The latest viral police profiling confrontation is a black man, Brandon McKean, getting stopped by a Michigan cop for walking with his hands in his pockets in freezing cold weather. McKean’s video adds another example to the multitude of stories that are coming to white people’s attention about how police profile, harass, and brutalize people of color. What’s different in this case is that the police department defended itself with a counter-video on Facebook, demonstrating that McKean edited his version to make himself appear in a good light.The introduction of new media technology, which started changing the game with videos and Rodney King in 1992,Read More →

An aliens and monsters meme floated around Facebook this morning with this annoying cast of images. The meme depicts aliens and monsters in pop culture transforming from ugly and monstrous to attractive and desirous. It asks WTF happened? Here’s my first FB post: “People would rather embrace aliens from outer space than illegal aliens.” My later post: “It’s actually an old pattern from way back when. People who study pop culture say that we had an invasion of alien bug movies when we were afraid the aliens (in this case, Japanese during WW II and Koreans afterward). We’ve been invaded by illegal aliens time andRead More →

Let me introduce you to this cat. Her name is Monkey, which is short for Alien Monkey Cat. Some people call her AMC for short, but only on Facebook. She is visiting from another planet and she is residing with me for a time while she spies on us. I am using this as an opportunity to spread the word widely, and perhaps save the planet from takeover by her species. Be forewarned. They have dripping, venomous spikes in their tails. Now, just to be clear, the purpose of today’s post is to discuss the equinox broom phenomenon. A meme has been going around onRead More →

Today I opened something somewhere online 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 for the user to accept or reject with one click ofRead More →

On this Veteran’s Day, stop fake supporting 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 preemptively 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. Flag-waving “support your veteran” statuses on Facebook are amusing. They’re pointless. We might as well cut and paste a status from a statusRead More →

My first version of VoXYgen was posted in 1996. It was fun building the most rudimentary webpage and exploring what could be done on the internet. Since then, things have changed, and I’m suffering from “information fatigue” sans the extreme levels of anxiety or sleeplessness that it presumably provokes. I have noticed, however, that I can’t keep up with Facebook. I bookmark sites that friends post and then waste time deleting them without reading them because the list is obscenely long. I skip surfing my usual reading spots. RSS readers have made blog surfing incredibly easy. The downside, however, is that with a simple clickRead More →

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 significantRead More →

While playing on Facebook Facecrack tonight, I noticed all the groups, pages, and causes on my page. The accumulated weight of mouse clicks shocked me, not only because of these groups’ sheer purposelessness (i.e., the various Farmville hate groups), but also because joining typically leads to nothing fruitful even when the groups are actually meaningful (i.e., Southern Poverty Law Center). Now, we could rationalize this by saying that Facebook allows us to construct ourselves in a very strange hybrid space of reality and virtual reality. So I want all these groups/pages/causes in my profile. They are little hyperlinks to represent me, and all my connectionsRead More →

New technologies erode the boundary between the personal and the public, as Joshua Meyrowitz observed about television in No Sense of Place twenty five years ago. Since displaying ourselves is de rigeur, thanks especially to Facebook and Twitter, I feel less guilty about doing it on my blog, even though personal disclosure was never my original intent. In class, students appear to enjoy my disclosure. Still, there’s an art to disclosing appropriately in the classroom, one that has taken me years to balance comfortably. As one friend put it, it’s easy “to hold your students hostage” to your personal narratives in class, which is anRead More →