PopCult: September 2004 Archive Page

By teaching kids to become both media producers and media consumers, the Adams Avenue project promotes the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary to succeed at the college level, Seiter says. That's especially important for at-risk students, she adds, because while "they may know a lot about TV or movies or video games, kids don't get points in school for just being media literate. In fact, it tends to get you labeled as someone who is media-saturated and not growing up in a healthy environment." -- Sara-Ellen Amster --Shakespeare vs. Teletubbies: Is There a Role for Pop Culture in the Classroom?  (Harvard Education Letter: Research Online)

Since I work in a program with creative writing colleagues who publish popular fiction, and since the areas in which I have been working recently (weblogs and computer games) yield much to pop-cult inquiry, I've become more interested in examining this subject.

As Amster notes, being fluent in pop culture doesn't necessarily help you succeed in college or the professional world -- unless, of course, you go into the pop-cult industry. But the ability to memorize Star Trek trivia or sing Disney songs only takes you so far in life.

I do sometimes encounter students who are frustrated that, when they do choose to write on a popular culture topic, they are still held to the same rhetorical standards (no unsupported personal opinions or generalizations; cite your sources; focus on specific passages from the book, etc).

I'm not so sure that this article's final point about journalism follows from the premise, but I still appreciated the overview.

When we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that'swhat it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci'svisions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time when the pace of technological change rapidly accelerated and people began dreaming about the future in new ways.

--Transportation Futuristics (Berkeley)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

There is little financial incentive for recycling, and recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials. Yet there is a growing campaign for recycling, particularly promoted by local government - and more people are taking it up. The 'black box' outside your house is becoming a symbol of virtue, to reassure yourself that you are doing your bit. --Rob Lyons --Being seen to be green (Spiked)

I just picked up a few extra bucks reviewing the manuscript for a forthcoming freshman comp reader that included a whole chapter with about 12 readings on nature and ecology. The chapter included no articles that offered any significant challenges to environmentalist assumptions.

I dutifully put my cans and plastic bottles in a recycling bin. I save up all my junk mail and bring it to the university to recycle. I open the drapes to the east-facing windows in the winter, in order to take advantage of passive solar heat.

So it surprised me to read "recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials". I know about the bet between Paul Erlich and Julian Simon, and I've blogged from time to time about environmental skepticism, but I still don't want to think that the (admittedly modest) effort I put into recycling at home makes so little impact.

The Last Starfighter, a world premiere science fiction musical inspired by the 1984 screenplay of the motion picture of the same name, will open the 2004-05 season of Off Broadway's Storm Theatre, Oct. 15-30.The musical marks the return of lyricist-composer Skip Kennon (Herringbone, Time and Again) and draws on the Jonathan Betuel screenplay, about a teen video-game player enlisted to save a universe. Fred Landau penned the libretto. (The movie marked the last film appearance of Robert Preston.) --The Last Starfighter, the Musical, Beams Down Into World Premiere in NYC (Playbill)

"Beams Down"? What a cliche. I thought theater people were supposed to be creative.

I need a new blog category called "retro".

I begged the Dean not to make me teach "Modern American Politics" this semester. I knew that in order to teach it properly I would have to delve into the secrets of the Bush administration. I knew that I would learn THINGS THAT HUMANS (as we say in these post-sexist times) ARE NOT MEANT TO KNOW. I feared that this would drive me insane--into shrill unholy madness. And so it has.

But up until now I have still able to teach my course. I am proud of that. Far gone in shrill unholy madness as a result of the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and disconnection from reality that I am, I could still communicate with my students in English and. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!

Apologies. The fits come and go. They come more quickly now. By proper effort of will I can sometimes. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh. Stop them. There. --MORNING ANNOUNCEMENTS: MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY: SEPTEMBER 16, 2004

An amusingly goofy example of Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh demonic fisking (a rhetorical mode that Lovecraft would have done well). Thanks for the link, Josh.

William Shatner, who played the commander of the starship USS Enterprise in the '60s Star Trek series, arrived in Riverside [Iowa] Tuesday to hold auditions for four small parts in a low-budget, sci-fi movie he wrote with Star Trek co-star, Leonard Nimoy.....Although Kirk's hometown was never mentioned in the TV series, Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator and executive producer, wrote in The Making of Star Trek that Kirk was "born in a small town in the state of Iowa." --Shatner, Nimoy team up on sci-fi project (Toronto Star)

In Star Trek IV, Kirk mentions he is from Iowa. "I only work in space."

"Yoda's philosophy was quite simplistic. 'If you get angry, you're gonna lose.' 'Don't try, do.' He has a basic philosophy that is very charming. Not very profound, although young people consider it profound. I wish they would read more." --Irvin Kershner, mentor of George Lucas.

--Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s (CNN/AP)

Spam: In Your E-Mail and on Your Blog (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Wikipedia has an excellent overview of spam -- electronic junk mail. A strict definition of spam identifies it as unsolicited commercial bunk messages, but viruses that send multiple copies of infected messages, and chain letters bearing bogus virus warnings or charitable messages are responsible for another kind of spamming.

SPAM® is a canned meat product from Hormel; the name derives from "spiced ham," which is how it was initially marketed (starting in 1926). Because the cans did not require refrigeration, it was an economical and convenient way to get meat in your diet. You have probably heard of the 1970 Monty Python SPAM sketch, which features a chorus of operatic Vikings singing the praises of the ubiquitous product (which was plentiful in Allied nations during wartime, when many other products were carefully rationed). I've seen several online references to a website that credits Hormel with creating the first commercial jingle in a 1940 ad that featured the word "SPAM" repeated in a jingle sung to the tune of "My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean" (see "The SPAM Story") but that doesn't ring true -- I imagine that there were radio jingles long before that.

Unsolicited bulk messages have existed ever since there have been messages, but it is so easy today for a small number of spammers to make the internet virtually unusable.

The internet and other forms of electronic communication are not free. Someone has to build it, design software for it, and maintain it. But the cost of sending any individual message is insignificant. A marketer who sends out a million e-mail messages may get responses from a fraction of a percent of recipients, but that may be all the marketer needs in order to make money.

The tragedy of the commons describes the human tendency to take more than one's fair share of resources that appear to be abundant and are unmonitored. Originally "the commons" was a public, grassy area where people could graze their flocks. A small number of people who unethically overused this shared resource could destroy the grass completely.

Seton Hill University's internal spam filters regularly trash any e-mail sent to me from a hotmail address; this has caused some distress for students, and some tension at home (since my mother-in-law uses hotmail).

For a while, I completely gave up on my Yahoo account because of unsolicited bulk e-mail (mostly due to viruses, which flood my in box with numerous copies of unwanted messages) that rapidly filled up my in-boxes, thus preventing me from getting the messages I did want.

Competition from other advertising-supported e-mail services caused Yahoo to improve its interface; now it does a good job of filtering out the bulk messages. Occasionally, when I see a junk message in my regular in box, I feel virtuous when I identify it as junk, since by doing so I might help hide it from potentially millions of others who get the same message. I recently installed the free open-source Office add-on SPAMBayes, which learns from what I have classified as spam in the past, and predicts the spamminess of every incoming message. If it contains certain keywords that rarely if ever appear in messages that I consider to be legitimate, the spam score rises. If it contains keywords that often appear in messages that I consider legitimate, the spam score drops. If it can't predict, the message goes into an "unsure" folder, which is where messages go when they have mostly de!iberately mispe!!s w0rds designed to exploit the human ability to recognize alternate ways of spelling.

Spam in blogs is another matter. Every couple days, I receive one or two junk messages. But I've recently created the 170th blog on blogs.setonhill.edu. These blogs all exist in the same database; they are accessible according to a program that can be rather easily hacked. One day I found over 300 spam messages across the blogs, which rendered the "50 most recent comments" page unusable. I installed MT-Blacklist, a free extension to Movable Type, which cannot actually prevent the creation of spam, but does simplify the removal. MT-Blacklist has a master blacklist, which contains URLs and keywords that other MT users have banned from their blogs. All a spammer has to do is create a new URL that isn't on the list, of course, but without MT-Blacklist I think I would have given up on academic blogging.

At any rate, if you have a MovableType blog, and your MT installation includes MT-Blacklist (as all the Seton Hill blogs do), you can help keep your blog (and everyone else's) less clogged with spam if you go to "Weblog Config" and check the box "E-mail new comments." You will get an e-mail message shortly after anyone posts to your blog; the e-mail will include a link that you can use to delete the comment from your blog and add the sender's URLs to the MT-Blacklist. If the spammer is actively spamming hundreds of Seton Hill blogs at that moment, you might be able to help me block intrusions into other student blogs.

"Turn off the television and read the newspaper. There's more truth in your local paper than you'll find on CNN." -- James McBride, author and musician, concluding his remarks at tonight's lecture here at Seton Hill University. --James McBride Lecture (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

On April 12 1979, Kevin McKenzie of Arpanet's MsgGroup made the following suggestion:


Perhaps we could extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e.: If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:

"Of course you know I agree with all the current administration's policies -)."

The '-)' indicates tongue-in-cheek.


At that time, the initial response was less than enthusiastic and the idea sank into oblivion.

Two years later, Scott Fahlman, a professor from the University of Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) sent this message:


19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman

From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(


From the Fahlman message, the phenomenon expanded at great speed. First, it propagated to other universities and research laboratories, then worldwide. A few months later, tens of variants began to appear in messages, becoming more and more elaborate.


However, not everybody agreed that Scott or McKenzie were the true inventors of this system. Some chronologies assure that PLATO educational system users began using smiley characters probably as early as 1972.


The main problem was that the original messages in which the smiley was invented had been lost... until September 2002. After a significant effort to locate it, the original post made by Fahlman on the CMU CS general Bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 Vax backup tape. To our knowledge, the McKenzie message has never been retrieved. --FIRST SMILEYS (APRIL 1979)  (old-computers.com)

The full archives of the MSGGROUP discussion used to be available at www.tcm.org, but that link is now defunct. Much of the site (I don't know how much) is still archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20020209153802/www.tcm.org/msggroup/.

At any rate, I pulled McKenzie's original post and the first response, and did a preliminary search for the text string "-)" that came up negative. I used this subject for a class years ago.


>http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/clippings/smiley/emoticon.txt

McKenzie says "This idea is not mine, but stolen from a Reader's Digest article I read long ago on a completly different subject." While McKenzie himself seems to have vanished into the ether, I did at one point head to the library where I looked at microfilm copies of several years of Reader's Digest articles. I found one interesting article about the messages a family leaves on a refrigerator, but I couldn't imagine how McKenzie could get "-)" from that.

In his book Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov describes, with some amusement, journalist Alden Whitman sending him questions in April 1969. According to Nabokov, of the dozen or so questions, only three of N's answers made it into the New York Times article. He suspects that the unpublished answers will appear as a future "Special to the New York Times." (Here's a link to what seems to be a transcript of the article.)

When asked, "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?", Nabokov writes,

I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of a concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. (133-4)

I am fairly sure that Reader's Digest exerpted Nabokov's book... if I weren't up to my neck in unrelated work, I'd try to dig up that reference.

(Other sources have noted Nabokov's "supine round bracket," but I don't think I have seen anyone make the connection between McKenzie and Nabokov. So I really should turn up the citation.)

McKenzie's contribution is often overlooked now because, well, it was overlooked when he originally made it... but since his suggestion was for "tongue in cheek," not a "smiley," it's probably inaccurate to use MacKenzie's post to indicate "the first smiley". I think "-)" for "tongue in cheek" probably failed because it's a literal depiction of a metaphor. The symbol represents a metaphor, which represents an ironic, detached mode of speaking. The ":-)" figure is an icon that represents something far more immediate and informative. As much as I hate to quote the lyrics to "It's a Small World After All," it's probably true that 'A smile means friendship to everyone," while I wouldn't expect speakers of other languages to understand what "tongue in cheek" is supposed to mean.

On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a similar decision in Indianapolis, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware." Posner adds, "To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked  (PBS: The Video Game Revolution)

Part of PBSs "The Video Game Revolution," a companion website to a show that I probably won't be able to see anytime soon. Via GTA, where I just noticed Nick Montfort's excellent "Academic vs. Developer, They Will Fight Eternally."

A computer game written by Douglas Adams is being revived to coincide with a new BBC Radio 4 series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

The text adventure will appear on the station's website and was described by the late Adams as "the first game to move beyond being 'user friendly'".

"It's actually 'user insulting' and because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,'" he said.

--Radio 4 revives Hitchhiker's game (BBC)

The text game was available on Adams's own website for some time. While there was no link to download it, if you played it on the site, a playable copy of it appears in your web cache (provided you have a separate player for the game).

The story indicates the new version will be illustrated.

"People fall for it all the time," said Greg Paradee, a Chatting AIM Bot, or CAB, fan. "It acts so much like a real human, sometimes it's hard not to fall for it. The bot ... keeps conversation going with normal, everyday questions, so people answer those thinking it's a real person."

--Beware of Bots Bearing Messages (Wired)

In this age of computer virus paranoia, I wouldn't have used a "beware" headline for this story.

Note also that the author casually links to the Wikipedia entry on Infocom. (See "Librarian: Don't Use Wikipedia as Source")

For math and science geeks it was a badge of honor, nestled neatly into a plastic pocket protector along with a handful of stubby pencils.

And then, one dark day in 1972, with the advent of the pocket calculator, the slide rule went the way of the abacus. Why fiddle around with the arcane log scales and indexes required to use a slide rule when an inexpensive calculator required nothing more of its owner than the ability to push a few buttons? --Michelle Delio
--Slide Rule Still Rules  (Wired)

The exhibit features "celebrity slide rules," such as one donated by astronaut Neil Armstrong.

In the mid-70s, I had a metric-to-English conversion slide ruler that I loved. I wonder if I still have it... I remember after watching the first Star Wars movie, I used it as a light sabre (extending the middle portion while making a dramatic "schloommmvvvvvvv" noise)... until I nicked it in battle with one of my siblings, and it wouldn't slide so easily anymore.

Bliss, Sugar, Cosmo girl, Elle girl, the list goes on ... The power of such marketing is highlighted today by a survey which shows that most seven- to 10-year-olds are using makeup.

The survey showed that by the age of 14, around nine out of 10 girls apply some type of eyeliner, mascara or lipstick. The number of those in the 11-14 age group who report using lipstick or lip gloss on a daily basis has more than doubled intwo years.

Mintel, one of the UK's leading consumer research organisations, which carried out the survey, draws the controversial conclusion from its results that cosmetic companies could go much further in their drive to entice young girls to buy their products. Firms should place vending machines for their products in schools and cinemas to target teenage consumers, Mintel says.

--Makeup and marketing - welcome to the world of 10-year-old girls  (Guardian)

What hath Barbie wrought?

Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx. --Joel Spolsky --It's Not Just Usability (Joel on Software)

Spolsky tweaks software design guru Jakob Nielsen, with the claim that "an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit." True. Bad usability will may scare away people who haven't made a decision yet, but if you're committed, then you keep working regardless of the interface headaches.

I remind myself of this every time I click the "Start" button in order to shut down my Windows computer.

It's a mistake to assume that college students who hold jobs are working to pay tuition -- or, for that matter, any college-related expenses.

One full-time student at Wright State complained of working 50 hours a week, but then admitted using much of the money to pay for flying lessons. Others acknowledged spending a substantial chunk of their money on electronic gadgets, or drinks at the bars along nearby Colonel Glenn Highway.

But the share of students, nationally, who report needing to work to pay college expenses has spiked in recent years... --Peter Schmidt --Paying the Price for Tuition Increases (Chronicle)

It would be hard to measure which students are taking multiple part-time jobs in order to pay for their portable phones and entertainment, rather than their tuition.

I watched a few episodes of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" this week. I enjoy the concept -- a "deserving family" is whisked away on a vacation while a team of designers leads an army of workers to re-design their home, though I rolled my eyes at the efforts to emphasize tension between members of the design team (gruff and aloof designer A borrows a chisel from gruff and aloof designer B without asking; fur flies).


Even watching "free" television brings with it commercials that create new "wants" that can only be satisfied with new purchases. Ultimately, however, I came away from the show realizing that its premise is that families that suffer "deserve" a fancy home, which will magically lessen that family's suffering. It's a very materialistic concept, and it's the same one that undergirds The Sims.

My six-year-old has been trying to teach our two-year-old the difference between "wants" and "needs." She "needs" love, but she "wants" a cookie. She "needs" a new diaper, but she "wants" this particular toy.

There are two ways you can have all that you "want": you can try to get enough money to pay for all your wants, or you can discipline yourself to "want" less.

Of course, anybody's family life would be a little less stressful if there were a little more money to pay the bills. Truth be told, if we did have a little more money, we would have bought a slightly bigger house, and we'd still be watching our pennies -- and I'd still get in trouble with my wife for occasionally buying a book that I could have gotten via inter-library loan.

What made the early Internet so very threatening to the mainstream media was not just the new opinions being expressed, but the fact that people were spending hours of their lives doing something that didn't involve production or consumption in the traditional market sense. Families with Internet connections were watching an average of nine hours less commercial programming each week. Douglas Rushkiff --The Real Threat of Blogs (Douglas Rushkoff)