for keeps

annicka: via modernandmaterialthings:

amelias — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:53:55 -0400

at it again

amelias — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:29:52 -0400

Despite declaring my opposition to the cult of female technosocial self-improvement, I have been plugging away at some of what they call e-Learning!

For one, I have been doing Code Academy tutorials, which I unashamedly love. I could sit at my dining room table for hours doing Code Academy, (sometimes with a glass of chardonnay). So perky, so encouraging!

But I’m also doing another Coursera course, and it leaves me so deflated. Who on earth can learn from a condescending, unedited video lecture? Moreover, if you’re gonna teach a Coursera course, which to my understanding is an unpaid gig, why be a dick?

I should hope that these snide, mumbling Coursera instructors are at barbecues this summer, and are greeted by friends and acquaintances who say “Gee, Steve! I tried to take your free online course but it was totally impenetrable! Half the time I couldn’t tell what you were saying, beyond that your tone implied that I was stupid!”

Maybe one disruptive effect of MOOCs will be how they reveal the poor state of tech pedagogy.

From the Journal of Body Projects

amelias — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:47:41 -0400

I’ve spent too much time doing grapevines back and forth behind a Reebok step to really be able to think objectively about modern gym culture, but I have come up with a few hypotheses: Maybe we’re craving an outlet for a competitive drive that would be inappropriate in other social situations. Or, perhaps we are trying to create a sense of meaning and satisfaction in our likely perfectly-fine-but-maybe-a-little-bit-boring lives.

I love a nutty spinning class article.

It’s a cyclic thing: get overwhelmed by daily life, the working on this, getting to that,...

amelias — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:14:24 -0400

It’s a cyclic thing: get overwhelmed by daily life, the working on this, getting to that, taking care of this, going here, reminding myself i should be doing that. Then something flies up into internet conscious: buckle down ladies! work harder! feminist housewives! don’t be rude in calling out deplorable human behavior!

For the past few months, I’ve been casually studying the rhetoric of technosocial self-betterment for ladies: Learn to code! Be a better worker! Take MOOC courses! Maybe I’m hopeless, but I find the promise of this so specious. All of this seems to be on the order of self-improvement, what Laura Kipinis calls “the girlfriend industry”. Self sufficiency is a nice thought but a terrible means for social change.

Can we declare a ban on proscriptives, or at least an agreement that they are all basically camp on the order of Cosmo articles? So much mass-anxiety is triggered by cheap attempts to point out or patch systematic societal failures.

What are the alternatives to this? I have visions of 1990s anti-oppression workshops.

"On the way to a longer reflection — one day, I don’t know exactly when — on my ambivalent feelings..."

amelias — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:56:10 -0500

“On the way to a longer reflection — one day, I don’t know exactly when — on my ambivalent feelings about the circulation of that quote that regards how very, very special it is to be in graduate school (which incommensurati responded to so wonderfully), I’m just going to put this right here: Thinking about mentoring can tell us something about the cluster of promises, the attachments and fantasies, and generally, the double-bind that defines the place of minority discourse in the academy. Doing so also helps us to remember that the university was never a utopian institution, that the current potent rhetoric of its “defense” might unintentionally but deeply be linked to a fantasy of it as harboring its potentiality as such, a fantasy that can render it more difficult to negotiate contemporary conditions, to navigate the academic world and understand the constructs and conditions that privilege certain fantasies and attachments and refuse others. Acknowledgement of the ways that minority discourse sometimes refers to field-practices driven by an attachment to institutionalization per se - to what Roderick Ferguson has referred to as the “will to institutionality”[1] - rather than something like broad-based socio-political transformation toward greater equality and justice, clarifies the importance of sussing out the conditions (structural, affective, epistemological, economic, political, aesthetic) within which the university itself takes priority as object of discourse. Why this attachment? How, in this context, do we relate to aspirations to academia? How do we relate to or apprehend our own aspirations of and to academia? Kandice Chuh, “on (not) mentoring” Social Text Website: Periscope section (published Jan. 13, 2013).”

- Ugly feelings indeed, via BEST SPARKLER

“Academic culture is a huge and diverse ecosystem. People who come along with grand plans...

amelias — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:52:25 -0500

“Academic culture is a huge and diverse ecosystem. People who come along with grand plans about how everything is going to be transformed so often don’t have even a very shallow understanding of how that ecosystem works: You have all these Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are going to blow everything up and transform it; what you’re really talking about doing is killing all the green plants in the ecosystem and then expecting the deer to have something to eat; no; the deer are going to die. There’s this basic economic argument for the cheapness of online education that is always about requiring less labor; paying people less, replacing people with technology. And at the end of the day, what you’re going to have is a very stagnant intellectual culture.

“Who writes the textbooks? Who writes the lectures? You tape the [MOOC] lecture once, but then what happens next year? You just keep recycling the same materials over and over again? It’s like a really bad ecological management system; you think you can remove something that is really crucial to the ecosystem, and nothing else will change?”

Maria Bustillos’ piece for the Awl today, Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College, is so good.

At some point I am going to write more in-depth about how I took a Coursera Python class this fall, and how poorly it went for me. It made me completely certain that liberal education is a ever-more precious commodity.

As someone who comes from a really not-fancy background and as the sort of person who finds big lecture classes incredibly hard to deal with (really, I can show you my freshman transcripts), the structure of MOOCs terrifies me. What’s worse than a bad community college? A bad community college that’s run like an internet platform.

"Losse, like other women who have navigated the archaically sexist halls of new technology..."

amelias — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:04:04 -0500

“Losse, like other women who have navigated the archaically sexist halls of new technology businesses, was still required to present a pleasing front, to “sell herself” constantly while never explicitly acknowledging what was being sold and who was buying. Facebook and companies like them deny this game, claiming that anyone with the skill to ascend the ranks can do so: Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, they like to say. Women in the Valley are somehow meant to believe this, to pretend that women’s value in this industry isn’t limited to their emotional labor, even as this industry produces companies that could not succeed without that labor.”

- Girl Geeks and Boy Kings, via karaj

I weaned Letty over New Year’s, and it was a relief. I was lucky to have had a relatively easy...

amelias — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:57:18 -0500

I weaned Letty over New Year’s, and it was a relief. I was lucky to have had a relatively easy time with nursing, but it is an immense relief to quit. While I was hardly a teetotaler (or more accurately, a coffee and prescripton-forgoer) it is nice to not think of your body as a contaminated food source. I often thought of the descriptions of grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic free, free-roaming cows on the sides of milk cartons, and then thought of myself as a cow holding an orange pill bottle and a can of beer.

"Of course, you don’t know me from adam. I could be a terrible parent; I could be lying myself. I can..."

amelias — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:34:11 -0500

“

Of course, you don’t know me from adam. I could be a terrible parent; I could be lying myself. I can only ask you to believe me when I tell you that those things aren’t true. I have been married for over twenty years, my husband and I love each other, my son is bright and happy (now, on medication), we live a very Ozzie and Harriet-looking life in many ways.

Nonetheless, it would be very very easy for someone to comb through my blog and find “evidence” that these things aren’t true. When I was writing it, people sometimes did so, and wrote blog posts like yours. I can only tell you that most of what they concluded was wrong, and highly shaped by confirmation bias to fit prejudices that they already had: that educated women with children were bad mothers, that people with depression are self-involved, that my husband and I would be divorced within a year, that I was surely warping my son and should have him taken away from me. Again, none of those things were true; we are a very happy family. We have been through some hard times, and I have written about them–often with jocular (or not so jocular) exasperation, including statements like the ones you found in Liza’s blog.

It is very, very easy to pass judgment on what people write about their lives. It is very, very easy to pass judgment on parents, and especially mothers, in this culture. When one is a mother, that kind of judgment is ever-present. It makes parenting in public, let alone writing about it, difficult at times–especially when one is under stress, or when something in one’s life doesn’t fit the Ozzie and Harriet mold. Everyone has an opinion about mothering; everyone has an opinion about mental illness.

”

- Buffalo Mama via Blue Milk

"Some idiot went on a crusade last week to get as many naked snaps as possible from random users,..."

amelias — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:02:54 -0500

“

Some idiot went on a crusade last week to get as many naked snaps as possible from random users, took screenshots of them all and put them on a (now shut down) Tumblr, “Snapchat Sluts,” leading to another round of articles about how the app is just for sexting.

The narrative goes something like this: self-destructing photos have to be nude, otherwise why would they be self-destructing? Then Snapchat isn’t even a good sexting app — recent articles have pointed to the screenshot ability and the public top Snapchat friends lists as ways to get caught with your pants down or ways for your spouse to discover you cheating.

”

- “Snapchat isn’t even a good sexting app!” This tech crunch post is kind of hilarious by how indignant it is about the alleged sexting (Your wife will catch you!) and how “whatever” it is about the Snapchat Sluts tumblr.

“I am totally going to this neighborhood party today.”- Nathaniel

amelias — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:55:37 -0500

“I am totally going to this neighborhood party today.”- Nathaniel

When I try to explain the academic labor model…

amelias — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:37:01 -0500

When I try to explain the academic labor model…

"Twitter is bragging because it didn’t go down on Election Day. The info-bloat peaked at..."

amelias — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:34:22 -0500

“

Twitter is bragging because it didn’t go down on Election Day. The info-bloat peaked at 327,452 tweets-per-minute last night, and not a single Fail Whale appeared! High fives all around! Way to… work like you’re supposed to.

It’s just another symptom of the ever-growing beta culture plague. And it sucks.

Because, reading Twitter’s own statements and the commentary by some of the press, it appears that you all should be grateful that Twitter didn’t collapse in on itself. After years of crapping out constantly, Twitter didn’t crap out yesterday. Not crapping out—even while you weren’t supposed to crap out in the first place—is what counts as a raging success nowadays.

Yes, maybe that’s the benchmark of excellence now. Here, Twitter. Take a medal for not sucking.

After all, the tech world is now pure beta culture. It permeates everything—software, hardware and internet services. The planet is bursting with half-baked products and features full of bugs and pathetic excuses.

”

- Jesus Diaz : “Why Twitter’s Election Night Success Is Not a Success”

Yeah. Beta isn’t infrastructure.

"I saw Gillard’s speech live on television and registered that it was important. But I looked..."

amelias — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:32:04 -0400

“

I saw Gillard’s speech live on television and registered that it was important. But I looked again on YouTube this week to see how it might appear to the casual viewer, local or international, days, weeks, even years from now. What I think I missed the first time is how the reaction of the Opposition Leader adds to the tension and, in turn, validates what Gillard is saying. Every man would recognise the flicker of panic in Abbott’s eyes, when he switches from blokey guffaw to “hang on, she might have a point”. This is the son being told off by the mother, the partner being given the ultimatum.

The moment can never be re-created, but the clip doesn’t suffer from replay because of the uniqueness of the moment. This is about both of them. The personal context matters because Abbott and Gillard were old-school political buddies before they faced off at the 2010 federal election. Scroll down the page on YouTube and there is a clip titled “Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard flirting”, which was uploaded in 2007. It is a cut and paste of an appearance on the Nine Network’s Today show and is jarring with the hindsight of their mutual loathing as leaders. (It has had more views than Rudd’s apology speech.)

What Gillard’s speech clarified is that Abbott doesn’t understand his opponent, even if he once got on well with her. He mistook her silence before last week as weakness. She didn’t react to the taunts because she didn’t want to seem shrill. He kept pressing, expecting that she would eventually crack. But she was biding her time, waiting for the opportunity when he over-reached.

There was another look that crossed his face - exhaustion. He seemed to shrink as she approached her finale. Then, with a gesture that could never be scripted, she mocked him as he glanced at his watch. Abbott threw his hands up, the child protesting to the mother that he wasn’t guilty of that too. The theatre was the story; an irony given the self-serving critique that the press gallery has faced on social media.

”

- George Melaogenes from The Australian on Julia Gillard’s Feminist Troll Moment

"yet what happens to the blogs and tumblrs, these infinite, immaterial notebooks? one can erase them..."

amelias — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:42:47 -0400

“yet what happens to the blogs and tumblrs, these infinite, immaterial notebooks? one can erase them but even then they may persist, traces of them still saved somewhere on the internet. who is archiving these scraps of our existence? those who decide what is important or not to archive. who to preserve, what to throw away. if you are important enough, john tells me, any note or scribble relating to your work is valuable…this is a memory campaign. who is canonized, who is remembered.”

- kate zambreno, heroines (via karaj)

The “Male Etiquette” thread on Quora is BLOWING MY...

amelias — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:10:08 -0400

The “Male Etiquette” thread on Quora is BLOWING MY MIND. It’s pretty much the tumblr misandry tag.

"I stopped taking my medication when I got pregnant with Milo. After I gave birth, I nursed him for a..."

amelias — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:03:37 -0400

“

I stopped taking my medication when I got pregnant with Milo. After I gave birth, I nursed him for a year. I should have gone back on it then, but the project of making an appointment and making it into the city with the baby was overwhelming, and I was always going to do it “tomorrow.” And then my doctor retired, and I would have needed to find a new doctor and show them my medical transcripts, etc, and it became even more insurmountable. And then I got pregnant again. And now I’m nursing again, so.

I want to go back to school for my teaching certification. I know that in order for this to happen, I am going to have to go back on medication. And I know that many people scoff at this idea that ADD is a real thing. “You just need to stop daydreaming. You’re just being lazy,” they say. I say the same thing to myself. The reality of it though, to me, is that it’s much more than just daydreaming or being lazy. I feel like I’m at the end of a very long tunnel, trying to peer out the small opening in the other end where I can see small glimpses of people going about their daily lives, just taking care of business like it ain’t no thang. And, god, I want to be like that.
Will someone do me a favor in about 6 months and ask me if I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for myself so I can get back to my life?

”

- The Kids Have Arrived

True to life.

"I can’t help but see an element of self-preservation amid our data collection. Preservation embedded..."

amelias — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:59:10 -0400

“

I can’t help but see an element of self-preservation amid our data collection. Preservation embedded deep within our check-ins, our food photos, our tracked steps and mapped run routes. We are collecting like never before.

We used to collect privately. The physical possessions one owns when one dies constitutes, perhaps, an idealization of the self. Those possessions, however, have always been unnetworked. And they were limited by physics; you could only collect so much. Closets filled, things decayed, people moved, treasures were thrown away.

Now the collection is boundless. The space near infinite. Every single item collected is plugged into the network. And so that self—that idealization—suddenly flows fast and far. It touches other selfs, other idealizations. It can be reconstituted by data mappers.

”

- Paris and the Data Mind

So, in lieu of a self-challenge that involves anything healthy or enriching, I’ve made it my...

amelias — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:53:17 -0400

So, in lieu of a self-challenge that involves anything healthy or enriching, I’ve made it my goal to listen to the Misfits every day during the month of October. This has been a wonderful plan. I have fantasies of being a Real Hausfrau of whatever and staging an elaborate children’s halloween party featuring a Misfits cover band, comprised of children, doing g-rated versions of all the classics for the delight of my imaginary fellow hausfraus and their spoiled children. Obviously my first choice would be for the Danzig impersonator to be a 6 year old girl.

But by far my favorite part of this ritual is listening to “TV Casualty”, and the point where, when listing off all of the things the scary television has done to him, Danzig drones about the “Christmas cards to which I’ve never replied!” How hilariously banal. That’s the point, right?

Over on ye olde HASTAC blog, I wrote about privilege-checking as a performance of anti-social...

amelias — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:07:19 -0400

Over on ye olde HASTAC blog, I wrote about privilege-checking as a performance of anti-social feminism:

If you have ever gone down that internet k-hole that is wedding blogs (DONE IT! NO SHAME IN MY GAME!), or Mommy blogs (DITTO!), you probably know about Offbeat Bride, a web site where you can read about people who have gamer/hobbit/rockabilly weddings or whatever, and Offbeat Mama, for Y B Normal folk who chose to reproduce. Ariel Stallings, the owner/editor of these web sites writes, in a blog post, that in all this Offbeat stuff, the privilege checking is driving her nuts:

I’ve started recognizing this kind of behavior for what it is: privilege-checking as a form of internet sport. It’s a kind of trolling, with all the politics I agree with, but motivations and execution that turns my stomach. It’s well-intended (SO well-intended), but when the motivations seem to be less about opening dialogue about the issues, and more about performance, righteousness, and intolerance for those who don’t agree with you… well, I’m not on-board.

I think that maybe we might reconsider this. There are some aspects of privilege checking that are hilarious! And cathartic, and provocative. Perhaps it is not the easiest job to earnestly manage an internet community, but could we distance ourselves a bit? Comedian Julie Klausner routinely has professional bloggers on her podcast for the purposes of discussing internet fracas for the sake of humor. (e.g. Salon editor Jessica Grose came on to “discuss a few nutty posts from lady blogs”.) It’s usually great.

As I said yesterday, I think there is a clear but largely unspoken relationship between trolling and infrastructural/moderation work. The right to troll, it may be argued, is won by investment and entrenchment in community. I’d like to consider priviliege checking not as some sort of failed attempt at activism, but rather as what Halberstam calls “anti-social feminism”. While “liberal bullying”, as Stallings calls it, can be seen as one-sided grandstanding, could we also see it as it as performance for iterative purposes? (Not to mention a spur to page views and registered users and other numbers used to make a rationale for capital and profit?)

Despite the lack of constraints we usually assign to internet communities, we still hold rather parochial views about what people should do in them. Conversing nicely is to narrow of a norm. Let’s leave some room for shouting, spectacle, and absurdity. There’s a lot to learn from it!

for keeps

annicka: via modernandmaterialthings:

at it again

From the Journal of Body Projects

It’s a cyclic thing: get overwhelmed by daily life, the working on this, getting to that,...

"On the way to a longer reflection — one day, I don’t know exactly when — on my ambivalent feelings..."

“Academic culture is a huge and diverse ecosystem. People who come along with grand plans...

"Losse, like other women who have navigated the archaically sexist halls of new technology..."

I weaned Letty over New Year’s, and it was a relief. I was lucky to have had a relatively easy...

"Of course, you don’t know me from adam. I could be a terrible parent; I could be lying myself. I can..."

"Some idiot went on a crusade last week to get as many naked snaps as possible from random users,..."

“I am totally going to this neighborhood party today.”- Nathaniel

When I try to explain the academic labor model…

"Twitter is bragging because it didn’t go down on Election Day. The info-bloat peaked at..."

Jesus Diaz: “Why Twitter’s Election Night Success Is Not a Success”

"I saw Gillard’s speech live on television and registered that it was important. But I looked..."

"yet what happens to the blogs and tumblrs, these infinite, immaterial notebooks? one can erase them..."

The “Male Etiquette” thread on Quora is BLOWING MY...

"I stopped taking my medication when I got pregnant with Milo. After I gave birth, I nursed him for a..."

"I can’t help but see an element of self-preservation amid our data collection. Preservation embedded..."

Paris and the Data Mind

So, in lieu of a self-challenge that involves anything healthy or enriching, I’ve made it my...

Over on ye olde HASTAC blog, I wrote about privilege-checking as a performance of anti-social...

Jesus Diaz : “Why Twitter’s Election Night Success Is Not a Success”