Up From the Holler: Living in Two Worlds, at Home in Neither

I try and tell myself that where I come from is a strength. That it doesn’t bear negative weight on who I am and where I am. But some days I just can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong – that I am a creature of another environment – and that everyone knows it too.

The following quotes, from a NYTimes article on class, resonated with me:

…”I think class is everything, I really do,” she said recently. “When you’re poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don’t have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It’s knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections.”

…”The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers,” Ms. Justice said. “It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn’t have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn’t know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn’t know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn’t feel well.”

… “I couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world,” she said. “And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything.”

Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. “Somehow, they all just knew each other,” she said.

…”The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren’t don’t,” she said recently. “I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I’ve not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I’ve done nothing but work to try and pull myself out.”

The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. “If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can’t start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime.”

…And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville’s leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. “My stomach’s always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I’m wearing the right thing, if I’ll know what to do,” she said. “I’m always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?”

Class Matters – Social Class in the United States of America – The New York Times

What is citizen or participatory journalism?

Citizen journalism, also known as “participatory journalism,” is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.” [1] (http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php?id=P36)

“Public journalism” can refer to this journalism work by ordinary people, or it can mean certain work or aspects of work by professional journalists. The latter meaning is also often called “civic journalism”.

Citizen journalism usually involves empowering ordinary citizens — including traditionally marginalized members of society — to engage in activities that were previously the domain of professional reporters. “Doing citizen journalism right means crafting a crew of correspondents who are typically excluded from or misrepresented by local television news: low-income women, minorities and youth — the very demographic and lifestyle groups who have little access to the media and that advertisers don’t want,” says Robert Huesca, an associate professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Citizen journalists may be activists within the communities they write about. This has drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions such as The New York Times, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of objectivity.

Civic journalism refocuses the mission of the news media. According to Edward M. Fouhy of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, “It is an effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers have about the things in their lives they care most about — not in a way that panders to them, but in a way that treats them as citizens with the responsibilities of self-government, rather than as consumers to whom goods and services are sold. It takes the traditional five w’s of journalism — who, what, when, where, why — and expands them — to ask why is this story important to me and to the community in which I live?”

Wikipedia: Citizen journalism

Episode III Rocked!

I was at the Star Wars premier at Neshanamy Mall last night with Richelle, her mom and dad, and some friends from work. The movie rocked. I said this in Binq‘s comments thread: I went in looking for something great and the movie did not disappoint. That’s a rare thing.

This one movie should have been made into the three.

I don’t take much stock in critics, and as always there have been plenty of negative reviews, but surprisingly, this time around there have been just as many positive ones as well. Here goes two:

Washington Post: ‘Sith’: The Promise Fulfilled

NYTimes: Some Surprises in That Galaxy Far, Far Away

Related: Turns out there are some on the right uncomfortable with some lines in the movie: NYTimes: Latest ‘Star Wars’ Movie Is Quickly Politicize.

You’ll want to see this on the big screen. I’m seeing it again this Saturday with another group of friends and family.

Bands Embrace Social Networking

Traditionally, bands toured cities and played dive bars to create buzz about their music. But with MySpace, bands can host demos of their songs, announce shows and connect with fans without spending weeks on the road.

“We’ve developed communities for unknown bands really quickly, which would take a lot longer a few years back,” said Alan Miller, co-founder of Filter magazine, which last month teamed up with MySpace to develop The Booth, an online promotion featuring a different band each week.

“It’s a medium where people can go and hear new music and develop an attachment to the band,” said Miller.

Wired News: Bands Embrace Social Networking via Scripting News.