Category Archives: Emerson College

Jan 08 0 comments
Community, Emerson College, Personal Rants, Social Media

In with the Old

I recently made as my Facebook status, “Aubree Lawrence misses honest status updates.” A former student commented on the status and asked, “Aubree, what do you mean? Just curious. Does it have to do with the ‘old’ vs ‘new’ facebook?”

A quick question that prompted a lengthy response from me. (Surprised? I didn’t think so.) Facebook has a limit on comment length, and it took four full response boxes to reply to Rachael’s question. My response, in full, is reprinted below. My mind is still whirling around the topic. My friend and colleague Vanessa Rhinesmith has been blogging about managing the Social Media in her life, raising some great questions about how to integrate social media to complement her life… and not invade it. Her blog entries, my midnight status update and Rachael’s subsequent question reflect the anxieties we have about Facebook, how it is changing and how it is changing us.

Without further introduction, our exchange:

Status Update: “Aubree Lawrence misses honest status updates.”

Rachael: “Aubree, what do you mean? Just curious. Does it have to do with the ‘old’ vs ‘new’ facebook?”

Me” “Hi there! It depends, in this case, what you mean “old” vs “new,” which seems to get used at least two ways.

Old vs New can mean the formatting changes instituted about 4-5 months ago. The updates caused a lot of confusion and upset, spawning many groups with names like “Facebook, change it back or I quit.” (I made that particular one up, but you get the idea…)

But Old Vs New can mean something else. Social Media, in particular, is in constant flux, changing as the users who engage with it change. Facebook exploded past its origins as an online “who lives in my dorm” tool and became a means of community organizing and a quasi-professional tool. Its membership base grew, and the dynamics of Facebook (in my anecdotal opion) changed accordingly.

My own observation is that the “old” Facebook (”old” is such a relative term) had a degree of freedom and self-expression now missing from the Facebook experience.

In the “new” Facebook experience, one must consider the audience at large when posting… anything. Pictures, even quotes and status updates. There are tools to help manage what goes out to who, no question, but what you don’t let others see can raise suspicion among the denied. You can “de-tag” yourself from images, but your image is still out there posted indefinitely in the most navigable manner possible - a visit from a friend of a friend.

Even your profile can be problematic. I’ve recently been reconsidering my “Religious Views” profile item, which reads right now “Religious Views are lamer than scenic ones.” While early on this got a lot of chuckles, I’ve worried as my number of friends went from 30 to 170+ that I’ve been retro-actively offensive to some people. It’s hard to know what people will take seriously when they aren’t your most inner circle.

Most specifically, however, I was referring to my own status updates, which have gotten very… bland, I guess… since my Luddite boyfriend joined the Facebook party. Love him as I do, I’m sensitive to his feelings. I felt bad recently when he brought up that I posted “is bored” on New Years, when he was one room over.

I struggled Monday night to articulate my feelings into an appropriately “cathartic yet cryptic” status update. The thing is, Steve knows me very well. He’d see through “would rather be dancing” to the relationship anxieties I (and everyone else, let’s be honest) go through from time to time. He’d know it meant I wish I could turn the lights on and listen to music and make an idiot of myself dancing in the mirror at 1:30am… all things I can’t do since he lives with me. In that moment, I was remembering loving living alone. And, at 1:30a, I worried that that might hurt his feelings.

Of course, Steve is Steve, and he not only wouldn’t mind that I wrote it, but I’m sure he’d understand, and even sympathize. I can’t imagine he finds living with me all roses either! So, at 1 in the afternoon here I don’t mind spelling out word for word on my wall what, at 1:30 AM I thought might hurt his feelings. (He also would never bother to read this long of a post, so I have that going for me too.) ;)

Still, it was a moment that magnified for me personally an anxiety that I know many of my close friends feel about the way we “used” to be on Facebook. Facebook is growing in usefulness, but declining in personality. We can only wear one mask at a time, and we change masks according to our audience. On Facebook, we must try to wear many masks at once, morphing us into an “average” of all our various masks and personalities. The look (and outlook) is pretty bland. Its inevitability (the bland morphed mask) is somewhat ironic on a tool called “Face”book.

::laugh:: Does that answer your question? :)”

Is there a paper in here somewhere?

Sep 17 1 comments
Consumerism, Economics, Emerson College, Labor, Social Media, Thesis

She Works Hard for the Whuffie: Free Labor in the Age of Peer Production

It’s a title possibility for my thesis. Maybe I’ll change my mind. If I do I’ll simply come back and delete the entry altogether. How very 1984.

Thankfully the title, according to the Emerson College Department Handbook for the Master of Arts in Media Arts Program, 2004-2005 (my official catalog year), is open for redevelopment during the writing of my thesis.

I have decided that for my thesis I absolutely want to look at the economics of peer production. Almost everyone who knows me has heard my tirade on Amazon reviews (Short Version: On the whole, reviews increase sales (otherwise Amazon wouldn’t allow the system) people who take the time to write reviews are doing free promotions for Amazon products “to help educate others,” while increasing Amazon’s bottom line without compensation, etc…). Peer review systems, contests with consumer winning prizes for designing ad campaigns, corporate-sponsored play… these are topics that I’d wondered about in the abstract for but started being able to articulate after reading a Wired article by Long Tail author and longtime Wired editor, Chris Anderson, who writes:

Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie [sic*],” or simply whim.

On the whole, the article presents a far more idealistic view of peer production than I generally embrace. His line “It’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism,” left me with a riddle to solve. I’ve been in the process of temporarily moving out of my house (long story, happy ending) and, as I was packing and unpacking my library I took inventory of the number of books I’ve accumulated trying to answer this question, ‘with what, then, should I be equating peer production?’ (One hopes the answer will be less grammatically awkward than the question.) Anderson writes, “This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other,” but I have a hard time swallowing such a Utopian notion.

So, that’s what I’d like to drown in, I mean, dive into, in the next 9 months. The water is a choppy as it ever is with me, but it’s my last two semesters at Emerson. To keep with an already painful metaphor, it’s time to sink or swim. I invite anyone out there who has similar questions, or insights they’d like to share… or even just a good cookie recipe, to jump on in. I swear, the water’s fine. Join the Coast Guard and help me be the best that I can be! (As if the metaphor wasn’t bad enough, now I’ve gone and mixed it. ::sigh::)

My jump-start of a reading list is on the Works Cited tab above. Thanks for reading.

(ok, ok, that was more like 6 hours than 15 minutes of writing. 15 is a minimum, 24 the max in any given day. Deal?)

*The spelling of the word has it’s own “the day Aubree edited Wikipedia” story that ends in my wuffie entry being redirected to the “h”-bearing “whuffie“.

May 29 3 comments
Education, Emerson College, Urban Life

Lessons from a purple alien fetus

“I’d say it was a setup for disaster, but, it’s so much more than that. It’s my routine.”

Last Friday I fell. I fell hard.

I was sprinting down the stairs of the Central Square subway station when it happened. In typical Aubree Lawrence fashion I was listening to my iPod, reading an academic paper (marking it up with my favorite red pen), and hurrying down the stairs on my way to a meeting at Emerson. Yes. Listening to music, reading, writing, and hurrying. I’d say it was a setup for disaster, but, it’s so much more than that. It’s my routine.

I’ve pretty much pieced together what happened. At the bottom of the stairs I took a long stride toward the gate—not realizing I still had (at least) one more stair to go. When the floor didn’t meet me with it’s usual timing I pitched forward out of control. My confused right foot twisted on impact, bringing the rest of me down off-kilter. The resulting blow to my left knee has since blossomed into something resembling a subcutaneous purple alien fetus—summer fashions are on hold. My body stressed every muscle in panic. The next second I had the first of many sharp chest pains that (after stopping into the meeting to “touch base” first, of course) sent me to MGH fearing a (fourth!) lung collapse.

I don’t need to learn the same lesson twice. I’m done rushing. Rushing, scrambling, hurrying, hightailing it—whatever you want to call it, I’m over it. Yes, this means I will need to learn to leave on time. If I fail and end up being late somewhere then it will just have to be an (albeit public) important reminder to practice diligent time management. Not only that, I’m DONE multitasking as I walk place to place. True, I was harried, but with my adept skill paying attention to everything other than my surroundings the fact is, this accident could have happened at any time. (I must admit, though… for dramatic purposes I’m rather glad I was at least nobly risking life, limb and, um—knees, to get to a meeting when it happened. ::sigh:: Anything for a good story.)

Being a person of intelligence, and bearing the bruises (to knee and ego) of my fall from grace (sorry), I am henceforth resolved:

  1. I will not listen to my iPod for walks under 10 minutes long.
  2. I will no longer read papers, books, Spare Change News, or the Improper Bostonian while walking.
  3. I will not check my email on my cell, nor reply to text messages. (I still need to check texts in case someone is writing to say “meeting’s canceled, go back home and finish that half-eaten yogurt,” but I’ll stop and step to the side to do so.)
  4. I will not place phone calls. I hate talking on the phone anyway.

Only maybe worth noting: I will probably continue to drink coffee while walking; I am still a grad student/”human” after all!

Up until now I just cruised through the world in hopeless distraction. And why? “Efficient use of time! Productivity!” goes the argument… But seriously, could I really take good notes while walking? Compose a respectable email? How many times have I had to reread a paragraph after a near-stumble? Gods and callers alike know I can’t hear a damned thing on the phone with all the city’s street noise in the background!

I’ve been practicing my new walking-life philosophy for three days. I’m shocked to realize how much of the world I was missing, everything from the lilacs I didn’t see because I was always looking down, to snippets of some seriously eves-drop-worthy conversations that now leave me alternating between laughing and realizing humanity is a lost cause (which is to say alternating between laughing, and laughing even harder). The change has been surprisingly rewarding.

I suppose I shouldn’t make it sound so simple. It’s rewarding and all, but it’s also really hard. At this point I’m fighting well-honed habits, acts in which I once took pride! Seconds after I exit to fresh air I instinctively reach for my cell to have it fetch my email. The phone buzzes with a text message (most likely a Facebook Mobile status update) and I have to resist. I no sooner correct myself for going for my cell, and I’m already I’m shifting my bag to reach my iPod. But I have stay strong. I have to be patient and just keep reminding myself: Slow down. Breathe. Look around. Listen. Take notice of the world. Be radical and give a go at actually participating in it. And most importantly—don’t fall down.