An earnest thanks to Emily for showing me this piece by Dorothy Allison titled "Notes to a Young Feminist," and a sarcastic thanks a lot to AKMA for IMing me the link to Kingdom of Loathing, the procrastinatory game I never knew I always wanted. My character is a disco bandit named Yoterlon, after my old high school D&D character, Yoterlon Doonsbern the Fair.

No bloggers that I've seen are commenting on the fact that Disney subsidiary Miramax dropped Michael Moore's latest film, a point-by-point critique of Bush's presidency, particularly involvement in Iraq. Moore says it's because Disney is worried about losing tax incentives. Disney says they don't want to be perceived as endorsing any particular candidate, and indeed kairos has a lot to do with it, and good for Moore for taking advantage of the timing. A representative for Disney says that Moore can find another distributor. Let's hope he does, but not before a lot of people get appropriately outraged over this act of censorship.

Feministe inspired me to create the soundtrack of my life. I guess this is the next big meme. I purposefully sat out of the page 23/fifth sentence one, so I'd better get on task.

Edited to add: Oops, I forgot to include the criteria set forth by Green Fairy: "These aren't necessarily your favourite songs, or even ones you like, just ones that you associate with a particular time, incident or memory." Lest anyone think these are my favorite songs, heh. Others haven't put them in any particular order, but I've done mine chronologically: two from childhood, two from junior high/early high school, two from high school, two from college, and one from my master's program. It was hard to think of some recent ones; I don't have the perspective yet.

Celebration - Kool & the Gang

This is the first song I remember. My parents had the 45, and my mom showed me how to arrange the little arm on the record player above the needle so that I could make the 45 play over and over again. The exuberance of the song stuck with me, and to this day I love it.

Ken Smith is collecting bloggers who do and who do not maintain eye contact on their blogs. I am listed as an eye-contact blogger, as is Jill. Michael Bérubé does not make eye contact.

Now I want to join in: Liz, Scott, Tracy, Lessig, Siva, Logie, and Becky make eye contact, as does Amy (I took that picture!); Jason Nolan, Ron Silliman, Jason Shim, and Mike do not. I guess that last one is debatable, but I don't feel that the eye contact is direct. This phenomenon is not particularly important, of course, but fun to observe nonetheless.

Many of you have followed my recent adventures in tenancy, so in the interest of following up, I'll report that I have put a deposit down on a new apartment: a studio in a blissfully un-trendy industrial park neighborhood. This will be the third time in 12 months that I've moved; the last time, after the roof caved in, was in -4 degree weather, on ice. After living in two trendy neighborhoods, I've found that the landlords there can charge far too much for rundown slums, and treat you poorly on top of it all. I was going to move into a new apartment in my current, post-roof-cavein building (my roommate is getting married), but I was hesitant, as our sleazy landlord has entered our apartment unannounced just as I was getting out of the shower, causing me to panic because I realized someone was in the house, plus he smokes in our apartment. Do you want to elicit pure rage in me? Smoke in my apartment. But I looked at an apartment in this building anyway; there is something to be said for hauling your stuff down the stairs and not having to bother with renting a van. I'll call the apartment the fallout shelter. It was in the basement, it stank of smoke and cat urine, and there was one small window level with the ground, which any shady person could kick in and shimmy into, not to mention that the lack of light would have made me quite depressed.

Then I looked at an apartment in the un-trendy neigborhood (said studio), which has a whole wall of windows, new appliances including a dishwasher and microwave, tons of storage space so that my living area can be nice and sparse, and the lease-incentive option of two accent walls, to be painted before I move in on 1 June, in my choice of about 10 colors. I have already chosen red (my color exactly) and "expressive plum." I think I'll have the red wall in the main room and the plum wall in the bathroom. I hope this is the last apartment I'll have in Minnesota.

Elijah has posted the two papers he co-authored for Into the Blogosphere:

Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright, "Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs"

Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah Wright, "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs"

I encourage you to check them out and draft responses if you like. The collection will run on Movable Type, so you'll be able to post the responses directly under the essays.

In a recent post with many thoughtful comments following, Jill ponders the ethics of having students write blog reviews after one person whose blog was being reviewed protested to the assignment. Ethics in blog research is an issue we need to talk about, and I've been learning from Lilia's thoughts and Alex's as well. Jill says,

In time, I hope that the general public becomes more aware of that to publish something on the internet means to publish it, and that unless it's password protected it can and will be read by anyone.



What do you think?

I'm in agreement with most of the people in the thread and with Jill--when you blog, you are publishing. The Association of Internet Researchers has this huge PDF tome on the ethical issues in internet research, and one is perceived privacy. From the tome:

What are the initial ethical expectations/assumptions of the authors/subjects being studied?


For example: Do participants in this environment assume/believe that their communication is private? If so – and if this assumption is warranted – then there may be a greater obligation on the part of the researcher to protect individual privacy in the ways outlined in human subjects research (i.e., protection of confidentiality, exercise of informed consent,
assurance of anonymity - or at least pseudonymity - in any publication of the research, etc.).
If not – e.g., if the research focuses on

publicly accessible archives;

inter/actions intended by their authors/agents as public, performative

(e.g., intended as a public act or performance that invites recognition
for accomplishment), etc.;

venues assigned the equivalent of a “public notice” that participants and their communications may be monitored for research purposes;


….
then there may be less obligation to protect individual privacy.

A big question in internet research is: Are we studying texts, or are we studying people? The answer makes all the difference. Perhaps there's the rub--articulating a rationale for why studying weblogs is studying texts, not people. For my part, I know my blog is reviewed or discussed in some way in at least two classes. It doesn't bother me at all; they can say whatever they want. They are studying text, as far as I'm concerned, but then again I don't blog about my personal life very much. If I were studying a blog like Jasper's, I'd definitely see it differently and would feel unethical if I didn't have informed consent.



Addendum: When starting my first project on gender and blogging, I had to get IRB approval (a.k.a. Human Subjects Review). They did not see what I was doing as studying texts at all. I understand to some extent; I was doing a survey, after all. But what is most interesting to me is that, when I explained that I was giving a survey to the members of Blog Sisters and that I might quote material posted to the site, they required me to get a letter of consent from the site administrators of Blog Sisters. They said that a web site is no different from a physical site to them (for example, if someone wanted to do research in a writing center or in a museum, they'd have to get that research site consent letter.). It strikes me as strange, but I'd like to see what others think.

I've been meaning to post my approved rhetorical theory reading list. As you can see, I'm skewing it more in the direction of the modern era: