Hippo Dignity

In the focus group I did with HIV+ people on Sunday, someone raised a really interesting point. There used to be all sorts of movies about AIDS, all with the same inevitable theme — death. Someone gets AIDS, and they have to set their affairs in order, or reunite with their family, or even sue for their rights, as in Philadelphia. I loved Tom Hanks in that movie, but he still died in the end.

Nowadays, with antiretrovirals, there’s not as obvious a dramatic arc. Tom Hanks gets HIV, goes on ARVs, and lives happily ever after in that loft with Antonio Banderas. That’s not a story! So stories about people living with HIV are just a lot less common these days, outside of some gay-oriented media that doesn’t always make it overseas. (Given the importance that Christianity and Zulu traditional spirituality, both extremely conservative, play in the lives of the people I’ve met here, I can’t imagine Queer As Folk going over big in Kwa-Zulu Natal.)

However, that doesn’t mean that all those “HIV and then death” stories aren’t still out there — movies, especially, have a long afterlife. And so the belief that AIDS is always already a death sentence persists and is reinforced. The question then becomes: how do you tell a mainstream story in which someone’s survival on ARV isn’t miraculous or presented as a great triumph, but just the ordinary order of things?

I wonder if the complete lack of alarm clocks so far in my South African hotel rooms is in any way related to the intermittent blackouts the country is being plagued by? An alarm clock not guaranteed to ring in the morning is worse than no alarm clock at all. I will try to remember to to ask my hosts in the AM.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this…

Originally uploaded by Kelly Sue.

The way LOLcats spread last year showed me that the increased growth of the Internet has both homogenized it and just allowed a whole range of subcultures to flourish and interact.

Or, to put it less wonkishly, it means the weird can spread.

This Obama poster is completely illegible to someone outside of certain Internet subcultures — in fact, I wonder if someone coming to it from “outside” would assume it was racist. But to someone inside any (or many) of those cultures, it’s — well, after a day spent talking to HIV treatment counselors who have to see 20 patients every single day, it’s a delightful change of pace.

And of course a reminder of how detached those subcultures are from the grim meathook future from where I’m currently sending dispatches.

It’s overcast here, which is a drag - there’s so much sky in Cape Town, and by all accounts it’s spectacular when it’s sunny. But hopefully the sky will clear tomorrow, when we have some more tourist time.

(I just went to check the weather forecast online, having forgotten that I’d already logged off the Internet, since as noted before the cost is metered. I bought four hours worth and have already gone through an hour and a half. What I’ve come to realize is that it’s not that I use that much Internet time — I got through most of my email fairly quickly — but that so much of what I do with my computer now presumes that I’m always online. I downloaded MarsEdit so I could compose blog posts about all this offline; so far so good.)

Presumption is also a good place to start thinking about the Interactions conference, and about this trip, since the former was so much about using and challenging them, and this trip just overturns them, or exists outside of them.

(more…)

I am here. It’s useful to be reminded.

The Internet access here is pay-per-hour — not a lot, but just enough for me to take Malcolm McCullough’s advice from last weekend and go for a walk.

More soon.

I had hoped to do a Rebecca and blog the heck out of Interactions’08, but the fact is, there came a point where all I could do was sit back and let it wash over me. With eight sessions a day for two days straight, there was a lot to think about, and a lot to take notes on.

Plus, as it turns out, the whole thing is going to be available online as streaming Flash movies anyhow. The TED talks have really, I think, changed the game in terms of how a conference’s knowledge can live on as a continuing provocation/education and publicity for what the conference does. It will also, I’m sure, change the game for conference speakers — in the same way that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has admitted to being super-aware that he can no longer reuse a joke onstage without someone in the audience having already heard a bootleg of the first time he told it, streaming video will make regular conference speakers break out of their practiced shtick or risk seeming like hacks. (How you balance the need to build on earlier thought with the demand for novelty is the next problem, I guess.)

So for now I’ll just congratulate the tireless Dave Malouf, Dan Saffer, Joshua Seiden, Liz Bacon, my colleague Robert Reisman, and the rest of the IxDA board, the volunteers, and the faculty and staff at SCAD for a truly extraordinary conference experience. The quality of the dialogue, the intensity of the energy, and experience of the place were all extraordinary. I am so honored to have been a part of this first-ever conference for interaction designers, and I can’t wait for 2009.

(If you can’t wait for the movies to be online later this week, or don’t have 20 minutes to spare to see me race through my deck, Core77 did a bite-sized writeup of my talk and a few other talks as well.)

You can follow the Interaction08 backchannel on Twitter, if you’re so inclined. The best comment so far came from my former coworker Keith “it depends” Instone, who joined with others in complaining on Twitter about the noise from the sponsor area bleeding into the speaker area. When it finally quieted down, he said:

i guess we just used a twisper - a way to tell someone on the other side of the room to hush up

I wasn’t in the morning sessions in that part of the conference, but I did notice that after lunch, things quieted down pretty quickly…

I’m at Interactions08, the first annual conference of the Interaction Design Association, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It’s a beautiful day in Savannah, and I’m looking forward to the conference — and, uh, to finishing the slides for my talk, which I’m giving on Sunday. Come on down, if you’re here!

I got bad advice on the geography of the South, or I would have scheduled my trip differently to see John, who is fighting the good fight with the Conservation Voters of South Carolina. As happy as I’d be to see him, it’s probably just as well it won’t work out this time, since my schedule is insane — on Wednesday morning, I’m flying to Cape Town as the frog representative on a research trip for Project Masiluleke. I’m not sure how much Internet access I’ll have, but I’m hoping to blog the hell out of the trip.

And as long as I’m talking about online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about television, I’d be remiss to not mention this amazing video, which I was pointed to by my friend Francesca Coppa.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/28/pressure-a-metavid-by-the-california-crew/

It’s a “meta vid,” a fan-made vid about the process of making fan-made vids, back in the days when people did it with two VCRs, a tape deck, and a stopwatch. The level of commitment to the task at hand makes me exhausted just thinking about it!

Along with its celebration of the ingenuity necessary to do something like this in the days before every Mac came with iMovie, it’s also a useful reminder to those of us who go on and on about “user-generated content” and social media sharing on the interwebs that we’re not necessarily creating the wheel here. We may have invented the radial tire, to stretch a metaphor way too far, but we’re not creating the desire to interact with content — we’re just facilitating it. The new behaviors that arise when it doesn’t take three people and a weekend full of diet soda to make a three-minute video — well, those are a whole other ball of wax.

I was too annoyed with Virginia Heffernan’s recent piece on the way new online “franchising” opportunities for TV shows may or may not help make them a hit to take the time to write up a response to it. Luckily for me, Maura had more time to spare, so I point you to her.

Pull quote:

i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general….but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be

(Yes, she doesn’t use proper capitalization. We’ve mentioned it to her, yes. We love her regardless.)

Read the whole thing here.