Tonight, Yes Tonight

Even though my video was finished on Sunday, I feel like a post is in order here.

Tonight, "the d.ethnogs of '09will shamelessly and elaborately celebrate themselves" at the First Annual Diggie Awards potluck night of awesomeness, hosted by the Wesch family. I cannot wait. Our class has really accomplished something, and seeing it all together will be great. It helps that they're all just great people to be around.

Also, Tim and Patrick of Two Seconds Away have posted my video to their band's site, newmusicmonday.com! These guys are big fans of Dr. Wesch and were so great to work with in producing my video.

This is what I have asked them to post along with the video:

Dr. Wesch's Digital Ethnography class is the kind of thing you can't get away from. The ideas we threw around in discussing the concept Anonymity this semester seemed to apply to everything: my other classes, my relationships, random car commercials... life had become research. Researching pop culture does well to blur the line between work and play. In the arena of "play", Tim and Patrick had been faithfully posting their songs every Monday, and I couldn't get "In The Way" out of my head. In my part of the project, I kept noticing how much people needed to be known and understood. That seems pretty basic, but it still fascinated me that the knowing and understanding was sought from unknown people. In the song, that last line, "You see me" repeated as it was came to me as a triumphant declaration that being known was possible. I wanted that resolution in my project, and so built my script around the song.

Then we read a speech by David Foster Wallace in my Philosophy class. He says, "My natural default setting is the certainty that situations like [grocery shopping after a long day's work] are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way."

The rest of the song clicked. It is about breaking the myth that we are so disconnected from one another. And I can't shake the feeling that the way Tim and Patrick's song fit so perfectly with a semester's worth of my research is a little bit beyond us.

Check back for the results of the Diggie Awards!

-Katie