Okay, so I've (obviously) been less than diligent about posting to my blog... more than a year later and here's post number 2. Sigh. I can only offer in my defense that I've been reeeeal busy. Since I began my blog, I've finished my second comprehensive exam and my dissertation proposal, presented papers at two conferences, and, more recently, accepted a position as a copyeditor for Dancecult. Those things may not sound like a lot of work on their own, but they are. Trust.
So, here's one... Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim, "the medium is the message," suggests that it is not the content of the medium which influences perception, but the medium itself that does. The analogy that most people are familiar with is that of the light bulb: devoid of content, the light bulb is pure information, and without it society would not be able to function the way it currently does; people would work shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer, there would be little in the way of nighttime recreation, and so on. Most media aren't pure information, however, and, according to McLuhan, they tend to contain other media. For example: the content of writing is speech---> the content of speech is though--->the content of thought is abstraction--->ad. infinitum. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call this process remediation. So, what does this have to do with remixing? Remixes, like all media that we assume are not actually media, contain all the media that came before it. Remixes contain recorded music, which itself contains musical performance, which in turn contains musical ideas, which again contain abstraction. When I began formulating my thesis four years ago, I was obsessed with the idea that media contained media and I was sure there was a name for it. I likened it to that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game when I tried to explain what I was after; of course, media ecology is a very young intellectual tradition and there aren't any media ecologists at York, so no one knew what I was talking about. It wasn't until last week when I read this article by Lance Strate that I finally (finally!) found what I was looking for. So, there. Three cheers for progress!
Monday, April 18, 2011
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Inaugural Post
It's 7:48 AM on a Saturday. I should be asleep, but instead, I have decided to set up a blog about my research. Super nerd? Sort of rediculous? Why aren't I back in bed? Those are all right. Let me explain...
I am a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Last year, the union I am a member of, CUPE 3903, went on strike after 6 months of stalled negotiations with our employer. This strike lasted 85 days and, needless to say, it was pretty disruptive to my program. When I tried to talk to people about the disruption (invariably, people were fascinated by the event and had a lot of questions, even if they were questions that poked fun at me for supporting my union), it seemed like a difficult proposition to accept--that being on a picket line for 20 hours a week made it impossible to get any academic work done. Let me tell you, it's impossible to know the exhaustion of being on a picket line until you've actually been on one. But, I digress...
As a result of this disruption, I found myself way behind in my program, where before, I was only a little behind. I proposed my comprehensive exam questions in July 2009 and began working on them in earnest in August, after a short "vacation" with my family in Edmonton (Don't get me wrong! I love my family! But everyone knows that nobody makes you as crazy as your family does. They figure pretty prominently in the narrative of my life, so I'm sure they'll crop up again as this blog takes shape). I submitted the first exam on February 1, 2010, and last night I received an email from my supervisor that leads me to believe that I passed!
My first exam was a survey of literature on the subjects of media ecology and music technology, exploring how in the hell the two could be related to each other. I looked at that stupid exam nearly every day for about 5 months and I really started to hate it near the end... I mean, how the hell do I know what I'm talking about? Staring at something so huge (the document ended up being about 36 pages, with 48 sources cited. And, yes, I did read every source I cited) and feeling like I probably didn't know that much about it really sucked. I've long joked about how I still haven't figured out a good "sound bite" for my research--meaning that I don't know how to talk about it to strangers without crumbling when they ask a question I don't know how to answer--but here was proof that I didn't have a complete grasp on how to defend my own work. Moreover, if I didn't come up with a way soon, how could I expect to write that other long document known as the dissertation?
This blog is an attempt for me to sort out my thoughts as I progress along the road I like to call "finishing up this goddamn education o'mine." A lot of it will be stream of consciousness, un-edited (that is, until I go back, re-read and feel mortified at my spelling and other mistakes) and, hopefully, hilarious writing/rambling about what I discover along the way. Case in point: in my quest to collect remixes and learn about DJs, I've joined a site called soundcloud. Nobody's dropped any remixes into my box yet, but I've got a small amount of followers, which is, I think, a result of my username: fuckbunker. This is from one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, Peep Show. The dialogue goes something like this:
Mark: Hey Dobs! Just wondered if you'd fancy coming down with me to the Fuck Bunker and...
Dobby: Is that what you call the stationary cupboard?
In a word, HILARIOUS!
Anyway, this is a blog about my life as I research. I'll talk about music, books, people, and the things that distract me from my research. Hopefully there won't be too much distraction. I have a second exam too write, a dissertation proposal and the dissertation itself, so that'll keep me busy. Oh, and teaching misanthropic first year students. How could I have forgotten about that?
I am a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Last year, the union I am a member of, CUPE 3903, went on strike after 6 months of stalled negotiations with our employer. This strike lasted 85 days and, needless to say, it was pretty disruptive to my program. When I tried to talk to people about the disruption (invariably, people were fascinated by the event and had a lot of questions, even if they were questions that poked fun at me for supporting my union), it seemed like a difficult proposition to accept--that being on a picket line for 20 hours a week made it impossible to get any academic work done. Let me tell you, it's impossible to know the exhaustion of being on a picket line until you've actually been on one. But, I digress...
As a result of this disruption, I found myself way behind in my program, where before, I was only a little behind. I proposed my comprehensive exam questions in July 2009 and began working on them in earnest in August, after a short "vacation" with my family in Edmonton (Don't get me wrong! I love my family! But everyone knows that nobody makes you as crazy as your family does. They figure pretty prominently in the narrative of my life, so I'm sure they'll crop up again as this blog takes shape). I submitted the first exam on February 1, 2010, and last night I received an email from my supervisor that leads me to believe that I passed!
My first exam was a survey of literature on the subjects of media ecology and music technology, exploring how in the hell the two could be related to each other. I looked at that stupid exam nearly every day for about 5 months and I really started to hate it near the end... I mean, how the hell do I know what I'm talking about? Staring at something so huge (the document ended up being about 36 pages, with 48 sources cited. And, yes, I did read every source I cited) and feeling like I probably didn't know that much about it really sucked. I've long joked about how I still haven't figured out a good "sound bite" for my research--meaning that I don't know how to talk about it to strangers without crumbling when they ask a question I don't know how to answer--but here was proof that I didn't have a complete grasp on how to defend my own work. Moreover, if I didn't come up with a way soon, how could I expect to write that other long document known as the dissertation?
This blog is an attempt for me to sort out my thoughts as I progress along the road I like to call "finishing up this goddamn education o'mine." A lot of it will be stream of consciousness, un-edited (that is, until I go back, re-read and feel mortified at my spelling and other mistakes) and, hopefully, hilarious writing/rambling about what I discover along the way. Case in point: in my quest to collect remixes and learn about DJs, I've joined a site called soundcloud. Nobody's dropped any remixes into my box yet, but I've got a small amount of followers, which is, I think, a result of my username: fuckbunker. This is from one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, Peep Show. The dialogue goes something like this:
Mark: Hey Dobs! Just wondered if you'd fancy coming down with me to the Fuck Bunker and...
Dobby: Is that what you call the stationary cupboard?
In a word, HILARIOUS!
Anyway, this is a blog about my life as I research. I'll talk about music, books, people, and the things that distract me from my research. Hopefully there won't be too much distraction. I have a second exam too write, a dissertation proposal and the dissertation itself, so that'll keep me busy. Oh, and teaching misanthropic first year students. How could I have forgotten about that?
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