Whew, with one resolution out of the way, I’ve vowed for the month of February to carry on a Media Fast. I’ve polled several friends about how I can take this on, and they’ve all responded in kind. “How can you eliminate electronic media from your life?? No blogs? No podcasts? Hardly any internet? No YouTube?? You are so interesting! How will you find so many amazing and hilarious topics to share in conversation???”
I know. I am incredibly interesting. And I’ve depended on the web much too long to maintain that illusion.
Thus, for the shortest month of the year, I embark on a mission to rediscover the “static” life.
Electronic media is ingrained in all of our lives, mine own moreso than many since I work in media production. So, not unlike the Vatican, I’ve developed a massive cannon for determining what is and isn’t permissable during my abstention.
This is a work in progress, so please feel free to call me on the huge allowances I’ve allowed myself.
General Web: No reading blogs, news, or casual browsing. No use of crucial web-based tools, such as moviefone, weather, or lolmish. I may rely on others who use the web, but may not on my own. General web is allowed in cases supporting work or creation. (E.g., music for the podcast I produce, looking up a speaker bio, tech help, purchasing, cooking, and of course this blog)
Audio: No prerecorded music of my own. I may only listen to talk podcasts when engaged in cooking, driving, or commuting. Otherwise, it’s radio and live music all the way.
Video/TV: No YouTube or web video, unless it is very specifically relevant to work. TV only if it is live or a first-run of a show (e.g., the Superbowl, SNL, non-reruns of the Office). DVDs if I have not watched them before, or if I am with more than one person. Movies in the theater are okay for now.
Games: Video games are fine, but no computer games.
Social Media: Email is totally fine. Twitter and Facebook only for output, unless someone sends me a vital message.
Obviously I’ve allowed myself a huge Get Out of Jail Free card with the caveats above. As punishment:
I must chronicle every single use of the web that I engage in for work or otherwise – chronicle will appear here daily.
I may only follow the blogs that are pertinent to work, so I must rely on you to keep me honest. If the blogs that appear in my Google Reader on the sidebar (or here) don’t appear pertinent, you may publicly flog me (metaphorically).
I live and breathe electronic media, so you’ll have to forgive me if I can’t come up with a good punishment for myself. If you have a better way of doing it, please, I’m all ears.
Tastespotting just posted three really appetizing looking vegan recipes. Where were you when I needed you????
Well, the good news is the rules I crafted for my February media fast do not restrict me from looking at recipes I’ve already found on the web, so I can still experiment with some of these tasties come Sunday.
I can’t really describe what happened this week in the form of a normal blogpost, so without further ado I present you a screenplay for my new short film.
THE DOWNFALL
INT. SUPERIOR COURTHOUSE, NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION CENTRAL HEARING ROOM, EARLY MID-AFTERNOON
BAILIFF: Hear ye, hear ye. All rise for the honorable Judge Harry Anderson.
An undistinguished JUDGE enters, dabbing rib sauce from the corners of his mouth. He wears a lobster bib and unpacks a lunch box on the bench.
JUDGE: Be seated. Will the defendant please remain standing? I see we have you charged under seven counts of violating your new year’s resolution to be vegan through the end of the month of January. How do you plead?
DEFENDANT: Not guilty your honor.
JUDGE: You have declined court appointed counsel. Have you retained an attorney?
DEFENDANT: No your honor. I will be representing myself.
The PROSECUTING ATTORNEY – who looks like that guy who played the mayor of Gotham in Batman wearing too much eyeliner – rises.
PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: Your honor, I move that we forgo hearing this case and move on to the sentencing.
JUDGE: On what grounds counselor?
P.A.: The people see it as a waste of valuable time and resources given the overwhelming evidence.
Exhibit B: Shark Fin Soup - Exotic!
JUDGE (stern and skeptical): Lay out the case for us counselor. Then we’ll decide.
P.A. stands. The judge cracks a box of BBQ chicken and chews on a wing.
P.A.: Last Tuesday evening the defendant engaged in no fewer than seven violations of his self-imposed vegan diet.
DEFENDANT (mumbles): Allegedly.
P.A.: On the day of the Chinese New Year, the defendant was asked to film a celebration of Chinese restaurant owners and their families at the ornate Asia Grill in Lincoln, Rhode Island. A gourmet chef was brought down from Boston, and a twelve-course meal was served for over 100 patrons. While there, the defendant willingly and with forethought consumed seven different dishes containing meat, poultry, and seafood.
DEFENDANT (forcefully): Allegedly.
JUDGE: Be quiet, sir – you’ll have your turn. Proceed counselor.
I complained earlier this month about the fact that honey was considered on the naughty list for vegans.
Kottkeposted this week an environmental reason for laying off the honey, and again, it has to do with monocultures.
CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder, not Charged Coupled Device, AV geeks) is annihilating millions of bees across the country, and threatening the built-in ecological services our little pollinating friends offer.
Among the possible culprits are a virus, increased vulnerability to disease due to breeding, overwork (hives of bees are trucked around the country for months to pollinate crops), increased exposure to all kinds of insecticides, and perhaps even all of the above.
The fact is, using one or two kinds of bees for all of our pollination and honey-producing needs makes all of these dangers more likely.
In an amazing guest column for the NYTimes Aaron Hirsh suggests using feral bees of many types to pollinate regionally. AND we could still harvest the honey.
So, avoiding honey as a monoculture: It meets the “political” and “environmental” vegan definitions, though not quite the “ethical” vegan definition, since there is nothing suggesting that we shouldn’t go for the honey.
But nonetheless, this is just a good enough reason to Bee good to the Bees! Heh heh… eh…. Too soon?
Apartment Therapy articulates some of the good reasons to avoid corn syrup here.
Here are some quick capsule reasons that motivate me:
(1) It is pervasive: Notice how many ingredients lists at your supermarket have high fructose corn syrup. The dependence on corn as a sweetener has been heavily the result of market forces and government subsidies. Farmland used for corn could be used for so many other crops that are nutritionally important, and depletes soil resources. It also makes our farm system vulnerable to massive devastation. In 1996 70 million US acres were used to grow only a few varieties of corn. It would only take one infestation, one disease to spread creating a domino effect of crop depletion that would be difficult to recover from.
(2) It it nutritionally useless: As with everything, moderation is key. Some sweetener, some corn syrup is okay for the diet. But a diet that exposes us to high amounts of highly processed high fructose corn syrup every day which has been connected to obesity, diabetes, and other nutritional problems.
(3) It’s just plain gross: Okay, not a particularly great reason. But visceral. Check out the scene in King Corn where they showed how corn syrup was made by processing corn with hydrochloric acid (which contains mercury and emits toxic fumes!) Nasty.
Give a cheer for our friend Mike who is doing one food-based resolution a month for the year. I like his reasoning. He’s doing vegan this month, but attempting some even more radical approaches over the course of the year including locavorism (food created locally/regionally only) and kashrut (which I actually had to look up – basically means kosher)!
I love the web, and many of the people I know love it, too. So we heartily join together in indulging our passion, twittering, link sharing, posting, facebooking, blogging, last.fm’ing, rss’ing, tumbling, hulu’ing, delicious’ing, digg’ing, flickr’ing, chatting, wikipedia’ing, emailing, itunes’ing, youtubing, and commenting.
It’s a world that you must be enmeshed in to truly understand, so don’t be afraid if you didn’t understand half of the above words. There is no true real world analogy for this flurry of activity, but it might be best to imagine a cocktail party with everyone in the world, from your boss to your ex from high school, from a New York Times reporter to Demi Moore, from a random dude in Nebraska to your most distant cousin, from your banker to Barack Obama, and everything in between, each one of them in turn coming up and whispering something in your ear, handing you a postcard about their life, a photo, or a drawing, or showing you a video that they found or made on the wall right in front of you, all while a bumping and rapidly changing soundtrack of your choosing is playing in the background. Meanwhile a newsie runs around shouting only the latest headlines that might interest you, Dr. Phil gives your head a check, Sanjay Gupta checks you for symptoms of flu, and Karl Kassel records the message on your home answering machine. Meanwhile, you run around playing scrabble with at least a dozen of them, whisper in their ears, hand them a message, and have passionate, vibrant discussions about everything from Gaza, to Battlestar Galactica. And this only makes you want more.
You could easily get used to that kind of attention and quickfire interaction, couldn’t you? Addicted, even.
I was surprised to find that there are a large number of folks out there battling the addicting side of the web.
Earlier this month, CSMonitor reported the opening of a rehab for internet addicts in China, where non-material addictions – particularly to activities like online games, chatting, and trolling dating sites – have ballooned as a result of rapid modernization.
Similarly, a Minnesota-based Christian group called Sound Off for Poverty asks young people to take an electronic media fast for 3 days or more, collecting pledges to fight poverty. Feel free to peruse, and punch holes in their list of impressive stats about the danger of the web for young people. But it’s a noble effort in a time of cynicism.
danah boyd, a fellow from the Center at which I work whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, engaged in a voluntary email sabbatical after completing her PhD at the end of last year. Essentially shutting off her email for over a month while she was globetrotting, she carefully and politely informed her contacts that she would delete any message she received between December 11 and January 19 (read more about why and how she did it here).
And there are others. Another colleague did a whole day without the internet at all last year. A number of other blogshavechronicled a media fast of somesort or another, and offer copious reasons (stymying information overload, detoxing on sex and violence, refocusing on a marriage, avoiding news about the recession) and tips (take up knitting) for the fast.
I take comfort in the fact that I am not the first person whose passion and livelihood depend heavily on the web to see what might happen if I take a breather. I may not have the adjoining distraction of a trip to refresh me, but I see the fact that I have to keep engaged in my “regular” routine through this rehab thing as an important dynamic.
Still looking for ideas of rules and consequences. If you take a look at my January resolution – vegan, corn syrup, and refined sugar free – it was quite easy to create the rules: avoid the bad stuff or pay 20 bucks to my Sin Debt. But I’m having a particular creative block with this one. Keep the ideas coming!
With the VRSFCSF resolution month not quite over, but having proved somewhat successful (I’ll attempt to justify that in a later post), I’m announcing my most daunting month-long resolution to date: a Media Fast. From February 1st until the end of the month I will be engaged in a complicated and difficult temperance of media and especially social media. This one is to refresh my brain and try to figure out what role media should play in my social, work, and private life.
Yeah, it’s getting heavy.
What I intend to do, in general:
Abstain from recreational online social and digital media (reading blogs, watching youtube videos, hulu, playing on Facebook, games, news, random google searches, twitter, pandora, last.fm, itunes, etc.).
Moderate consumption of other electronic media: chat, email, film, DVDs, video games, and podcasts.
Refocus on consuming static media and live media, engage in direct interaction, and create more media.
Keep track of my progress and reflections.
Why?: My S.O. constantly teases me about my dependence and increasing addiction to the internet. I am subscribed to 100+ blogs in my google blog reader and I often spend 10-12 hours a day on the computer, constantly patched into the net, for work and recreation. My iTunes has more than enough music to entertain Noah (that’s over 40 days worth of songs for you gentiles), and 20 days worth of podcasts. If you added up the random seconds I spend reading twitter posts and “interacting” on Facebook it would fold into hours. I use my iPhone on the train, in the bathroom, while driving, and at the dinner table.
“But,” I argue most self-righteously, “I work for an institute that studies internet and society! As a digital media producer! I create podcasts, videos, and animations, and manage the youtubes and the blogs on a day to day basis, and that means I must constantly have my finger on the throbbing electronic pulse of the web! It’s a burden, but alas I must.”
But the meld is becoming evident. I engage with both colleagues and friends via facebook and twitter; I ravenously consume blogs, podcasts, and videos that entertain and inform me, but they also sometimes influence my creation of media for work.
In spite of all attempts to segregate them, profession pertinent media always entangle with the less relevant. Digital engagements have disgustingly lumped my work life and my personal life right on top of one another. It’s like when the lunch ladies in high school would dump the cinnamon apples right onto my mac and cheese.
While some of the digerati argue for the “give” of electronic media – they help enhance our lifestyle, increase productivity, build communicativity, foster informedness, lower social and institutional barriers, defeat the Nazis, and turn water into wine – even the most skeptical would argue that there is a “take” – which I intend to rediscover.
So does anyone have any tips? I’ll be creating the rules and consequences for my fast over the next few days. Should I cut out everything? Or allow myself a few indulgences? What should my penalties be if a break the rules? I’ve only got one week left, so bring it on!
With all of the culinary options available in NYC – Little Italy, Junior’s Cheesecake, Cone’s Ice Cream, the Olive Garden – you’d think I would have been brought to my dairy-loving, sugar-craving knees this weekend in the city. But in fact I ate better than I have in weeks. I made a bee-line for the previously mentioned Thailand restaurant near China town by 100 Centre Street (where I came close to snapping a photo of a recently arrested chain gang – but thought better of it). Mock duck was better than I remembered it. Light, sweet, perfect texture down to the fake feather holes. The next day it was Zen Palette just north of Times Square (the ornate Union Square location sadly closed) where I dined on yam fries, asian tex mex, and free vegan key lime pie (courtesy of our nice server).
But Zen Palette is most known for their Sweet and Sour Sensation (pictured), moist, crunchy jewels of protein covered in a light sweet and sour sauce that my friend Dave Harris originally introduced me to. I ordered a batch to go and saved them for dinner upon my return to Providence. I was halfway through when I realized that the tangy sweet taste reminded me a bit of ketchup, which is often used as a flavoring in Americanized-Asian cuisine. And ketchup usually contains corn syrup. A no-no. I’m putting that on my Sin Debt list just because I’m not entirely sure. But damn, it was worth it.
This image courtesy my S.O. Can you guess what it is?
Technically it is chicken. Reconstituted.
This is what they make Chicken McNuggets out of apparently. It looks creepy. It sounds creepy. It feels creepy. And it’s not just because it looks like what would happen if someone put those “Manna Manna” muppets through a sausage grinder.
But why should this gross anyone out? Why is there such a bias for all things pure and fresh? Is there evidence that reconsituted chicken (or any other product for that matter) is more likely to be infected with bacteria, less nutritious, or more potentially unhealthy?
I’m not saying I’d be likely to eat these, even if I was off my vegan diet. I’m as prone to the fresh bias as anyone. But it is not because that picture disgusts me. It doesn’t surprise me in fact. If it makes it easier to produce, preserve, and deliver the food then of course they’re going to do it.
Part of the aversion may be the intentional whitewashing of the product in name. It isn’t “Chicken” in the sense we think of it. It is actually “Chicken Product” in the same way Velveeta is not cheese but “Cheese Product”. The realization that what you think you have been eating for years is not the same as the conjured image is a startling one. It’s probably akin to what Charlton Heston felt in “Soylent Green”. (”It’s made from PEOPLE! PEEEOOOPLE!!!”)
But I am sure there is a rationality behind avoiding reconstituted chicken, too, beyond the vegan/vegetarian moral rationality. I’d be interested to entertain your thoughts.
3 bowls of granola with honey = $60
1 serving of bread with honey = $20
1 serving of ketchup (maybe) = $20
1 bad night at Chinese New Year = $100
1 gulp of Gatorade before I noticed = $20
Running Total: $220
We have an extra ticket for Sat night's "A Behanding in Spokane" (@behandingbway) w/Chris Walken. For a few Hamiltons it's yours!
about 19 hours ago from Power Twitter
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Whew, with one resolution out of the way, I’ve vowed for the month of February to carry on a Media Fast. I’ve polled several friends about how I can take this on, and they’ve all responded in kind. “How can you eliminate electronic media from your life?? No blogs? No podcasts? Hardly any internet? No YouTube?? You are so interesting! How will you find so many amazing and hilarious topics to share in conversation???”![[del.icio.us]](http://www.justamonth.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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I complained earlier this month about the fact that honey was considered on the naughty list for vegans.
Apartment Therapy articulates some of the good reasons to avoid corn syrup 
I love the web, and many of the people I know love it, too. So we heartily join together in indulging our passion, twittering, link sharing, posting, facebooking, blogging, last.fm’ing, rss’ing, tumbling, hulu’ing, delicious’ing, digg’ing, flickr’ing, chatting, wikipedia’ing, emailing, itunes’ing, youtubing, and commenting.
Why?: My S.O. constantly teases me about my dependence and increasing addiction to the internet. I am subscribed to 100+ blogs in my google blog reader and I often spend 10-12 hours a day on the computer, constantly patched into the net, for work and recreation. My iTunes has more than enough music to entertain Noah (that’s over 40 days worth of songs for you gentiles), and 20 days worth of podcasts. If you added up the random seconds I spend reading twitter posts and “interacting” on Facebook it would fold into hours. I use my iPhone on the train, in the bathroom, while driving, and at the dinner table.
With all of the culinary options available in NYC – Little Italy, Junior’s Cheesecake, Cone’s Ice Cream, the Olive Garden – you’d think I would have been brought to my dairy-loving, sugar-craving knees this weekend in the city. But in fact I ate better than I have in weeks. I made a bee-line for the 
= 
This image courtesy my S.O. Can you guess what it is?
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