A Place in Space: December 2005 Archives

Little Brother calls during bowling (affection flows back). Blood brother suffers. Parental pathology is passed on. I dream randomly.

SEMP subjected me to the most intensive grilling I’ve yet received over the Informed Consent form for Reflexivity. :-) The beginning point was this “favorite sentence”:

The guidelines used for selecting material have to do with intrasubjectively-perceived salience in the moment,…

The individual words make sense, but what do I mean by stringing them together in this way? Most simply, what I mean is, “I decide”. Yet the consent form puts limits on this power. The different choices people make concerning their own consent establish certain conditions that I commit to operate within – each individual’s decision contributes to a structure of accountability for me. Why do I need to be accountable to others in this way? Why not just rely on my own personal integrity? Because any kind of integrity requires a supporting structure and I’ve had no other. The academic language adds (hypothetically) a precision that seeks to specify the rationale justifying the choices I make.

I’m quizzed about “public” and “private”. “There’s no such thing as privacy,” says Jesus Evil Kachina. Intersubjectivity theorists (whoever these might be, smile) agree: we all mutually co-construct each other through acts of calling (instead of/in addition to "mission", also identity: interpellation). In commonsense terms, one could say we do this through culture (norms, values, etc).

“I don’t know if I want to be a blog! “ A log? A bog? “It sounds like a glob.!” A lob?

Anuj collected several accounts already, including a link back to a rant on stupid people.

Seems he's been having a bad run-o-luck in the vehicular department. :-( Maybe it's because he reads while driving? What the heck is Mobile Eye? I bet that's what beat me out for company. Jeez. You know it's bad when Research beats Roadtrip.

"The crises in the media are the crises of the media." Geert Lovink + Shuddhabrata Sengupta, in their preamble to a workshop on The Uncertain States of Reportage hosted by Sarai-Waag in March, 2003.

"If the spectacle of the crisis becomes quotidian, banal and commonplace, does it make sense to speak of a ‘crisis’ any more, as a temporally distinct phenomenon, a time apart from the rhythms of normal time? Or does this overproduction of crises give us an opportunity to reflect on the making and unmaking of crises, their announcement and forgetting? Does it allow us to ask questions about media in crisis with themselves, about their offerings of uncertain truths to shadowy audiences[?]"