Digital Culture Studies

Ben Stein has a new movie out, called Expelled: No intelligence allowed. The tagline is pretty precious: Big Science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom. What they forgot is every generation has its rebel…Ben blows the horn on supression. Apparently, Big Science also expelled grammar from the classroom. Its hard not to automatically reach for the joke on this one, but the movie is dead serious about ‘exposing’ the stranglehold so called Big Science has on …. science…and how unaccommodating they are about teaching things that….aren’t scientific….in science classrooms.

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• ERNursey: It is my fondest dream that every politician in this country start reading a health care provider’s blog on a regular basis, so that they may better understand how money and power have isolated them from the health care crisis in America. See also, White Coat Rants, DB’s Med Rants, and Med Blog Groupie.

• Passive Aggressive Notes: Be sure to check out the minor gall, the major lift (bonus points if you get the reference), The angry graduate assistants, and a great email from the front-lines of post-post feminism.

• I am RICH and I want to spend it on YOU tonight: I wish my husband would stop posting his personal ad on craigslist like this :)

Its called “getting your Google MD”, and you know you have done it - that late night search to diagnose yourself. This scratch, is it infected? That ache - sprain or break or strain, or cancer? Because all Google medical searches end in cancer, according to my own n=1 experiments. Hangnail, or …cancer? ACL issue, or….cancer? Migraine or brain tumour? Its cancer, always cancer in the end, with Google searches, but we do it anyway, and for the not squeamish and highly hypochondriacal, there are always Google image searches on medical ailments to help the diagnosis along.
But now Google is getting into the business of individual health on a very real basis, via our health records, by creating a system that will allow patients to access and transfer their health records to a google repository. While the official word is that these records will remain secure, as soon as I saw this I started wondering about the privacy implications. Fred Stutzman says it more eloquently than I:

Can I ever really give informed consent when I’m trading my health records, deeply personal and private information, for the measly tradeoff of what essentially boils down to online hosting of text files? Sure, I’ve already given Google my search and communication information, but they had to work for it. But my entire medical history just so I can access it when I want? And they can market to me with that information? This is simply too much to give away for convenience.

My own health service has a wonderful online component - I can see and track my test results, run simple charts to show change over time, and message my doctor for minor stuff and/or request refills online. Its convenient, and private, and gives me a measure of control over my medical history, and it isn’t hosted by Google. Accessing my records digitally in this manner is covered by HIPAA, but using a third party vendor like Google may be considered a form of opting out of the protection of HIPAA. I cannot help but wonder who will see those records at Google, how will that information be mined, and what will they do with it? After all, Google isn’t an impartial philanthropic foundation devoted to the betterment of society via technology, although that seems to be the stance most users take when they use the search engine, download the search bar, and link google functionality to their Firefox browsers.

How much does Google know about you, and about me, and where is the balance going to be - where is that thin line where what we give up to them, privacy-wise, no longer is enough for what they offer?

The internet is inherently voyeuristic. On it, we watch people beg for money to pay their bills, have sex on camera, photograph what they eat as a way of breaking bread virtually with their online community. The act of web surfing is a form of combined voyeurism and identity creation - do you look like me, do your actions validate my actions, is my particular kink kinkier than yours, are my kids better looking than yours, is my dog smarter, my blog better designed, are you writing things on your blog that I wish I was writing on mine, if I link to you what does that say about me? What I post defines me, what I surf defines me, the very nature of the web is that we redefine who we are and what we believe as we consume it.

I am a voyeur - the ultimate lurker, I watch and read and wait, and try to make sense of what I see - looking for smaller patterns in the bigger web picture. And now I am not sure what i am watching, or what my culpability is in watching it, but according to her website, Jane is planning on killing herself in 90 days, and is inviting us, the voyeurs, to watch her chronicle her last 3 months of life.

I am no stranger to the insane amount of energy people put into garnering a little attention online, but the consequences of this game are much higher than normal. That Jane is in LA makes me suspect this is a viral marketing blog - either for an actress, an indy movie, or a game, but as always, there is the worry that it is real.  

I must have my head too far in the books, because it never ocurred to me that people just print fake versions of real degrees from real schools and sell them, but this sure looks like the University of Cambridge seal to me. Best of all, this one comes with a transcript. It does make me wonder, though - how prevelant is stuff like this? If I saw this framed, in an office somewhere, I would assume it was real -  this is a real bricks and mortar school and a real emblem. I realize that anyone with photoshop could do something like this at home,  but it is troubling to see something so clearly meant to pass as legit being sold on Ebay. Apparently you can ask for any school that you want. Ugh.

Over on Multicultclassics, a nice example of the most overused African-American stock image in the ‘families’ category. I believe these two were also on a United Way poster recently. This is not a critique of the models, by the way, but of the advertisers and marketers who chose those models, and who appear to have one ‘go-to’ black image, one which incorporates very, very light skinned people as representative of African-Americans, and is comfortable with representing an AA family as one with a child and one female parent. I notice more and more lately, especially after reading excerpts of model Alek Wek’s recently released autiobiography, how oddly African-Americans are portrayed, especially in American advertising and marketing communications, and I can’t help but wonder how we all internalize that representation. Wek made the cover of Elle magazine in November 1997, and at the time that was considered a very daring choice, since the traditional assumption about covers is that magazines with dark-skinned models sell fewer copies than covers with caucasian or light-skinnned models. Think about that for a moment - in 1997, it was considered a daring move to put a woman with dark skin on the cover of an American magazine. In 1997.

Every day, I look at things that were designed by professional designers, and I think about how every piece was designed for a specific function on every single thing you own, and  the best comment I have ever read about design was from an Amazon reader, who wrote that the Kindle looks like technology as designed by civil servants. There is a lot of poorly designed product out there, and even more badly designed advertising. Lets mock it!

• Delicious for Chanukah!  Really? I don’t have a lot more to say about this, except it is just … nope. No words.
• Pioneer’s ocular dentata. I saw this image in this month’s Wired, and…what does this have to do with watching tv? What about this image is meant to inspire people to buy a new tv? I couldn’t even read the ad, because the image was disturbing to look at.
• Women talking about ads that don’t work. The good: hearing women say exactly why advertising targeted at them isn’t actually reaching them. The bad: these videos are done by an NYC creative agency that describes itself as ‘all girls’. Why is it so hard for adult women to refer to themselves as women? I could rant here, but basically, I have never heard men refer to other men as boys, and I always hear men and women refer to women as girls.