week #5 excerpts

Lincoln's Legal Career

Harrison:  A man from the library introduced the lecturer, Guy Fraker, and put in a lot of Lincoln humor. "Lincoln's birthday was eight score and six days ago." "Buy this postcard set, it will only set you back a Lincoln (aka $5)." I thought it was funny. Oh yes, it was also President's Day. Everyone in the room was a total Lincoln-phile. President's Day is like their Christmas.




   
 "Education Under Fire"
Film Screening and Discussion
Sponsored by Amnesty International

Alejandra:  There are at least 300,000 members of the Baha'i faith in Iran alone, so this sounds like a massive genocide that is waiting to happen (and somewhat already begun).  It is a common factor in genocides around the world.  Something bad is always around the corner when the teachers start to disappear.

  Critical Cultural Informatics:  Twitter and Black Discourse with Andre' Brock

(as part of Black Geek Week)

Hugh:  I wasn't expecting such a thorough and critical lecture when I walked in, but I'm sure glad it was. I felt smarter walking out of this one. Growing up in Chicago and in academia, these sort of multicultural, critical analysis of race in society isn't new to me but this one went a step further.  In some ways it was very academic, and Andre Brock acknowledges that in his talk: "This part is for my professors... so bear with me." And he also referenced some of the professors in the audience and what they would expect of him, tounge in cheek.

I learned that black populations use twitter more (percentage-wise of internet users by PEW) than white, and Brock claims that to be due to mobile phone ownership and use over desktop or laptop use.  Black users tend to have a more equal relationship to their followers (a 1:1 follower to following ratio).

He said, technology culturally embodies the beliefs and culture of its designers and engineers, which is interesting to me as a maker, because sometimes I battle with meaning or cultural value in my work – sometimes my work speaks for me, rather than me speaking through it – which I think is perhaps good evidence that my culture is speaking for me over any emotional voice.

He suggests, therefore that the interface of twitter, and the way that it is accessed lend itself to be adopted by those familiar with the texting format – any decent enough texting application will sort by date and user which is what twitter does as well. That being said, the twitter format introduces hashtags and @usernames, which functions as the basis for all contextualization in twitter conversation. Besides these context functions, the language of the text also offers a cultural hinting, for example, he provided "We don't eat no [food here]."  But besides this, twitter still functions on vague contexts for the most part – the hashtags tend to be short, abbreviated words referring to something very specific – which makes twitter a very private space, despite its openness.

"Race functions as the articulation of personal identities' oscillation between social structures and cultural representations."

Brock offers the word "signifyin'" as describing the way that words (in particular, idioms of ebonics) signify their context but also are playful, or acknowledging at its context at the same time. For example "Yo mama" or "ratchet," which I had never heard of before, but apparently signifies the dance "ratchet" and the dancers who dance it as well as "ratchet."

The Hashtag in use is a cultural acceptance of the idiom or signifier as performing a cultural call and response.

A guy in the audience asked a question about an online gaming platform that he (and I) frequent (League of Legends) which, like other online games was plagued with racist comments. But when the introduced a new system that allows players to reward each other for their friendliness or teamwork, the comments disappeared almost instantaneously  and was replaced by attacks on technological literacy. It is interesting then to observe that when users are suddenly responsible for their behavior as part of their public image, they are immediately self conscious or sent to the back of the conversation and become invisible.

Black Geek Week - Panel 2: Turning your Passion into a career

John Jennings, Kevin Grevioux, Terry Grant, Andre Block, LeSean Thomas

Selina: " I chose to go to this lecture for a couple of reasons... content-wise, I've always been very hopeful that I might eventually make a living out of my personal interests. What better way to get closer to that goal than to learn directly from people who have already accomplished that? "

"Overall I was very inspired by the stories of the panelists. I walked away with some advice that I'll probably keep with me forever. The things below were mentioned more than once and by more than one panelist.
Meet people that got to where you want to be.
Ask people doing what you want to do questions."   
 

Social Personality: Brown Bag Lecture with Kisha Jones.

Kelsey:  This week I attended a lecture at the psych building, which wasn't so much of a lecture as it was a battle between the speaker and her audience. It was a bit painful to watch.
Gino: Hi my little miners! How are you doing cause I wanna know? I have no idea what a brown bag lecture is, but I went to one. For me, I brought a brown bag in case I needed to throw up in it because I was so hungover. I hid incognito in the back of the class.