Manifesto

Cultural Manifesto

Culture is not a weapon. It is not a pedestal upon which the powerful can stand in order to assert more power. It is not a commodity to help the wealthy become wealthier. Culture belongs to you and me and every other person who wants a piece of it.

Fuck Mickey Mouse! Fuck Vivendi-Universal! Fuck anyone who wants to take away your free access to culture and subvert it to satisfy their greed.

Conglomerate coprorations destroy culture! They limit the capacity for humans to progress and evolve through free cultural, scientific, and technological discourse. They establish false boundaries and limit our access to things and ideas that belong to all of us!

We are the culture creators: you, me, and everyone else who chooses to participate! We choose whether or not to accept or reject what we are fed; this choice is our voice, and in choosing we create our culture. Culture belongs to all of us, and it’s about damn time we fight our way through the lawyers, blast away the bullshit, and start working to take it back from the pigs who attempt to steal it from us on a daily basis. Abolish any law that stands between you and your rightful access to any and every aspect of our culture!

There is no such thing as “high” and “low” culture! These are constructs designed by fascist thinkers to maintain the power structure. You have the right to choose what you consume, and in choosing you establish the worth of what you consume. No one else can decide this for you!

Your choices can change culture. Your refusal can bring down corporate control of free culture.

REFUSE!

(For more information about free culture, check out some of the links in my Blogroll)

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Purpose Statement

As a student and teacher of composition at the University of Illinois, I am fascinated by all types of communication. In particular, I’ve spent the last few years focusing my research on multimedia composition in print and digital environments. My most recent work has focused on two primary realms of multimedia communication:

1) Interactive narratives as a genre and the formation of personal identity in virtual interactive environments.

2) Creative writing as a visual medium; i.e. expressing written narratives through other media such as film, photography, graphic design, and various combination of these media.

This blog serves a few purposes for me. As an academic, it allows me to collect, catalog, analyze, and synthesize any interesting “new media” objects that I find. This includes videos, images, comics, games, other blogs and websites, scholarly articles, etc. As a creative writer and artist, this blog gives me an opportunity to disseminate my creations to a wider audience. On a more personal front, this blog also allows me to keep people updated on my everyday life as well as allowing me to keep a record for myself of thoughts, ideas, feelings, accomplishments, etc.

Oh, and sometimes I just post shit that makes me laugh