It was fun, though, to discuss teaching and research all day long for three straight days and once on Saturday.

Gaby and I had fun in Denver. The downtown area is amazing with dozens of restaurants and shops, pianos every block for anyone who wants to play them and a free bus to take you from end to end.

We were never bored, and I think Gaby enjoyed the entire time, even though I was in interviews or sessions Wednesday through Friday.

We also saw Boulder for a day to get a little exercise and a little exposure to Colorado’s wilderness after having spent the better part of a week downtown.

Seth (Ashley) drove us from Denver to Boulder, and we had fun hiking with Liz Gardner and Liz Lance. Note: those of us with short legs cannot hike that quickly, and Liz Gardner’s face just gets like that when she moves faster than 5 m.p.h. Nothing to worry about.

My favorite part was when we happened upon a TED event in the middle of Chautauqua Park. Technology, Entertainment, Design + Boulder = icing on the cake.

Picture this: You’re sweaty and tired after hiking and running every now and then because you stop to take pictures of everything and have to catch up to the group.

The wind is shaking the tall pines, and a thunderstorm seems just on the verge of crashing over the Park.

The rain creeps in. Your car is a mile away, and no one’s quite sure where to go.

This happened to us, but it turned out to be the best possible detour.

We went from being lost, guessing whether or not it would make sense to walk into town rather than to try to hike back through the forest. We hit the nearest trail head, and right in front of us were about 200 to 300 people lounging in a park, eating out of picnic baskets.

The rain never picked up. Liz Lance talked our way into the venue. Everyone but Gaby and I went back to the car to get the rest of our stuff.

As Gaby and I hung out in line, we looked at the Flatirons, rock formations. The people at the TED event who had not brought food were waiting in a long line to buy BBQ. They ran out of veggie burgers first.

We ended up staying until dark learning about what makes something funny, quantum physics’ 11 dimensions, water all around the Universe, and African crowd-sourcing using cell phones.

They had free posters and t-shirts. Since we arrived at intermission, they found free tickets for us traveling grad students.
We met a Mizzou J-school grad within seconds of arriving at the theater. She’s a freelancing foreign correspondent.
I kind of love Boulder.

After the show and a little bit of a walk, we had Thai noodles at a place just off of Pearl Street.

I guess the only thing you could do to improve upon a memory like that would be to enhance participatory democracy in the world by helping to save the best of global journalism. Could happen.

I mean, how many times have you wandered through the woods and happened upon a group of intellectuals also seeking answers to life’s burning questions? It doesn’t happen every day.

Or does it?

It seems that critics of participatory journalism assume that American journalists are able to act independently. Ok sure, freedom is a spectrum, and if you avow yourself to communitarianism it could be argued you’re allowing some of your freedoms to be subsumed for the good of the community or communities into which you place yourself. The current system may be in some ways more free than communitarian journalism, but at what cost? And to whom are we paying?

I would say that you can be deeply involved in a community and still free to act independently, perhaps more free if you actually take stances once in awhile, as long as you are transparent about why you take which positions you take, who pays you, what your past political behavior is, etc.
Comparing Media Systems

Some scholars behave, write, and speak with full throats as though the American system of media production were the only one and if journalists in America could ever be beholden to no one. Hallin and Mancini would say: “NFW; IDTS” Yes, I just inserted a semicolon into my chatspeak.

I don’t understand the assumption that anyone working in the American system is or even could be free from corporate pressures or, to quote J. Herbert Altschull in Mixed News, “Money”. Money’s good, except when it’s not. Phil Griffin and Rupert Murdoch employ quite a few journalists. (Yes, they do.) They also have a tendency to let it be known how they think news should be covered. They both first and foremost agree that news should make them and their corps a lot of money whether it does any good for the citizens of America. It might, but it’s not the primary goal of our media system (duh). I’m talking about how they address their shareholders (Newscorp – NWS; MSNBC – GE). It’s good and it’s bad, but it is, in fact, a system.

It would be crazy to argue that there’s too much money in American Journalism right now. There might not even be enough money to call it “Money” in a few years (worst case), but that’s not my point. American journalists live and work in a media system that puts major constraints on what’s acceptable. This explains why several prominent journalists are questioning Michael Hastings. That’s the stuff that used to get me excited about journalism. But I also know if I pulled that while working for network television (in my dreams, of course), I probably would be out of a job by now.

At any rate, for every Amber Lyon alive and kicking, there are hundreds of ho-hum TV reporters. I know: I pretty much was one.

Participatory journalism isn’t guaranteed to save anybody’s job or to save journalism or Democracy, but it’s something we should teach our journalism kids to be able to do. In addition, we should be willing to teach them about the soup they’re in so none of them will buy the false dichotomy of independence versus community engagement.

“How independent can we be?” “How engaged is too engaged?” I’d rather journalists and future journalists be asking those questions than assuming that independence is full-on possible for anyone but the occasional freelancer and before presuming that the answer to the crushing normalcy of traditional news is complete submission to the community most likely to succeed.

Fans of participatory journalism need to remember it will be much easier to play to the community chambers of commerce than the community of underrepresented Americans if the community itself is your source of support.

I think it was President Obama who said, “This is hard. If it were easy, it would be done already.”

How do we approach community relationships so that we feel free to join, free to report, free to advocate and free to call “Bullshit!” ?

How can journalists approach their communities the way my wife approaches me – with love, respect and a healthy dose of “when you’re wrong, you’re just wrong” ?

From personal experience, as a former average TV reporter, you can be an independent-minded American journalist and get in trouble for covering too many Iraq war protests. You can do your job well and still go home feeling like an idiot. You can work your way up the ladder until you’re not a cog (There are the Amber Lyons out there.), or you might go into academia and demand from a relatively comfortable position that things change.

Demanding is the easy part.

Designing a curriculum to train participatory journalists in a field that doesn’t fully exist yet, and doing meaningful research across borders on identity, engagement and the role of communication and technology in society, well, I guess that’s where I earn my keep.

In order to manage the least number of immigration hassles before their big wedding in the Philippines, they decided to go this route with a small, beach-side ceremony, and I absolutely understand.

Gaby and I were married eight years ago today in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, according to the Catholic Church, but we did the official legal ceremony here in good ol’ MO on July 1st of the same year, followed by a renewal ceremony thing (read: excuse to have a reception in WashMO and party) in August, right around when the Town and Country Fair was going on.

I’m not sure which anniversary Justin and Anya will celebrate. Gaby and I always celebrate the first one, the big church wedding with the big reception complete with a band and Gaby’s whole family…well, most everyone made it. I think a few cousins couldn’t make the trip.

I totally love this photo of Anya and Justin chatting with their parents in the Philippines and in WashMO right after they gave their vows.

They look as happy as can be. I know the decision came sort of last-minute to go this route to avoid immigration issues as they plan to travel to the Philippines for another celebration with Anya’s family. I was in strong support of it because I think getting married officially by a judge in MO saved us hassles on Gaby’s path to citizenship. I think this will help in their efforts to sort of expedite residency status.

Most Americans are ignorant of the immigration process. TV sitcoms make it look like a civics test and a marriage license are all it takes. For us, residency took a couple of years. Then, a conditional status had to be removed after a couple more years. Since then we were saving up the money to pay the fees for the citizenship application (not that that actually worked…in a way, student loans helped pay for this latest round of fees).

We have also moved three times since we were married, and we’ve both been through about a career and a half, so I guess we put it off for about two years. Permanent residency is really the key to working and traveling relatively comfortably, but if Gaby ever needed to spend an extended period of time in Mexico, she needs to be a citizen. Also, soon she’ll be able to vote.

Gaby will finally take her vows to become a citizen on July 15th of this year, right in the middle of the “Three Anniversaries”.

It’s great that Justin and Anya’s parents could “attend” their (first) ceremony, and it kind of makes me wish Gaby and I would have had something like this eight years ago. We might have forgone the three weddings and just brought our laptops with us to Hawaii.

We’re still hoping to get a honeymoon. Maybe we’ll go next year after I finish my dissertation. (Mind you, we do travel to Mexico, but it’s always to visit family, and we have been to a couple of journalism conferences.)

I’m so lucky to have had eight years with Gaby. It’s reassuring in this age when everything moves so quickly to know that we will always be together.

Congratulations to Anya and Justin, safe travels, and keep sharing the pictures!

A tie is the best outcome the US side could have hoped for in this match. It’s worth a point toward advancing from group play. The best explanation for allowing matches to end in a tie is that you don’t need a win to advance. It makes wins all the more valuable since they are worth three times as much as a tie.

I don’t know. The more I try to explain it, the more I feel like I’m trying to convert an entire culture. If you believe winning is everything, you’re never going to accept a tie. NFL games can end in a tie, but even NFL players aren’t always aware of that.

Look, if don’t like the idea that two teams can be evenly matched, each get a point and be either better off (America) or worse off (England) in the relative long run because of it, I don’t know how to convince you.

Obviously once single-elimination begins games don’t end in ties. I think a major issue is that the game is played on a huge field with 11 on a side and to decide a game played across so much space where attempts on goal can take a minute or two or even three to develop by who has the best penalty kickers seems incongruous.

I’m left saying, “You either get it or you don’t.” It’s like life, sometimes two opposing forces are evenly matched, and it ends that way. One usually feels it lost an opportunity. Anther might feel it eeked out a lucky break.

It’s nice for TV. In group play, games do begin and end at expected times. Soccer may be boring to some, but it could be a 3-and-a-half-hour baseball game with eight pitching changes. No game is perfect.

Each class is meant to represent a week’s worth of work, so they have to show up ready each time.

Today was kind of like the first day of track practice where Coach Sill always had us “shock the system” by running across town and back. The first day was always the longest, most frightening day of the year, and it was meant to wake us up and let us know – mentally and physically – that things were about to change and that much would be expected of us.

Today we did a quiz, an information gathering assignment and a deadline assignment. They will do another deadline assignment before Friday, and their first major project must be done between Friday and next Wednesday.

Back to life, back to reality.

I love teaching. I love this part of the gig. I really need to work on my research and on publishing, but teaching is something I expect to love for a long time.

I love how some people can’t wait 45 seconds for the show to start. You’d think Sharon Osbourne would have a little patience since she has to go through life guessing what Ozzy’s saying.

This is the coolest of acts on what has been a decent Gong Show “America’s Got Talent” thus far!

Much of what makes a garden work is done before anything is planted, and I have a tendency to go out and buy six-packs of whatever’s available and try to make them grow, even in funky soil. Last year this worked because I stuck to the garden box in the back yard, which was a compost pile and was fertile, and I planted a few things after removing the grass from a small square in the back yard.

(I also have a bunch of tomatoes out front with a weed barrier and morning sun, and those are fine this year just as they were last year, but it kind of messes with the metaphor to talk about those).

This time around, I tried to turn over the grass in the back yard area for my larger garden, and I didn’t get rid of all of the grassroots. The plant starts also sat out for a week between purchase and planting because I was eager to buy them but didn’t actually have time to get them in the ground the Sunday when I got them. They sat out and got a little dry during the week in between.

Not getting the starts in the ground on time and having not prepared the ground well enough to begin with has made it rough for several of the plants. They are growing to some extent, but I might have to use fertilizer on them, or at least mix some compost with a couple of bags of topsoil and dog turds just to get them some “food”.

The lesson for my dissertation is to prepare well, and have a focus. I need to clear away the 10 bright ideas I get every week and just focus on getting my project done. Most semesters, I have survived the way these plants will, which is to say I start out kind of a mess, but I put a lot of extra effort in at the end, basically piling on the crap and just fighting to stay alive the last few weeks, just to get things done.

I don’t think that’s going to work with the dissertation, and, aside from tomatoes and pumpkins, which I can’t seem to kill if I try, it’s going to be a rough year for the garden despite, or maybe because of, my efforts to make it bigger and better than ever.

It’s going to be a hot one today. Going to be muggy too. No wonder people want to hang out inside

Still thinking this is my best choice in town. There’s a coffee shop downstairs, a dozen study rooms and plenty of tables. Electricity is easy to come by since the building isn’t 100 years old. It works .

David Bell in Cybercultures also quotes Mark Dery with a definition of cyberspace from 1992: “A far-flung, loosely knit complex of sublegitimate, alternative, and oppositional subcultures whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities often framed by radical body politics…Cyberculture is divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avant-garde art, and pop culture.”

This is all very promising to me sitting at home with a large pot of coffee and the door hanging open to let the cold front in. It justifies discussions of virtual reality, fringe science and popular culture in the context of cyberculture. If I’m supposed to become an expert in something over this next year and come up with a book about it, or at least a book-length dissertation, it would be nice if I could do something to establish a career studying the relationship between news and cyberculture in a way that lets me branch out to look at cultures online in other contexts. My research will always be about discourse and power in a networked environment.

We have always had social networks. Cyberspace just makes it more easy to connect in some ways. Of course with those capabilities come the danger of giving up more than you know.

Speaking of power and friends, Gaby and I watched Where the Wild Things Are last night, and they snuck a little social commentary in there. When Max, the king, couldn’t stop the monsters from disagreeing, I couldn’t help but thing of Hope and Change and Oil Spills. I had the idea that the monsters were the only ones who could fix their problems, and that Max could at best be a catalyst.

Max’s biggest problem was promising that he could do magic. President Obama is having the problem of having promised hope and change, a rather magical platform, and then having to reminding us several times that there are no magic wands to wave and fix our greatest problems. (I’m fairly sure he used the “magic wand” term specifically in the health care discussion, credit crisis, and the related mortgage crisis, possibly regarding immigration reform as well).

What Obama could do better is to push people to work together to clean up the oil spill. Have there been requests made to take stock of underwater diving capabilities that don’t belong to the oil company? If the oil company is the only entity capable of fixing the problems it creates, should it be allowed to go relatively unchecked by the Mineral Management Service? It’s easy to say “no” now.

Perhaps this is naive. Perhaps, even if the U.S. government had someone on the rig every two weeks to do oversight safety checks, he or she would not have been able to do anything to prevent the explosion. We may need to re-think regulation in the context of cyberspace.

What if cyberculture were used to regulate and identify problems of social concern before they exploded? If you can examine our shopping habits and know that it’s about time to buy milk, you should be able to automate an estimation of when the rig is perhaps, maybe due to assplode. Maybe have someone swipe a little plastic card (with a drop of oil insignia on the front instead of a tomato) across a UPC scanner every time he checks the blowout preventer to be sure it still has its rubber seal.

In the age of cyberculture, there may be a tendency to assume magical things can happen, but data mining isn’t magic. It’s a tool, and it can be used for more than delivering ads on for Rogaine on Facebook to males aged 30-39.

To paraphrase my former colleague Mike Colon, who had a photographer’s way with words: “How about you hope in one hand and and data mine in the other and see which fills up first?”

I want to see a proactive government regulatory data mining system in place by the time the oil stops belching into the Gulf.

There’s something the President can do.

As for our other problems, “too big to fail” and “too deep to cap” (insert sick Eazy-E joke here) have the same mother. Corporate power, in these supposedly anomalous but hugely important cases, got just a little bit too big for government to effectively affect. There’s your threshold, the end of your slippery slope: When it’s so big the entire force of the federal government couldn’t fix it.

Never mind control over all of BP, I’d like for our government just to be able to take over cleanup of one offshore oil rig explosion. That’s a legitimate question to insert into the paperwork for the environmental impact statement: “If this blew up, could we, as a nation, freaking do something about it?”

When things are deregulated to the point that the culprits are the only ones capable of fixing their own mess, the rule of law need not apply. People are worried Obama’s a socialist. I’m worried the lack of regulation will destroy our society much sooner. In the past year, it has nearly killed our global economy: twice via the US and once in Europe, and now the lack of regulation is destroying our environment in a direct and obvious way.

If I were you, Mr. President, I might put on the crown, grab the scepter and start growling. Getting away without being eaten might be the best you can hope for on this island, and BP is one of the biggest, meanest monsters. But, if you don’t do something more, now, you’ll be sailing back to the real world and left with the rest of us just waiting for the sun to explode in 2012.

The search continues for perfect places to read for comprehensive exams and eventually to work on my dissertation, and the Columbia Public Library has to be considered.

Gaby and I have lived here for two years and only rarely have we ventured up to the second floor. Before now, the third floor I think I saw once when I was looking for an unoccupied restroom.

It turns out, the library is just as comfortable upstairs as it downstairs. The front reading room overlooks the entire town, and it is beautiful, if a little stuffy with the current heat and humidity.

It’s a helluva lot easier to park here than on campus. It’s also about two blocks away from Office Depot, which is good, since I’m always running there for more little sticky notes and junk.

After a couple of days of doing very little work, it is nice to be able to transition back to the grind in a relatively comfortable way. The Columbia Public Library even re-opened the coffee shop on the first floor just a couple of months ago. I think they have an egg omelet sandwich for $1.50, which could really come in handy.

The building looks like a bird taking flight. The statue across the street suggests the same. Here’s hoping this dissertation gets off the ground, whether it’s here, on campus, or both.