The Walker Art Center, PBS and Social Media

For a paper in my Museums and Media class I explored the uses of social media and iTunes by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. While the use of social media by businesses is a hot topic, the use of social media by non-profits is not as big of a topic of conversation in media. I was really impressed with all of the ways that the Walker has reached out to use social media and iTunes. It's great to see all of these resources that can be considered places for solely for socializing or having fun used in an educational and cultural capacity.

Museums in Suburbia

This semester in my Museums As Media class we've talked a lot about interactive media in museums and on their websites. Many of my classmates and I live in urban areas. This weekend I am visiting my parents in the sprawling suburbia of southern New Jersey. It gives me a different perspective on the features of museum websites.

This Digital Life

This semester one of the classes I'm taking is about social media. It's not quite what I expected. I feel as if we've been reading serious, conservative articles written by people who I just don't relate to but then again I'm often impatient about building the background and learning about things that have no immediate practical use to me. This week I feel the connection and am starting to see what I need to do in regards to social media.

It's the Spring of Museums!

The Spring semester has started and so far I love both of my classes - Museums as Media and Social Media: Content, Community, and Culture.

In my Museums as Media class someone mentioned an exhibit that was as the Museum of the American Indian. There's a blog post on the Smithsonian website that talks about the exhibit and interviews a Native American skateboarder and filmmaker. This video was contained in the blog:

4wheelwarpony from Dustinn Craig on Vimeo.

The first project in my Museums class is to write a paper on a visit to a museum, and so I visited the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday. The exhibits were all based on a portraiture theme. The works were not in the form of traditional portraits and caused me to consider the many ways that we as humans can be represented in art.

Guy Debord, Mobile Media, and Facebook

Guy Debord, one of the well-known participants of a radical group active in the middle of the twentieth century called the Situationist International (SI), would have detested mobile media. Further, his theories that were to change society have played out in the social media website, Facebook. Some say that Debord's book of theses The Society of the Spectacle is the unofficial manuscript of the group (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt, and Watts). Debord’s description of “the spectacle” could easily be a description of mobile media, and his theories on situations and the dérive can certainly be used to describe Facebook. Like many thinkers that came before, such as the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, Guy Debord was reacting against established society. The fact that his theories have played out such as the theories of political radicals before him to describe the actions of popular society would have been a great disappointment to the man who was a progenitor of the SI.

Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and grew up in Cannes. His family had quite a bit of money and possessions that they lost due to the economic crisis felt throughout the world in the 1930s. Rather than try to obtain that wealth once again or ascribe to the expectations of bourgeois life, Debord decided to follow a “life of adventure” and align himself with radical political groups in Paris in the 1950s. He was part of a group called the Lettrists that eventually morphed into the Situationist International. Debord wrote many screenplays that were published in each group’s journal (although their journals would be what we now would call a zine). In addition to contributing to the journals for the groups with which he was affiliated, he published what has been considered his most famous work and the unofficial manifesto of the SI, The Society of the Spectacle. This work has been described as “one of the most radical critiques ever assembled of the modern appearance of capitalism…rejecting all previous leftist positions, which at one time or another had all claimed for themselves, at least in name, the same philosophical traditions” (Ohrt).