Final thoughts on Human Geography and Mass Communication

I came into this class with a decent sense of what human geography was and very little idea of what a mass communications department did. I think it’s a testament to the related nature of these two interdisciplinary departments that, when I went over the syllabus recently, I found it fairly difficult to discern what came from where. Both departments seem to be interdisciplinary convergences of history, sociology, technology studies, and spatial relations. As our class demonstrated, I think there are a few ways in which the actual convergence of the two disciplines is extremely fruitful.

The first is fairly straight-forward and was something talked about in class regularly. Human geography and Mass communications come together well when talking about the industries of mass communication. This was demonstrated well by Zook’s book. The analysis of labor and the economic effects of communication industries seems extremely geographic, and agglomeration regions play a big role in development discourses. I am not entirely sure how much attention mass communications departments pay to the actual economic workings of IT companies, but it seems as though there is a clear relationship between geography and communications when looking into the physicality of technology. Many of the books we read that referenced the city are good examples of this, including Zook most directly but also the two anthologies, on the network society and cities. Castells, too, is an interesting example of this, and I found his work, especially his article on Silicon Valley and Finland, to be a good vision of the intersection between geography and mass communications in an economic development sense. A related line of study would be the interrogation of physical technology infrastructure, notably the work on urban agglomerations but also potentially work that dealt with the creation of places through their interactions with physical infrastructure. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, as both a failed a state and the only place in the world where the material in cell phone chips is mined, seems like a perfect example of the linkages between place and communication technology. Lisa Park's work, which we referenced in class a few times, seems like another great version of a merger of mass communications and geography scholarship. More work that analyzes the physical geography of placeless communication seems like a really interesting direction for scholarship to move in. Zook's attempt to map the internet industry is a great example, but I imagine there are plenty of other research possibilities.

This relates directly to the question of space, and the idea of produced space could have tremendous connections to mass communication. Spaces and places are constructed though a variety of means, with mass communication playing a distinct role. Soundtracks dealt very clearly with these issues, and served as an interesting demonstration of the intersection of media studies and geography. I imagine that very similar books could be written on the construction of places though media, both discursively but also experientially. How is our sense of place altered and constructed through mass communication technologies? And how does the representation of places via the mass media serve to change them in actual, physical terms? I think the potential work on the Congo referenced earlier is one version of this, as well as studies that looked into how spaces change as a result of what media is being broadcast in them. The experiential qualities of space hinge very directly on personal encounters and feelings, so the process of altering spaces through media seems very obvious. An easy example would be the modification of public places through the broadcasting of sports events or political debates - what is the interplay between viewer and broadcaster in the creation of a mediated public place? Additionally, the discursive quality is there as well, and the way in which geographic areas are represented in the media presumably plays a big role in how they are perceived and subsequently experienced. Historians like Robert Beauregard have dealt extensively with the discourses surrounding urban decline, and I am interested in how representations of crime influence tourism and industry creation in urban centers. It seems hard to separate mass communications and geography when thinking about the representations of geographic areas. This then has implications in tourism, economic development, urban renewal, and countless other categories.

I am also interested in the ways in which the logic of communications technology dictates new attempts at theorizing. I think Castells is the most obvious example of this, but Downey's piece on network science is another. Communications networks have a metaphorical power, and the study of Information Technology, by way of geography and mass communications, seems to influence broad theoretical frameworks. I am interested in the network as a distinctly spatial metaphor, and it seems as though both geography and mass communications are needed to properly understand the way in which the metaphor works. I'm not sure where mass communications segues into peer-to-peer communications, but my guess is that the two departments should lay claim to networks as both geographic and communications-based. The humanities can keep post-structuralism.

Ultimately though, I think it is hard to distinguish the two disciplines, which points to both the strengths and weaknesses of both departments. Geography is so unstructured that it is almost impossible to find anything that is not geographic, and there is a severe lack of a canonical focus in the discipline. Key Texts in Human Geography was actually a very helpful book in terms of solidifying my own grasp of the historical progression of the discipline, but ultimately I was left with more questions than answers. The same could be said for mass communications, I would imagine, and I think this speaks to some of the limitations of hugely interdisciplinary work. I would love some thorough engagement with what makes up Geography and where the disciplinary boundaries begin and end, as I imagine that would help geographers to situate their work outside of the discipline. Historically, geographers were able to map icy lakes while advocating against economic polarization using the same methodology, and I think that there is something missing when geography lacks a methodological or substantive foundation. At the same time, there is a strong virtue to interdisciplinary work, as demonstrated by this class, so I'm not entirely comfortable advocating for stronger geographic methodology and focus. We could be in the ideal middle ground at the moment.

In the end, it is somewhat difficult to determine the positive qualities of collaborative work between the two disciplines when it is so hard to determine what the disciplines actually do. I think this class pointed in very useful directions, and I would be interested to see how a strengthened disciplinary focus could either help or harm interdisciplinary work.

Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, by Paul Willis

Willis’ study in Learning to Labor is a study of 12 boys "the Lads" attending the “Hammertown Boys School” from 1972-1975. The book is divided into two sections, ethnography and analysis, which Willis uses both to illustrate and analyze his observations through the lens of Cultural Theory and Marxism. As I read the study, I was intrigued by Willis’ understanding and explanation of how the counter-school culture at Hammertown was created and reproduced and how that same culture went on to be useful in the factories and shop floors of the industrialized world.

Willis’ aim in his research was to look at the way the working class cultural pattern of educational ‘failure’ is achieved. Willis believed that this class pattern was not neutral; it wasn’t a mental category or a set of variables pressing in on the school from the outside. What it was… according to Willis, was a set of experiences, relationships as well as what he termed “systematic relationships,” which set particular choices and decisions at particular times. Willis was interested in how these events are structured--really and experientially--and how these choices came to be defined in the first place (p.1).

We can view the process of cultural reproduction among young, working class boys as a network process of meaning-making and penetration, which Willis defines as containing, “…a certain cruciality in context, embedded and lived insights with respect to their own conditions of existence (*Willis 2004 p. 172).” The Lads understood that the promise of education to lift them out of the working-class world was largely hollow.

As a result of this understanding or penetration “the lads” felt they knew something that other kids [and adults] didn’t know, and were therefore superior to them. They understood that credentials and qualifications didn’t matter in their world, so why try to conform to what teachers and school administration wanted? As a result, “the lads” developed an opposition to authority and rejected conformists. Willis writes, “The Lads specialize in a sort of caged resentment, which always stops just short of outright confrontation” (p. 12).

“The lads” exercised their feelings of superiority through a variety of activities from, “having a laff,” to sexism and racism. Having a laff, occurred whenever the Lads were bored, and consisted of humiliating anybody they could and usually consisted of what we would consider sophomoric pranks, but these pranks could also be cruel and violent. For “the lads,” girls are seen as both sexual objects and domestic comforters. They must be sexually attractive, but not sexually experienced (p.43.) Racism was exercised against the minorities in the Hammertown Boys School and, “racial identity to “the lads” supplanted individual identity (p. 48) According to Willis, “the racism in the counter-school culture is structured by reified though somewhat differentiated stereotypes” (p.49).

The second half of the book focuses on the analysis of Willis’ study and takes a decidedly Marxis approach. Willis writes, “The working class is the only group in capitalism that does not have to believe in Capitalist legitimations as a condition of its own survival” (p.123). The working class exemplifies this belief through labor power and patriarchy i.e. selling one’s labor in exchange for a living and following the rules, about what it is to be a man, handed down by their fathers.

Willis reveals the plight of the working class struggle through his analysis of Learning to Labor. He writes, “Many aspects of “the lads” culture, for instance, are challenging and subversive and remain threatening. There are many breaks, lags, antagonisms, deep struggles and real subversive logics within and behind cultural processes of reproduction which fight for outcomes other than those which satisfy the system for the moment”(p.176).

If you are at all interested in cultural production and reproduction, educational policies, class issues and the notion that we all play a role in the various aspects of society, Learning to Labor is worth the read.
__________________________________________________
* Willis, Paul (2004) Learning to Labor in New Times. Dolby, Nadine and Greg Dimitriadis (Eds.), Twenty five Years On: Old Books New Times. (pp.167-196). New York, NY: Taylor and Francis Books, Inc.

Summary: Jefferson Cowie, 'Capital Moves'

Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves.

Jefferson Cowie’s Capital Moves is a challenging, engaging, and most importantly, readable look into the history of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It is primarily a historical work, but Cowie is well couched in the language of geography, and the book functions as an expose of the conflicts between localized place and the fluidity of space. He articulates this conflict by looking into the history of labor at RCA Plants, noting, “The core of the problem is that the wielders of capital have far greater ability than workers to transcend and use space…Command of spatial relations, therefore, becomes a crucial weapon in management’s arsenal” (185).

Cowie begins his story in Camden, New Jersey, hotbed of industrial unionism and the first plant site for RCA. Emerging from the wireless communications industry around WWI, RCA set up their Camden plant in 1930, and by 1936 employed almost 10,000 people. Looking to avoid industrial conflict through hiring supposedly docile workers, RCA attempted to hire primarily female workers. In 1936, 75% of the workforce was female (17), and this trend continued through most of RCA’s history. In Cowie’s analysis, the search for a docile workforce largely characterized RCA’s entire attitude towards labor, and the constant geographical movement of the company represented a search for increasingly needy labor. In 1936, Camden’s RCA workers walked off their job, and won serious gains after an extremely volatile and violent strike. The strikes were short lived, however: new plants opened in Indiana in 1936, 1940, and 1942, and by 1952, there were only 700 consumer electronics jobs remaining in Camden (33,34). Almost all the RCA jobs moved to Bloomington, IN, in what Cowie refers to as a Regional Division of Labor, a parallel precursor to the New International Division of Labor characteristic of globalization. It is also a sexual division of labor, and Cowie makes this clear when he notes, “Having betrayed their ‘cheapness’ by endorsing a union contract and having undermined their ‘docility’ by partaking in street battles during the strike, Camden women would be replaced with female workers from rural Indiana” (36).

Workers in Bloomington, including women, would prove to be anything but docile. Union activity and workplace activism was a major component of Bloomington workers’ eventual relationship to the plant. RCA set up their plant in 1940, when Bloomington’s two major industries, limestone production and furniture making, were practically nonexistent. There was a palpable desperation for work, and RCA attempted to take advantage of this. At first they were successful, but the company was unable to keep activism out of their plants as time progressed. To Cowie, this is a process that occurs in all RCA plants, as “the simple facts of stress, fatigue, and swollen hands” (4) helped to articulate a “staccato beat of social transformation” (4) that spans the contingency of place. He notes, “As wage earners punched in and punched out over the years, their feelings evolved from a sense of gratitude to the company to one of possession that allowed them to stand up for an expanding notion of their rights” (4).

The result is further movement. As RCA workers began to feel more entitled to certain conditions, and as a shortage of workers rather than jobs allowed RCA workers to organize and strike, management moved production again. This time, the move was to Memphis, TN, a city facing a very similar labor situated to the one in Bloomington before RCA showed up. By the time RCA showed up in 1965, however, the terrain of global capitalism had shifted dramatically. Forced to compete with increased competition from foreign companies, RCA pushed Memphis workers hard, and the result was a dramatic increase in workplace activism, especially in the context of the civil right struggles that were raging in the city. The result was that RCA closed down the plant five years after opening it, and began the long process of moving production to Ciudad Juarez, right over the Mexican border from El Paso, TX.

The move to Juarez follows the same logic as the previous moves: the search for cheap, female labor. RCA found this in droves in Juarez, and soon began to shift all production to Mexico. This is the part of the narrative that is largely commonplace at this point, but Cowie uses it to explicate his broader questions of space and place. Mexican workers make attempts at unionization and workplace activism, much like workers in Camden, Bloomington, and Memphis, and the labor is never as docile as hoped. Like all the other sites though, workers are unable to organize in interregional or international ways. Cowie states, “As the new labor history has shown, the pull of place and community has been a powerful force in labor relations, but the limitations of local identity also create constraints on a more expansive notion of working-class politics in an era in which capital transcends boundaries with complete ease” (182). The result is the same conflict between space and place that has characterized Cowie’s historical narrative. Cowie, as a labor historian, is primarily concerned with the possibilities of international solidarity, yet his work raises questions about place and space in a broad sense, and the ability to find a suitable interaction between the two. Like urban governments caught in transnational capital flows or individual musicians trying to navigate the fluid networks of music consumption, the intersection between locality and fluidity is a hugely important question for scholars of all disciplines.

Cowie ends the book with a story that hints at international solidarity, albeit in a limited and macho sense. Before the 1998 shutdown of the RCA plant in Bloomington, workers received a truckload of chassis with a note attached to the front, addressed to “our RCA Compadres” (201). Inside were a few marijuana joints. In return, RCA workers went taped some copies of Playboy Magazine, and shipped them to their Mexican counterparts. Transnational solidarity, indeed.

Maps and networks

Okay, so this is my contribution to maps in this class. I was quite surprised... and I'm not sure why...when I received a link from the Obama folks about making a difference and getting together for a house party to talk about change. Okay... so deliberation is part of democracy. I get that. What amazed me was the fact that deliberation now comes with MAPS.

The network that was established during the campaign appears to continue to thrive and the map and invitations to various house parties appear to be an attempt at inclusion of the network and inclusion of voices that are typically not heard from. This will be interesting.

So, click on the link and give it a look. I'd love to hear people's comments on this strategy. Has any other president-elect done this?

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/changeiscoming/

REVIEW: Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development

Jennifer Robinson gets right to the point in the first sentence of Ordinary Cities: “It is the argument of this book that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’” (1). By that, she is calling for a post-colonial shift in urban studies and “a form of theorizing that can be as cosmopolitan as the cities we try to describe” (3).

Robinson points out that US and European cities are typically used as the standard for comparison for all cities. This, she argues, limits imaginations of what a city is or can become in academia as well as urban planning. She divides her book into two main ways in which the old dynamics of urban studies are found: “celebrations of urban ‘modernity’ and the promotion of urban development” (2).

Robinson argues that modernity can be understood as the West’s self-definition, which is problematic because 1) it is exclusionary (focuses only on Western cities) and 2) it is illusionary (doesn’t even reflect the dynamic and complex realities of Western cities). This understanding of the city comes from the Chicago School, which focused on the end of kinship ties in and the rationality of the city. Simplified, this literature constructed two sets of modern/traditional dichotomies: urban vs. rural and Western urban vs. non-Western urban. Robinson complicates these attributes of the city by looking at the Manchester School’s research on the Copperbelt cities of Zambia. This research found that tradition was a crucial component of the city: “revising ethnic identity, making connections and forming associations was central” (49). Their research demonstrated that African cities were dynamic (urban studies had traditionally situated non-Western cities as static) and noted that tribalism exists in Western cities as well as non-Western cities.

Robinson then rejects the global cities approach, which focuses on the economically “successful” cities or regions of cities, and the development approach, which focuses on poor cities or economically disadvantaged parts of cities. She wants to take a middle-ground approach and conduct city-wide analyses that account for multiple dynamics within a single city. She cites a City Development Strategy in Johannesburg as an example of inclusive urban development that prioritized policy formations across the city. From a policy perspective, she argues that all cities need to be seen as creative and dynamic and even wealthy cities can learn from poor cities. Viewing all cities as containing unique attributes and networks of relationships allows us to view all cities as ordinary.

Ordinary Cities is an interesting read and makes some useful arguments about modernity and the colonial underpinnings of urban studies, but I do have a few initial criticisms. First, on the policy end, she argues for taking a city-wide approach to urban development, but then indicates that cities are already doing so. If this is the case, why is her call-for-change necessary? Also, I wonder how you include city-wide analyses in comparison without essentializing cities as a whole. Is there still some way that we can organize, if not categorize, cities or parts of cities that have similar or different attributes without creating a typology that gets us away from the “ordinary.” If we accept that all cities are ordinary, then what next?

Book Review Summary - Play Between Worlds (T. L. Taylor)

Play Between Worlds examines video game culture through a four year experience playing EverQuest. Taylor describes culture creation in virtual worlds and the overlap of real world and gaming cultures. This is both a case study and a first-step discussion; it addresses many topics but does not fully flesh out many.

Taylor breaks her chapters into considerations of virtual worlds; high-intensity gaming; women gamers; and ownership of game culture. Throughout, she incorporates ideas on gaming economics, games in mass media and games in the legal system. She argues that game research needs a non-dichotomous framework for considering in- and out-of-game space to fully understand games and technology in society. She is right – unfortunately, her work did not really reflect this proposed frame.

She asks numerous questions about how serious gamers are altering definitions of work, play and fun; how women gamers experience gender identity through gaming; and how developers (and gamers) consider demographics in creating games. Taylor does not, however, follow her argument through to any real life impact of these considerations, leaving gamer social relations and organization separate from the rest of lived experience.

Taylor broadens the focus in considering ownership in a collectively created culture. While corporations assert legal rights to brand and identity, gamers increasingly demand spin-off and ownership rights to characters, avatars and virtual worlds. Taylor passes on specific legal questions of intellectual property and free speech, asking instead if culture is something that can (or should) be regulated.

Play Between Worlds was fun and interesting, but Taylor seems hesitant to make any strong argument and asks an infuriating number of rhetorical questions. While she is concerned solely with culture studies, I would like to expand a few of her topics to address how video games, as an integrated piece of society, are and will shape our understand and negotiation of life.

More Border Radio...

Thanks for the link Brian. Bill Crawford is the co-author of the border radio book I am reviewing. The link you sent compliments the book because hearing the voices adds aesthetic value. How insane that Wolfman Jack was selling baby chicks over the radio!

The irony of us passing around X-radio links should not be overlooked. I love that Dr. Brinkley (the goat gland guy) is still getting airplay. It seems like something he would appreciate considering that he devoted much of his life and his money to getting his voice (and brand) on the air.

Here is another link for more border radio archival audio.

The Arhoolie label also put out a 3 CD set of the Carter Family on XET (see photo above). Arhoolie is a national treasure.

NPR Should Start Paying Me...

I just listened to an episode of Here on Earth that focuses on this project called Urban Earth run by Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geographer at the Langtree School. Similar to Google Street, they are trying to capture still images of cities by starting at one side and walking to the other, taking a picture every 8 steps. The goal is demystify mega cities and show that there is much more to these cities than what is traditionally represented in the media.

If you're interested, here is the story...http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_081021k.cfm

There's not much on the website yet, but you can check it out here...http://www.urbanearth.co.uk/

Also, this summer On the Media had an interesting segment on border radio if Jim sparked your interest...http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/07/04/07

A Rape in Cyberspace

Here's a link to the Julian Dibbell article.
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html

Turns out Julian is a he.

The Geography of the Internet Industry - 1st Half

I actually found this book to be a surprisingly easy read. And before I get into the substance, I also want to point out that (for those of us who came in with know really geographic training), of all of the books we've read, this was the easiest to understand as geography. By which I mean it probably was the most cartographic book that we've read - I was pleasantly surprised how many maps there were in the book, and how well they explained the data, and how well the text utilized that information. I also thought the book did a good job of balancing the quantitative and qualitative research, but more on that later.

CHAPTER 1: UNCOVERING THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNET INDUSTRY

Mostly Zook defining his terms. He tells us what the Internet is, and a little bit about how it got there (more in the next chapter). He also tells us how he defines "Internet industry," a term that could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. So, for our purposes, there are three criteria: 1) a business model that either is primarily Internet based, or that wouldn't work without the Internet; 2) expectation of extraordinarily fast growth (more on that in CHAPTER 4); and 3) financial backing from risk investors looking for big returns.

More important, though, is that he tells us up front that he doesn't buy into the notion that the Internet is placeless or that it renders space insignificant. "The development of the Internet industry is fundamentally embedded in geography and defies simple expectations of diffusion and the demise of cities and instead illustrates the continued importance of particular regional and urban nodes in an increasingly globalized economy" (p. 5).

He also misspells "Foosball" (fussball?).

CHAPTER 2: ORIGINS AND SHAPE OF THE INTERNET

A short historical background, from ARPANET to Mosaic and beyond. Zook uses this to lay the groundwork for the argument that some places had head starts, that other places quickly made up ground, and that the Internet really is made up of many connected places. He uses maps and tables to show us how use of the Internet grew, but also says that's not the best measure of what's going on in cyberspace. He also shows that peculiarities of place can be informative, sayig cultural factors in Japan may be responsible for the relative dearth of domains in an otherwise wired society.

CHAPTER 3: MAPPING THE INTERNET INDUSTRY

Zook first argues that the Internet is largely an urban phenomenon, clustered around a few major (and key) cities. In particular, I liked how he connected to the previous chapter (something I thought he did well throughout the book), noting that Washington, D.C., began as the leading hub for domains, but was quickly surpassed by San Francisco, New York and LA when the Internet went commercial. By presenting and comparing data on domains, domains per host, and major Web sites, Zook establishes a sort of Internet heirarchy (San Francisco, good; Chicago, not so much). I also like how he demonstrates that some standard measures are less effective than they might seem, showing that while Internet use grew quickly throughout the U.S., the Internet industry remained concentrated in a few key cities.

CHAPTER 4: ECONOMIC CLUSTERS, KNOWLEDGE CIRCULATION, AND VENTURE CAPITAL

Zook argues that most scholars get it wrong when they assume "the uniformity and perfect mobility of capital" (p. 40). While money may be invested anywhere with little effort, that doesn't mean venture capitalists don't think about location. He says that the Internet industry, like all industry, is influenced by factors such as government support, availablity of human capital, and infrastructure. However, Zook argues that what's more important than any (or even all) of those individual factors is whether people know how to best make use of them in concert 0 a sort of networking of resources (human, civil and governmental). Here, we get to his discussion of knowledge (I still don't really like that "tacit knowledge" thing) and its transfer. We also begin to meet venture capital, and to see how that system is set up. It, too, relies on networking - investors (from individuals to banks and pension funds) networking with "venture capitalists" and entrepreneurs, capital funds networking with each other so that each can supply a small amount of support for a project. He also notes that entrepreneurs often value venture capital for the contacts (networks) it provides ("[A] survey of 464 venture capital-funded entrepreneurs . . . found that "capital" was consistently the least important variable in an entrepreneur's decision. Entrepreneurs were primarily interested in establishing connections with venture capitalists wh could help recruit management, provide contacts with other key actors, lend credibility to their company, and contribute to overall firm strategy.") (p. 56) as much as for the money itself.

CHAPTER 5: CONNECTING VENTURE CAPITAL TO THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNET INDUSTRY

Here, Zook argues that the primary connection between the Internet industry and venture capital is the desire to get big fast - in the Wild West that is the Internet economy, estabishing a reputation is more important than having an actual product. And the capital recognized that, being willing to spend for something that might pay off big time. Here, again, he argues that there is a localism to the Internet, both from the side of capital ("Why should I even drive down to Redwood City [approximately 25 miles south of San Francisco] to see a company when I have more quality business plans that I can hope to review here?") and from the entrepreneurs ("A lot of people either come to [Silicon] Valley or spend a tremendous amount of time out here because this is . . . what did that guy say about robbing banks? . . . This is where the money is.") (p. 61). Here, too, is where I thought he did a good job of blending the qualitative (much of this chapter is essentially ethnography) with the quantitative - I have no idea what a "multivariate linear regression" is (maybe one of you quantoids can explain it to me over about 9 beers), but I know that Zook used one to show how things such as available tech jobs, an educated work force and available venture capital all combined to create the ideal environment in places where the Internet industry flourished most.

That's it. On to the second half . . .

The Geography of the Internet Industry - 2nd Half

The second half of Zook’s book was easy to swallow but tough to digest without a little discomfort. Having seen many of the aspects first hand, I find it difficult to accept some of the ‘environmental’ factors that he calls out as short-sided economic planning in the emerging internet age. The push-pull relationship between investors and technology companies often openly ignored some of the fundamental, established practices that kept the doors open for years at traditional brick and mortars. Some attention was given in the book to the complicated nature of venture capitalism, but I’m hoping in class we can discuss the nuanced role of core employees within the financed companies. Additionally, investment funds were often spent for the sake of depletion, in an attempt to cast a wider net for the next round of funding.

It is surprising that the book ends so abruptly without exploring the implications of the dot-com crash. Expectations by both investors and employees were seriously altered as a result of unusually high returns and baseless salaries. The book was published before the current financial situation could be seen, but Greenspan cut interest rates as a direct result of the financial crisis in the tech sector. The low interest rates fueled a sharp increase in real estate sales, with many nontraditional (including subprime) loans getting approved. It took awhile for the process to occur on a national level, but the fallout includes the current $700 billion bank bailout. It’s a bit off topic, but relevant when considering the geographical implications.

Obama Map

In reference to our earlier conversations about where and how we encounter maps; I found this Barack Obama’s Journey to the White House map when I visited Google Maps a few days ago.

http://www.mibazaar.com/obama_igoogle.html

Researching Cybercultures

The utility of “Researching Cybercultures” is not that it presents any new knowledge but rather the rich literature upon which it is drawn. Essentially Bell is concerned with research methodologies and ethics in cyberspace research and its related debates. Bell positions cyberspace as a site with questionable intellectual rigor, who’s the expert, and denotes its ephemeral nature all of which could prove problematic for researchers.

The bulk of the reading concentrates on textual analysis and cyber-ethnographies as “useful” methods and the unique ethical considerations one faces in cyberspace research. Textual analysis, in this case, is just the transference of an off-line method to the online environment, investigating style, layout, relationships with other texts, and “multimedianess” etc. However, the blurred lines between producer/consumer, and “intertextuality” of web documents can make textual analysis in cyberspace more challenging.

Is cyberspace a site for fieldwork? For many researchers virtual ethnography is thought the best and cost effected methods for getting at the rich data contained in chat, email, and “MUD/MOO sessions.” The biggest debate here appears to center on verifiability which gets into a larger debate on adaptability in new spaces. Many feel that cyberspace is a new world with different realities and thus, methodologies and researchers should evolve to meet these new dynamics.
The ethical considerations were perhaps the most thought provoking. Is masquerading in cyberspace wrong? Is that what people do in cyberspace? Does asking a series of questions count as spam? Are chat rooms and discussion lists public or private space? These are some of the unique ethical considerations faced by cyberspace researchers. Unfortunately Bell provides little in the way of answers to these questions; but perhaps that is beyond his scope here.

Artists of networks in network

We haven't really talked about artists, and I just ran into one. His name is Jonathan Harris. He's a programmer who develops attractive and intuitive ways to monitor the content that's moving around on the net.

He has one piece called "We feel fine" that searches blog posts for the phrase "I feel" and grabs the sentence. He presents these sentences, and then offers a few tools to break down, such as weather, location, gender and so on. Right now, the word "accomplished" is coming up 5.5 times the normal level. Feeling better is more common than bad, but bad is more common than good, at the moment.

You can find this and other artworks at his website:
http://www.number27.org/

"We feel fine" came out in 2006, but you could find a similar presentation while the election results were coming in on the New York Times website.

When I think of artists as people who digest, simplify, and help us understand ourselves and our society, pointing out things we might have trouble seeing or have trouble accepting. I usually don't think of them doing this in respect to the internet. The net seems more like a commercial and expressive space. I like how this artist has positioned himself as a digester, between me and internet content, and that he is maintaining an identity as an artist. Not a web designer or a company. He's in deft command of technology, but doesn't identify primarily with it. He isn't constructing the messages, either, he's helping me focus on them, because without him, they would be scattered all over.

Somehow it's stuck in my mind.

Geography of the Internet Industry, Assorted Comments

While reading The Geography of the Internet Industry, or, all about venture capital, the links between knowledge and capital brought to mind Foucault. We often think of the power/knowledge couplet, but books like Zook’s really highlight the money/knowledge relationship for me. Try replacing “power” with “capital” in the following passage from Discipline and Punish (which I am reading for my other class):

“We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitutive field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”  Kind of scares me!

On the capital note, did anyone else get annoyed with Zook’s attributing some person Martin with the idea that money is a social relation?!

Also, I am curious to know what other people thought of Zook’s employment of the term tacit knowledge throughout the book. For example Zook concludes, “Thus, while capital in the most general sense of the word, i.e., money, provided the fuel for many Internet companies, in many ways it was the transmission of tacit knowledge of the venture capitalist that was perceived as the more valuable element” (p. 58). Even though he gives examples, it was easier for me to understand what counts as qualified knowledge than what tacit knowledge might be.

Several of the books we have read in this class have made me consider the relationship between geography and knowledge. I wonder why we have read about “knowledge” in terms of technology. That seems limiting to me. What is knowledge? And what is its geography?

I wanted to say something positive about Zook. I thought I might applaud his use of both quantitative and qualitative research. Some of the quotations from venture capitalists were great. But . . . I am pretty sure that we learned in qualitative methods class that making a point, then picking a quote to support it, making another point, picking a quote to support it—is not the best way to write up what one learns from interviews. It got distracting. But I lost the geography lessons after the first couple of chapters of this book anyway.

A final thought on music

While watching music videos as a way of avoiding real work, I found myself thinking about the ways in which I have structured places by associating music with them. I suppose this is not all that original of a thought, and we may have talked about it in class, but it is nonetheless interesting to think about music in the role of place-making. Or, in this case, conceptual place-making.

I'm reminded slightly of Mike Davis' work on LA, and the ways in which the film industry has constructed a particular mythology of LA. I wonder if there are great musically-defined cities that stand out to y'all. I'm particularly tied to images of Kinshasa and Lagos that I've encountered though African music of the 70s. These are places that I, at one point, had no non-musical point of reference for, but have a fairly well developed mental image of both. I've created largely mythical images of a place, and I think its interesting to think about these visions, and also communal visions. How did (does?) Motown structure the making of Detroit, both politically (or lyrically) but also in terms of sound? I remember touring the Stax Records Museum in Memphis and watching a video where Rufus Thomas talked about how once Soul Music hit the South, it turned dirtier and uglier. Its a common but nonetheless great thought, and one that I think directly relates to the construction of place though music, and the inverse, the construction of music through place.

I'm particularly interested in the actual sounds of music in terms of place-making and not the lyrics. Tempo and sound seem crucial to my conceptual understanding of place, so thinking about the sonic differences between hip hop from Houston or hip hop from Miami gives me a totally different read on the feel of the cities. The same could be said for a variety of different genres and cities and readings and misreadings and I imagine the result is that conceptual schemes help to create the realities of particular places. There is no Memphis without Elvis, ultimately.

Web Science: Understanding and Engineering the Internet

Read this article Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Futur, co-authored by the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee.

It's great to see the acknowledgment that the Web is more than technical, but must be considered though social and political (and geographical) approaches as well.

One of many interesting points raised is that of "scale-free" networks, which characterize how particular nodes have many more connections to and from them than other nodes. This insight proved useful beyond the realm of the virtual, however, and is incorporated into citation analysis and biology.

And a lot of other goodies ...

sound tracks -- the first part, with frustration

The most succinct summary of the first part of this book would be, "Music has been used in many ways by all sorts of people and organizations in different places to many ends; and through all this flow themes of place and identity on different scales." Actually, it could probably be even more succinct, "Look at all the music in the world, la la la la!" And yes, I'm feeling snide. While I found interesting tidbits in this book, and while I think it has opened my musical horizons with the case studies, the material on the whole I found uncompelling and largely descriptive. Since most of us engage in some musical culture, I think many of us are aware on some level of the cultural milieu that we are participating in. How did we choose to be part of one musical culture or another? This choice is something that most humans don't get wrong. (Am I wrong about that?) The discussions offered here are adventures in the wide diversity of musical activity across the globe, but the diversity is more often overwhelming than enlightening, repeating pictures that we ourselves experience, instead of providing a strong framework for analysis or further understanding. That said, I will try to outline the first part of the book around issues and stories that appear repeatedly more than on their resolution or discussion.

Fluidity and fixity, whether real, imagined, or constructed, seem to play a big role in music, but the way we group musics popularly doesn't follow these qualities in a clear way. Folk music is a good example. Folk appears to be remade every generation or so. A new wave of music arrives on the scene, and starts "tainting" what came before, and people branch out to collect or preserve the "untainted" music (and identity) of the past. The preserved, fixed, music became folk, while the living music moved on. I find this weird, since the qualities of the music before preservation, such as change, loss, life, and connection, are not really part of the music once preserved, so it isn't really the same beast at all. And then there are musics, such as rock and roll, that now would qualify as folk (I sang them in elementary school), except that no one had to preserve them. Once a music crosses the fluidity fixity line, should we rename the genre? Anyway, a more stable difference between folk and other music might be the level of commodification, where folk could be defined as music that is indivisible from the politics, religious, communicative practices in a local group (a fluid music), whereas other musical forms are more entwined in entertainment and culture industries, and often recorded for distribution (fixed music). However, our terms for musics tend to stick more to the sounds, the material part of the music, than to the practice of it, and so the ideas of fluidity and fixity have only so much prominence. Fluidity and fixity do not seem to me to be inherently geographical, either, but if one considers the role of globalization of culture and technology, it becomes clearer how they are useful concepts for geographers.

These processes of preserving and innovating, fixity and fluidity, are part of a larger process of constructing credibility or authenticity, which are often bound up in rhetorics of place and identity. The common perspectives of people from one place in apposition to another place have caused audiences to coalesce around genres. Rap is inner city, country is rural, punk is suburbia, metal is deiundistrialization and so forth. Similarly, common identities of ethnicity or nationality also causes people to group in their musical interests. In some ways, how a musician might connect with the audience depends on what scale they're trying to establish a connection with. For example, many Swedish bands have grown to global prominence by not claiming authenticity or Swedishness. However, other genres, such as American country music, depend strongly on images of rural life and values, however idealized. Themes of place seem to resonate globally fairly well, as for example many rural populations around the world listen to and emulate country music, whereas nationality or ethnicity probably doesn't carry well beyond borders, and may not carry well even within them.

Some places come to prominence for their musical scenes or unique sound identities. Musicians often seem very aware of where they are, and channel the vibes of a particular place into their music. Listeners, when they are aware where the musician is from, seem to channel it as well. Sometimes this comes out in lyrics, but often lyrics are vague as to direct places. Music as a whole seems to give off senses of places, but you could say it gives off senses of all kinds of things, places being one type among many, so I'm not sure how this is useful as a guiding concept. Music may convey messages of mobility. Both people and music moves from place to place, cross fertilizing all over the globe. Advancing technology has strongly affected music, whether in how far it moves (across the world), or in where it moves to (the living room). Some music, such as western music, has moved further and more deeply into other places, probably due to capitalism.

The paragraph you just read is terrible. I know. I've been frustrated for days writing this summary! I can't seem to find anything in this book that doesn't add together to anything besides "varying," multiple," or "different." While I think recognizing change and differences are important, if you put it all into a heap, it will stay a heap. We already know that the world is full of diversity! Dig in deeper! The text boxes and the parts of the text incorporated context and more complete discussions of real places and musics were more effective for me, and should have been capitalized on. This book has missed something in that the world that we live in is the geography that organizes music into something comprehensible. If we take the world out, it stops making any overall sense. If you take the world out, you have to put something else in place to keep it from imploding, and these authors have failed to do that.

Please, tell me I'm wrong. Geography and music shouldn't be incompatible!

Malls as public space

For those interested in reading Bock v. Westminster Mall, I think I figured out how to upload that into my MyWisc space. Try https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lewerenz/BockvWestminsterMall.doc and let me know if it works.

Optional Readings: Secondary Worlds (James Kneale) and Cinematic Cities (Maria Helena B. V. da Costa)

da Costa (looking at film) and Kneale (looking at science fiction literature) suggest a methodology for a geographical interpretation of representations of place. They examine the difference between representations of place and realities of place, looking for the cultural politics, interpretations and commentary embedded in those differences. Representations give new meaning to the lived experience of places and spaces, which translates into an influence on action in or reaction to place.

Both da Costa and Kneale consider the geography of texts: the pace of characters’ action and experience; the relationship of places to characters and plot; and the meanings and functions of places, both as part of the in-text action and as paralleled with reality. How places are represented (writing of the smells on a city street or showing a panoramic skyline) and the denotations of those representations (a character said to feel at home or the upbeat music in a scene) give meaning to places in texts.

Kneale warns against placing too much emphasis on a writer: the important things are the differences between the fictional world and the real (not the writer's) world, and the reader's interpretation (not the author's intention) of meaning in a work.

da Costa, however, does consider how the filmmaker’s own experience informs feelings about and presentation of a place. She also considers that representations of place are never solely informed by direct experience, they are also informed by other representations; and that interpretation of texts is subject to influences of place and space. (For example, a viewer’s interpretation of a movie is dependent on viewing place (at home or in a theater), space (alone or with friends) and mediation (private reflection or group discussion).)

While da Costa and Kneale give interesting explanations of how geography can inform textual analysis, I am unfortunately still unsure of how textual analysis can inform geography.