85. 📶 questions & new media 📶

thinking about the possibilities of questions

Hello, and happy Monday.

I hope that you all are doing well this Monday morning. I had a chance to go to the Bay Area Queer Zine Fest at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Dogpatch, and I came back with a grab bag of zines! I’m still trying to find communities of zinesters in the greater Boston area, so let me know if you know of some that are doing cool things! ☺️

🌼 Yesterday was also Noruz, or Persian New Year. I spent it laying outside and breathing in the air from the Bay and getting excited about the start of spring. Happy Noruz to you all! 🌼

This week’s newsletter is going to be a little different, because I’m still thinking about a podcast that I listened to a month ago. It was an episode of ICYMI (short for “In Case You Missed It”), which is a podcast about internet culture. I want to share my thoughts on this with you all, because I’m hoping that it can open up a conversation for how we think about cultural commentary, particularly in the age of new media.

All in all, I think that the podcast is great.The hosts, Madison Malone Kircher and Rachelle Hampton, spend about a half hour talking about newsworthy items related to memes, internet trends, and turns in the tech sphere. Their format is pretty standard for most episodes: about 5 minutes at the beginning on a less noteworthy item, and 20 minutes focused on a larger story where they are able to interrogate from multiple angles. I’m constantly surprised by the questions that these episodes manage to elicit in my own thinking, particularly on my walks to campus as I’m beginning my day. Usually, the podcast is a prompt for me to think more about the ethnics involved in technology, new media, and the way that we form community through these spaces.

One episode, however, left me feeling a bit perplexed precisely because it didn’t do the work of thinking in a nuanced ways about its subject. While the main story was about Shailene Woodley and Aaron Rodgers’ relationship, I was actually more interested in the shorter segment on criticisms of Nora Lum (aka Awkwafina) and her decision to get off of social media.

If you’re interested in listening, feel free to listen below, from around 1:50 to about 8:10.

As a way of telling you what I left me perplexed by this analysis, let me share the email I wrote to the ICYMI team with my thoughts. This is something that I rarely do, but I think in this particular conversation made me feel like there was a wider opening from which to have a dialogue about the goals of the podcast in relation to its audience. Here’s the way I put it:

Hi ICYMI team,

First, I want to thank you all so much for the podcast. I frequently listen to it on my walks to work, and it always leaves me thinking. I really appreciate the time and research you put into the stories to make sure that they are accurate and informative. Thank you for what you do.

I'm writing to you after having listened to the 2/9/22 episode this morning re: Nora Lum & Shailene Woodley/Aaron Rodgers. I thought that your discussion of Nora Lum & her notes app apology was an interesting one, but really left me longing for more. For me, I was less interested in the apology and her evasion of this conversation in the press, and more interested in the avenues of possibility that open up when we look at this as just one case of a larger conversation in race & media representation. In terms of this convo, there are so many branches that could have been discussed, like:

the history of racial representation in film
the historical black/white binary in the film & larger media industry
the stereotyping of Asians/Asian Americans in film & how this permeates into public discourse & the national imaginary

Also I think that this is particularly nuanced given the fact that Lum is Chinese American and that there is anti-Blackness within the Asian American community. What does it mean for her to be taking on these vocal signifiers, and how is it complicated further when we think about it in the context of communities of color in the US & anti-Blackness? Finally, I think it brings about questions surrounding accountability and transformative justice: who is Lum accountable to, and how can this open up conversations of scaling transformative justice? Is that even possible?

To be clear, I hope that I am getting across that I am "yes, and"-ing you all, here. Yes, it is difficult to see this person perpetuating these stereotypes in a very public way that need to be addressed, and I think that it is important to step beyond the person to interrogate the systems that foster and maintain these types of situations to occur in the first place.

I understand that there is likely a time constraint with the podcast, so you likely cannot go into too much of this on the show, but I think that it would be productive in future episodes to signal the ways in which these shorter stories serve as avenues for thinking about larger systemic issues re: the ways that we occupy digital spaces & what we should ask from those digital spaces. Perhaps it would also be helpful to leave your listeners with open-ended questions that they can discuss with their communities after they listen to the pod, so that this podcast is framed as a conversation, rather than a one-way interaction.

I do think that the ethos of ICYMI is conversation, considering the fact that I am writing to you this morning. 🙂 I do hope that you find what I wrote useful & generative for the future of your podcast, which again, I absolutely love listening to. Thank you for your time, and please do feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further!

Warm wishes,
Ida

Basically, I thought that their analysis of Nora Lum wasn’t critical enough. By critical, here, meaning a deeper look at the particular dynamics at play, and what this says about the social world around us as it increasingly moves online. Rather, they chose to be critical in the sense of disparaging Nora Lum the individual, which seems far less productive in the grand scheme of things.

I also wanted to get across the understanding that I know they have limited time on the podcast to discuss everything in the most detailed manner. However the problem with this as it currently stands is that they frame their opinions as a unidirectional imparting of knowledge or the “correct opinion” about something that they haven’t fully unpacked. (Though something may be “less newsworthy,” I still think it is deserving of reading fully.) Instead, I’d like to see these shorter segments as moments where the podcast acknowledges its limitations (in time, medium, perspective, etc etc) by framing them as a jumping off point for larger discussions for listeners to have with their communities. Instead of ending with a joke that Nora Lum will run in the next presidential election, this segment could have ended with a call for listeners (either individually or in their communities) to reflect on the role of cultural representation and its impact on our understandings of race, or even acknowledged the history of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community, and how this complicates and potentially deepens our reading of Lum’s controversy. Not only would the podcast itself feel more community-driven (which I do think is important to ICYMI based on the incorporation of their listeners), but it implicitly tells folks that this is something they can and should think about more.

One podcast that I know ends each episode by opening the conversation to its listeners & their communities is Octavia’s Parables, hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Chapter by chapter, they go through the works of Octavia Butler, discussing the significance of each work on our present moment. Besides being an interesting listen, I love this podcast because of the way they end each show with questions to the listener. These questions are like invitations—to interact with each other, to think alongside, to push back.

Along this tradition, I’d like to leave you all with some questions that I hope serve as starting points for conversations with your communities:

• How can we begin more dialogues in our day-to-day life that challenge our thinking more deeply? What do we need in order to do so?

• What work would this do for our communities?

🌀 Still consuming.

In the bookshop:
Currently Reading: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
On Deck: The Idiot by Elif Batuman

• Friend and td reader Melody S. recently was on Latinx Lit reading some of her poetry. Check it out & the BTS above! You can also read her work here. 🤗

• Tiktoking from a bomb shelter.

• I see Angela, I click.

• It was only time before Sianne Ngai’s analysis of cuteness would make its way into a critique of Animal Crossing.

• Arghhhh!! Why is Pachinko streaming on something I don’t have a subscription to!!!!

📖 Book club corner.

For February’s book club, we will be reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. I am so excited! Feel free to purchase the book here, and the details are below!

Here’s the event info:
Date & Time: Tuesday, March 29 @ 5PM PST/8PM EST
Registration Link!
Suggested Donation (for those able to donate): $3-10 through Paypal or Venmo (@idyalz)

🐶 A pup-date.

Girlie had a fun, relaxing day in the sun next to the water.

As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!

Warmly,
Ida