Month: June 2007

Facebook vs. MySpace: Deepening Class Divisions

I often voice my dislike for MySpace. I use Facebook, and feel uncomfortable enough releasing my personal information on that.

But today I read a very eye-opening essay by Danah Boyd, a Berkeley PhD student and USC Fellow specializing in youth involvement on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”, while not an academic essay, highlights differences in preference for Facebook and MySpace between “hegemonic” teens – college-bound high schoolers who are “in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities” – and “subaltern” teens: “Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm… kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.”

Boyd goes far beyond the simple observation that hegemonic teens prefer Facebook and subaltern teens still gravitate towards MySpace. She talks about public misconceptions regarding both social networking sites, and the deeper impact that the division has made on American young peoples’ lives today. For example, in the military, most of the enlisted, low-income, pro-war demographic uses MySpace, while higher-up officers with college degrees and more drive for upward mobility tend to prefer Facebook. OK, big deal right?
Wrong! A month ago, the military blocked all access to MySpace, but not Facebook. This is just one example that Boyd uses to illustrate the accentuated divergence between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic classes of young adults.

In reaction to her own observations, Boyd expresses a genuine concern for all of today’s teens; while there is a stark difference on the outside for these kids, they exhibit much of the same behavior on the inside, regardless of whether they write about it on their MySpace blog or their Facebook profile. She worries for the heightened tension in the Facebook crowd, which is college-oriented and focused on living up to goals for self-success imposed by themselves, and often similarly upward-motivated parents, as well.

Anyways, I’ve yakked about it in almost essay length myself. It’s a long-ish read – a few pages printed – but definitely very interesting if you like reading about diversity, race, class or youth issues. Read it!

A Day in Software

I recognize that it’s kind of sad, but I am a hardcore computer junkie and a significant percentage of my work and play are done on the computer. So here’s a peek into the software I use daily:
Waking up:

  • Southwest DING! – Check for low airfares to/from Phoenix. Find that there aren’t any.
  • Mozilla Firefox – Check e-mail, Facebook, Digg, Engadget, Dilbert.com, XKCD.com, and New York Times. All banner ads huffed by AdBlock Plus plugin. But it’s bloated and RAM-hogging, so I won’t use it for the rest of the day.

At work:

  • Internet Explorer 7 – Work stuff in an all-Microsoft environment. Lots of ASPX web apps that don’t work with standards-compliant browsers.
  • Microsoft Office 2007 – More work stuff… Greatly eased by Microsoft SharePoint Portal, one of the best CMS and project management suites out there.
  • Instant Messaging – Office Communicator for work contacts, Pidgin or Meebo for personal contacts
  • Windows Remote Desktop Connection – log in to lots of systems remotely. Login to my home machine to stream MP3s.

The coffeeshop:

  • Safari 3 Beta – Surf sites, correspond with web design clients. Using Safari because it’s the fastest browser on Windows, standards-compliant, and makes me feel like all of the Mac hotshots in the coffeeshop.
  • Adobe Design Premium CS3 – Web design with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop.
  • Gmail – check with clients, share documents and web copy, load PDFs and Word documents without having to download them.
  • Microsoft OneNote 2007 – Track progress on design projects.
  • Pidgin – IM with friends. Share links to pictures of pitbulls attacked by porcupines.
  • WordPress – write this blog post to refresh brain between romps in code.

Home:

  • iTunes 7 – Crank up the tunes. Sync iPod with new DRM-free music from eMusic or iTunes Store.
  • Picasa 2 – Load shots from yesterday’s bike ride off of my Canon PowerShot S3. Maybe upload them to Picasa Web Albums and blog about them.
  • e-SWORD – Get confused about something in the Bible that says men with long hair bring shame upon themselves. Consider a haircut. Cory then tells me that it was written in a cultural context to age-of-Christ Jews, so I’m overreacting.
  • Safari 3 Beta – check deals on Woot.com, newegg.com. Pay bills.
  • Windows Media Player 11 – Watch Star Trek: The Next Generation or Futurama.
  • FL Studio 7 – Write jazz fusion licks. Bang head on desk because of the steep learning curve. Go back to newegg.com and check prices on a desktop computer with hardcore audio interfaces and a MIDI keyboard.

Yep, I am lame and spend too much time on the computer. But it makes me money and keeps me connected to a lot of friends that live outside of Fort Collins, so I make no apologies.

Woop-woop!

I lost the game.

But I found out that I passed Calculus! Which means that I am done forever with it. HUGE relief. Only math I have left is stats and accounting – easy.

I have web design projects kicking up, so I should be a bit less busy for the two weeks I have left before Cape May and Belize

Lame Facebook interview after the break! (Click “Read More”)

Continue reading Woop-woop!

Wasting Free Time

Would someone care to tell me why I don’t do anything useful with my rather ample free time this summer?

I have PHP and FL Studio projects that I totally want to work on. But I prefer to stay home, sit on my butt, and surf the net or watch Star Trek.

Laaaaaame.

Studio Fun

A few weeks ago, I went to a Dave Weckl drumming clinic. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, but one thing I noticed was how he does almost all of his session work by playing along to pre-made tracks. Usually the recording workflow works the other way around, laying down drums first or second, but since this guy is one of the most in-demand studio drummers in the country, they record the rest of the track and e-mail the files to his home studio, where he records his part.

Personally, I learned to play drums by listening to and playing along with CDs. It’s definitely a good way to get up and going, since a pre-recorded band isn’t going to be mad that you’re a bad drummer, but as you get better, it does less for you; there is little room for creative expression, no interaction with other musicians, and no potential for disaster if you don’t keep good tempo.

So I decided to start messing around with some backing tracks of my own, sans-drums. That would open the possibility to work my creative muscles, which are honestly several steps behind my technical abilities.

fl-studio.jpg

So I bought FL Studio 7 Producer Edition, a professional digital audio workstation. It has everything I should need to record, notate, synthesize, or generate any kind of music. It’s very powerful and expandable, so if I later decide to build a more complete home studio with mics and stuff, I will have that ability.

I chose FL Studio (previously known as Fruity Loops) over some much more expensive competitors, like Cakewalk SONAR and Sony ACID Pro. The truth is, FL Studio is just as robust, but at a fraction of the price, and the developer actually seems human. For example, my purchase entitles me to free updates for life. It’s a per-user license as well, so if I want to install it on another computer of mine (gasp!) it’s fine. There’s an active forum community, flash video tutorials, and over 2GB of audio samples available for download.

There is a steep learning curve with any of this software – I have a lot of work cut out for me before I can even complete my first real song. It’s slow, but interesting, so I enjoy it. Once I figure it out, I might share some of it here.

Technolust

I am a self-admitted victim of Grass Always Greener Syndrome (GAGS). My laptop is no older than 10 months, and I already want something else. Don’t get me wrong, this thing works awesome with huge battery life and features up to the gills with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I can do everything I need from this one system.

But with how much I use the thing, I really should be using a desktop computer. Parts die a lot more slowly, and are cheaper to repair. Another year on this thing with my crazy usage patterns, and it’s gonna start Googling “seppuku” on its own accord.

In any case, I am developing a serious case of Mac envy. True, Vista does a lot of the Mac stuff that Windows users have missed out on for five or six yeats, but it just lacks the top-down integration present in OS X. It’s got some of the polish now, but it’s like comparing a luxury Hyundai or Daewoo to an Audi or BMW – it has very similar functionality, but it’s still just missing something!

So I’m scoping out my options. I would be totally irresponsible to ditch this laptop for another one, since it’s seen so little use and I’ve poured about $1400 into it. About 75% of the time, I’m using it at home, so a desktop seems like a wise choice. Here are possible ways I could go:

  • iMac Desktop at home, current Vista laptop at school (Cost: $1,175 including Office)
  • Ubuntu/Vista Desktop at home, Laptop for school (Cost: $400-600)
  • Sell the Dell, buy a MacBook Pro (Cost: $1000 after selling the Dell)

Yet again, Apple has a $500 premium over the PC. In terms of actual utility, it’s simply not worth it (that’s why I went with Dell over Apple last year). But I still want it!

I guess that this is just another example of why I shouldn’t covet worldly goods. This is how I become financially irresponsible 😛

Time for the Yearly Identity Crisis

Something interesting happened in my business calculus class today. The prof gave a quiz that had questions that we’d never seen before, but with some understanding of the concepts we did know, could be solved with a couple of smart realizations.

To the tell the truth, the quiz knocked my on my butt- I had been slacking for a day or so, and in an accelerated 4-week course, that is all you need to be in deep water. But pretty much everyone didn’t get the problems, even though they weren’t all that hard.  In fact, after the quiz, the students pretty much revolted against the prof. They seemed to think that she couldn’t test on anything that wasn’t on the homework. But she wasn’t testing uncovered material, she was just giving us problems that were slightly different from the ones we already saw on the homework.

I was flabbergasted by the reaction. Here were at least fifteen students who sincerely believed that they were only responsible for rote memorization, and not the critical reasoning and analysis skills that they should actually be learning.

Then I remembered: These are business students. They are not engineers or scientists, whose whole professions revolve around innovation and challenging our preconceptions. Business, in free market capitalism, often thrives on imitation and adopting others’ ideas. Simply put, there is little incentive to bother with analysis and creativity in business.

For the first time, I realized why they have a separate calculus class for the business majors! Simply put, they would die in Calc for Scientists. But that puts me in a strange position: I am very happy with my business major, since it gives me the technical software engineering skills as well as the business communication and management skills that will differentiate me from the next guy applying for a tech job.

But every once in a while, I get the feeling that my job isn’t enough on the tech end. It’s too biased towards proprietary Microsoft technologies, and doesn’t expose students nearly enough to UNIX/Linux environments or industry-standard languages like C, Python, Java, or PHP. And like my business calc class demonstrates, there isn’t a true push to understand or innovate.

I’ve considered adding a Computer Science major, or switching to Applied Computing Technology (Really CS with a business minor, as opposed to my current Business Major with the CIS concentration.) But to do so, I would have to retrace my steps in the introductory classes; they’d be different programming languages, but essentially the same basic concepts.

Also, I don’t think it means that much of a difference in the job field. They will be more interested in what I can actually do, not which degree I have. Since I already have the motive to learn the extra UNIX skills and non-Microsoft languages, I could easily teach myself the stuff. It would avoid annoying course prerequisites and save me some money.

Really I’m most concerned with the innovation, with differentiating myself from my competition. I guess that it may prove to give me an edge in the future, but whatever I choose to do, it’s gonna be a rough road ahead while I learn all of this stuff. (And I’m gonna have to put up with – sigh – being a Business major.)