The Reformation

Jay Rosen published a fantastic piece on his blog today (which you can find here), describing how the landscape of journalism has fundamentally changed. He uses the metaphor of migration, describing old-media types as "reluctant migrants" who must leave their familiar terrain for a strange, new land. Rosen sounds the death knell for the traditional, top-down, "one-to-many" news model and describes a new way:

Across the digital divide the conditions for doing journalism are quite different. I’ll give you the highlights. Communication is two-way, and many-to-many. Horizontal sharing is as important as top-down messaging. Readers have become writers and the people formerly known as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers.

I've been tossing around another metaphor in my head for what's going on here. Could this be a Reformation? An Information Reformation?

Back in the 16th century, people of faith got sick of the Roman Catholic Church making all the rules, restricting who had access to Scripture, claiming people needed an intermediary (e.g., the pope) to have a relationship with God. All this while selling indulgences and engaging in myriad other acts of corruption and silliness. Wait a minute, people said (Martin Luther notably among them). Can't we just talk to God ourselves? Can't we share information among ourselves? Can't we read the Bible ourselves instead of allowing it to be filtered by people who obviously have a self-interest in what they preach? Thus, the Protestant Reformation. One-way, one-to-many communication became two-way, many-to-many communication.

So maybe we're witnessing another Reformation of sorts. The Internet Reformation. Just a thought.

Book report

I'm reading this book called Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It's amazing. Totally perspective-changing. LeBlanc, a journalist, followed a family in the South Bronx for about 15 years (I think–I'm not finished yet), and this is the story of their lives. Simple concept, but the result is fascinating. She tells it straight. She just hung out with members of an extended family for a long time, kept interviewing them over and over, and used court documents and secondary sources to corroborate what they said.

It's a story of poverty, drugs, family, street life—especially notable is how gender, race, and class intersect and create these dynamics that are so hard to unravel. What I love is that the author suspends judgment. The book is all description. I highly recommend it. You'll never look at urban poverty the same way again.

'Sex' and the Feminist

Saw Sex and the City. Loved the TV show. Guilty pleasure.

As a moviegoer, I enjoyed it. I was entertained. I appreciate a movie (and TV show) whose central characters are multidimensional women in their 40s. Hollywood needs more female representation, on- and off-screen. It was funny.

But as an academic, I thought: Really? I'm tired of the message that fairy tales really do come true, as long as women lower their standards. Trust me, the film is explicit about this. Also: Another one-dimensional "magical negro" character who, with her earthy, keep-it-real honesty, saves the damaged white woman from her cynicism? Sarah Jessica Parker's character actually says to Jennifer Hudson's character: "Thank you. You saved my life." Before Jennifer Hudson goes back to the 'hood (where apparently she belongs) and marries her old sweetheart.

So. Go see the movie, enjoy it, but don't expect any new ground to be broken. It's, ahem, hardly a feminist consolation prize for Hillary not getting the nomination, as some pundits—seriously—suggested. It's not a feminist film. But that doesn't mean feminists can't enjoy it.