minnesota on a daily basis. I have friended/liked Al Franken’s Facebook page and so I get posts about his work on several times a day. Jealous, jealous, jealous. He does so much good, progressive work, and he’s damned hard-nosed about it.

I get regular emails from Vitter, too, because I signed up for his newsletter for some stupid reason. They are nothing but grandstanding. I hit reply and respond with that statement on a regular basis. Vitter’s last email announcement praised his efforts to pressure “the administration” (by which I assume he means Obama) to send in the Fish and Wildlife folks and to increase the number of people assigned to the Louisiana gulf coast. Of course, in the mean time, Jindal is dicking around on calling in the National Guard.

Anyway, back to Franken. I have always liked Franken. I remember rolling [...]

MLIS @ LSU

~LS~ — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:25:59 +0000

I should have linked to this before, but I didn’t think of it. The LSU library and information science program is under threat of closure due to budget cuts. I wrote a letter in to the Advocate in support of the program. It actually got published.

A day of lessons in stereotypes

~LS~ — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:40:21 +0000

Today has been an interesting lesson in stereotypes.

Lesson one:

I had a guest speaker from Deaf Services in BR come to my Interpersonal Communication class. He was dynamic and interesting and the students loved him. Before his visit, I decided to learn a little more about Deaf culture the capital D is important to people in the Deaf community). I’ve been fascinated about it ever since a friend of mine demonstrated the way that sign language is not a literal interpretation but a more poetic one. She did this by signing a song. I’ve learned a long time ago that it’s your responsibility to educate yourself about others who are culturally different rather than to expect them to translate for you. I think the most memorable statement came from Audre Lorde who said that white women expect women of color to “stretch across the gap of ignorance.” So in [...]