Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

This video would have been such an informative tool in early 2005 when I was looking at grad schools. I’m not involved in the media production stream (although they appear to be doing an excellent job by the looks of this vid) but I would say this is an accurate portrayal of the department agenda. Score for journalistic integrity!

Check out the video at this website.

Posted on the Media Studies listserve…

PEOPLE’S POTATO

Job offer - Full Time Collective member

The People’s Potato, a not-for-profit food service organization is  looking for a full time staff member. The primary activity of the People’s Potato is to serve daily vegan meals to approximately 400 students at  Concordia University. The long-term vision of the project is to provide a healthy and ethical alternative to the corporate domination of the food system.

The People’s Potato is a worker-run consensus-based organization and applicants must be willing to work within a collective structure. The People’s Potato is a unique working environment in which employees both guide and execute the vision of the organization.***

We recognize the present nonexistence of a level playing field, with regards to people’s experiences and job qualifications, given the structural injustice that affects those who exist within patriarchal racist capitalism. As a result, we recognize the need to compensate for these inequalities in our hiring policy.

We encourage applicants to describe the unique contributions they, as individuals with diverse experiences, would bring to the People’s Potato, in their cover letter.

The People’s Potato undertakes its hiring procedures upon the basis of employment equity. Indigenous people, people of color, people with disabilities, women, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, two-spirited people, trans people and working class people are encouraged to apply.

This is not an exhaustive list as we understand that there are many types of barriers to employment. Please indicate in your cover letter if you would like to be considered for employment equity. Please note that we do not require applicants to specify the basis on which they are applying for employment equity.

The individual hired will participate in collective meetings,  kitchen work and other portfolios in both english and french, to be decided following the hiring procedure. Regular driving is also part of this position, both in the city and on the highway.

Requirements include:
   -Self-motivated/self-directed.
-Strong organizational skills.
-Ability to work closely with others.
-An aptitude for applying new skills
-An aptitude to cook (both small and large scale)
-Dedication to or involvement in social justice causes
-Ability to work in English and French
-Valid driver’s license

Assets:
-Knowledge of food politics
-Experience with vegan and/or vegetarian cooking

-Knowledge of consensus-based decision making processes
-Willingness to facilitate meetings
Remuneration: $12.67/hour Hours/Week: 30/35 hours
The deadline for applications is January 26 at 5pm
Applications and cover letters can be sent via fax: (514) 848-7450
(ATT:People’s Potato),
e-mail: peoplespotato@tao.ca or dropped off in person to the People’s Potato office located at 1455 de Maisonneuve W. H-642.  

Only applicants accepted for interviews will be contacted. Position to start the week of February 5th
***For more information about the People’s Potato and to see our constitution, please refer to our website: peoplepotato.resist.ca

Douglas Kellner, the Philosophy Chair of Education at UCLA, lectured at McGill this Thursday on the ‘Metaphors of Cyberspace’.

Kellner named four major influences in creating the internet: 1) Military 2) Big Business (IBM, Xerox, Apple) 3) University research 4) Hacker culture.

These groups have necessarily shaped the way we talk about the internet. For example, computing language is filled with militaristic terms such as “erase”, “abort”, “delete”, and “spam”. He observed that metaphors for new objects are pulled from familiar objects, such as the idea of Home, which result in relatable terms like “homepage”, “MySpace”, and “YouTube”, names that put the focus on the personal and immediate surroundings. The Work environment creates language like “desktop”, “mailboxes”, “trash”, “files” etc.

Given my research interests in BlackBerry, I was particularly intrigued by the Nature metaphor, which he argued was used to soften and blur the boundaries between nature and technology, thereby naturalizing it. Companies like Apple and Microsoft (MS fits in here because of the ’soft’, which is natural and sensuous) use the nature metaphor, as do products like BlackBerry and Mac, and terms like ‘virus’, ‘bugs’, ‘mouse’, ’surfing’, and fishing’.

Travel was another metaphor Kellner touched on, claiming the term ‘information superhighway’ was particularly problematic for Bill Gates because a highway implied a FREEway, and so, Microsoft made a move toward a different language that didn’t create an expectation of a free lunch.

And this is why metaphors matters…

Language enables what one can conceptualize. The metaphors you use limit and enable certain discourses. Kellner cited Stuart Hall who said “a metaphor is a serious thing, it informs one’s practice”, and Derrida who said “a metaphor is never innocent.” The tremendous influence metaphors can wield in public and private discussion is why it’s necessary to get out ahead of the trend and define your own terms.. There are plenty of people/companies/ideologues that have a vested interest in defining a dialogue in a certain manner and once a certain way of talking about an object has been established it’s very difficult to break the mould and view it from outside that frame of reference. The Democrats face this problem, in that they’ve been reduced (in many instances) to being a reactionary party, rather than a party that defines the issues they want to pursue.

One of the most interesting comments was a brief aside toward the end of the lecture when Kellner noted that modernity was characterized by the big businesses and infrastructure of the industrial age which have masculine overtones, and that postmodernity (if that’s what we’re still in) is characterized by smaller and more personal infrastructure of the information age which is more feminized (big frames vs. sleek laptops). Postmodernity as feminine.

After Kellner’s lecture I checked back in on a blog I keep track of and in Sept the writer had referenced a lecturer at the Industrial Designers Society of America who said the future of computing needs will be facilitated by more intuitive and human interfaces.  The same lecturer was also encouraging designers to become more “sensually sensitive” and to reconcile the design of digital interfaces with basic human cognition and intuition. Intuition, sensual, sensitive, reconciliation… is it possible the future of cyberspace is female gendered?

I sent the address of this blog out to some of my friends and family, including a journalist working in Guangzhou, China.  This is his response:

What on Earth did you put on your blog?  Declarations of love for the Dalai
Lama?  Your views on Taiwan independence?  The communists have blocked it!!!

Wow.  First-hand experience with the Chinese censors. The journalist says they often block anything with a blog address or name, so given my current fascination with blogs I guess I won’t be making it into his bookmarks any time soon.

I’m beginning to feel like a real Concordia student, contending with issues of censorship and all…  speaking of which….check out the below links to learn more about Concordia’s most recent incident in the world of risk assessment committees, race relations, and alleged censorship.  The timeliness of the story may have influenced the pickup it received from the Guardian. “North of 9/11” will be read tomorrow at the uni co-op bookstore.

http://thelink.concordia.ca/view.php?aid=38622 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867994,00.html 

Back to the Chinese censors….the Dali Lama was in Vancouver, B.C. this past Saturday.  Two friends from Victoria went over to see him and were duly inspired.  Apparently there were sound issues that made him a little difficult to hear, and during one of the lulls, 20,000 people in GM Place broke into a spontaneous round of “O’ Canada.” 

Who says Canadians aren’t patriotic?

Patriotism. 9/11. Censorship. Co-op bookstore.  Race relations.  My blog’s never going to make it big in China.  Sigh.