Friday, August 2, 2002

Inside the Blog Navel YET Again, or What is Honest Journalism? You would think I'd get enough of these kind of articles, but I'm still weighing them out. Mostly I'm laughing at all the mainstream media's "discovery" of blogging, because I was one of those journalists with the 500-word writing assignment (I gave it to myself, since I choose my own column ideas at work), but I am having trouble with superficial writing. Mostly that is because I wrote a 300-page hypertextual dissertation on Internet cultures, so writing SHORT is still a bit problematic for me. But also because my research method was immersive ethnography--the assumption that you CAN'T KNOW anything from the outside looking in. After that, I could never be the same kind of journalist again. Too much of journalism is the pitch, the commodification of a story. Just like Po Bronson served up the Internet Entrepreneur as Cult Hero. Fuck that shit, man. I couldn't write that then, and back then, that was the mythos that SOLD, you know? If you didn't pitch some variation of that, you didn't have anything to sell. So now the pitch is "Blog As Salvation of the Internet After Those Philistine Dot.Com Assholes Blew Town With Their Tails Between Their Legs." A far more attractive mythos, to be sure, but probably just as false as was Internet Entrepreneur as Cult Hero." What is Honest Journalism? LOL. That is the bug up my ass now, isn't it? I would like to thing blogs are 1994 Web headiness all over again, but mostly I just suspect that honest journalism incorporates both insider and outsider views and resists the pitch, resists commodification of stories in order to sell them. Which means, of course, that Honest Journalism, at least in our day and age, cannot exist. Which only leaves me to side with the bad smell I leave behind, yours truly, Miasma "What We're Doing When We Blog" [Daypop Top 40] [...] The articles' authors are rarely webloggers themselves, which places them in the unenviable position of describing and defining weblogs based on observation, not experience. Given the vast number of blogs, it can be very difficult to understand the breadth and scope of blogging when an editor wants 750 words in 48 hours. I've noticed this has resulted in a variety of ideas about and definitions of the weblogs -- from statements that blogs are personal journals filled with the (often dull or trivial) minutiae of daily life to a belief that blogs are right-wing responses to the liberal media establishment. Witness the recent article, Online Uprising by Catherine Seipp in the American Journalism Review: "In general, 'blog' used to mean a personal online diary, typically concerned with boyfriend problems or techie news. But after September 11, a slew of new or refocused media junkie/political sites reshaped the entire Internet media landscape. Blog now refers to a Web journal that comments on the news -- often by criticizing the media and usually in rudely clever tones -- with links to stories that back up the commentary with evidence." 1:27:16 AM    Comment [] Internalmemos.com: Fuckedcompany dude finds something else to do Well, companies are still fucked, but now they are fucked in different ways. Sometimes I think the fuckedcompany attitude contributed to the corporate loss of faith now. It was a trickle from the dike and now huge gaping holes are gushing, you know? What I like about internal memos that I didn't like so much about fuckedcompany.com is that it feels like Freedom of Information Act sort of halfassed applied to corporations. Corporate democracy, yee haa! Fuckedcompany was mostly a petty sniping rumor mill. Georgie Bush is as scared of whistleblowers as anyone else, but ol' Pud here, he's giving them a little bit of cover of darkness, altho still not much room to operate. Cyborg ghosts in the corporate machine are still very much terrorized into submission, and if an internal memo has a limited circulation, just like Rumsfeld and his leak patrol, corporations could go all anti-cluetrain and paranoid and lock everything down tight. Can you imagine having to sign a non-disclosure agreement for EVERY memo you get? Miasma <---still loves http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org for putting up PDFs of all those Monsanto-Polluting-The-Fuck-Out-Of-Anniston, AL Memos "INTERNALMEMOS.COM - Internet's largest collection of corporate memos and internal communication" [Daypop Top 40] 12:37:57 AM    Comment [] PoMo Nation on a Moulin Rouge CanCanCan Kind of Day What it is. Pastiche. Mirrors of mirrors. Images of images. No there there. Everything always already in drag. Welcome to the condition of postmodernity, eh? No, I'm not going to deconstruct a take-out menu, thankyouverymuchness. This is that kind of day. I watched the girls in California get rescued. What I really watch is the brother of one of the girls take a turn at the press conference while his buddies say "Go man, 15 minutes of fame," while no one had boarded a helicopter, and no one knew what kind of shape the girls were in. Mirrors of mirrors. Reflection of reflections of reflection. That AMAZING sitcom on tonight, "The ReRun Show." OK, so the show itself was not that amazing, but it was ALL ABOUT BOOTLEG CULTURE. It was like fan fiction in a feedback loop crossed back on to TV. Subversive, totally subversive, yet also married to the thing it reflects, like a teenager who, in rebellion is still being controlled by the authority he or she is rebelling against, if only to do the opposite. Bootleg culture. Powerful computers and easy-to-use editing software are challenging our conceptions of authorship and creativity. As usual, the entertainment industry doesn't like this one bit. [Salon.com] [...] Typically consisting of a vocal track from one song digitally superimposed on the instrumental track of another, bootlegs (or "mash-ups," as they are also called) are being traded over the Internet, and they're proving to be a big hit on dance floors across the U.K. and Europe. In just the past couple of years, hundreds if not thousands of these homebrewed mixes have been created, with music fans going wild over such odd pairings as Soulwax's bootleg of Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" mixed with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Freelance Hellraiser's mix of Christina Aguilera singing over the Strokes, and Kurtis Rush's pairing of Missy Elliott rapping over George Michael's "Faith." Bootlegs inject an element of playfulness into a pop music scene that can be distressingly sterile. 12:08:45 AM    Comment []

© Copyright 2003 Miasma. Last update: 25/3/03; 11:26:40 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.