Slacktivism, or: Elisa feels bad about saying that philanthropy might not always be awesome

Posted on August 1, 2011 by | 2 comments

This New York Times 2010 article, which I think ends rather too optimistically, discusses two instances of the Red Cross’ use of Twitter to help raise funds from the US after a typhoon in the Philippines and the following earthquake in Haiti a few months later. After the typhoon, the Red Cross’ toll-free donation number was a trending topic on Twitter; the article says that thousands of people were posting it and asking their followers to donate – but, in spite of all of the Twitter attention, there wasn’t any noticeable change in donations. After the Haiti earthquakes, the Red Cross launched a similar Twitter campaign, but instead of having to call a number, people could just text a single word to a certain number to donate $10. The Red Cross raised 3 million dollars in 48 hours.

Beyond the moral and ethical questions about slacktivism, simple practical issues interest me: how much people’s altruism increases in relation to its ease, if distanced giving lets us avoid the overwhelming sense of incompleteness and unending need that often comes from volunteering or working for charities in RL…

And yeah, social networking has done wonders for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to communicate or have a way to organize themselves – the election protests in Iran, for example. But I’m talking about things like the hunger site, where you go to their adful page and click a button to give “the value of 1.1 cups of food” to feed the hungry (also, now, to support education, veterans, abandoned pets, mammograms, the rainforest…), or care2.com, which has a similar “click once to give” thing as well as a “Petition Site” which literally has a “Today’s Hottest Petitions” link on their home page.

It seems like each separate out-of-borders emergency or consistently-in-need-of-funding-issue has a random YouTube video’s chance at viraldom to make it in to the public’s consciousness long enough for us to donate to it.

Yeah, every dollar that’s made via slacktivism, either the free advertiser-supported kind or the donate-easily-via-texting kind, does work. But the satisfied well-that’s-my-good-deed-for-the-week feeling that such distanced altruism gives is worrisome, because it instills a conclusive, complacent feeling that will ultimately be the death of any culture’s drive towards public service and philanthropy.

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The Batgirl of San Diego: Diversity in the DC Universe

Posted on July 28, 2011 by | 14 comments

Yesterday I was blessed with the opportunity to interview “The Batgirl of San Diego,” a woman who was at this year’s SDCC [San Diego Comic-Con] dressed as Stephanie Brown’s alter-ego. While she was there she appeared at every DC panel and asked questions which were met with responses ranging from indifference to open hostility. Gotham’s Batgirl may have rid the city streets of crime, but San Diego’s fights to ask why there aren’t more women in comics.

She responded with more thoroughness and thoughtfulness than even I expected, so I asked as many questions as I could before our time was up.

Evan: You made quite a scene at this year’s Comic-Con. Could you explain to us in a few short sentences what exactly went down?

SDB [San Diego Batgirl]: I don’t know that I would say that I ‘made a scene.’ I attended several of the DC Comics panels and asked questions about what I saw as a lack of female presence, both in comic books and on the panels. The audience, while receptive initially, eventually seemed to grow angry that I was asking these questions.  The main questions were simple: “Where are the women?” in response to the fact that there was not a single solo title cover featuring a woman in the entire Justice League line-up (though I believe Wonder Woman is supposed to be included), “Are you committed to hiring more women?” in response to the fact that the panels I attended were entirely male with only two exceptions, and one addressed to the room asking whether people there would buy and read a comic written about a strong, intelligent female protagonist.

Evan: Do you believe that DC has a large number of strong female characters?

SDB: The female characters DC has are definitely strong.  But let me give you some statistics presented by another women at one of the panels. She went through and counted, and out of 98 prominent figures on the covers, 27 were women.  Out of 28 single character titles, six were women.  As you can see, about a quarter of the DC universe lead characters are female – which means that the other 75% are male.  On the other hand, there are many existing female characters that aren’t being used or are being underused.  If DC were to bring these existing characters more prominently into the spotlight, it would be easy to make this ratio a little less extreme. Continue reading →

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The Debt Ceiling: A Summary for People Who Don’t Know What The Debt Ceiling Is

Posted on July 25, 2011 by | 3 comments

So if you live in or have heard of the United States then you’ve probably heard lots of people talking about the whole debt ceiling deal, and if you’re the average internet peruser you probably have no idea what they’re talking about most of the time. Honestly, neither do I. So I’ve spent the last while skimming only the best Wikipedia articles, clicking on every relevant link on the New York Times website, and harrassing my one (1) political-science-inclined friend to get a very general idea of what all is going on – I call it The Grossly Simplified and Possibly Only Pseudo-Accurate Debt Ceiling for English Majors: A Love Story.source: www.sodahead.com

Background: Debt is accrued, kind of obviously, when the government spends more than its revenue.  In order to keep funding public programs and paying gov’t salaries, etc., Congress basically sells debt to people, and according to somewhere in the Constitution, Congress is the only thing that can borrow money on the America’s credit. So back in the day, like founding-of-the-US-through-the-early-20th-century-day, Congress had to individually approve every time it borrowed money.  During WWI, we were borrowing so much money on credit (i.e., selling debt to people and countries) that Congress decided to kind of streamline the process and just say, “eh, it’s all approved – just don’t go over . . . let’s say 11.5 billion dollars” [not adjusted for inflation].  Since then, each time the US debt was approaching the debt ceiling limit, congress would raise the limit – which has happened like 76-78 times, depending on who you ask.

And so the current debt ceiling (it’s like 14 trillion and something) was “reached” sometime in March, and the government can’t borrow any more money – so we’ve just been paying the interest on our loans. But we’re going to run out of money to pay that interest pretty soon, about August 3, is what’s been estimated, so we either have to raise the debt ceiling or default on our loans, which is basically saying “uh, hey folks, remember when we said we would pay you back? Well, we can’t. Don’t know what you wanna do about that.”

People argue about what would happen if we defaulted. Some say that the world economy would, if not completely collapse, definitely develop a very nasty limp. Others say that it wouldn’t be all that bad for reasons I don’t quite understand. Some people say that China (which owns more than half of all our foreign-held debt) will come over and shake us upside down so our lunch money falls out of our pockets. Rush Limbaugh says that Obama chose August 2nd as the deadline because it’s the day before Ramadan.

source: blog.cunysustainablecities.org

Since 1962 Congress has raised the debt ceiling 72 times

So what’s different now from all those other times that the debt ceiling was raised, as far as I can tell, is that Republicans, who hold the majority of the house of representatives, think that they can use the urgency of the situation to get the Dems and the White House to agree to a budget that they wouldn’t normally approve.  This is coupled with the fact that there is a bigger representation of the Tea Party, especially among junior representatives, than there has been before, and many of those junior representatives campaigned on promises to not raise taxes or do anything that looks or smells remotely like raising taxes ever in their lives. There are two ways to reduce deficit: reduce spending and raise taxes. The Republicans are pushing budgets that reduce spending but don’t increase taxes (or even just let the Bush tax cuts expire, or reform corporate tax laws that allow corporations to take loopholes and get out of paying taxes at all). This makes this difficult for everyone to get along.

So that’s the summary of what’s sort of going on. As the date draws nearer, things get sketchier – like, right now, it’d be impossible for anyone to write up a comprehensive budget by then. There was even talk of the Republicans just making a decision to not raise the ceiling, which the president can then veto, just so they can still say they voted against it. The closer we get to August 3, the hairier and more confusing things get. But that’s an attempt at a summary of the context of the whole issue.

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The Representation of East Asian Characters in Two Popular Western Comic Strips

Posted on July 21, 2011 by | 4 comments

Familiar to almost anyone who grew up in America, Archie Comics has told the stories of a fairly interesting group of teenagers living in the town of Riverdale for decades. First established in 1939 these comics are still published today, 72 years of panels featuring that insipid redhead Archie Andrews and his friends [who I actually don’t mind]. The comic strip Zits, on the other hand, was first published in 1997, and has for 14 years chronicled the misadventures of much-more-modern teenager Jeremy Duncan and his own group of eclectic young people.

It’s not difficult to see how the two [a single strip and all those created by an entire company] are similar to one another. Both are about American teenagers and their day-to-day lives, albeit living in very different eras. Having originated in the late 30s Archie and his friends have moved forward generation after generation, yet stick to a much lighter tone in regards to issues that teenagers have to face. Zits, starting at the turn of the 20th century, has a more realistic view of the high school years, addressing such topics as the disconnect between teenagers and their parents, the short attention span of today’s youth, and so on.

What I would like to explore and elaborate upon is the representation of Asian characters, specifically those of East Asian descent. Both of these comics are [or, at the very least, have been] immensely popular, and as a result their content is in part representative of what the West [in this case Canada and America] is familiar and comfortable with. Continue reading →

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Thoughts on MetaCelebrity

Posted on July 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

So Stephen Colbert recently got his Super PAC approved – which means that he can raise an unlimited amount of money, as well as advertise for his PAC on Comedy Central. The approval has brought attention to large role privately-run PACs are going to play in the next election – and brought up questions about the legitimacy of the process as a whole.

Colbert’s Super PAC allows him to raise unlimited amounts of money from whoever he wants; he has stated a goal of ‘infinity dollars’.

The Colbert Report has been doing strange things with reality for quite a while, of course – the myriad overlaps between Steve Colber[T] and his alter ego; the 2006 elephant Wikipedia thing, the selling of his wrist cast for charity, and his various in-character and semi-in-character appearances on Bill O’Reilly’s show, doubly ironic rallies, and before Congress. Stephen Colbert’s character has been breaking the boundaries of his allotted time slot since the show’s inception. People don’t even talk about Steve Colbert the comedian – he seems to be kind of a low-key guy; little is known about him that can be wholly differentiated from his pretentiously pronounced character.

Two other examples of this blurring of public and private life: Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana (I can’t really comment too much on this, but I DO know now that there was a show and a movie and that they are the same girl but one of them is sometimes a cartoon or something), and Lady Gaga, who has said that she considers her entire life a performance.

Lady Gaga arrived at the Grammy’s in an egg. There isn’t really much more to say.

So what is this thing? Why are fictional characters bleeding into real life? Well, in the case of Colbert’s Super PAC, it’s like a pop-up book version of satire – it’s a real-life critique that plays by the rules of the society it’s critiquing, legally approved and earning real money and possibly having a real effect on the election.

And meta-awareness is the key to mainstream comedy right now: The Simpsons (with their constant in-show jokes and references to Fox), anything by Seth McFarlane, Community, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development (Arrested Development sooo muuch), and 30 Rock, eg. It’s not enough to just be funny within the show anymore – shows need to make audiences feel like they’re in on one huge inside joke.

Characters and stories in the media have to be aware of what they are, and go outside it, for audiences to appreciate them.

Well, I mean, that’s the heart of satire, right? The acknowledgment of the form. It’s why all the songs in the Book of Mormon are so dang catchy – because the music is everything that is catchy and addictive about Broadway boiled down into one show. And so it’s like stories and characters can’t just be stories and characters anymore – they have to be aware of what they are, and go outside it, for audiences to appreciate them.

The interesting thing is that I think this indicates a certain inability to lose our self-consciousness – it’s like we can’t enjoy ourselves unless we’re letting everyone know that we know what’s going on – that we’re willingly playing along with entertainment’s game. Entertainment is becoming more and more about who is breaking the fourth wall and how well, and so we abandon the maintenance of any sense of separation – that other-worldy, play-acting quality that movies, shows, and characters used to have. Entertainment is no longer contained within the realm of fiction. I’m not sure if this is good or bad or just a natural evolution of a communication-saturated society, but there it is. We seem to have abandoned all possibility of the acceptance of myth, and now everything has to be self-aware.

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Holly Brook is Skylar Grey

Posted on July 14, 2011 by | 2 comments

At the age of 18 Holly Brook Hafferman, going by her first and middle names, was signed to Machine Shop Recordings, Linkin Park’s vanity label. Two years later she made it big by being featured and singing the chorus on Fort Minor’s fourth single, “Where’d You Go.” Holly Brook’s debut album, Like Blood Like Honey, dropped two months later, on June 6th 2006.

The above video is one of the only music videos I could find of her on YouTube, and it’s a live recording and not a professionally filmed one. While nothing flashy, it manages to sum up pretty well where she came from musically, “heartache and self-discovery over heavy piano chords.”1 Like Blood Like Honey managed to hit number 35 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums chart, but soon after she faded into obscurity.

This year Holly Brook reentered the music scene under the new stage name Skylar Grey, and went on to do big things. She helped write sections of Eminem and Rihanna’s hit “Love the Way You Lie” and was featured on tracks by both Diddy-Dirty Money and Lupe Fiasco. Her debut live performance as Skylar Grey was at the 53rd Grammy Awards where she performed “I Need A Doctor” alongside Eminem and Dr. Dre.

Already having accomplished so much this year Grey is currently working on her solo studio album, titled Invinsible. Below is the only video currently on her VEVO YouTube channel, a music video for the song “Dance Without You.”

Although it’s never directly stated who it is Skylar Grey would like to “dance without” it seems apparent that the person is Holly Brook, and the video drips with (unsubtle) symbolism. Evidence can be found in her black clad character’s actions bordering on murderous [the neck-snapping action at 1:35] towards her hospital gowned alter-ego and her dismissively stepping over the latter’s prone body at the video’s conclusion. The message is clear: It’s time to change and move on.

It’s impossible for anyone to judge Skylar Grey’s decision to change her image and genre of music, especially taking into account her past with the music industry.2 The chorus of “Wanted,” a song from Like Blood Like Honey, begins with the words “I will be wanted / I will not fall from grace.” Maybe this was just her way of making those words ring true.

1. AllMusic’s review of Like Blood Like Honey. Source: http://www.allmusic.com/album/like-blood-like-honey-r836849/review

2. In reference to her fall out of fame she’s quoted as saying “[s]uddenly I was chewed up and spit out,” admitting a lot of confusion over what had happened in the past. Source: http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2011/06/hooked.html

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