Posts by Daisy Pignetti USF:
CCCC 2008| Blogging New Orleans: Locals Creating Reality Online
For those new readers of my blog who may be visiting this site after attending our Saturday Katrina panel at 4Cs–”Composed in the Wake of Disaster: (Re)Writing the Realities of New Orleans”–I’d like to post some text and links for your benefit. As I was the last panelist of four and we were Internet-less in our conference room [something I've started to rant about over at Dennis's blog], I felt a bit scattered. I typically create Powerpoints, but wasn’t in the mood for that this time around. So even though I had typed up a few pages and had a plethora of examples to share, I ended up doing what I prefer, extemporizing.
Here is a more fleshed out version of what I shared on my handout:
Like Bryon Hawk [who spoke on Hurricane Katrina as a cultural media event, using the framework Jean Baudrillard sets forth in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place], I agree that there were repeated and manipulated images of Katrina that circulated at rapid speed, particularly during that week of the storm when little to no information could be verified and the media focus had to remain on those still stranded in the city, Superdome, Convention Center.
But as a New Orleans native, I had other issues with the depiction of my beloved hometown. I was skeptical when Brian Williams declared on NBC’s Today Show (August 30, 2005. 7:05 a.m. ET): “There has been a huge development overnight … the historic French Quarter, dry last night and it is now filling with water. This is water from nearby Lake Pontchartrain; the levees failed overnight.”
Not only did I not know how to begin to process this information—which levee? how much water? where would the water go?—when I watched the news later that night and saw streets in and near the Quarter bone dry, I knew that these news stories were evolving into journalistic “meta-narratives,” and I knew that from this moment on, these would no longer suffice.
Thus, my focus today is on those locals–primarily those cyberliterate and with access to technology–who had evacuated and were watching from hotel rooms or the homes of extended family members. When they could not find any information relevant to their neighborhoods, never mind their eventual return to their homes and beloved city, many went online.
[Here I referred to the chart from a Pew Internet and American Life report on getting news during the storms of 2005, and wanted to highlight how it's likely that, once again, locals were not part of the sample population. ]
While it’s great that more and more Americans nationwide are turning to and trusting alternative news sources like blogs and discussion boards, my argument is that in the years since the storm, the only place one can truly get a real depiction or chronicle of a Katrina survivor/resident of NOLA is in the New Orleans blogosphere.
With that said, and without Internet access, I read from several blogs, highlighting the dates of the posts to prove that the Katrina narrative is still developing, with every insurance claim, abandoned house or business, death, and reiteration of why New Orleans matters!
Full list of examples I shared or wanted to share, organized by rhetorical mode:
1. EXPLAIN: Katrina stories—locals who stayed and who watched from afar
2. DESCRIBE: the look of one street in January 2008 and a video commentary 16 months after the storm:
Grocery from Editor B on Vimeo.
3. ENTERTAIN: in order to meet new insurance guidelines and avoid flooding next time around, one has to raise one’s house:
4. PERSUADE: a powerful speech and then the speaker’s reflection 1 year later, still outraged at the lack of change when it comes to crime
5. INFORM: One’s shock at the lack of discussion surrounding a scary statistic.
Finally, how to describe New Orleans? It’s a place of its own and one to which we are intensely attached
If anyone has comments or questions, please leave a comment. Watch this space for a link in the coming weeks because a more theoretical look at the “writing wrong” examples like these demonstrate is now in print in the Spring 2008 issue of Reflections.
tenure and self-promotion at its finest!
Absolutely fabulous! Congrats to Brian Donovan and thank you for sharing this on YouTube! As an internet researcher, I too plan to document my academic career in creative ways!
Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
I’m so happy Leisa posted the link to this in her Twitter stream. I think I had heard of this project through the Open Society Institute, but never got a chance to read more or watch the student-produced videos until now. The Katrina Media Fellows’ mission is stated as follows: Through stories and images, the [...]
Berkman@10
I really wish I had the time to get up to Harvard for “The Future of the Internet” conference May 15-16, 2008, but now that I’m 80 days away from my anticipated defense date, I have to focus on things like producing pages, making edits, and figuring out where I’ll be living in July! The [...]
and the award goes to…
It’s that time of year again when the department gives out its Graduate Awards. I couldn’t be more honored! Now that I’m dissertating and have a job lined up, it kinda feels like senior year for me, and this tops it off quite nicely. Joseph Bentley Teaching Fellowship: Taylor Joy Mitchell Estelle J. Zbar Award [...]
venting
and for once, it’s not me doing the venting! As a frequent visitor to the Academic Careers Comp/Rhet wiki, I noticed a week or so ago when all of its content disappeared. I mostly referred to this site before and just after MLA to see who had scheduled interviews and campus visits. Once I got [...]
Twitter tweets
I just noticed that my category for Twitter bookmarks in del.icio.us has grown to nearly surpass my teaching and dissertation tags, and I only started with Twitter in January! The buzz on the NOLA blogger listserv is to get more locals tweeting, and this video offers a nice primer. I wish this had come out [...]
I survived Job Search 2007-2008!
As soon as I get the contract in the mail, it will be both the end of a trying time and the beginning of a wonderful adventure! Ever since Andy and I returned from eloping last August, it’s been nothing but stress related to establishing FL residency status in order to save my tuition waiver, [...]
academic zodiac
I think I’m a much nicer person than this Chronicle Careers essay describes; still, it is accurate in many ways, namely the organizing and my academic future in rhetoric and composition Virgo: (August 22-September 23) You are probably a disagreeable person who likes to find minor things wrong with other people’s work or ideas, while [...]
fleur de lis fashions
Ever since Katrina hit, the fleur de lis has become a symbol of rebirth in NOLA and you can see them everywhere. In my previous blog post about the Katrina Warriors, I included their symbol which, in case you couldn’t figure it out, is a fleur de lis/heart/vagina hybrid created in time for the 10th [...]
an offline lesson
I recently spent an unprecedented 5 days offline. And I liked it. In fact, since my return to the web, I’ve only forced myself to log on so to read my online students’ drafts and check email. I find I can focus on my dissertation much better this way, even though those days off produced [...]
my favorite superbowl commercial 2008
for crying out loud!
I haven’t blogged or even felt guilty about not blogging in weeks. As you can tell from my previous posts, I’ve become intrigued with Twitter; however, I haven’t really been updating that timeline either. When I’m anxious like this, I don’t spend much time online. Also, my parents came in town and I’m still juggling [...]
Hillary
Like Rebecca Traister, the author of this Salon piece on Hillary v Chris Matthews, I too am not a Hillary supporter. But last night I was glad she proved the pundits wrong. I don’t have cable but, surprise surprise, I read the play-by-plays on what they were saying about her on Twitter. As a woman [...]
online memorial
I’ve not been on Twitter a week yet but have become a fan of how immediate the information shared is. I’ve also become quite fanatical about reading and clicking on the links mentioned in everyone’s 140-character posts. Perhaps it’s because I’ve chosen extremely interesting and tech-savvy people to follow? Sadly, though, we have lost one [...]
here i go again
joining another site that prompts me to write in shorter spurts than this blog. First it was delicious, where I don’t have to write anything at all, just tag. Then it was Facebook with its status updates. And now I’m talking about Twitter, which asks me to answer “What are you doing?” in 140 characters [...]
hummers helping?
Speaking of commercials, I just saw one laden with Katrina images, streets flooded, etc. spliced with images of a Hummer driving through the deep water. The final tagline: Visit HummerHelps.com. Upon doing so, I was directed to the main Hummer page, then to a menu of links “to learn more about what you can do [...]
holiday travel
Flew up to Chicago today with intentions to drive over to my husband’s family home in Minnesota. All I can say is snow, wind, snow, a lame white Mustang Convertible as our rental car!!!!!, snow, snow, wind, snow. We may have been able to push on, but here we are, halfway there, in a hotel [...]
XOXO! An early Christmas gift!
I was not at all expecting to receive my XO laptop before Christmas since I ordered it a little later than most, so imagine my surprise when a loud knock came at the door this evening. As soon as I saw the box, I screamed, “It’s my XO!” and I put everything down. Sadly, I [...]
dopplr followup
Like D Weinberger, I had not noticed that dopplr went live last week. I’ve been enjoying the service since July and, because I hope to see a lot of travel in my future, I plan to use it to continue to keep up with my contacts in the new year. And, again like DW, I [...]
LACC Conference / NOLA in November
[I started composing this post before Thanksgiving, but never got around to finishing it until now--my apologies] As you all know, this has been the most hectic semester for me. While I probably did not have the time to attend a conference, I knew I had to attend the Louisiana Association for College Composition conference [...]
high school
dopplr
When I was at Harvard this summer, I was introduced to a slew of social networking tools. I joined Facebook a couple weeks before the session started and have come to use it on a daily basis to keep up with my SDP and other academic contacts. Now that applications have been added, I can [...]
Oh Snap!
I just found out, funnily enough, that I added Snapshots to my blog two days after Jill/txt disabled it on hers! I added it this morning after seeing that my husband’s new blog automatically had the plug-in. While I’ve had some issues with it today–sometimes the snapshots show up, other times they don’t–I do like [...]
thankful for the job search???
It’s been a wonderful couple of days, with a trip to New Orleans for a conference last weekend [a post on that is already in the works], and then coming back to Tampa for Thanksgiving break and the end of the semester in sight. Only two more weeks of teaching and grading, and I couldn’t [...]