Chapter 3. Liquidarity: Vague Belonging on the Dancefloor

Mutek, Montréal, 2010

es, I know that it’s been more than two weeks since I defended my dissertation, and yet this chapter-by-chapter series on my dissertation is not even halfway finished. This is partially due to the fact that I had to take care of post-defense revisions and re-submit a final draft to the university before an immovable deadline. But this is also partially due to the fact that I partied and relaxed and partied and relaxed for quite a few days after the defense itself. I regret nothing.

(NOTE: This is the sixth installment of a series where I summarize my dissertation through blog posts. You can find the inaugural post here.)

So, this chapter expands the analysis of intimacy from the previous chapter to the broader scope of nightclub crowds. Whereas the previous chapter thought about intimacy primarily as contact between a pair of strangers, this chapter focuses on the loose social bonds that hold together a crowd of strangers at an EDM event (a party, a nightclub, etc). I develop a concept that I call liquidarity

The Other Acknowledgements

A fairy-ring of mushrooms grew overnight on the lawn during the NEH Summer Institute at Wesleyan

uring the preparation of the final, revised, post-defense version of my dissertation, I finally had to flesh out all of the “front matter” of my dissertation. The front matter usually includes things like an epigraph, a dedication, acknowledgements, a table of contents, lists of tables/figures/maps/etc., and an abstract of the dissertation. Writing the acknowledgements was surprisingly hard, and there were a lot of people, organizations, and things that I couldn’t acknowledge in a scholarly dissertation. But this is a blog, and I have considerably more freedom to shift between levels of formality and punch through layers of politics and politeness. So here are all the other things for which I am grateful, dissertation-wise.

Chapter 2, Part 2: Gender, Sexual Touch, and Rethinking Intimacy

Splendor in the Grass: the residue of pleasure in Lakeshore Park, Chicago

lthough the first half of this chapter describes EDM events as intensely tactile spaces where there is a greater openness to touch, it’s not like everyone at a nightclub is hungry for touch—sexual or otherwise—nor is everybody all that tolerant of being touched. And yet, touch is everywhere at EDM events. How does that work? How someone manages this diversity of attitudes towards touch in a crowd of strangers is one of the more obscure aspects of EDM tactility,

Chapter 2, Part 1: Touching Strangers: Touch and Intimacy on the Dancefloor

Somewhere in Paris, 11eme arr., 2006

ack when I had just returned from my second year of fieldwork in Paris, I had this great moment of short-circuited intimacy. I was at Souvenir#3 warehouse party (with Seuil headlining), when a woman came up and introduced herself as a Lola, a friend of some friends I had in Chicago. We talked briefly, and then went back to dancing. More than twelve hours later, as I was leaving the after-party, our mutual friend asks me and Lola if we had met each other. Lola replied, “Of course! We’re best friends,” and we gave each other a big hug and a peck on the cheek. When I wrote about it on my old blog a few days later,

This One Is Full of Keywords: SEO, RSS Aggregators, Dissertation Writing Services

Happy Noodle Boy is not pleased with you. (by Jhonen Vasquez of Slave Labor Graphics)

EO spam is a cancer on the internet, and those who engage in it shouldn’t be trusted. People who use RSS aggregators to scrape topical content and repost it verbatim for their SEO spamming purposes are just the worst sort of people. And don’t get me started on dissertation writing services. If you’re reading this on a website other than LMGMBlog, report the site to Google as SEO spam, close the window, and notify me at my Gmail address (theluisgarcia).

See what I did there? According to Internet Wisdom, websites such as the one that copied an entire blog article of mine yesterday use underhanded SEO (Search Engine Optimization) methods to game the search-engine system and give them high page rankings. If they manage to appear on the first page of Google results for a topic like “dissertation writing services,” for example, they’ll get tons of traffic to their page, which will drive up the numbers of “eyeballs” and “clickthroughs” on their ads, while perhaps also allowing them to sell some snake oil to the more gullible visitors.

To build content and generate incoming links to the site, the administrators of these sites often use programs that aggregate RSS feeds (from blogs, newspapers, etc) and scan them for particular keywords and/or other characteristics. When the desired conditions are met, this program “scrapes” the entire post from the RSS feed and reproduces on their own site. They’ll often include a link (hidden at the bottom of the page) which points to the original article. This will usually create a “pingback” or “trackback” on the original blog, which creates a link from the original source to the copied article on the new spam site. Now, they’ve got many pages, a lot of content, and a growing set of both outgoing and incoming links. All of these are things that Google’s search engine measures when it creates its page rankings, and thus this mostly useless and ad-smeared website crawls up to the top of Google’s search results.

So, all of my first paragraph is going to appear in the RSS summary of this article, with several keywords that will hopefully trigger RSS aggregators for “SEO”, “RSS Aggregators,” and “Dissertation Writing Services.” My hope is that, since many of them seem to have automated content-scraping, this’ll result in a post that undermines some of their own purposes.

In any case, I’ve adjusted my RSS feed to only post summaries instead of full articles, and I’ll be back to writing about my dissertation soon!

That Blog Be Yankin’: Plagiarism-y Developments Halt Dissertation Series

UPDATE: See comments for details. Short version: the offending page is down, it seems.

Hey folks, just to let you know that this “dissertation writing service” (Google Cache of the page)website has reposted the entirety of my last post in the series that I have been writing on my dissertation. This looks to be a form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam, and it’s a problem for a number of reasons: 1) I was never contacted to ask permission (and I certainly wouldn’t have given any to this site); 2) it quotes the entirety of the original work, which is in violation of “fair use” (US IP law) and most other legal guidelines for acceptable use of intellectual property without permission; and 3) since it’s a “dissertation writing service“ website, the framing of this post (me writing about the preparation of my dissertation) in this context gives the impression that either I paid for their services to prepare my dissertation or I’m trying to sell my dissertation to them—either interpretation could harm my future career as an academic and could thus be a form of libel.

In any case, this means I’m going to be putting a halt to the dissertation-in-blog-post series, until I can figure out what to do about this. In the meanwhile, I’ll add occasional updates in the comments below; sometime later, I might write a whole blog post on this experience. If you have any expertise or advice to share about this sort of situation, you’re welcome to contact me through the comments below or by e-mail. Sorry for the interruption, folks!

Introduction, Part 2: Fieldwork Sites and Methods

A ubiquitous tag in Lima, Peru, found near the Bajada de los Baños in Barranco

his is the third installment in my series of posts summarizing my dissertation, chapter by chapter (first post here). Today’s post completes the second half of the introductory chapter (first half here), which introduces and describes my main fieldwork sites (i.e., Paris, Chicago, and Berlin), and outlines my methods for conducting research.

(Note: The image for today’s post has nothing to do with my dissertation project and everything to do with the fact that I’m in Lima, Peru, right now. But the image has a cute graffiti tag, spanish-colonial architecture, and pretty flowers, so quit yer whinin’)

Cities and Scenes

My fieldwork took place in

Introduction, Part 1: The State of EDM Studies

Peeps Hunting Trophy, Shit Show 01, DEMF @ Detroit, 2010

his is the second installment in my series of posts summarizing my dissertation, chapter by chapter. In the first post, I gave an overview of my dissertation project, elucidating the main research questions, highlighting some overarching themes, and giving an overview of the chapters to follow. Today’s post covers the introductory chapter, where I review previous scholarship on similar topics, introduce and describe my main fieldwork sites (i.e., Paris, Chicago, and Berlin), and outline my methods for conducting research. This chapter also includes the chapter-structure of the rest of the dissertation, but since that was already covered in my previous post, I’ll skip over that here.

Brief Recap: this dissertation aims mostly to make sense of scenes like this,

‘Can You Feel It, Too?’: Affect and Intimacy at EDM Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin

Steve Bug at Freak n' Chic (in Batofar, Paris), September 2008

s I had mentioned in my last so-sorry-I’ve-been-gone post, I’m still putting the finishing touches on my dissertation ahead of my defense (which will happen in July, it seems). But I don’t want to slip away into another 2-month period of blog-silence, so I’ve given myself a dissertation-related blog project for the next couple of weeks.

Every couple of days, I’ll be posting brief summaries of parts of my dissertation, beginning with today’s overview and then following chapter by chapter. These will be written in plain English and in the informal style typical of most blog posts. These summaries serve three purposes: 1) as reading guides, to help non-specialist readers read my dissertation when it is published; 2) as practice for my defense, since this forces me to review all of my arguments and organize them in my head; and 3) as “reading excerpts” for people who might be interested in reading the full dissertation, but aren’t sure. In any case, my goal is to make these all short and easy to read.

Today’s post is about the dissertation as a whole, and gives you an overview of what the dissertation is about, how it’s structured, what my methods were, and so on.  My dissertation project arose out of a relatively simple observation:

Back to Blogging & the DissertationDistraction Podcast

Somewhere in Chicago

‘m back! Well, sort of.

 

As you probably noticed, I’ve been rather silent on this blog for the past couple of months. Sometime around mid-April, I realized that the deadlines for the submission of the final draft of my dissertation aligned with travel plans for both me and my committee members in such a way that I needed to either defend my dissertation in mid-June (with plenty of time to revise post-defense) or in mid-July (with barely a week to do all revisions). I went into Emergency Dissertation-Finishing Mode