thinking at the interface

I caught video pod on Current the other day about what they were calling “sponsored” documentaries (unfortunately, the pod is no longer up, which makes me suspicious).  The more precise term might be “corporate-sponsored” documentaries.   One example is the documentary “Drive and Deliver,” which is directed by Brett Morgan about three truckers as they drove across the U.S.   The film is sponsored by International Trucks, a division of Navistar, and all three truckers are driving new “International LoneStars,” a type of truck made by the company.  The film opened at the Angelika in Dallas (as well as at a trade show).  In effect then, the film itself is a 45-minute product placement ad rather than simply the artistic expression of the film’s director.  In this format, content is no longer interrupted by commercials, instead the content and the commercial are one and the same.

Calling these kinds of films “corporate sponsored” still doesn’t quite capture what’s happening with these, however, because the sponsorship and the point-of-view of the corporate underwriter are somewhat hidden.  Take another example, the documentary series  “America’s Heartland,” which airs on PBS.  Visitors to their website and potential viewers are invited to:

Celebrate our nation’s generous earth and the people who work it as America’s Heartland travels across the land and follows our food from farm and ranch to fork and table. 

While it does say, in small text, on the bottom of the “About the Show,” link that the series is sponsored by biotech giant, The Monsanto Company, the casual viewer could easily miss this.   And, indeed, many environmental, consumer, agriculture and media groups have objected to Monsanto’s sponsorship of the documentary series and the corporation’s influence on the content and point-of-view.    One critic, Chris Cooper, a spokesperson for Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), makes an apt analogy when he says:

“While it might be fine for Exxon to fund a program on Masterpiece Theatre, it wouldn’t be for a documentary on oil.”

All of which has me thinking about how these (corporate)sponsored documentaries which blur the lines between journalism, advertising and documentary filmmaking are similar to cloaked sites.    Cloaked sites, as I’ve written about here before, are published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to deliberately disguise a hidden political agenda.  They’re basically a new media form of propaganda.  These (corporate)sponsored documentaries are forms of propoganda as well, often linked to websites that further obfuscate the political agenda of those funding the films.    The increasing subtlety of persuasion and propaganda, and the sharp decline in critical thinking through de-funding educational system strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

For a couple of weeks, the “away” sign on my gmail just said “mourning.”  I still feel that way, but I’m beginning to feel the inexorable pull of life, moving onward.

I’m also able to concentrate a little more now, so I expect the blogging various places to pick up pace.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve also let several things drop.  So, if answering an email or following up with you is one of those things that got dropped, I do apologize.

Today, I’m going to a funeral for an 8-year-old boy.  That is just so wrong on so many levels.   His name was Alexander Toulouse, known as Zander, and I knew him his whole, short life.  I don’t especially like kids - just not my thing - but Zander was an extraordinary kid.    He was wicked smart, funny and engaging.  One of my favorite things about him was that he loved “Dancing with the Stars.”  I remember one conversation with him about the show in which he was completely conversant about who all the contestants were, what he thought about their chances of winning, and how he couldn’t believe one particular celebrity had been voted off.   I love anyone that can talk pop culture, and Zander was a gifted observer of this particular eddy of popular culture.

Zander’s parents, Chris and Bonnie, are some of my oldest and dearest friends.  I taught with Chris at Hofstra University.  We both lived in Brooklyn at the time and we used to do the reverse commute out to Hempstead, Long Island via the LIRR.

I was friends with Chris and Bonnie long before Zander came along, and I still remember the conversation in which Bonnie said that in talking with a group of art-friends about “five year plans” she realized that she wanted her next five years to include a kid.   So, with that, Zander appeared not long afterward.  Chris and Bonnie were such great parents because they simply and without fuss incorporated Zander into their lives as they existed already.  Even as a really little kid, Zander went to the art studio with his mom, and on class field trips with his dad.    Just recently, while Bonnie and Zander were visiting her dad in Florida, we had Chris over for dinner and he talked with such delight about Zander and their adventures together.

It is still incomprehensible to me that Zander is gone.   And, I have no way of understanding how difficult this must be for Chris and Bonnie.  I just know that Zander was an extraordinary kid, and that kids don’t necessarily come that way.  He was exceptional because he was wanted and he was well-loved by two amazing people.  I will always remember what a great kid he was, and I will miss the man he never got to become, and the conversations about pop culture we won’t have.

It’s a new week and I’m continuing the “newness” meme here with yet another announcement of newness.  Starting next week, I’ll have a new title, new position, and a new affiliation.   Beginning September 1, 2008 (aka, next week) I’ll be Associate Professor of Sociology at Mercy College.  Mercy College has five campuses around the NYC-area, and I’ll be teaching at the main Dobbs Ferry campus, just north of the city, and at the Manhattan campus, near Herald Square.   This move to Associate (from “Visiting Assistant”) marks a promotion for me and I’m very excited about that, and looking forward to a new (there’s that word again) set of challenges.

And, another thing.  I am delighted to report that I’ve been invited to launch a group blog for the ASA, called Contech.   This new blog will explore the “sociological imagination for the digital era.”  And, it also gives me a chance to work with my long-time friend and former colleague, Chris Toulouse.  As I get this new blog venture up and running, I’ll also spend some time figuring out whether I want to keep this blog going, and if so, what I want to do with this space.

In the meantime, you can follow my periodic updates via Twitter.

Also in the new-project category, I’m launching an interview project with bloggers who identify as “feminist,” however they define that term.  The goal is to do at least 30 interviews, either face-to-face or phone depending on geography, over the next three months or so. Those in-depth interviews will last about an hour.  I’ve used SurveyMethods (because “survey monkey” is just too embarrassing to say) to set up a little pre-screening survey.   Know a feminist who blogs?  Please point them toward this link:

http://www.jessiedanielsphd.com/survey.html

And, please forward this link widely to your networks. Thanks!

Apparently, I’ve taken something of an unintentional haitus from this blog.   This summer sort of got away from me and I had to let go of several things, like this. The upside is that I’ve been able to launch a couple of new research projects, have an offer from another publisher for a new book and an offer to edit a book series, in addition to lots of other news that I’ll post over the next couple of weeks.

Today, I just want to post a short note about one of the new research projects I’ve launched which is a digital ethnography, following on Sarah Pink’s work.  I’m still trying to figure out what, exactly, this will look like, but this is a start.  Comments are welcomed!   More about other new-ness in the next few days.

A while back, I mentioned Errol Morris’ latest film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” and highly recommended. (In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing it again.) The reason I’m mentioning it again today is that Morris’ film was released along with a co-authored book of the same name (written with Philip Gourevitch). And, this combined book/documentary creation and simultaneous release is also true of a film that premieres tonight on PBS called “Traces of the Trade,” directed, produced, and written by Katrina Browne. The book is called, Inheriting the Trade, and is written by Thomas Norman DeWolf. This is the wave of the future, my friends, mark my words. We will increasingly see non-fiction books combined with documentary films geared for (near) simultaneous release. I’m not great at predicting future trends, but considered this one called. This is really good news for those of us in the classroom, and it fits in nicely with the teaching strategy I’ve discussed here before of combining documentary films with scholarly readings. Now, if I could only think of a name for this trend, maybe I could get this idea published and funded. Suggestions for naming this trend are welcomed! I can pay in acknowledgments.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article up now called “Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture,” by Jeffrey R. Young. Here’s the first bit of the article:

Dalton A. Kehoe, an associate professor of communication studies at York University, in Toronto, has for decades won teaching awards and praise for his lectures. So when he was asked to do his first online course, a couple of years ago, he was excited to head into a studio to capture his 50-minute talks on video. When the recordings went online, however, they were anything but hits. The main complaint: They were much too long. “It was the most extremely boring thing my students had ever seen,” Mr. Kehoe acknowledges. His course evaluations, usually glowing, grew dismal. “I had to sit to down and look at these lectures and realize that when you’re looking at someone online as a talking head and shoulders in video, you just want to kill yourself after about 20 minutes,” he says with a laugh. So, for the first time in his 40 years of teaching, he decided to overhaul his lectures. He broke them up into 20-minute segments, each focusing on a narrow topic. Other professors who have ventured into online education have made the same discovery: Just because 50-minute classroom sessions are the norm on a college schedule does not make that the ideal duration for students outside the lecture hall.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold for passing this along, and for some interesting discussion following that article. Thinking of lectures in “modules” and in smaller chunks than 50 minutes I think is a smart strategy. It forces those of us at the front of the classroom to re-think what it is we really want to get across and how best to do it. There’s nothing inherently valuable, pedagogically, about the 50-minute time slot that so many of us have to deal with, these are just institutionally convenient chunks of time.

I ran across this story that is a fairly dramatic illustration of the way that digital video can be a transformative technology in the hands of the least powerful in society.  Women from 80 villages in the Medak district in India have created 12 films that chart their experience regaining autonomy over food production, seeds, natural resources, markets and autonomous media.  Under the organizational umbrella of Community Media Trust, the collective of women farmers launched their multi-media effort, titled “Affirming Life and Diversity: Rural Images and Voices on Food Sovreignty,” which includes a series of films that emerged from the action research project on sustaining local food systems, agricultural biodiversity, and livelihoods supported by fair and participatory trade.   Here’s a an excerpt from the end of the article:

t an interactive session here, Masanagiri Narasamma, 35, related how the community-led PDS taught them to revive locally-grown crops such as sorghum and millets and create local systems of storage and reach out to the most vulnerable in society.

As if to prove a point, Ms. Narasamma took out her video camera and shot the proceedings of the interactive session. Even while she was on the dais, she continued to shoot. She said they failed to relate to the advertisement-oriented form of story-telling and want to tell their success-story their own way.

“I am a seed-keeper. I store a variety of valuable seeds in the baskets in my house and with them, the knowledge of farming, environment and life. Since I learnt to use the camera, I am storing the knowledge of my communities on film and interpreting them for the world,” said Sooramma, who is in her late 40’s.

Ms. Narasamma, a dalit, said they were not allowed entry into temples and rich homes earlier. “But now even the rich allow us to touch them to pin the lapel-mike on them for a video-shoot.” While continuing with their collective, the women now plan to replicate their on-farm and off-farm activities and show the way to the world through their films.

Powerful stuff.