Who knows when I’ll ever get to see this [considering my new Wisconsin town has yet to get Burn After Reading], but I know I’ll look as hard as I can to find it. May even drive to Milwaukee since this schedule says filmmakers will be there in November.

As Loki writes, “It is fortunate that Katrina hit us in an era when technology has made documentation like this possible. Camera phones and video cameras have allowed a much more intimate view of the disaster than any prior era could offer. This is an opportunity to be on the inside for a moment, to put yourself in the shoes of one of us.”

I can’t think of a better way to introduce rhetoric to my class next semester.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Levees.org has just posted “The Katrina Myth” to YouTube.

The more people who visit this video,watch it, rate it, and comment on it, the higher it goes in the YouTube ratings.

If you are a YouTube member, rate it with a high rating (five stars) and make a comment (any comment, it doesn’t really matter.)

Also, please send this message to your friends and colleagues.

Time is of the essence.

Because of the third anniversary and Gustav, New Orleans is in the spotlight.

If attention is ever going to be paid to the levee problem, now is the time.

As today is the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’m honored to have been asked to reflect on my own experiences over at the Open Society Institute’s Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster blog.

Some information about the site is as follows:

Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster was named the best nonprofit website of the year in the 12th Annual Webby Awards. OSI was chosen from nearly 10,000 entries from across the United States and more than 60 countries.

Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster features the Katrina Media Fellows’ investigative reporting on the Hurricane’s continuing devastation across the Gulf Coast. The site combines never-before-seen video, photography, print, and radio with previously published work to spark a national discussion on race, poverty, and government neglect.

So far just my biographical post is up, but a longer narrative should go up today.

I hope you explore other parts of the site too because there is a lot of informative and revealing text and video.