Category: Culture

Categories
Art

Body Worlds

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center today. If you’ve not heard of this, it’s an exhibit of preserved human bodies formed into shapes to best demonstrate the human anatomy.

The human bodies are without skin, so that the muscle, bone, tendons, organs show. Believe me when I say that there is nothing at all gross about the exhibit. On the contrary, it was all rather fascinating. Our bodies are incredibly sophisticated machines, and the exhibits were a celebration of our wonderful sophistication.

In addition to the staged human bodies, the show also featured cross sections and preserved organs, both diseased and healthy. Another interesting type of display was the vein work sculptures, displaying only the veins.

What was terrible, though, is that I had the strongest craving for beef jerky during the show. I confessed my hunger to my roommate, and he said that he had the same craving. As we were leaving, we could hear the people behind us, debating where to go to lunch because they were starved.

There was something very Freudian about all of this.

update

I gather there was or is a 20/20 investigation of Body Worlds, especially about where the bodies originated. According to the information I know, the bodies used in the displays at the Body Worlds in St. Louis were all donated at the behest of the individuals, and with permission of the individual families.

As for whether the show was purely entertainment, most of the show is devoted to a closer look at organs, including those diseased, as compared to healthy. Displays of lungs damaged by smoking, livers damaged by drinking, and one cross section display of an obese man with diagrams detailing of the damage to his body based on his weight–including a cross section of the pacemaker he wore–were juxtaposed with bodies seemingly in the peak of health and vitality.

Was the work educational?

One elderly woman wearing a camel colored coat, and a hat with a little feather was talking with three kids who part of a school tour group. Their discussion was occurring over an exhibit of hip bones, including one demonstrating a hip replacement. Evidently, the kids had been at the display, looking at the hip replacement when the lady heard them talking. She started telling them about her own hip replacement, her mobility before and after, answering their questions. The small group of four were so intent, they were completely unaware of the kids’ chaperons, patiently waiting for them to finish so they could move on.

Was the work art? Art is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.

Categories
Burningbird Connecting

Community and Technology

I am cleaning out my weblog after all these many years. Seven years. Seven years of past discussions and writings, many of which no longer make sense when taken out of the context of the previous times.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll find an old post that seems to highlight, not only what I felt then but what I feel now. One such was the following, posted May of 2002. Long before the Techmemes, WordPresses, OpenIDs, and the social networks; much earlier than the Facebooks and Twitters, it read:

————————-

Dave responded to my earlier post with a thoughtful and considerate posting that asked a very valid question:

So anyway, here’s a question for Shelley. When I see your site update on Weblogs.Com, I usually go for a visit to see what the bird is burning about now. I think of that as a community feature. Do you think it’s valuable? If not, why do you participate?

First, thanks for stopping by Dave, always appreciated. And as a point of clarification — I dropped that silly rule about comments I had about five minutes after I originated it, so please feel free to drop in with comments.

Back to the question: Why do I participate in pinging weblogs.com, when my interest tends to be on the people aspect of weblogging rather than the technology?

Though my focus is on the participants, I also appreciate much of the technology used in weblogging, particularly the weblogging tools such as Movable Type, Radio, and Blogger. And I also appreciate community services such as weblogs.com that let me know when my favorite webloggers have updated.

To me, technology provides a framework that allows me to communicate with my weblogging community easily and without a lot of hassle. I’ll alway be grateful for the folks who create all this technology that makes my weblogging life a lot easier. Still, technology is only an enabler — the content of the weblogs is the key aspect to “community” in my opinion.

If technology could be considered equivalent to the nerves in the brain, it is the people that provide the chemistry that enables the synaptic (community) connections to be made. Without the chemistry provided by the webloggers, the technology is nothing more than bits and bytes and wires all jumbled about in a chaotic and undifferentiated mess, thrown into the ether.

Consider my own community of webloggers — the virtual neighborhood that I reference fondly and at length. Technology will tell me that Bill Simoni’s weblog can be accessed at the URL, http://radio.weblogs.com/0100111/. And technology can let me know when Bill has updated his weblog, through weblogs.com.

Bill uses technology to create his weblog (using Radio), which is accessed through additional technology (the Internet). And I read the weblog through my browser (Mozilla by preference), contained on my laptop — yet more examples of technology.

However, technology doesn’t tell me that Bill is expecting a baby any day now. And technology doesn’t tell me that Bill has a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor, is pretty excited about the baby, and has a a thing about grammar and spellchecking.

That’s community.

If Userland and Movable Type and Blogger were to discontinue innovating their products as of this minute, we would perhaps have less fun toys to work with. We’d miss out on better products, and more reliable hosting, and more interesting ways to post, and better ways to aggregate the postings, and more efficient approaches regarding notification…

…but we’d still have our community. You’d have to take the Internet down to take down our community, and due to the pervasive nature of the Net, I don’t think this is even possible, now.

Ultimately, the community is not dependent on the technology as much as the technology is, itself, dependent on the community. Because without the community, why would we need the technology in the first place?

—————

What I didn’t know then but I do now is that online communities are both dynamic and mutable, and if not created or destroyed by technology, can be fragmented by technology. When I wrote the original post, if someone would say something online I would know what they said–it would be in their weblog. Now, though, this same person posts photos in Flickr, and short quips in Twitter, and sends virtual chocolates or plays Scrabulous in Facebook, or MySpace or whatever the new thing will be in 2008–and there will be a new thing in 2008–as his or her weblog remains silent, sometimes for weeks. But I only, still, listen to the weblog.

Technology has created new paths and in the wake of passing, left us a conundrum: follow the paths to stay with the community, or remain where we are, either to be part of the fragments left behind, a new community, or no community at all.

Then one looks closer at that long ago post and realizes that technology’s fragmentary effect on community is illusory, at best. Life triumphs over all, as it always has with any community, virtual or not. Every person, but four, in the comment thread or mentioned in the earlier post has either quit weblogging, or died. Of the four remaining, Allan and I are still friends, though our communication with each other is sporadic; I haven’t talked with Bill in months; Dave and I stopped being part of the same community a long time ago–not because of technology, but because of who we are, and who we became.

Categories
Diversity

Respect

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Lane Hartwell has posted a statement addressing some of the misconceptions about the use of her photo in the Bubble 2.0 video. For instance, one misconception is that she’s suing Richter Scales. She wrote:

It has been erroneously reported in various media outlets and blogs that I have either filed or am in the process of filing a lawsuit against The Richter Scales. This is simply not true. At no point has there been any talk of filing a lawsuit on my behalf. To make matters worse, I have yet to be contacted by even one of these media outlets or bloggers to verify the authenticity of my supposed lawsuit.

Lane is actually easy to communicate with via email, which leads one to wonder if people have gotten so used to twittering, they’ve forgotten there are other forms of communication.

Tara Hunt had two good posts on this: Tragedy of the Commons: Lane Hartwell vs. Richter Scales and Mobs with Pitchforks and Mis-information. Tara speaks as a person who was busted herself for using photos and art without permission. She writes:

Whether or not Lane invoking the DMCA is legal or not isn’t really what matters here and making it about ‘hurt feelings’ belittles what is really at stake here. What is at stake here is that the continuance of individual abuse of the privileges of the works put into the commons will lead to fewer of those works being put into the commons.

That is the point. Perhaps because we have a knee jerk reaction to the term, DMCA, we tar and feather any use. However, Lane trying to protect the integrity of her photography is not the same thing as Disney trying to preserve the Mouse in perpetuity. If we overreact about copyright abuses from corporations to the point where we deny the validity of copyright for individuals, then we’re not good neighbors in a village sharing a commons–we’re nothing more than the Horde looking to sack the village; reacting petulantly, even violently at being denied our goodies. The issue is less one of copyright than it is one of respect. Lane deserves the respect due a person in her craft.

Respect also plays in a sub-thread that ended up slowly emerging from the original discussion. In Mathew Ingram’s post on this topic, as I wrote previously, Michael Arrington wrote in a comment to me that the only reason I was supporting Lane, was because she was a woman:

Mathew is right, you are wrong. But since Lane is a woman, it really doesn’t matter what she did as far as you are concerned. She’s a woman, so she’s right.

I was flabbergasted. I never once thought about Lane’s sex when forming my opinion. Any of you who have read me for years know that copyright has been an issue near and dear to my heart, and I’m actually a copyright supporter–not the Disney type of copyright, but copyright as it was originally intended.

Several people did respond to the statement, both in my comments, in a post that Jeneane Sessum wrote and also in Tara’s posts. She didn’t specifically mention this in her second post, but Tara did allude to this:

I’m really put off that there are so many people spreading, but also believing, bad rumors in this case. I’m sure the many men behind the Richter Scales don’t want a mob sent out to harass a woman whose photograph they used. None of this was done in malice: the photograph used, the request for credit.

Why the maliciousness now? From uninformed bystanders?

We didn’t introduce the topic of gender in this discussion, but now that it has been introduced one can’t help wonder: given the rather astonishingly harsh criticism of Lane Hartwell is there a possibility that some of it goes beyond just our reaction to the DMCA term? Could this also have something to do with Lane Hartwell, being a woman, asserting her rights against a bunch of guys?

I don’t believe this of Richter Scales, the originators of the video. They seem truly unhappy that they’ve caused this unfortunate consequence, and didn’t attribute the photographers as they should. But when I read the following at a post Michael Arrington wrote, after leaving the comment directed at me at Ingram’s, I have to question the emotional context of some of this protest.

The real issue here is that Hartwell’s feelings were hurt. She wanted attribution in the video, and the creators ignored her. Attribution and people’s feelings are not things copyright law considers; rather, it sets forth the rules under which copyrighted works may be or may not be used by others.

The real issue here is that Hartwell’s feelings were hurt. (Also see the the comments to this post describing Michael running into Lane at an event yesterday.)

Haven’t we seen this before? When a woman reacts to an event, her reaction is reduced to one of ‘feelings’, rather than rights or laws, or even common decency? Lane Hartwell did not react as a woman whose feeling were hurt. She reacted like a professional photographer, frustrated with people stealing and using her photos without giving her credit or asking permission, who then contacted the transgressors. When the group who created the video responded that their use was fair use, rather than respect her wishes, or even contact her directly about the use, she then hired an attorney who specializes in IP law to work with her to resolve this issue. An attorney, I might add who represented, pro bono, ThinkSecret when sued by Apple looking for the names of ThinkSecret’s sources. Perhaps we might want to give him the benefit of the doubt that a) he’s not evil, b) he knows what he’s doing, and c) Lane knows what she’s doing.

Agree with Lane’s move, don’t agree–there is nothing wrong with having an opinion on this issue. However, when we start advocating violence, plotting how to destroy her career, or belittling Lane’s actions because she is a woman than, frankly, we have more problems in the commons than whether we get to view a funny video, or not.

Michael Arrington considers me …one of the most unpleasant people he’s ever known. Fine, great, perhaps I am. I, however, didn’t bring up the ‘gender card’, but when it’s played on me, I sure as hell am not going to fold and leave the game.

What do we want from this environment? Where only those who are popular are allowed to determine the ethics of our interactions? That webloggers can speak softly in weblogs, but nastily in comments, Twitter, and backchannels and all is well? Where women can be so easily and so frequently belittled with nary a raised eyebrow? Mobs can be whipped up and turned loose without a thought to the consequences?

That only the little people get called out for their actions?

Weblogging is ten years old today. Huzzah! Now, what do we want from this environment? Because what we’re getting is something I don’t value anymore.

update

Lane Hartwell has issued a more detailed statement:

A photo of Owen Thomas that I shot under contract for Wired News was used without my permission in a music video created by the Richter Scales. I own the copyright to the photo and, as I do in every instance where I find my work used without my permission, I contacted the band, told them my work was copyrighted and asked why they had used it without contacting me to license the work.

The band’s response was that upon receiving my complaint, they contacted an attorney who told them they had the right to use my work without gaining permission, paying a licensing fee or giving me credit. They said the video was a parody and thus the unauthorized use of my image was protected under something called “Fair Use”. Normally when I contact someone about my work, they apologize and remove it immediately. Because they didn’t, and mentioned talking to a lawyer, I felt it necessary to talk to a lawyer myself. Despite reports to the contrary, I have not sued the band. I spoke with a lawyer to clarify my standing on the issue of copyright.

I suggest you read the whole thing. Especially those of you saying Lane’s feelings were hurt, she should never work again, and generally dwelling on her evilness.

There’s also a thing in the commons called an ‘apology’.

Categories
Connecting

Nullifiers

One thing I’ve discovered this weekend, is there are some people who suck the life out of a discussion. They use their popularity, their rank, their legions of fans, to overwhelm and crush any opposition. No, crush is a melodramatic word. They nullify opposition.

Sometimes they’re sweet in their weblogs; sometimes they’re not. Typically they’re held up for admiration and respect, and given accolades and affection by many. Yet there’s a dark side to them, a seeming need to control everything around them.

When they become involved in a discussion, the focus changes from the topic to the person. I don’t know about others, but it almost invariably leaves me going, “Why do I continue doing this?” They take what joy I have in this space, this writing, and they taint it, corrupt it.

People complain about trolls, but anonymous people who come into a space and leave a bit of snark are nothing more than the buzz of a bug. Flap your hand, chase them away. No, these people are never treated like trolls. Ostensibly, they don’t act like trolls. But when they’re done, if the discussion is not dead, it’s certainly been redirected. And they’re satisfied; they have control. Even if all their control brought, was discord.

I’m not perfect, I know that. This is more observation than proclamation. People read Techmeme to see what discussions to get into. From now on, I’m going to read it to see which ones to avoid. It’s not a healthy place for me.

Categories
Connecting

With sadness

This has been a week of sad good-byes.

Danny Ayers and Dan Connolly both write on an incredibly tragic event. Last weekend, while Chimezie and Roschelle Ogbuji were having a rare night out, a baseboard heater caught fire in the basement. Though the babysitters were able to escape, the Ogbuji’s three little girls–Imose Esosa Ikpia, Chikaora Credell Zion, and Anyachiemeka Chibuzo Anastar–weren’t so fortunate. The oldest was 6, the youngest just a baby. Three beautiful little girls.

This last weekend, Marc Orchant passed away from his heart attack earlier in the week. He was only 50, and leaves behind a wife and two kids, and friends and co-workers who will miss him, as well as a community who respected him deeply.

Then tonight, Bill Humphries posts another sad note: Anita Rowland passed away today, losing her fight with cancer. Anita has been around for so long, it’s difficult to think of her gone. Anita left behind a beloved husband, Jack William Bell, family, and too many friends to count–both online and off. Jack has created a memorial page, for leaving comments, writing If you knew Anita or she touched your life in some way — something that applies to many, many people — please leave a comment with some memory of her here.

Frank reminds us of an interview he did with Anita, five years ago. Thank you, Frank, for capturing her voice.

My deepest sympathy to all of the families and friends.

Hug someone you love. Reach out to a friend.