Digital World Extra 3 (October 6): Truly Outrageous!

Remember when television refused to take itself too seriously.   Sitcoms had actual theme songs.  You could sing along to the openings of Family Ties, Different Strokes  and Growning Pains without caring about how ridiculous you looked or sounded.  You didn’t care because all of your friends were doing the same thing.  It was just culture.  

The 1980s was such as shamelessly cheesy decade, wasn’t it?  I loved in its prime and miss it in its absence.   I miss it mostly because that airy optimism, which was so real then, is now virtually non-existent.

The 80s.  Michael Jackson looked human.  Cosby was King.  Anthony Michael Hall epitomized geek chic.  Punky showed me how to wear my jeans.  Molly Ringwald always got her happy ending. 

  Atari and cassette tapes were my XBox 360 and iTunes.  Commodore 64?  My sweetest amore!  Mom or dad drove me to Sam Goody’s for the latest from Whitney or Paula.  The Internet download was not yet part of my reality.  I had to communicate with others to get what I needed.  That need forced my family together for better or worse. 

There was beauty in that simplicity.  There was something so clean about it all.  Darn it, I want it back!  Maybe, I can have it back.  No, it’s gone.  Darn, it!  We laughed and sang along together in dad’s indigo volvo.  Our eyes were wet with give-and-take love and hopeful innocence.

It’s over. 

Time took it! 

Let it go. 

Ah, the 1980s. 

Truly Outrageous! will be the first of many Throwback Sunday Gimmie Back My 1980s entries.  Pine, whine and reminisce with me if you so desire. 

Last Digital World Post (Dec. 4): YouTube and Good Country People

YouTube is pretty chock full of crap.  This blog is proof of that.  Search Blurred Absolute’s archives, and you’ll find such nonsense clips as Andy Samberg dangling a Christmas wrapped gift box over his person or the theme song from the 1980′s pop-cult cartoon favorite Jem.

I mostly use YouTube as a nostalgia inducer.  Whenever I’m sick of looking cheerless saps also known as co-workers in the face, staring down an inky, blinking cursor the tint of faded bone black so much like a Senegalese body thrust against that sharp white background Zora Neale Hurton goes on and on about in How It Feels to be Colored Me or sifting through pesky Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance and Suntrust credit card bills, I flock to YouTube.

The Family Ties theme song, scenes from random Cosby Show episodes or Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk–all these things trigger irrepressibly happy memories of not having any responsibilities and of a world revolving around mom and dad.  I need that.

So, yeah, I use YouTube for a selfish end.  And what?!  You want to fight me?!  Didn’t think so, chief!  (Yeah, right.  The only fight I’ve ever been in was a three-way dispute between me, my umbrella and one helluva windy Monday night.  The umbrella won!)

In all seriousness though, YouTube can be used for so much for more than a platform for the mentally insane:

 

(Is it wrong that I want to hang out with this guy?  I sometimes throw tantrums just like this.  We would get on famously!)

Or, a haven for the spatially challenged:

Uh, hey, that’s me!  No clip necessary.

In his new book, The First Campaign, Garrett Graff mentions that, “The first Democratic National Committee YouTube debate…sought video submission from regular Americans for the candidates…the questions from “real” Americans made an impact that debate moderator Anderson Cooper, even with his abundance of gravitas, could not match.”

For all my cynicism about American politics and all my talk about what this country constantly does wrong, I can honestly say that freedom of speech/advocacy of public discourse is something it does right.  The YouTube debates foster this notion of unfiltered voice.  Granted, voice was gained in the country at the expense of silencing Native American Indians (many of whom reside on really nifty reservation to this day.)  And though freedom of voice for people who like me didn’t come on the first Independence Day (If I had been alive in 1776, I would have been a slave.), I like the fact that in the last 40 years or so, the opportunity to speak freely and lawfully has been extended to everyone.  Now, that freedom extends to online content.  The YouTube debates offer a platform to all–regardless of race, gender, orientation and socioeconomic status.  This is a beautiful thing because I think people like to hear from around-the-way folks.  Illusion or not, it seems like there is something inherently honest about everyday citizenry.  Where the YouTube debates are concerned, folks might come wearing blue jeans and frowns.  I think ordinary people respond to frowns because they see honesty in them.  No bs.  No pretense.  They relate to them more than they do the plastered-on, circus clown grins of suit-clad politicians.

Digital World Post 10 (Dec. 3) I wish I knew how to quit you

“Online tools are a way to get people to act,” Edward Cone notes in his article, The Marketing of a President,”–to meet in the physical world, to put up flyers and posters, write letters and checks, speak to other people face to face.  And ultimately, to get out and vote.”

It’s funny because I mostly regard the dot-com-o-sphere as an insular entity.  I can check websites, post anonymously on my favorite gossip blogs, read news releases on the Darfur region and the status of gay marriage legislation, recieve/send emails without every having to physically interface with another living soul–I love that!

I clock more hours on the Web than I do at my day job, and I’m not exactly sure if that’s a good or bad thing.  I’m kind of unhealthy about it all.  Shouldn’t I be out volunteering somewhere?  Perhaps.  Still, this Internet thing is too legit to quit; too good to leave by the wayside. 

Upon reading this week’s linked articles and selections from Joe Trippi’s book about how Howard Dean became the first presidential hopeful to use the Internet as an effective campaigning tool, I came to see the potential in using the Web as a great unifier and not just as a means to a mastubatory end.

Civil rights legislation immediately came to mind.

For whatever reasons, the GayLesbianBisexualTransgender (GLBT) Community weighs heavily on my mind these days, though I can’t quite pinpoint why.

Maybe it’s because all these Republicans are being called out left and right for their down-low behavior.

Maybe it’s because I still can’t get over the fact that Matthew Shepard died such a senseless death.

Maybe it’s because the Kinsey Scale challenges me to rethink my own orientation.

Maybe it’s because I think Brokeback Mountain is the best film made in the last decade.

In any event, I like the idea that social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace can be used to organize meet ups, protest rallies, and same-sex marriage petitions nationwide.  A so-called insular entity can work to an all-encompassing end.  It can really motivate folks and broaden close-minded world views.

All one needs is the will and an Internet connection.  Web 2.0 can pave a way.

Digital World Peer Response 3 (Nov. 13) If I tell you’re hot, will you please put some clothes on and go away?

On her blog, The Spicy View, Sara taps into the celebutante curse in her entry, Puh-lease, Don’t Gimme More.  She rations out the blame that the media placed squarely, and perhaps unfairly, on Britney Spears’ shoulder after a less than stellar performance of her single Gimmie Some More at the 2007 VMAs.

Sara states, “It’s interesting to see the media hype pre-VMAs and post-VMAs about Britney’s comeback.  The media built Brit-Brit up, several years ago, encouraged her to over-sex herself at a young age, and has been waiting for a huge media-meltdown ever since.”

The sexualization of young women is nothing new.  This practice dates back to the Bible.  Today, the lusty Lolita fetish perserveres.  Only now, it verges on caricature.

“She was awful!” I heard various CNN, FOX News (Truckload of salt there.) and MSNBC commentators declare the day after the VMAs.

But, wait!  I refuse to believe Britney was ever alone in this whole thing.  Someone helped lure her into a seductive, Pinocchio tango.

I know.  I know.

She has her voice; her own mind.  Still, she began her career as a minor.  We’re talking 16 or 17-years-old here–that’s about how old she was when Baby One More Time debuted.

I just want to know the role her handlers played in all this.  I wonder how her mom passed the time as her nubile daughter writhed around in body glitter and with pythons on an MTV awards show stage.  I can just see mama Spears somewhere in the background, tallying up album returns.

Everything from hijacked photos of a newly legal Vanessa Hugdens displaying her goodies to Rihanna’s good-girl-gone-bad dominatrix ballerina get-up to crotch shots of a vajayjay popping Lindsay Lohan just feeds the machine that keep the celebutante curse kicking.  What’s worse is that some of these young women are actually talented.  Lindsay Lohan, for instance, has great comedic timing, and I think critics responded to that before she went bonkers and the sex kitten osteoporosis gnawed the marrow straight from her funny bone.  I ponder these celebutantes’ greatest fears and wonder if their deepest anxieties reach beyond gaining weight and turning 30. 

Peer Response 2 (Oct. 12) The Anti-Cyber Space Baller

My baby cousin Timothy Paul (though he’ll always be little Timmy to me) fits the dreamy, high school football star archetype to a tee–well-muscled, acne free, straight white teeth, sickeningly popular and outgoing.  I would hate his guts, if he weren’t my cousin.

“Oh, girl, look!”

Tim and I are at the mall.  A group of Sketcher clad teeny boppers stare him down.

“Look at him,” they coo.  “No, that one–the fine one with the dreads.”

I can almost kiss the swooning.  It’s that close in memory.

Timothy’s popularity with girls is most apparent on his MySpace page.  He shares his player’s paradise with me one Sunday afternoon.  “Want to see something?” he asks, clicking madly.

Before long, his friends’ listing appears.  The page is filled with beautiful young women.

“So these are all your friends?” I ask.

“No,” he responds.  “Just girls who want to get with me.  I’m a baller.”

Blech!  Perhaps this is typical behavior, but I can’t relate to it all.  I feel weird basing friendships online or otherwise, on how badly I want to suck face with someone.

Dayo Akinwande seems to share my dismay in his You want people to know you, right? post on his blog, Warlord Treatment.  He states,

I just never got the repulsive culture of self-absorption that so many–if not all–of [MySpace] members adhere to.  What’s the point of having a million “friends” when most of them will always be strangers that you’ll never meet or have any meaningful connection?

I agree.  There’s a harm in maintaining surface affiliations.  Online business partnerships and classmate affiliations sit fine with me because, well, at least there are commonalities in those unions; substantial ones at that.  At least those relationships reach beyond superficial I’ve-gotta-have-you-now associations.

Digital World Post 9 (Nov. 13) War Blogging Post

I view blogging as the maximum expression of self-centeredness.  Where war blogging is concerned,  I think the most interesting debate is an internalized one.  It poses the question, “Do you care enough about what’s going on in Iraq to blog about it?”

The most alive discussion focuses on whether or not this works for you, not whether or not it’s generally a good or bad thing to do.

I’m not a soldier–haven’t been on in the past, am not one in the present, nor will I ever be one in the future (no matter how many hungry recruiters call my house in a zesty search for young, PG County flesh.)

It would be pretty presumptuous of me to condemn the author of American Solider for sharing his combat experience.  No one forces folks to read his blog or any other miliblog for that matter.

If you don’t want to hear the most minute details of his combat experience, click elsewhere. 

Nobody is forcing you to read it anymore than anyone forced him to experience it.  There’s always a choice.   Move on if you don’t want to hear what American Solider has to say.

I consider myself pretty fortunate.  My life is all about creature comforts.  I reap the benefits of what my parents and grandparents fought for during the years of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.  They marched, so that I don’t have to.  Mine is a taken-for-granted existence filled with comfy, cotton sheets, hot meals, Ugg Boots and MP3s.  It’s nothing like what blogger American soldier has seen.  His motivations for suiting and arming up are beyond me, but his reasons make sense to him.  That’s all that matters.  It’s just enough for him, so it should be just enough for me.

American soldier sums up his blog’s aim perfectly when he says, “These words are my experience and not a place where I need to write for anyone.”

I say, “Write on, brother!”  It’s not my life.  It’s not my experience. Therefore, it’s not for me to judge.

Digital World Post 8 (Nov. 7) Achenbach of the People

WashingtonPost.com features over 60 blogs, including Maryland Moment, The Fix and opinion blogs like Think tank town and Achenblog.

Achenblog’s author Joel Achenbach applies a conversational tone to his writing.  One of his latest entries, entitled A Tub of Mail:  Some Items Not Entirely Useless, focuses on the mundane practice of sifting through mail–some of it pertinent, most of it not.

Any reader can relate to this because everybody gets junk mail.  People stow or throw away letters from friends they rather forget or bill collectors they prefer to avoid.  These unopened envelopes rest on kitchen counters and table tops, sometimes collecting dust or grime.

Achenbach eventually ventures through his unopened mail stash and gives the following account:

“Some of it was intriguing and I mentally filed it in the Might Try to Read Someday category.  Some was more likely to go into the category of Might Peruse Conceivably on Hypothetical Rainy Day But Probably Won’t.  Some went straight to the Ignore Intensely file.”

Other folks make similar designations, usually with less inventive titles.  Achenbach’s inventiveness injects fun into his post, thus making his entry more readable.  It’s readable because it’s relatable.  He embodies every man.

Perhaps Achenbach does what most bloggers aspire to do–integrate unfettered creativity and individual voice in a playful, conversational manner that attracts rather than alienates readers.

It sometimes seems like hard news stories showcased in print publications lack creativity or unique voice; they might read like a regurgitation of facts.

Still, in comparing Wasington Post blogs with Washington Post print articles, a flurry of similarities rush to the surface.  For instance, both Post blogs and print articles can contain genius writing that resonates with any given readership; both might include errors–grammatical and/or content-wise; and both usually highlight topical/current events.

As far as differences, Post print articles adhere to Associated Press (AP) rules whereas blog structure morphs with an author’s moods; unlike the off-color jokes sometimes present in blog entries, most print articles exclude slang terms; more, editors correct mistakes in print articles while bloggers self-edit.

Digital World Post 7 (Oct. 25) For the Love of Fiction

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

Ugh.  The memory of these words pierces like Minute Maid orange juice on chapped lips.

The above quote belongs to none other than Dr. L Williamson–creative writing professor, reluctant mentor, player hater, mommy dearest, platonic friend.  She fit all these categories.

“Too much color imagery; not enough character development; and on top of all that, I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Williamson continues, while declaring civil war on my homework with her trusty, red Bic.

I channel Norman Bates right then.  Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!  The horror of it all.  The paragraphs and punctuation marks my hands made fall victim to her scarlet pen.  The words drown in crimson ponds.  All this red makes me dizzy.  What a deadly afternoon.

And just when I think it can’t get any worse…

“Hey.  This looks an awful lot like what Matt wrote.”

“D’oh!”

“Is this your original work?”
Yipes!  Dr. Williamson stuck it me good that February afternoon.  The icicles on the trees were surpassed by the child in my professor’s tone and the darting movements of their suspecting eyes.  I suppose she did what she felt she had to. 

I know colleges and universities have honor codes to uphold.  After all, schools are communities, and communities need rules too.  (Oh no.  I feel so Bobby Brady overly aggressive hall monitor when I say that, but you get the idea.  Try not to hold it against me.  Like Bobby, I’m just a lamb.)

Still, I wonder if Professor Williamson considered the possibility that artists are influenced by other artists.  Each one of us was/is an artist (I say was/is because I have no idea who from my graduating class is or isn’t on crack right now.  If I were a betting woman, I’d say Matt hits the pipe on a regular basis, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part.)

Each of us creative writing majors had a fetish for the written word; we pledged allegiance to our pens.  Each of us boasted a unique voice but never to the point of back biting. 

The remembrance of those foundations feed my appreciation for the concept behind Creative Commons (CC), particularly its non-exclusive clause.  According to the CC website,

Creative Commons licenses attach to the work and authorize everyone who comes in contact with the work to use it consistent with the license.  This means that if Bob has a copy of your Creative Commons–licensed work, Bob can give a copy to Carol and Carol will be authorized to use the work consistent with the Creative Commons license.  You then have a license agreement separately with both Bob and Carol.

If I were to publish my blog under a copyright license, it would be this one.  Keeping my creative writing courses in mind, I like that CC allows one to alter an original work, so long as that altering does not stray too far from that work’s original intent.  The very action of commenting on a blog sort of spoon feeds the CC philosophy–allowing others to offer their opinions and help reshape existing content.  That’s a beautiful thing.

(late) Digital World Post 6 (Nov. 5) Virtual Obama-virtually unattractive

On a completely superficial note, I think Barack Obama is a living, breathing work of art–a Harlem Renaissance portrait in breathy motion.  He sort of resembles a caramelized, ancient Egyptian pharaoh–complete with the most shimmering hue of cooper skin.

As silly and trivial as it seems, I like perusing pictures of him and his wife Michelle.  I enjoy sifting through photographs of them captured in magazines.  I study them the same way I do Canadian pennies, which for some weird reason, I often find stuck to gum wrappers left on sticky cement in mid-July.

I keep this idealized image of him in mind as I play a round of Persuasive Games’s Presidential Ping Pong–a game accessible through CNN’s website.

As soon as Persuasive Games redirects me to CNN Election Center 2008, I meet a list of Election 2008 candidates, each of whom possesses a special power that correlates to a particular strength of their candidacy.  I click play.  The system immediately informs me that I am Obama and my opponent is Rudy Giuliani.

“Cool, but yipes!”

This frightening caricature glares back at me, complete with an over-sized, cheesy grin and Dumbo ears.

“Good lord.  They managed the impossible,” I think.  “Barack looks fugly.”  He tries to hide the bottom row of his giant, Alvin and the Chipmunk grill behind a white pong paddle, but it’s no use.  Anyway, back to the game.

I receive an alert that Obama’s special power is the Lincoln Statehouse Power Up.  This power allows me to catch the ball on my paddle and redeploy it by clicking.  

All in all, I had fun.  Giuliani beat me twice.  I beat him once. I can’t say I learned anything political or even that I was persuaded to do anything other than hit a ball over a net.  The only thing I know for sure is that cyber space Obama is the stuff of soggy, lucid nightmares and couldn’t be farther from my saccharine dreams.  

Digital World Post 5 (Oct. 15) The Trouble with Truthiness

“I’m not fan of reality, and I’m not fan of encyclopedias,” Stephen Colbert jokes during The Word segment of his Comedy Central program, The Colbert Report. “I’ve said it before:  Who is Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves?  If I want to say George Washington didn’t have slaves, that’s my right.  And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it’s also a fact.”

I feel like such a douche as I read this.  Stephen Clobert states the above to make a point–one that clangs in my ear drums like a deafening gong.  I consult Wikipedia more than any other encyclopedia or reference work.  I do this because it’s easy.  I do it because it really is the ideal default reasearch tool for this lazy aspiring journalist.

Stephen Colbert’s truthiness argument, in all of its comedy and irony, forced me to reconsider this crowd-sourcing information bank and challeneged my allgeiance to it.  To say that George Washington did not own slaves is a blatant lie.  Of course he did.  An infinite number of American white men of means living during the 17th, 18th and early to mid 19th centuries owned slaves.  No offense to wikiality ( though that’s a really adorable nick name), but that was reality.  It’s not a comfortable reality to recall, but it’s reality nonetheless.  In denying that, one denies American History as well.  More, if facts about slavery can be erased, so can facts about the Holocaust, the Iraq War death toll and Janjaweed militia attacks.  Everything becomes subject to web user whim and/or discomfort.  That scares me.