Multimedia Communication

Tonight I suffered through another Mass Media class at my uni. When class was finally over and I stepped outside, the entire world was white with snow. During the last three hours of my life, the world had gone from patchy pieces of snow to being a winter wonderland.

But I have not come to describe the weather to you. Most of you live in Michigan, and if you want the details on that particular story you can either A) Look outside of the window, or B) Call my dad. He likes chatting about the weather. He was a meteorologist in a past life.

If you do not live in the U.S., google me. I don’t know.

I hurried back to my dorm, and the first things I did were as follows:

1. I realized that I left facebook up again for the whole world to see and my roommate to hack (if she was here, but luckily she wasn’t, she went home for the weekend). During this time I had ten alerts and my friend Stephanie messaged me.

2. Debated going to an event on Mary’s Mantle.

3. Debated untagging myself from the event on Mary’s Mantle.

4. Checked my e-mail.

5. Went on tumblr.

I’m going to be very open and honest with you right now. I am addicted to tumblr. Tumblr is how I get my news. It tells me, Something bad is happening in China; people are being stabbed; YOU SHOULD BE AWARE. It tells me that YouTube has this gosh-awful Barbie drama that I should watch, and so I watch all thirteen episodes, most of which contain bodily humor. Often it reminds me that Lydia Bennet just posted a new vlog and ** SPOILER ALERT** dear God, she just kissed Wickham!!! **End Spoilers**

Now, I am also going to be frank with you. My tumblr is private. Only two people on my facebook know where my tumblr is located, what my  name is, all of that jazz. However, if you were to see my tumblr profile, you would surmise that: A) I am obsessed with the U.K., B) My favorite singers are Steam Powered Giraffe and Owl City, C) I love Pride & Prejudice, and D) I am an avid feminist.

Oh, and E) I am madly in love with Thomas William Hiddleston.

On tumblr, I am able to follow people who like the same things I like—feminism, Tom Hiddleston, the U.K., Pride & Prejudice. And the people I follow introduce me to things like The Most Popular Girls in School, John Green’sbrotherhood 2.0 videos, and History Channel’s new first-ever scripted series Vikings.

When I got back from class tonight, there was a lot of messages waiting for me on tumblr. Steam Powered Giraffe is airing a livestream event tomorrow; I should watch it! Rachel Kiley, one of the scriptwriters for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, is being mean again. Tom Hiddleston is going to be in a vampire movie (after he gets back from Africa, anyway). Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Julian Assange (and he looks terrible with white hair).

This is my news source. This is how I find things that are interesting to me.

Tumblr is how I learned the names of the men (and woman) in my favorite bands. It’s how I follow the careers of my favorite singers. It’s how I see theories on how Sherlock Season 3 is going to go, and what’s going to happen with Lydia Bennet. It reminded me that I should wear orange to support the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. Tumblr is for people to make connections with other people, and while I do not talk to anyone on tumblr, it helps me navigate my world.

But it’s not just tumblr. It’s YouTube and it’s livestream and it’s blogs and it’s music. I find new music, which leads me to iTunes; I find gifs, which leads me to videos on YouTube; I learn via tumblr and YouTube that SPG is going to be on livestream tomorrow. That means I’m even more connected to my favorite band than I would be normally; with only a 7-second delay, I will be engaging with the band members as if I were actually in the room with them. They can see my comments onscreen, and so we are engaging in communication.

That’s all that this is. It’s communication.

And communication is something that Steam Powered Giraffe and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries do well. They are examples of interactive media, this new phenomenon that’s been taking off because of the immediateness and presentness of the internet.

Let’s take SPG for example. Originally, there were three members—Bunny “Rabbit” Bennet, David “The Spine” Bennet, and Jon “The Jon” Sprague. (There was a fourth, but we won’t concern ourselves with her here.) They have always been open with their fanbase, and so when Jon left the band, Bunny was honest with her fans. However, after the fact, the band thinks that they were possibly too honest (because a lot of early fans were divided in their hatred for Jon or the Bennet twins, because obviously when the founding members of a band break up battle lines have been drawn), but their openness is, really, a good thing. I feel like I know SPG, and I understand why they do the things that they do. This is why I was stoked to meet the new member, Sam “Hatchworth” Luke (okay, so he wasn’t new, but whatever).

In the case of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern vlog adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, from the beginning, viewers were consulted. We were told to stay in contact via facebook, tumblr, twitter, and google + (like anybody uses that). I subscribed to all of the above (I have a google + account, zomygosh!) and so I am always always always in the know about my favorite fictional characters.

For example, take YESTERDAY MORNING. I woke up, went on facebook (it’s like brushing your teeth, you are required to check facebook in the mornings, it is law) and saw that Pemberly Digital, one of the…for lack of a better word…widgets of LBD, had posted a quote: “Today is the day that everything changes.”

OH

MY

STARS

ABOVE

Something was going to happen. Sure enough, a video was released later that day by Gigi (Georgiana Darcy), hinting at future events. 

It was not until 11 a.m. that we saw the first ramifications of “everything changes.” For those of you who don’t watch LBD, I won’t spoil it (or confuse you further), but something traumatic rippled the fandom. People got upset. People were confused. I cried. Brooke laughed at me. Then, at 12, one of the characters sent out an SOS on twitter.

This right here, folks, is the use of three different websites used for one purpose. It is an interactional television show in real time, in real life. No 7 second delay.  

Today in class, we were discussing the openness of media. Should everything be as open as my YouTube videos, as my bands? Should—gasp—businesses be required to open up everything to the reader, to release PR reports supporting their choices, as Bernie Su, one of the writers of LBD, did today?

Is this the future? Will I, an audience member, be able to watch in real time as Toyota builds a car? Will I be able to offer input? Will the creations that I and others I collaborate with via the internet someday become real and tangible things? Is this terrifying? ABSOLUTELY. The future is always terrifying.

But as for me, I am liking what I see.

Keane Came to Royal Oak

The Royal Oak Farmer’s Market was right next to the 44^th District Court. Laura pulled into a parking spot right in front of the austere building, made of sandstone and dotted with gold letters. Next to it, the Farmer’s Market looked small and old. There were a few stalls out there, with Russian-looking fur caps and a few old men.

We got out of the car and hurried towards the Market. I pulled my thin white jacket closer to myself, stuffing my fingers in the pockets. Michigan was cold and gloomy. The sky was a bluish white.

Inside, there were stalls full of old things—recycled things—a garage sale. I had been expecting Saint George’s Market in America, full of jewelry and original ware and food. “Where will we find Sarah?” Laura asked.

“We’ll find her,” I said. The market was only so large, after all.

We passed a man selling caramel popcorn. “The best caramel popcorn in the world!” he said, giving Laura and I eat a taste.

“The secret is, it’s baked, so the flavor goes right into the corn,” the man said. Laura bought a back, and I slowly sucked on the kernels he had given me.

“There she is,” Laura said, the first to see Dirty Girl Farms. There was a small table full of soaps, little rectangular blocks with different color spirals in them, and then lotions smelling of Lavender, Olive Oil, Hemp, Cucumber. Next to that stall was honey. I thought immediately of Chalice and the school Laura and Sarah have been talking about opening.

Sarah was with a customer, so Laura and I poked around the stall. It was crunched next to a man selling jewelry, also recycled; he was on the phone. I looked at the different perfumes—Bohemian Rose, Good Karma, Fairy Dust, and my favorite, Black Magic.  One entire wall was filled up with herbs and things I had never heard of; natural medicines and flavoring and bits and pieces. There were a few pieces of tea, to make your own loose-leaf at home.

Sarah talked to me about the different types of perfumes, and what was in them (because, as a Bath & Body Works associate, I find this very fascinating), and then I went and haggled over a set of ruby red goblets for her. By then the market was set to close; we had been later than we thought. Laura and I followed Sarah’s car to her house, down a bunch of side-streets to a duplex full of colonial-looking buildings, red bricked and white columned. Then we were off to Royal Oak again, in Sarah’s car, the TARDIS, to The Yellow Door and other little cute shops. My sister’s 18^th birthday is this Friday, and I wanted to find her something special. We wandered through all sorts of artwork, barrettes and rocks decorated to look human, picking up rings and books and stuffed animals. One of the stores we went to even had a ginger cat, asleep in a box full of random trinkets.

Stores close early on Sundays, especially the ones run independently, and so by six we found ourselves at Noodles & Company for dinner. I always get American Buttered Noodles, but after four months of eating very little but buttered noodles, I was finding that it was a little bland and tasteless. Sarah and Laura opted for more original, colorful dinners. I sipped my Izzie and stared at people as they passed by the window. Outside, all of the trees were wrapped with blue Christmas lights. I was glad they hadn’t been taken down yet. There weren’t many Christmas lights in Belfast, not the way we do it in America, and it was nice to see them still up and shining cheerfully in January. 

 Barnes & Noble, as a big corporation, was still open when we finished eating, and so we loitered there for awhile, picking up huge copies of Moby Dick, comparing Sherlock volumes, and making Laura promise to buy us copies this summer when she studies at King’s College London. She’s decided to take a summer class there on Jane Austen, so she’ll get to visit Bath. Most likely she will get to see the London Eye and Baker street to, and so the rest of us Sherlock fangirls are secretly pouting. 

 We got to the concert early and decided to stand on the periphery. Sarah’s boss from Dirty Girl Farms was there with her husband, and they kept popping in, making sure we were doing all right. All of the lights were blue, except for the ceiling, which was red, and I keep feeling like I was underwater. 

By the time the concert started there were a lot of people—I really don’t know how many. The opening act was Youngbloode Hawk, whose singer came on with long curly hair and a black and white polka dotted shirt that looked like it was made of that flimsy, static-y fabric. For a very long time I questioned his fashion sense, but he and the drummer were really good at beating the life out of the drums, so that I could feel the musical vibrations pulsing in my legs and in my heart—when the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums—and I got into it, bobbing slowly. 

Sarah and Laura, getting ready for Keane!

 Of course, we really came to see Keane, a British band made popular by “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Is It Any Wonder?” They came to promote their newest album, Strangeland. I loved the title. It reminded me of 30 Seconds to Mars--a stranger in a strange land. They were strangers in a strange land; it was their first time in Royal Oak. Everyone was really excited to see their Strangers; their British strangers.

Laura had said earlier, “I’m just so excited to be breathing air from British lungs!” and I did not think that I would be so emotional during the concert. I’m not afraid of Eoghann, Madonna’s resident Brit and basketball player extraordinaire (this is probably a very illustrious title. I am not sure he deserves it. I do not understand basketball enough, but Laura and others have assured me Eoghann is good at basketball).  Americans tend to be very enthralled with the British, but I think we’re really similar in a lot of ways—and they tend to lose their glamour when they drape themselves over you reaching for a crisp, sing songs about strawberry jam, get off of the bus three stops early and walk in the rain because you accidentally hit the ‘stop’ button, and ask you what you thought of Jonathan Swift’s feminine aversion in Gulliver’s Travels (answer: Jonathan Swift was beginning his swift (hehe, a pun) into madness, including but not limited to hatred of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially women and their bodies, and natural things like going to the restroom. Gulliver’s Travels is not a children’s book or even a book that can be looked at from a feminist standpoint; IT IS A BOOK ABOUT A MAN WHO WANTED TO BECOME A HORSE.)

In other words, I have stopped seeing the British people as a race of demi-gods.

However, during the concert I realized just how much I missed accents, and the way different people talk. It was so nice to hear Keane’s accents and imagine myself back in Belfast; and for a long moment I actually could see myself back in the U.K., wandering through the streets. I had to pull myself back and listen to the music. Sarah and Laura kept looking around, making sure I wasn't wandering off (I have the tendency of doing that, especially when I'm interested in something). 

Keane was really a great concert. The singer was brilliant, and he had a good voice live, and the other members were fantastic. I loved their lights show; it wasn’t repetitive and it was beautiful. At the end they had lights come up like little dots, and wild, mixed metaphors ran around my head: rice being thrown at a wedding, fireflies, dandelion seeds.

When we left the theatre, there was at least an inch of snow on the ground, and the weather was even colder. I pulled my gloves out of my purse and put them on, shivering and sliding on the slush. The roads were bad, and Laura decided it would be safest to stay the night at Sarah’s.

Sarah has a beautiful house. It’s covered with arts pieces, funny magnets, and tons of books. She pulled out two mattresses from gosh-knows-where, and we went to sleep. I was thinking of robots and dandelion seeds when I dropped off to sleep.

It was still sleeting in the morning, but the roads had at least been plowed. Laura and I rescued the car from its blanket of ice and snow, and took the perilous road back to Madonna. From there, I ran to get changed and ready and meet Hannah and Professor Andonian, who sent us to Northern Ireland. She still needed to get her present, and she wanted to ask us about our Experience and then interview us a little bit. She’s going to have us each interview each other about what happened, and then use it to send others abroad.

Only one other person is interested in going to Queen’s: Twizzler.

Anyway, the Keane concert was brilliant, and I had a great time. Sarah and Laura were great concert buddies, and no mosh pits were formed and few people were drinking in front of me! So the puritan in me was happy, and so was the hippy. Now I’m busy all this week—it’s hard work promoting feminism in a campus where everyone is “equal” already, and then we’re trying to get the Sociology group out from the underground, and I had to write a paper about Unions and Michigan and Right to Work, and then I have a fifteen minute presentation on Proto-Indo-European languages with a focus on Germanic that’s due………….soon.

And the printer stopped working.

And I think my new hand lotion is giving me a headache. That, or it’s bedtime for this chick.

Busy, busy, busy bee. 

Ag, headache. 

Wanderlust

The room is small and tidy but not fussily so. An ancient electric kettle has been put on, its roar louder than the music coming from the corner of the room. In a moment it will start steaming up the windows, because that is what ancient kettles do. If left to its own devices, the kettle would slowly boil away at the water until the room is full of steam and moisture and the kettle is empty and hissing angrily.

The girl knows this about the kettle. She rescues it from itself just before the steam becomes bad, and pours the water into a travel mug. It is the best she has at the moment, but it has served her well, and she is oddly fond of it. The cup is filled ¾ of the way, and then the rest of it is filled with cold tap water. Waiting for an ancient electric kettle’s water to cool is to wait hours.

She takes a Trader Joe’s tea bag that is lying on the sink and cuts it open with a pair of scissors, dunking the bag into the water. Peppermint immediately fills the air, and the girl wrinkles her nose. But she is hungry, and her stomach is so flat, and peppermint would do her better than the strong Edinburgh teas hidden under her bed. For a moment she thinks nostalgically of the Irish Breakfast Tea she has left behind, but she shakes that thought away. Her friends already tell her that she is too gloomy.

Leaving the cup on the sink to cool down, she sits down at her laptop and types King’s London summer school into the google search bar and clicks the first link that comes up. To her left sit two textbooks which need to be read, and a strange list of terms relating to artificial intelligence. She has time. Most of her friends are in Washington, D.C. for the March; one of them is going home to Ionia because she is sick with Pink Eye; one is working, and the rest live off campus.

For a moment, the girl abandons her search and writing down of figures (£1,350; £950, £60) and turns the heat down. For the last three weeks she has woken up cold, gone to bed cold, and suffered. Only last night she realized that the heat was off. Now the heat is on full blast, but even that is getting stifling. Outside, the snow is falling. She does not pity her friend the drive back to Ionia, a three hours’ distance from their University in Livonia.

Ionia. Livonia. American cities, named for places in the Old World. She pulls the teabag out of her cup and tosses it in the sink; she’ll rescue it later. The tea tastes weak and wrong. She’s never liked peppermint. Maybe she should try again, and make another cup—make it the proper British way. Instead she takes another sip of what she already has and thinks, I’ll get used to it.

Oh, but for a proper cup of tea!

No, I’m getting used to it.

Maybe she could go back to the Old World. Classes in America still don’t sit right on her shoulders; she squirms underneath the gazes of the professors. Look at the classes offered at King’s. They study fanfiction. What American university studies fanfiction? Doesn’t matter—three weeks back in the U.K., in England, is all that matters.

Now, why go there when people are dying to go here?

King’s College. It has a nice ring, she thinks. She’s already been to Queen’s University. A King and a Queen—how does that song go? We are the kings and queens of promise?

Oh dear, she thinks, turning away from the laptop. I’m getting an idea; and it’s never good when I get ideas. I’ve too many ideas for mayhem already. Her gaze sweeps over the room. She has worked hard to make it look like a nest, like she never left. But there are packages lying on the windowsill, to send away to Northern Ireland—pudding, American pudding, candy canes, Milky Ways and Three Musketeers. Could she really say good-bye to food again, just for a proper cup of tea? And what about all of the books she needs to read, nestled in with the books she brought back from abroad—and oh, can’t it wait another year at least, this wanderlust? This is not her journey to make!

She takes another sip of tea, gags, and tosses it down the sink.

Note to self: Do not drink tea people leave in your room willy-nilly.

'We Head Home'

Madonna University was the only school in Wayne County that did not close on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. My sister, who is still in high school, sent me two different drafts of a paper she’d been working on even before I got up. She was going to use her day off wisely.

I was going to school, and I was going to cause mischief.

The inauguration was on the t.v. in the Take 5 when I got there. I’d been getting updates from my facebook feed and tumblr all day, but it was nice to finally see it. Richard Blanco was onscreen, reading a poem from a binder. My boss was sitting next to a group of nursing students, who were quietly reviewing for a big test they had at one. I had just seen Ann on her way to eat lunch at the cafeteria, talking about how worried she was for that test. The life of a nursing student is not easy.

"All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the "I have a dream" we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever…"

Brooke, my roommate, had come down to the Take 5 with me. She was prepping for a big Pokemon tournament (my words, not hers) and needed fortification. She sat at one of the red tables, away from the t.v., while I sat on the floor and listened. Langston Hughes had been singing in my head all day; everywhere I could hear echoes of I, too, sing America. This new poet, this Cuban poet, did not sing like Langston Hughes did, and I had to concentrate to hear the music in his words.

Elisabeth appeared a few moments later, on her lunch break. She was wearing her blue SCOPE shirt, and wanted to start talking, but I hushed her. “Shh. Watching.” When I get interested in a program, I am very possessive of it.

Elisabeth wrinkled her nose and flounced over to the purple couch. “I won’t comment,” she said.

“Don’t you care at all? It’s history.”

She ignored me and went to go buy food.

"We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,"

When she came back, Richard Blanco had finished, and there was now a priest onscreen. Obama’s head was bowed; there were deep lines in his face. I remembered Sally’s commentary on facebook: Smile, Mr. President! He looks so much older, now. And there's so much left to do. Four years, and change is urgently needed...

“Amy’s going,” I remarked. “Did you see? She said she was going to go. Gosh, it must be freezing.”

“Yeah. I don’t know why she would.”

Because Romney’s party is too far away, I thought, and we weren’t invited, but I just shrugged and said, “Because it’s history. Don’t you want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you were there--”

Her face closed, and I shut up and started paying attention to the priest, whispering, “Amen,” when he finished. The cameras panned to Beyonce, who was going to sing the National Anthem.

Frances, my boss, got up and went back to the Writing Center. Her lunch break was over, and once Beyonce takes the stage you know it’s over.

“She looks good for someone who just had a kid,” Laura said, suddenly appearing at my shoulder.

Laura works with me at the Writing Center, and we were in the same Freshman cluster two years ago. She’s one of the smartest people I know, and she’s an amazing writer on top of that.

Together we watched Beyonce for a bit, and then discussed politics, scandalizing Elisabeth, who had no idea that we had elected a lesbian for Senate.

“From California?” she gasped.

“Wisconsin,” Laura said.

Not all LGBTQ people live in California. This is a fact. It costs too much to live there.

We broke shortly afterward for class. I have Marriage and the Family on Monday with Hannah and Nicole, both of whom I hadn’t seen in at least four days. I told them every little detail of my life, annoying them to death, and then Father George came in and had us pray that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would work hard for America in the next four years.

Father George is a slide-show person, and as he skipped through the slides, asking us why we are not writing down his tidbits of wisdom whenever he said something he felt was particularly poetic (“A human being is not a book to read. They are a book to take with you on the journey,” and “Feeling must be expressed at the right time, at the right place. Or your mother-in-law will try to sabotage your marriage.”) when he came to a slide about Feminist Theory.

“I think that women are now very empowered,” he said. “There are women in the senate, and in all major jobs. But, of course, there are feminists who try and tell women that they are still oppressed. Do any of you women still feel exploited?”

I nodded, and he called on me to explain. I gave one theory—just one, I could have gone on about this all day—and then looked around, wishing someone would step up and say, “Yes! I feel exploited, too!” But no one said anything.

Come on, I prayed, someone. Isn’t this more interesting than what we’re learning about onscreen? Aren’t you annoyed that you get paid less than men? That Afghanistan has a better maternity leave than the U.S. does? That 1 out of 3 women are raped, usually by men they know, and are too afraid to speak up about it?

Father George moved on and said, “I do not think that this is a big concern. Women are now very much equal to men.”

We only broke for class discussion when one of the two guys in the class said that the book had been written by women, and he was upset by this, and why didn’t women just say what they mean.

The book had been written by two men and a woman.

After class I ran off to my Sociology meeting, which was a lot of fun. Felicity, who used to live at the dorms with us, appeared and brought rainbow cupcakes, which we brought back to the Take 5 and ate. High on sugar, I decided to skip my Peace and Justice meeting, and Felicity, Hannah, Nicole and I went to Sheesh for dinner.

Sheesh is my favorite restaurant. When I was in Belfast, Sheesh was one of the places I missed the most. It’s cheap and it’s quick and it’s filling. Everything is doused in garlic, and I get to eat my fill of pita bread. Sitar music plays on the intercom, and pictures of Lebanon are all over the walls. I’ve gone to Sheesh so much, it actually inspired me to write a novel about it—an ongoing novel, at any rate.  When we came back to the school, the Candlit Service for MLK was in full swing, and I got to hear the recorded voice of the King himself: And I have a dream…

The day was going rather well, until I ran into my Mortal Enemy.

God sends certain people to try us (or perhaps the Devil sends certain people to drag us kicking and screaming to Hell, but whatever), and I am no exception. My own Mortal Enemy comes in the form of a jerkface who knows exactly how to push every single one of my buttons.

I did not miss him when I was in Belfast.

I got into a tiff with him, and then stomped off, and then he sent me an e-mail continuing the argument so I had to get off of my computer and stomp around the hallways, scaring my roommate because I was saying some very rude British words.

However, it’s hard to stay mad for long when you’re pouting in your room and Laura and Sarah come to serenade you, singing, “One day mooooreeee,” and then laughing loudly. The Writing Tutor group was meeting to watch The Last Enemy, which was extremely cheering because Benedict Cumberbatch took his shirt off, and then write. And gossip, of course. By the end of the day, there were two people sprawled out on my floor, Brooke Fox on my bed writing fanfiction, and my roommate Brooke on her bed watching funny videos on youtube and laughing every so often.

In the East, Barack Obama had finished his evening too. He referenced Stonewall, and was the first president to say the word “gay” in an official speech. Stonewall is one of those things you just don’t talk about, like the internment of the Nisei in World War II. But it’s time to start talking about these things. America never was America to me—as Langston Hughes would say--

And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!