So, if you had to predict what happened on election day in Loudoun County one week after the Loudoun County Republican Committee (LCRC) made national news for circulating an image of Obama as a zombie with a bullet hole in his forehead, what would you say: A.) As news of the image spread, outrage grew in the week leading up to the election, handing the Republican candidates in Loudoun County a devastating setback at the polls. B.) There was...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...

On December 21st, 2010, the Home News reported that Tyler Clementi’s parents filed notice of their intent to sue Rutgers University. In the notice, the Clementi family’s lawyer contends that the university failed to protect Clementi from the “unlawful or otherwise improper acts perpetrated against” him. The notice goes on to say: it appears Rutgers University failed to act, failed to put in place and/or failed to implement, and...

In Part 1 on Virtual Communities and Embodies Realities, I moved from Tyler Clementi’s virtual community on justusboys.com to the embodied community of his dorm. In Part 2, I will focus on a number of embodied communities at Rutgers and then, in the remaining posts in this thread, I will continue the discussion of Clementi’s correspondence with his virtual community. Here are a handful of examples of local efforts at Rutgers to...

Hacktivism is in the news, if not exactly grabbing headlines. When major service providers pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, temporarily cutting off access to the site via its domain name, “WikiLeaks.org” in hopes of hobbling financial support the venture, the boys at anonymous sprung into action, unleashing their anarchic, anti-corporate rage in the form of a series of attacks on a host of websites across the globe. What does this mean,...

Prizes. At this time of year, you can’t escape them. Top ten viral videos. Best scandals of the year. The Darwin Awards. And, of course, the induction into print media’s Hall of Fame: Time‘s Man of the Year Award. This award, you’ll recall, recognizes the person who “for better or worse has most influenced events in the past year.” Like the Academy Awards, there’s a lot of build up, the pre-hype hype,...

At the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...

Two acts, side-by-side. A student at Rutgers-Camden pens an editorial calling on the administration to remove Paul Robeson’s name from the library: It is certainly not in keeping with our timeless American values, layed out over 230 years ago by our founding fathers in the Constitution, for New Jersey’s finest public university to endorse a man as unsavory as Paul Robeson. A hacker at Washington State found a way into the classroom...

I woke this morning to find notification of comments on four of the five sections of “Worlds End, Worlds Begin,” the video that eventually led to the launching of this blog. That’s a puzzler, I thought. The video is a remixed version of a lecture I gave at a conference on the humanities at Clemson early in 2007. It’s the first multimedia piece Paul Hammond and I worked on together; the first thing we posted to YouTube. We...