Doctor Daisy

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Cross-posted at Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster:

Last week I was interviewed by the communications staff here at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. They contacted me, saying they had heard about my research into the post-Katrina blogosphere, and the result of our conversation is this press release, which was sent out to 50 local and regional reporters. I guess you could say that my new media efforts are about to make waves through the old media channels.

On a more serious note, the blog post that accompanied this news story has reminded me of my ever-conflicted feelings of trauma and loss. It features a picture of me that they describe as follows: “Pignetti is shown here in a February 2006 photo as she sits on the front steps of her childhood home in New Orleans, which was devastated during Hurricane Katrina.”

Anyone viewing the picture can clearly see that it was taken on a sunny day, with my house gleaming white. The only visible indication of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath is the spray paint on the front door. Because of this, I felt I should immediately share a link to pictures of the house’s interior, which truly shows the damage 10-feet of water can do.

The urgency with which I left that comment proves that I still wrestle with feelings of being misunderstood. After all, I was living in Tampa in August of 2005 and didn’t have to physically endure anything other than frustration at not having any precise information about which levees breached and what that even meant. Yet, three years later, I am still traumatized by what happened to my house, on my street, and to my city. I experience survivor’s guilt on a daily basis, with my feelings of doubt only increasing with the passage of time, making me wonder, how am I justified in feeling as sad as I do?

For instance, when I meet people face-to-face for the first time, I still proudly proclaim that I’m from New Orleans, but often only respond with, “We lost everything” to their question of “How’d you make out after Katrina hit?” Why is that all I say? I certainly am annoyed if no one bothers to ask, so why, when given the chance, do I truncate my story to a three-word response?

I think it is because I figure that if I respond, “I couldn’t find my parents for almost a week,” they will think that my mother and father were like the people they saw stranded either at the Superdome or Convention Center. I am convinced that when they find out my parents are better off than most “victims” due to their relocation to a second home we already owned in Picayune, Mississippi, any sympathy they had for us will diminish.

Writer and scholar Louise DeSalvo states the following in her book Writing as a Way of Healing, and I believe it explains my situation as a transplanted New Orleanian exactly:

Often…trauma remains undisclosed because, though people would like to discuss it, they can’t or won’t because they fear punishment, embarrassment, or disapproval or because they can’t find an appropriate audience. So, many people actively stop themselves from telling their stories; they inhibit the need to tell their traumatic narratives.

But, to quote Loki’s most recent post, “that is one of the reasons why I blog.”

By directing my writing to an invisible, nonjudgmental audience, I have used this blog to cultivate a more emotional persona and, as a result, have embarked on a journey of healing. When I find an image of a now-destroyed familiar place or a news story that disturbs me to the point of again unleashing the sorrow of that week of national and man-made disaster, I know I can blog about it. Not only will I feel better as a result, others will recognize that I am not OK that New Orleans is nowhere close to being recovered, and that the world should not deny us its sympathy.

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I’ll be presenting a paper on teaching with Twitter at 4Cs next year, so, in order to get my “data,” this Monday I will present my students with their task of creating accounts on the popular microblogging site.

I was nervous over the summer when the Fail Whale kept rearing his power-blue head, but it seems like things have stabilized since then. As my previous post indicated, though, I am hesitant to require students to visit sites outside of the already confusing course management software, but because the writing shared on Twitter comes in spurts of 140 characters or less, I think it is a great opportunity to experiment and meet my students where they are in terms of technology use—relying heavily upon text messaging and social networking sites. Ideally, my rationale for this project [which will be their final exam] is that asking students to post to their own timeline will teach them valuable lessons in audience, linking, community, and active reading. At the end of the semester, they will have to rely and reflect upon their short posts in order to compose a technology literacy autobiography. Hopefully they will see from their timestamped posts that they’ve evolved as producers and consumers over the semester, that their life on the screen is not necessarily an alternative life but a space for growth.

Now to put that into directions that are easy to understand…perhaps this video will help?

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All students at UW-Stout are given a laptop and (seemingly) no preliminary briefing on the course management software, which means it’s up to individual instructors to talk them through menus and screenshots. That’s fine by me b/c I like to limit the technology I ask students to use their first semester; however, I have been surprised that the so-called savvy they apparently have from Facebook doesn’t cross over into the classroom. There is a true disconnect, most likely because social networking sites spoonfeed their users with code, widgets, tabs, and drop-down menus while I’m asking them to compose and reflect.

For instance, they all tags photos and shares links in FB. But asking students to insert links into their discussion board posts [not just the URL, but actually highlighting the word, clicking on the link icon, pasting the link there, etc.] and getting them to understand the value of tags on social bookmarking sites like delicious has elicited more confused looks than I ever expected.

Still, it’s all about practice these first couple of weeks (believe me I’m still struggling with my own crossover from Blackboard to DesireToLearn), so it will be exciting to read their tech literacy journals [which I may ask them to log at Twitter, but more on that later] at the end of the semester to see what progress they’ve made.

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quite simply put…

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Things have escalated beyond imagination:

“The footprint of Katrina was about 400 miles when it hit. Gustav currently has a footprint of 900 miles and continues to grow.”

Video of the mayor’s official press conference is here.

My parents are staying in Picayune, Mississippi, for the time being. I’ve gotten in touch with nearly all my NOLA friends and they’re all leaving or have already left. Not sure about the few who just flew into town for Southern Decadence, but it looks like the rest of those scheduled events have been canceled so I would think that if they’ve got their plane ticket, they should be getting out asap.

Several NOLAbloggers have turned to twitter to set up their alerts so we [at least the people already following them, I’m not sure how many will use hashtags] know how to find out how they are and where they will be for the next few days. What’s most fascinating to me is that here’s even a GustavAlerts twitterstream to follow now as well as an all-encompassing Gustav Information Center & Social Network.

View my page on Gustav Information Center

I hate that I’m watching this from afar again because I feel so helpless, but all I can do is pray. Everyone’s much more prepared this time, which is great, but I really hope that this storm doesn’t ruin all the rebuilding efforts I’ve seen my friends spend so much time, money, and energy on over the past couple years.

More updates as they come.

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Last year I was honeymooning in Australia, this year I’m in Wisconsin starting a new job and still unpacking the new house.

I hate missing this, especially since my dissertation focuses on this fabulous group of passionate placebloggers, but I’ve already promised myself I won’t miss Mardi Gras next year and I won’t miss Rising Tide 4 either!

The schedule looks great, and if you’re in NOLA, you should definitely go. Those who can’t make it, go remind yourselves of how social networking saved New Orleans by reading this article by the same name.

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As much as I enjoy the trendy books out there on the internet and collaborative software, Howard Rheingold is the only author of such texts that I know of who also actively considers social media’s impact upon teaching.

Whether it’s his video letting his students see his point of view when looking out into their laptop classroom, his detailed syllabus for a Virtual Communities/Social Media course, or his book chapter on “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,”I find that all of his work helps me to articulate my own approach to discussing and teaching [freshman in particular] students to recognize and critique the technologies that bombard their lives.

This recent video is brilliant because Seesmic users can leave comments [I may create an account tonight or at least as soon as I get the coveted FlipVideo] AND it’s a widget with tabs that take you to Michael Wesch’s famous video and to a list of links pf all the theoretical readings Rheingold mentions. See for yourself and thank you Howard!

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Yes, I know I go on and on about Twitter, but even when it has its issues [can you say Fail Whale?], it’s still the place people keep coming back to [even after this week’s mini-exodus to Plurk!]

For reasons why people like me love the microblogging service, check out this video, which was created by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. After “he asked his following — through Twitter, of course — to reply with the reasons they love the popular social network, more than 100 people responded in the first two hours…”

Another article that came out this week praising Twitter’s interconnective nature is “Radical Interdependence and Online Telepathy: How Twitter Helps Us Find One Another.” This one, for obvious reasons, is inspiring to me, not only because it highlights NOLA but because on my last trip home I met with it’s featured personality Evelyn [aka eve11]. Much like the author’s encounter with Evelyn, mine was also inspiring. We talked about her tsunami survival, writing [she described blogging as writing to people, not the page”], New Orleans, and her plans to share lessons in social media with the Bywater neighborhood. I even donated my OLPC XO for her to have more machines to work with. I certainly wasn’t using it, so why not?

In fact, we connected on Twitter to discuss this exchange minutes after I tweeted this. One month after that tweet, here she is tweeting on my XO!

If you’re still not getting what Twitter is about, go read Palmer’s [aka @TRUE] article on Evelyn! It speaks of more of these “telepathic” moments, which to me demonstrate a wonderful fusion of web 2.0, genuine people, and a passion for place.

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I’m proud to share the link to the essay I recently wrote in response to Dan Gillmor’s “Principles of New Media.” It has been published as part of the publius project, which is a Berkman Center blog-site featuring “essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net.”

Having Gillmor as my advisor last summer when I was at Harvard for the OII Summer Doctoral Programme was inspiring, and it was great to get his feedback on my dissertation project. As I’ve been writing the past 8 months or so, I have often been skeptical about what new media genres can really do in terms of social change, but at the heart of my work will always be an appreciation for the writing and recovering that is happening in New Orleans quite independently of established channels.

New Orleanians like myself are a passionate people very much attached to our humid bohemian city, and the more my scholarly work and their blogs can remind the world that “we are not OK,” the more I hope people will take notice.

I hope you enjoy the essay and do leave comments!

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Been watching the webcasts of the plenary sessions at the Berkman@10 conference all day. Good stuff–some familiar from my 2 weeks there last summer for the Oxford Internet Institute–but I’m most excited about the speed with which I’m moving between windows and tabs. Haven’t juggled chatting, twittering, flickring, listening, checking email, searching, and posting to Blackboard for my online students since last July!

Daithí is there and already has some informative summaries up on his blog.

OK back to it. Also love the twitter feed here, since it seems we broke hashtags.org

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So glad @zefrank shared the link to this video of Clay Shirky speaking on Web 2.0 and time management.

Both this video and Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody will help me refocus the first chapter of my dissertation* b/c he makes the very obvious but necessary to hear point that “it’s better to do something than do nothing.” He sets up the binary between television media and participatory media to argue “media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” The NOLA bloggers I’m looking at started their blogging and wiking and photo and video-sharing as a result of Katrina and purposefully because they knew the mainstream media would get it wrong. So there you have it.

Go watch, experiment with social software, produce and share!

[*I’m totally a backwards writer. Discovering as you write means the intro has to change a dozen times]

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Still wishing I could make it up to Harvard for Berkman@10, but it’s nice to know that they’ve launched their own YouTube channel where I can catch up on their most recent conversations as well as a great historical overview!

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Since I’ve been on Twitter I’ve noticed people announce when their 1000th “tweet” is coming up. There’s a certain pressure to make it a good one, yet staying within the 140 character limit is always a challenge.

Tonight I hit my 1000th and have to admit it was chosen carefully, although only a few minutes before.

Since Andy’s been writing for his MFA program, I’ve picked up his regimen of freewriting, timed writing, and reading not for research sake but for craft’s sake. When I was in NOLA last November we went to the book sale at the Latter Library and I picked up Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. As I’m in the throes of the dissertation, I thought this quote was well-suited for describing my personal narrative chapter:

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

If listening to fellow Katrina survivors and New Orleans college and university teachers last week at 4Cs taught me anything, it’s that more and more people need to hear our stories because of the fact that they are so varied. I know my writing out of passion and emotion is something I may have to defend to a scholarly audience, but it’s something I find quite necessary to my academic work, at least for now. I can’t let what I think people will critique hold me back from constructing the narrative thus far. So thank you, Eudora, for reminding me of basic human nature because, as you say later, I know “The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.”

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Absolutely fabulous! Congrats to Brian Donovan and thank you for sharing this on YouTube! As an internet researcher, I too plan to document my academic career in creative ways!

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I’m so happy Leisa posted the link to this in her Twitter stream. I think I had heard of this project through the Open Society Institute, but never got a chance to read more or watch the student-produced videos until now.

The Katrina Media Fellows’ mission is stated as follows:

Through stories and images, the fellows aim to deepen public understanding of the government’s long-term response to Katrina; failures of public policy; use or misuse of public funds; the role of private contractors; the effectiveness of clean-up and rebuilding efforts; the psychological impact on residents, now more than two years after the storm; and lessons that should inform the handling of future disasters.

One of the most powerful videos, considering the subject of my dissertation research, is the one entitled “Not As Seen on TV.” Not only does it let locals speak for themselves, it shows the pain that permeates the city still today. (However, I actually wish less edits were made because I think some interviewees were on the verge of sharing more and, while that may be uncomfortable to watch, how else can their grief be honestly represented and understood?) Still, heavy emphasis is also made on the music, culture, and humor of New Orleanians, with one interview subject stating it quite plainly, “New Orleans is not just a place, it’s our soul.”

I’m in the midst of revising my own narrative which deals with my denial during the week of August 29, 2005, and watching this only reminds me of how my parents could have also been part of those people left behind had the storm not hit the magic number 5. I truly think that’s the only thing that convinced them to evacuate at the last minute. While they were lucky and never had to live in a FEMA trailer, I know we are all still trying to deal with the loss, the gutting & buy-out of our home, and the feeling of “not knowing when this was going to end.”

Even though I blog about this quite often, it’s not something I voice out loud much, probably because I’m still suffering from the pain and anger of things being forever changed by the levee breaches. Because I’m not living in NOLA now, and because when I visit I see friends who seem genuinely happy with the way their lives are going, it’s easy for me to purposefully forget how traumatic it must be to cope with the many changes that have occurred the past three years.

All I can do though is write my story, share the blogs of those living there now, and try to remain as involved in the city’s recovery as possible.

In fact, next week when I am there for the Conference on College Composition and Communication I’ll have a chance to meet again with fellow New Orleans bloggers and have my first ever “tweetup” with eve11 who I’ve connected with through Twitter. Her blog is wonderfully written and I’m looking forward to both talking to her about a term she introduced me to called “naked blogging,” and donating my OLPC XO laptop to her proposed children’s social media project!

Watch this space for updates on this next week. Til then, go watch the videos at the Soros site.

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I really wish I had the time to get up to Harvard for “The Future of the Internet” conference May 15-16, 2008, but now that I’m 80 days away from my anticipated defense date, I have to focus on things like producing pages, making edits, and figuring out where I’ll be living in July!

The planned breakout sessions described here sound amazing, so I can’t wait to read the liveblogging, wiki edits, and Twitter streams that come out of them!

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I just noticed that my category for Twitter bookmarks in del.icio.us has grown to nearly surpass my teaching and dissertation tags, and I only started with Twitter in January!

The buzz on the NOLA blogger listserv is to get more locals tweeting, and this video offers a nice primer. I wish this had come out 2 days sooner as I used Twitter in my teaching demo up at UW-Stout last week and it would have offered a perfectly succinct overview rather than my hurried explanation.

More on Twitter and my addiction to its coverage of SXSW later. I’m trying to finish a dissertation-related freewrite before heading to the gym.

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I’ve not been on Twitter a week yet but have become a fan of how immediate the information shared is. I’ve also become quite fanatical about reading and clicking on the links mentioned in everyone’s 140-character posts. Perhaps it’s because I’ve chosen extremely interesting and tech-savvy people to follow?

Sadly, though, we have lost one of our own. I wasn’t reading ashPEAmama’s updates, but found out that she died in a car accident from Susan Reynolds, herself a woman coping with breast cancer. BTW: You must check out Susan’s blog, Boobs On Ice™ as well as this Washington Post article about her online efforts and web community.
As Susan “tweeted” earlier: “Twitter again shows the potential to make lightning fast connections & do good in ways unheard of until now.”

Below is the link to donate to Ashley’s memory. She was a young mother of 2 who, as evident by this page of her final Twitter postings, was so happy her LSU Tigers won the other night.

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joining another site that prompts me to write in shorter spurts than this blog.

First it was delicious, where I don’t have to write anything at all, just tag. Then it was Facebook with its status updates. And now I’m talking about Twitter, which asks me to answer “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.

I didn’t really get why anyone would join, especially since I’m not one to text a lot. Then the Iowa caucuses happened and I could see firsthand how instant information from a variety of voices and witnesses was much more powerful than the cable news guys. This piece on techPresident.com called it:

Post-macaca, predictions abounded of citizens armed with camera phones bringing us live coverage of everything. It hasn’t happened… yet… but we saw a glimpse of the future tonight in Iowa. Perhaps the era of blogs and YouTube is giving way to the age of Twitter and UStream

Might this be the way we go? I can already tell that students might like it more than blogging because of its chatty nature, but then what would the lesson in writing be? Getting your point across in 140 characters or less? More than anything, their tech literacy practices would be pushed to new levels due to the need to shorten links [thank you tinyurl.com], navigate across tabs, and actually sit still at a computer and hit refresh in order to check for replies so they may fully contribute to a conversation. Interesting possibilities…

On a more personal note, I wonder what it would have been like to have a Twitter account last week when I was at MLA? Would I have updated my status after each interview? I guess we’ll never know…until I get [fingers crossed] campus visits

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Like D Weinberger, I had not noticed that dopplr went live last week. I’ve been enjoying the service since July and, because I hope to see a lot of travel in my future, I plan to use it to continue to keep up with my contacts in the new year.

And, again like DW, I have to say that this “spotlight on dopplr” is not one to miss!

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When I was at Harvard this summer, I was introduced to a slew of social networking tools. I joined Facebook a couple weeks before the session started and have come to use it on a daily basis to keep up with my SDP and other academic contacts. Now that applications have been added, I can also have my blog, my Flickr page, my del.icio.us account, and my Dopplr account all feed into my profile.

If you’re not familiar with Dopplr, it is an invitation-only travel schedule site, so you can organize your trips as well as “share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers that you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit.” I know some folks have privacy issues and do not necessarily want to publish all the places they are going, but so far I like it, especially since I have friends all over the place!

You can read more about it on the Dopplr blog, but my absolute favorite thing about it is this:

When I type in New Orleans, it tells me, “We know about just one place in the world that matches what you’ve typed: New Orleans, LA, United States.” However, when I type in Tampa, it hesitates: “We think you mean Tampa, FL, United States. However, there are 2 places that could match what you’ve typed.”

More reinforcement that NOLA is my one and only!

P.S. If you want an invite, leave me a comment or email me.

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After taking Clancy’s post on location and hiring into consideration and also attempting to organize the job postings that have piqued my interest in an Excel spreadsheet and failing miserably, I decided to try out My Maps on Google. As with all things Google, it was terribly easy and, not only can I geographically see where I might end up living next year [fingers crossed I get a job first time out on the market], I can add deadline dates, photos, links, and any notes I damn well please!

Take that Excel…you and your tiny rows and columns…

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In session with Henry Jenkins right now and here’s the first video up for discussion:

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Looks like I’m not the last person to join Facebook!

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