badass, more badass, and badasser II

badass: i updated my blog roll to reflect what i'm actually reading, which meant saying goodbye to a few and adding on these 5: Does it Sell Stuff?; The Ad Contrarian; The Brief; The Social Path; and Dave Trott. in truth, i haven't read Dave's yet, but he comes on recommendation, so i'm starting. any others you want to bring to my attention?

more badass: courtesy of @ryanatmghwom, snap bracelets are making a come back. don't tell me you forgot about that bit of childhood goodness. only this time, they're USB enabled. ...yeah.

badasser: you thought that promoting fake blood on behalf of a new HBO show was badass (well it is). but try being even more ghettofabulous. pimp my ride, you say? close. try Pimp My Kettle. oh yeah, baby. that tricked out kettle is selling noodles all over your block.

and a parting gift, for those of us who have a slightly different definition of badass:
geeky badassness: the joker as ronald mcdonald. eat your advertising hearts out. this is the only time ronald has ever been hot.

[previous badasses here]

eff you, directv.

speaking of people finding social medias irrelevant, directv is helping along the stereotype that msm is only for "tweens" and can't possibly help your company in the long run. i don't know how long this spot's been running for, but i caught it saturday afternoon.

basically, you enter in on a cable tv board room, as they discuss sales. one of the suits gets really animated and starts talking about how they'll just "get on the 'net" and "blog it up" and how now they have a XX% hike in tween approval.

the directv voiceover is one in which this is looked down on, suggesting the use of directv instead, because they 'really get you' or something. i was too cranky at that point to be able to quote like i can from the previous part.

i'm not saying directv is or is not the sort of brand that can benefit from msm, but their spot annoyed me nonetheless. i couldn't even figure out who exactly their target audience was, other than "not bloggers, not net-savvy people, not teenagers, and not-" a whole bunch of other groups.

[if you can locate the spot, send it my way. i tried.]

anorexia and how it changes blogging.

curiouser and curiouser: the french.

according to new laws proposed, the french are going to jail and fine 45,000 euros bloggers (among others) who encourage anorexia. free speech what?

not that i'm "pro-ana" (the term they use) by any means... but i'm not going to tell you that you can't blog about your anorexia, or post your... "thinspiration" pictures. for once, i give kudos to Facebook and Myspace for resisting the request to remove such "pro-ana" statements/photographs.

with the state trying to legislate beauty aesthetics and media guidelines, many media kids are up in arms, from the fashion world out. there will be trials held to determine if your site is "pro-ana" and, if so, how detrimental it is.

The new offence is defined as "provoking a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment" to the point of risking of death or damage to health. The maximum penalties are applied if the person dies. (Bremner)

some of this is excusable and even understandable, considering events like the "Miss Bimbo" website, which encouraged children as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure. The Miss Bimbo site invites users to create a virtual doll, keep it “waif thin” with diet pills and buy it breast implants and facelifts. The website attracted 1.2 million players in France.

now, i went to the Miss Bimbo site after reading this. it does seem rather odd, but so are a lot of humour sites. not that i'm outright defending it, but i'm not prosecuting it either. after all, it is named MISS BIMBO. how serious can it be? yes, it points out a poor represenation of women... i would think enough to point out that it's what you shouldn't be.

i am sad and somewhat anxious if 9 year olds are taking this site seriously. i don't think the site should not exist, but perhaps it should revisit its age limitations to an audience that can think critically. i know 13 is probably too generous, but other mainstream social media sites pick up there.

how young do you think is too young for exposure to that?
should states regulate this kind of thing in order to combat behavioral diseases?
do you think bloggers and other websites should be penalized for it?

blogging as sacred feminine?

First, brief yourself here. This is a response post.

[hey look, i seem to be in a caps mood today. how strange! or perhaps academic.]

Read it? Good.

Firstly, if there's one thing my (wonderfully) crazy professor Zillah taught me in all our sex/gender/war classes, it's that we constructed the binary by which we think.

Blogging is not a 'feminine' practice because it involves concept linking, communicative aims, and use of word craft. It is 'feminine' because we have -concepted- these things as feminine. They are just actions, thoughts, motives. We assign them to females, and thus encourage them in our females. This links to social networking only insofar as it is similar to social grooming (the way we are expected to act in social settings as defined by mass social standards).

Yes, throw studies at me about differentiations in brain activity in different sexes. I'll list book titles about how there are more than three sexes and brain biology is an individualized aspect rather than a sexualized one.

Moreover, if we were to even say that this brain dichotomy exists, we also don't know enough to understand if this is an evolutionary skill or an innate one: that is,
...if girls are better at verbal because they are expected to be; because they are expected to be, their brains have grown throughout time to be wired more efficiently to do so
...or, if it is just as simple as you think it is. (Which it never is. Anyone read up lately on how identical twins don't share identical DNA, making many studies based on this control flawed?)

As Jason Falls points out, "Yet, the first blogs were run by men. Most of the top blogs in Technorati’s list are run by men. Nearly 2/3 of the bloggers attending Blogger Social were men and professional blogging tends to be male-dominated. Are the liberal gender roles of the 21st century allowing men to embrace roles not traditionally given to masculinity?"

I don't think it is a matter of liberal gender roles, nor embracing a side 'less masculine' because we as a society deem them to be. I think it's that blogging/etc has offered up a venue of creative, nonlinear thought previously considered only to be accessible by women. The anonymity enables men who would not have engaged in such thought to find their own voice within it.

If anything, I would argue that in the stereotypical way that men tend to dominate in a patriarchal culture, "more men blog" because more men are given attention. Society still values the male opinion over the female, a shift that is still being fought today. Being male gives you more authority, and thusly, likely more readership.

This is not uncommon. It happened with books, news reporting... the list goes on. It just always seems more sensible, easier to swallow, and more authentic, out of the mouth of man. --At least (to qualify again) to the masses. The binary described attributing blogging/social media as feminine is only a product of our society's thoughts... not the actual aspect.

So therefore I would argue that blogging is not inherently feminine.
It is a human need to communicate through methods locked into the 'female' category and exploited (willingly or not) by their 'male' counterparts--all the while not realizing that the point is still the human need to communicate, regardless of boxes.

more thoughts (kthanxbi?)

tangerinetoad: Funny that texting abbreviations almost non-existent on Twitter. More reason to it than we're not in high school?

i'm not sure why this is. generally, i would argue that twitter has (currently) a different audience than the bff4evs of facebook--or at least that the ratio is in our favour. i am a text message fiend, however, even when i text i don't use abbreviations (unless i'm being sarcastic and referencing l33t-speak for ironic or other purposes).

i don't think it's a high school grad mentality... i think it's the mentality of bloggers. people who are communicating on a more public level than texting, and therefore secure better understanding by not using abbreviations.

even twitter pitches tweets as microblog updates. it's not like mass text messaging (even though it is!)--it's supposed to be like quick mini-blogs. i think that mentality is what encourages well thought out, generally well-spelled, and generally unabbreviated tweets.

i'm not sure though; do you use twitter? what do you think?
(ps i need friends. i feel like i have nothing to tweet about.)