I’ve had a long love affair with Queen. It is the first cd I remember playing, the Greatest Hits II belting out “Under Pressure” over and over again until my Mum screamed for me to turn it down. I don’t remember what age I was when my parents upgraded their old record player and tape deck to the compact looking stereo that’s still collecting dust in their lounge room, but I remember straining to reach up high enough to put that CD in top opening player. I still don’t know why my Mum doesn’t like Queen, but after I pilfered that CD of my dad’s, “A Kind of Magic” was on high rotation in my household.
Because of that CD, which is still floating around in my parents truly horrible collection of music, I knew all the lyrics to “I Want To Break Free” before I knew about “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It wasn’t until I started searching for my own music in early high school that I came across “Bohemian Rhapsody”. My musical world was exploding with Aretha Franklin and the Ramones and music was vast and creatively endless.
In grade nine or ten, my school concert band was playing a Queen medley. I was first trumpet, along with a new friend, and in a music lesson one school day, our music instructor sat us down and talked about Queen. He hooked up his fandangled mp3 player to the speaker in the tiny soundproofed room and we sat and listened to Bohemian Rhapsody. After the song had finished, he asked us what we thought it meant.None of us really had an answer, all I remember is that music teacher telling us it was about Freddie Mercury and his battle with AIDs.
Several years later, I was in a Coles car park in West End, getting out of my friend’s car as we headed towards Three Monkeys for a late meal. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was the last thing playing on her ipod in her car and we sat in her car and waited until it played out before leaving the car park. After our little sing along, she turned to me and wondered aloud what the song was about. I retold what my music teacher had said, we stood there under the fluorescent and had a little moment. Everything was quiet like the world around us was remembering the legacy Queen left.
Yesterday, I followed the hypertextual motorway called social networking to two links. Coincidentally they both contained versions of Queen songs that I loved because of the pure geekery displayed in the version of the songs.
First is the Muppets.
My favourite characters as a kid, and are still now as an adult, were Statler and Waldorf, but I can’t even begin to name all of my favourite parts of this video. With the inclusion of Manamana and Beeker, the video sent me back in time. It reminded me of being a kid, watching these hilarious puppets and playing “Under Pressure” until my Mum’s head burst. The next video sent me back in a different direction.
During part of primary and high school, I’d go to the PCYC afterschool program until my Mum finished work. My love of gaming really started there, with the competitions that were held at the end of the hall on the tiny little tvs hooked up with the game consoles. I first played a version of Mario on my best friend’s Nintendo, I’m pretty sure it was Mario World but I can’t be sure, but on those afternoons I was at the PCYC, I owned the boys at Mario Kart.
And “Don’t Stop Me Now” has a special place in my heart, because it seems to be the song that always ends a stint of depression (and the accompanying writers block). I don’t think you can be morose after injecting that song through your eardrums. After hearing these songs again, in this format, brightened my rained-on day. It gave me good memories of a past I can barely remember and set me in spirits that were bright. It was a little walk down a musical memory lane.
So, few readers, care to share the band that has followed you through time?
So on Monday, after flying back from my hometown for my mum’s 50th birthday party, I get a sore throat at work. Work has been pretty damn hectic for the past two weeks, what with my supervisor being on holidays and my filling in for him. I’m not used to eight hour shifts, and pretty sure I never will be.
On Wednesday night, when I was very clearly sick, having attended the doctor during the daytime, I get to work and the store manager comes up to me and says in her brightest (scariest) voice:
“KYSIRA. How are you feeling?”
And because my Mum brought me up right, despite my endless years of telling her the tall tales, I tell the imposing bosslady the truth.
“Um, not too well,” Offering a weak smile to smooth this over.
But she doesn’t take me up on my smiling offer. Instead she says just as loudly, “KYSIRA! How are you feeling?”
And I say it again. “Not too well.”
But then, because apparently I don’t know what employers want, when she says AGAIN, “KYSIRA! How are you feeling?” I offer, rather pathetically, “I’ll get better?”
This exchange clinched my certainty of my inability to communicate with humans. I have little to no people skills, talking on the phone creeps me out and if I’m around new people, I tend to be loudly and inappropriately obnoxious, through crude jokes and very personal anecdotes.
The brain fascinates me because it holds the answers to what people want and who people are, but science, and by extension me, hasn’t fully figured out how the brain works. So I don’t get people. Instead I read about serotonin in New Scientist
So this exchange with my boss made me think of how terrified I am of looking for a job in my field. In the last lecture of my ‘Writing and Publishing Industry’ class, my lecturer went through a couple of pointers on how to write resumes and act in interviews. He said, ‘Work out what they [the interviewer/employer] want, work out what type of person the interviewer is [as in, if they are meek or dominant not Sagittarian and likes long walks on the beach] and to frame your answers to the employer’s terms of reference”.
See, I know, if I ever get an interview, I’m going to stuff it up. Because I can’t read people and I really don’t know what they want. I’m going to be the person who goes into an interview with the wrong idea of what the employer wants and will inevitably partake in a colossal scene of misunderstanding. And I know I can’t be the only one who is scared of the interview process.
So, question, have you got tales of scary or hilarious interviews?
Filed under: Life
I love my parents, through all their flaws and my flaws and our mutual inability to understand where we’re all coming from. They love me and do pretty much anything for me and are always there in a crisis, even if they’re physically over a thousand kilometres away. Like the time my fan caught alight and threw the circuit board, I rang my Dad and he explained how the opposite sides of the apartment was wired. Or like this evening, when half of a tooth fell off during pizza and I didn’t know what to do, Mum was calmly telling me just to call a dentist in the morning.
I freaked out, I got so scared and the first thing I did was call my mum. Because despite needing to be responsible for utility bills, I still find myself in that hazy space of kidulthood. It hit me this evening when I was trying to not be bored and started a 30 Rock marathon, that all I’ve got in front of me now is work. Work I neither enjoy or hate, a kind of bland state of being that I’ll be participating in for, at least, the next six months. It all suddenly seemed like a severely bleak outlook of my immediate future, especially when I completely loose my shit and I feel like I’m going to vomit over part of a broken tooth trying to inch its way up my oesophagus.
I have a trip to Greece in my future, and writing projects to work on, but the listlessness and lack of deadlines has never seemed so daunting.
Also, if you know a good, cheap dentist I could see in the Brisbane Inner City surrounds, that’d be fabulous. Or hell, an interesting hobby and/or club I could join…
I handed the final assignment of my undergraduate career today. Gimme a month or so and I’ll be a shiny graduate in a pink-lined robe. After handing in the assignment I received marks back for my Brisbane Writer’s Festival piece and low and behold, a High Distinction from a notoriously hard marker. I’m pretty proud of myself of that one, I really liked writing it and I’m going to see if anyone wants to publish it before I post it here. Considering it was called ‘Recipe for an Erotica Panel’, it’ll probably end up here.
For my final assignment, I wrote a short story I’m rather proud of, considering 600 words into the accompanying research essay I had a writer breakdown and cried in my little pit of ‘I’m not cut out for this, I don’t want anything to do with the industry’ despair. Instead, I have shiny pretty things to occupy my free time (Yay Birthday Present Torchwood DVDS) and a novel to write.
But the best thing about it all? I’m not going to have to use the ‘university’ tag any more.
(I am aware the title of this post directly contradicts the title of the previous post. Oh irony, I love you).
Well I scrapped the novel I’ve worked on in classes for the last year and started writing a new one for NaNoWriMo.
If you don’t know already, NaNoWriMo is the most inconvenient abbreviation with capitalisation that stands for National Novel Writing Month. Though, it is now very international from it’s humble beginning.
I don’t even have 500 words yet, and I’m scared. But NaNoWriMo’s How it Works page says:
6) This is not as scary as it sounds.
Find me over there as, wait for it, klfair. Hey, NaNoWriMo proves that abbreviations are cool.
“This Is It” premiers tonight/tomorrow and I thought that, through my brilliant cooking skills, I should give my little tribute to old MJ.
Potato Smiles: A Tribute to MJ
Long live Thriller.
[Side note: I froze the Smiles]
[Side note 2: The director of the High School Musical movies directed this film. Good or bad thing?]
Special occasions roll around a couple times a year, whether it be those days over Christmas or the 150th birthday of the city or the sickie you chucked to go to a festival. They are the days that are spent with family or in bed with the other half; the days that are spent eating and celebrating, drinking and sobbing.
The way my body celebrates those special days is filled with pus.
At 11:25pm of Easter Day ‘07, I found a pimple on my butt. This is the first instance I remember of the phenomenon I now call ‘Attack of the Inconvenient Pimple’.
See yesterday was my birthday and I woke to an itch beneath my right breast. Low and behold, INCONVENIENT PIMPLE!
It’s that time of year when third year university students are getting letters in the mail that say “If you’re looking for an honours program, how about Accounting?” and no one turns up to birthday parties because graduation is only two months away while exams are in two weeks. So I was expecting the small turn out to the do that I held in my apartment yesterday evening.
Two. Two came to the do. (Plus a boyfriend but he isn’t counted). So when the second present I received was a collection of badges of images of the seven deadly sins, I didn’t hesitate to attached them all to my right breast.
Unfortunately, I forgot the Inconvenient Pimple.
The pins, with the help of my low cut bra, managed to stab said pimple that erupted like the shaken-up 2 litre Solo bottle ejaculating all over my kitchen bench.
As always, the Attack is retreating back into my skin in wait for Christmas or my Mum’s 50th. Bring it on body.
So I have just finished organising the planning process of writing my novel. I arrived back in Brisbane from the hometown last night and today was a relaxing day before a return to the banalities of life a.k.a. waking up at 5am for work on Monday morning. I knew that today, I wanted to write.
In an attempt at wringing all potential comedy out of my life, I’m going to rewrite a 4000 word memoir from two years ago, into the second chapter of my novel. I decided that sticking the six pages up on my wall in front of my desk may provide the inspiration and motivation for the rewrite. I was wrong.
The plannings of a masterpiece; the ramblings of a madwoman
Thus, I decided to continue in my endeavour of motivation by posting up a three tiered time line which will help me finally decipher the order of the chapters in my complicated reflective interweaving of independent time frames. I continue to confuse myself when I try to explain this book to others.
The gaping blankness between the first three chapters and the last three chapters is agonising. Though I’ve oft heard of the agony of writing, so I may be on the right track, after all.
It would be redundant if I begin this post with a reference to my absence seeing as I stated in the last how busy I was but here I am, doing it anyway. I’m currently on ‘holiday’ in my hometown, chillaxing at my parent’s house. And by chillaxing, I mean picking up all the slack from my sister’s lack of completing chores.
I’ve been writing and reading away and I just began ‘The Princess Bride’ yesterday. As usual, the book has a (I hazard to say) depth to it that the comedy of the film cannot portray. Goldman uses that to his advantage in the numerous introductions that are within the edition I am reading. I swear it took me fifty pages to actually find the start of the novel.
But besides the reading and writing and watching tv and getting a spanking new haircut, it’s pretty dull.
The main drama in the house at the moment is that the vegetarian accidently left a freezer door open overnight, and a cascade of fish and fishbits suddenly thawed to the point that everyone but the vegetarian is now eating fish for a week.
If I believed in a higher form, I’d swear they’re out to get me with my mother’s wrath.
And the gates are opened and up comes Take Home Exam on the right, with Reflective Essays coming a close second. Writing Portfolio is coming a close third but, OH Novel Chapter and Synopsis are edging ahead!
So the countdown is on until I’m on holidays and all the assignments are in. Let’s finish one by writing this blog post! Today, we’re talking about the future. Specifically, how the future of user-led content will perform as products, and how it is relatable to my future as a writer.
Going off the tutorial discussion, the ideal of produsage becoming our main form of production seems debilitating for our economic structure. In terms of social and other forms of media, we’re experiencing the evolution of communication as we interact and become produsers. Despite current economic dilemmas, capitalism will continue. Our economy will right itself but will operate in potentially a different way. This ideal of user-led produsage is more apt in a socialist society. But the discussion of the weekly topic proved that we can’t forecast the future of produsage, just postulate on possible scenarios for when the products become artefacts.
The future is bleak for me as a writer if the idyllic notion Bruns puts forward in his concluding chapter of his book Blogs, Wikipedia and Second Life is across the platform of all products. This break away from traditional capitalist hierarchies that our product/consumer led society thrives on will cause a crumbling of the current publishing structure, thus destroying any chance to make it as a novelist. The majority of publishing houses are owned by giant media corporations, with specific markets. It’s a brutally tough industry, but it works. Although it isn’t all bad. We’re rewriting how we write, but how the world views it, and the corporations are catching on.
Kindle is probably the most well known example of the digitialisation of writing. The eBook publishing companies are sprouting up everywhere, and as usual, the adult entertainment business was the first to catch on. There’s a great many romance publishers that deal exclusively in epublishing. This trend came about because of the users, for their convenience and privacy. But the products are still produced not prodused.
James Patterson’s most recent book is probably going to end up his best, as his ‘chain thriller‘ competition recently closed, where about 28 other people wrote the chapters between Patterson’s first and last chapter. One part of the process is obviously user-led by the community who reads/writes these genre novels. But the rest of production, from the PR to the distribution, is still conforming to the current publishing practices. So it’s one step at a time for writing and produsage.
This process of product into artefact is evolving, but it isn’t there yet. But on the opposite side of the spectrum, it seems like the process of artefact into product is in full swing. Many a blogging community support their writers through the buying of merchandise. While the users may not produce the content, their support is the only indicator of the success of the product. Blogs like Stuff White People Like and FU Penguin have created products from their very popular blogs but the most successful of online community projects (that users actually produce) that has turned into a product is PostSecret. Actor and blogger Wil Wheaton’s books and ebooks success is due to his online community of followers.
Ultimately, I think user-led products are unlikely in our current climate. So far, new media has seen the advent of services that thrive on produsage, but the likelihood that products created from a collaborative mass intelligence isn’t going to be commercially viable for our capitalism economy. Perhaps the future will prove me wrong, and if so, let me know when utopia arrives.
Well here’s the weekly round of up interesting articles I find over the days of scouring the news sites.Some disgusting segments this week, so be careful what you click on!
Worse or Worser
He’s packing produce! A teenager tried to hold up a store with a banana. Which one is de-evolving? The teen or the person he thought would have bought his farce?
Rats and Crabs Join In Fight Against Hygeine. Grossest restaurant in Australia title gets taken away from the McDonald’s in Adelaide. I really don’t know what to do with this one. I’ve already seen STI jokes so I’m just going to go with gross.
Stranger than Fiction
Randy Man Wants A Woman To Mate With Him So He Has Some Offspring To Rear. Admittedly, the male is an emu. And the woman is his owner. Horny emu coming at ya! Yeah, even I couldn’t come up with this.
Strange Combinations
Bike seats and the penis wouldn’t normally be a comfortable combination, but Cannes saw plenty of both when nude cyclists consisting of actors and director of one of the films took a warm ride. Double entendres are the bomb.
Michael Jackson and the youth! Yes a guy spent most of the year organising a record breaking Thriller dance because he could.
Bonus Round
Scientists have finally found what was lost! Thankfully, it was quite a bit more important than their keys. Yes, Ida the missing link has given the people with the science the proof of the evolutionary chain. Most exciting news of the week outside of the Cheeto Jesus.
In Other News
Obama is Spock, Nuff said.
Mickey Mouse’s voice died. But Disney will so go on. Considering they’re teaching the next gen about finance.
Olympic Torch bong jokes finally see fruition
Hostage couple didn’t need to steal from the bank cause the bank was just giving it away.
But lastly, the most heartwarming story of the week is the story of the Texan Mayor, who gave up office for his illegal immigrant Mexican gay partner. Seriously, cockles are now living once again.
Filed under: New Media, Television | Tags: Advertising, Folksonomies, The Gruen Transfer, University
Well this week’s blogging topic threw me for a doozy. Folks vs Experts.
Me, you see the girl with the laptop permanently attached to her lap, and the knowledge of social media, but beneath all that, I’m a traditionalist at heart. I think it comes part and parcel with being a writer. Publishing is an old form. And despite interests of subversive norms, writers will always stick within the framework of publishing industry if they want to get anywhere.
By becoming tertiary educated, I’m further supporting expertise. University education was my only pathway post school and by gaining a bachelor degree and potentially persuing a Masters, I become distinguished due to the letters on the end of my name.
The flipside: I’m an internet geek, can’t get me away from it and all the technology evolving. But despite loving the internet and much of what it has garnered, I dislike many of the masses I come across online. I use the net as more of a community based entertainment, where I can find people with similar (science fictitious) interests. Most of whom (the ones I communicate with) are of a similar intellectual background.
There’s a serious debate in my place as a writer in the current climate of publishing and my place as a person and professional on the internet, and thus how I’m positioned on this topic in each sphere. Do I stick with my career side of things and stay with traditionalists and say ‘yay degrees and our knowingness of specific topics’ or do I give into collective communities’ hive intelligence?
Short answer: I’m potentially allergic to bees.
So, after much internal debate, my point of discussion will be based on debate within the communal folk intelligence that Bruns discusses in both his book and produsage.org.
My main case study is not Wikipedia, but rather a community called Metafilter, a ‘community weblog’ that anyone can contribute. It’s goal is to “…Break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.” It embodies the very definition of hive intelligence.
Metafilter is ten years old this year, and rather unlike the other ten-year-old community I’m entrenched in (Entrenched is a nicer word that admitting my Livejournal addiction), Metafilter is less individualised than the uncountable amount of personal blogs on LJ.
Warning: do not click on the following links if you are easily offended.
The specific folksonomy vs expertise case I’d like to examine is a thread on MetaFilter that discusses obesity and Fat Pride. The thread is called Fat Hate is Ugly and many of the comments are particularly unsavoury. I was linked to this today, about an hour or so after watching The Gruen Transfer’s banned ad and discussion. The Gruen Transfer is an ABC program that examines advertising. Each week the segment ‘The Pitch’ is an agencies attempt at fulfilling the problem solving brief of the week’s segment. Last week’s episode caused much controversy as one ad agency breached ABC guidelines due to it’s deliberate shock technique. The ad was banned from being screened on television, but placed on the internet accompanied with a fifteen minute discussion.
So within the same afternoon I was presented by a hive community’s discussion that descended into discriminatory arguments, and a list of experts attempting to discover a way in which to curb that discrimination. This, for me, clearly describes the difference between folksonomy and expertise: that the experts are thinking about and trying to solve problems and the mass are actually living the problem.
Filed under: Interesting Articles | Tags: segments, articles, weird, news, politics
Ahh, the weird freaky true news feed. It is the love of my creative life. A cornucopia of articles that inspire my creative fruit. Or sometimes, just plain weird shit that makes me laugh. There are so many articles open in my tabs of hilarious or strange news stories, so rather than attempting to even figure out which is worse than the other, I’m going to break them into categories. Here goes nothing peeps:
Technology
Social Networking reachs Hubble. Astronaut only has two bars of reception. Takes forever to get his tweets back to Houston.
Flying Robot Penguins. Do I need to say anymore?
Toilet on the move warns to stop then go. The real question is how many people peed while the toilet was moving for a warning label to be created.
Animal Planet
Dolphins worse than mums, do sleep with their eyes open.
Crocodile thought he had body image problems. Turns out it was just the fat hairy dude’s reflection.
Riding a horse under the influence is the new Lindsey Lohan. Urban cowboy later ditched the police via a stunt with a Chinese man and his Native American wife.
Leisure
Increased exposure due to Disney press release (or at least that’s what I predict will happen now that they’ve stopped watching for flashers).
If sex on Windsor Castle grounds isn’t leisure, I don’t know what is. The only problem was that the royal guards were so used to not moving that they became transfixed.
Politics
Porn and cookies aren’t just found beneath fourteen year olds beds. UK Politicians list mole catching and horse manure on their expense list. Some kinks just shouldn’t be aired.
Stormy for Senate. Porn star probably has a better chance of winning the seat. And the carpet. And the back of the van. And the alley. And the pool…
Higher Education
Doctor McDonald had a weight problem. Fri-ee II-ee Oooo
Other news
Police altruistic, burgler stupid. Who ever needs rescuing after a botched burglary shouldn’t have delusions of living in Alias.
Marching band girl who beats up bullies with batons. Hell yeah, revenge of the band nerds.
Man delivers baby after watching youtube. Miffed he couldn’t find any ‘conception’ videos.
Woman almost bites off Beligun’s chocolate stick. She thought he was spreading the chocolate love.
That’s all we have for you in this week’s news segments. Be sure to look for the segments again next week!
Filed under: Literature, New Media, Television | Tags: Editing, h2g2, Literature, The West Wing, University, Wikipedia
This week’s blog is going to work a little differently. Due to the lengthy discussion topic, I’m passing the obligatory intro paragraph about something amusing this week cause all I’m hearing are pig puns.
Still on hearing, there’s something that has transcended literature and adopted in new media is the most useless thing on the internet. Babel Fish. Babel Fish was created by Douglas Adams as a fish that would live on brains waves in ones’ ear and secrete translated alien languages. Some clever chap has gone and called an online translation tool the same name. But what has this got to do with the week’s topic of Wikipedia?
Arthur Dent, the main character of Adams’ sagas, finds out about the fish his best friend is stuffing into his ear from the encyclopaedia ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’: an eccentric electronic guidebook that Arthur’s alien best friend Ford writes for. As giant database that serves as “the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom”, we can see a distinct parallel with our own time’s repository: Wikipedia. The incredibly pertinent comparison between The Guide’s entry on Planet Earth (“Mostly Harmless”) and Wikipedia’s stub entries show this connection. So yes, I think Douglas Adams created the idea of Wikipedia.
The voice of The Guide is inherently satirical of encyclopaedias as well as being a sarcastic tone that grounds the greatly fantastical stories across the many mediums Hitchhiker’s spread. This voice that is omniscient while being incredibly critical and subjective gives the stories a sense of satire and entertainment that lacks in traditional. The Guide has its own opinion and is almost a character in itself.
Despite the restrictions for editing the entries, because it Wikipedia is an open participation system, subjectivity is not always edited out. This is specifically telling of any Wikipedia entry that is giving data on any creative piece of work. There is a bias of the author present in each line as plots are summarised and characters are described. There is an agenda behind the structure and word choice of each sentence despite the communal evaluation. A quick example is this West Wing article about it’s character Toby Ziegler: “Toby is rather morose, a characteristic that is reflected in his typical wardrobe, usually dull shades of grey and brown.” That sentence is not a report sentence, but rather a commentary sentence (as we say in stylistics in creative writing). The author of that edit has used the adjective ‘rather’ which connotes a certain measurement, a qualification (thanks OED) of the object of the sentence. The choice of words give that edit a tone and hence the author has a voice. So the neutral POV of Wikipedia is nullified.
There is a site called ‘Wikipedia Bias‘ that runs on the same principal that anyone can post. It discusses spin and omission in political US Wikipedia entries. Though it states that the site is far from comprehensive as ‘dozens more need to be added’, it shows that Wikipedia is far from objective.
Conservatives think so too. Though I hate to mention and link this, Conservapedia’s entry on Wikipedia bias is 158 points long with 287 citations. Their list is fraught with claims that aren’t backed by any reputable research and basic hissy fitting over certain Wikipedia articles against their beliefs. But this post is incredibly important to take note of, because Conservapedia demonstrates that in this collective evaluation of an open slather encyclopaedia, alternatives are still sought.
The latest interesting Wikipedia news is that a student called Shane Fitzgerald pulled a stunt editing a Wikipedia entry, and his information ended up as fact in the news. His goal may have been completed, but Wikipedia isn’t dying. It’s equal to taking out a minion in an evil empire; the empire won’t crumble without Guard 3. Whether it needs to crumple is the debate.
There so many more points of contention in articles on bias in Wikipedia, I’ll list some on the Cite page in order to stop rambling.
While there is an online Hitchhiker’s Guide project called h2g2, I still say that Wikipedia’s forefather was Adams. Adams was eccentric and tangential in his writing so why else would there be a button marked ‘random’ on Wikipedia?
Regular segments return in the following post 
Filed under: Literature, New Media | Tags: Writing, University, segments, Literature
Another day of classes, another uni blog. In addition to seeing the premier vid for the cable movie once called ‘Alien Western’, I have managed to watch an awful lot of youtube videos instead of actively cleaning my apartment or doing any sort of assignment work (other than this blog). Re: cleaning – I have managed to put most of the rubbish in one corner. Zing!
So, back to the point of this entry. I’ll be, in a round-a-bout way, talking about citizen journalism due to the week’s tutorial topic. As I am not a journalist, citizen journalism means something slightly different to me as a writer in the digital age. So rather than writing about the theories and disadvantages of citizen journalism, (cause who’s really interested in a blog post about that from me, really?) I’m going to focus on a discussion that took place in one of my writing classes.
It’s an idea that has been around for quite some time now despite the fact that intentionally innovative and evolutionary books keep getting written. Broached in Roland Barthes’ essay, Death of the Author is a literary theory pertaining to the author’s intentions of a work, namely that authorial intention is irrelevant during interpretation of a text. “The death of the author was life for the critic” and meant that readers no longer used the author to “distill meaning from his work”.
This idea is realitive to citizen journalism because the predominant ideal of ‘death of the author’ is a subconscious weakening of the traditionalist writing heirarchy: the writer is the god and the readers are the followers. Citizen journalism is the journalistic approach to this lit theory idea. The traditional journalism venues are breaking down, and the bias that comes with them are disappearing as the author becomes the masses. The one-to-many trusty worthy journalist is being replaced.
This ‘trusty journalist’ is the heroistic figure traditional journalism portrays the journalist to be. Flew mentions this loss of the ‘hero journalist’ in his New Media book, discussing how the once revered source of knowledge and news is being broken down by citizen journalism. The worthiness of news sources are being actively questioned by the masses.
I suppose I could break it down a bit more, but I think the core idea of both understandings is that traditionalism is OLD. As a writer, neither bodes too well for me, but in relation to Death of the Author, I think we’re still plugging away.
And in other news: I was reading webcomics and saw Penny Arcade’s blog about forum ettiqute. I think it gives a great humourous look at the rules within these collective communities.
And for this week’s segments:
Strange Combinations
This week’s strange combination comes to us from a news article. The combination: Smally Annoying Dog and ‘the Wind’. Look out for the sentence containing word ‘airborne’ cause it had me in stitches.
Worse or Worser
Worse or worser is extremely difficult to narrow down because there are so many bad things out there. Within an hour of each other, I saw four grown men with rat-tails in varying degrees of disgustingness VS Prince Harry’s lack of hair care care. I just say Harry was refusing to use Charlie’s hair products due to side effects of bizarre SexyTalk.
