Phil Gara, filmmaker and MBA candidate at the Sloan School of Management, tries to avoid labels. He has been to a film school run by Werner Herzog, plays forward on the MIT ice hockey team, and participated in Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. He has produced and directed a number of documentary films and shorts, including Project Z (which examines global security issues via zombies), Occupy Central Park, and Morning on Mars (about the Mars Rover landing). I spoke with him about his internet presence, snap judgements, and the essence of drama.

AN: So, you did a film school with Werner Herzog. What was that like?

PG: …He’s able to focus on a level that’s much different than what everyone else is able to do. It’s, I think the success of his films is just the ability to focus in on a subject, and focus so deeply that you draw insights that would otherwise escape anyone else.

AN: You also made a film, Occupy Central Park.

PG: That was about the Occupy Movement. It was about this kid trying to organize a concert in Central Park in the middle of this movement. It just kind of followed for a month this effort… I mean, that was one of the films I made. I guess for some reason that one shows up more in Google results or something?

AN: I just zeroed in on that because I have actually been there.

PG: It definitely does make me less employable, I find.

AN: Really?

PG: Well, I mean, I’m in business school, right? I definitely notice whenever I apply for a job, my film page, facebook views get like a huge amount of views, and, I don’t know. I just imagine that for a large company that’s risk-averse, it’s not necessarily something that’s gonna help me get a job. … I’ve just kinda let that stuff all stay out there, but it’s definitely something I always think about. You know, if you have this stuff in public everyone can kinda infer things. If you actually watch the film, it’d be a pretty sort of even-handed look at the movement, etc. But those are all things you can’t really infer from just a search term or something.

AN: I understand that you were also involved in Hurricane Sandy relief.

PG: Yeah, I did a little bit of that. … I have all these pictures and videos I still haven’t done anything with. … The way I did it would just be going with a friend of mine… to Staten Island, kind of walk the streets to see people who were working on their houses, just clearing out sheetrock, and just asking if they needed a hand. Usually that was more effective, I felt, than going through a large organization. …I kind of wish I had done a more of an in depth film about the whole Sandy thing. …The ones I’ve seen kind of didn’t capture it, just how rough it was for a lot of people.

AN: What do you think is the most important thing about you that’s not available on the internet?

PG: I always worry about the inferences that people draw from the limited amount of information on the internet, and it can’t really judge your intent or your thought process, etc. The sort of tagging and search-term-keyword way of the internet organization seems to lend itself toward labels…and so I’m always worried about being labeled and having false inferences drawn from those labels. So let’s say, for example, if you made a film about the occupy movement, that would connote a bunch of different labels. …I’m always trying to be in between and avoid labels. Like, I did make a film about occupy but I’m also in business school. So that’s kind of, to some people, a contradiction… The one concern I have is that people just kind of infer the worst every time…this is some, you know, radical lefty with Occupy, or then some business school robot. And there’s definitely–hopefully–some room in between. I don’t know if it’s easy to see that with just the information that’s out there.

AN: What is it about your values that motivated you to do both of those things? What’s the overlap?

PG: I don’t know. The one thing that I did learn from filmmaking, maybe even the Werner Herzog seminar, is that the essence of drama is…the main actors are involved in a story that they’re kind of unaware of and that’s what’s interesting to the audience. You’re seeing them play out something but they’re not fully conscious of it, and I think that’s the way it is with everyone’s life. You’re driven by certain things but you’re not fully aware of those things…So I would say it’s hard to have an answer to that, but I’m sure there’s some reasons. But that’s more for other people to interpret I guess.

AN: But not on the internet.

PG: Well, I’m just worried. On the internet it makes it really easy to just superficially tag people but what I’m talking about is sort of sustained look at someone’s life and trying to infer a kind of grander theme to it all that takes a little more time and reflection. I don’t know if we get that. There’s definitely a mythical quality to everyone that I’m not sure you get on the internet.

So I made this video, a little taste of what it would be like if Werner Herzog turned his formidable focusing powers to interpreting Phil Gara’s publicly available internet life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkRFXLDdmE&feature=youtu.be

Meet Pau Pernghwa Kung

It is hard to interview a self-defined “not very active user of social media”. But as I see it, that’s a good quality. It does mean that you’re not going to fill my Facebook wall with videos of cute kittens, which is a blessing in these times. Yep, I said exactly those words to Pau. And he laughed.

Pau Pernghwa Kung is a first year graduate student at Deb Roy’s Laboratory for Social Machines, as you can read here. He is working on “mixing machine learning, network analysis, and journalism in ways that make news sing.” Continue reading →

I did what I think many of us did when starting this assignment.

I started opening tabs and tabs and tabs when I mistakenly clicked on the “Images link” on top of my window and discovered various shots of Michael. I wonder, would I know Michael if I saw pictures of him or read what other told about him. Does the web encapture who we are through quotes and snapshots of our lives or is it just a nice story book.

This pictures was taken a few years ago in Nashville, Tennessee where Michael went for a concert with his good friend Jessie. He had won two tickets to go see and hear Yo-Yo Ma play with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Other than the fact that Yoyoma “played like he had a demon inside him and that he was releasing it through the tip of his bow”, this picture is also used as the face of Michael on numerous websites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Michael first encountered Twitter through a high school class on media in the 21st century. After exploring this new form of media, he could not figure out a meaningful way to use it until a few months ago when he discovered the importance of Twitter in the media world. Twitter happens to be a great tool for surfacing information on subjects that Michael likes and follows but also for networking purposes. He discovered that Twitter acts a bit like a “social currency” amongst journalists. Following someone or being followed are not traded lightly in an industry where validation of peers seems important.

Look at that smile! This one was taken during Michael’s senior high school year as part of all the pictures taken for the YearBook and other internal school publications. This picture is actually the journalist face of Michael. It was primarily used as profile picture for the New-York Time blog. Michael wrote articles for the New York Times between March and June 2010. He was among 6 students who were selected to write about their college admission process in the NYT blog.

Michael journalistic interest did not start at the New York Times. He was Co-opinion and then Co-editor of his high school newspaper. He really enjoys writing and despite not being ready to commit to journalism, he knew that he was not done with it either. His take on this experience at the New York Times: “crazy”, “bizarre” and “fascinating”. He was impressed that so many people were invested in his story, and yet that the journalist’s work creates a “layer of abstraction” that put some distance from the reality of the people in the pieces and ease to write about anyone.

This third one is a treacherous one: the picture was edited and used in a very different context than the actual one in which the picture was taken. Let’s talk about the picture first. This was taken in sophomore year at Vanderbilt when Michael was “Vuceptor” Vuceptors are the older students dedicated to helping new students and their parents settled so they don’t have to lift a thing.

The trick here is that the picture was trimmed and Michael was put in the for front. Instead of seeing the load of other students helping and the queue of cars with parents eager to get their offspring settled in, the picture was edited and linked to a piece on the Vanderbilt blog talking about the One who chose Vanderbilt over Yale a few years ago and its evolution at Vanderbilt. Michael knows this is mainly because “Vanderbilt was excited I had picked them over Yale” but this piece, following the story the NYT started on him, was really “disconnected from the reality” and deciding for “college gets too many people stressed”. The one thing Michael wants us to remember from this picture is that “he was happy to be at Vanderbilt”.

Lastly I asked Michael about this picture. He remembered most of the context. This is an extract of a Vanderbilt TV coverage of an annual concert organized in Nashville for students. This particular concert was in 2012, Archives Nights were playing. Michael remembers a “great concert” and the 4 members of the band “were good”. He confessed that he had tried to organize a similar event to promote the band and it ended up being “a terrible event that he had tried to plan”.

After all of this, I asked Michael if this glimpse of what could be found on him on the internet was a good representation of who he was. He paused for a while and admitted that it was “incomplete”. The public content is mostly “polished and professional”, more of a “candid shot” and that none of the pictures or the articles attached were “capturing the true sense of everyday”. For him, his Facebook profile would give a better representation of who he is but even a privileged access on his social media profile would still not do the trick.

Most pictures present have been posted by friends rather than himself. An interesting thought crossed my mind. The absence of pictures of Michael was perhaps more representative of him than what you could actually find. After sharing this thought with him he concluded: “In a lot of sense I’m boring. I don’t put myself in position where people would take picture and I would be embarrassed in they posted them online”. This struck me. First, it would mean that not ending on Facebook in some weird half-naked outfit is boring. Second and more importantly, you obviously don’t end up writing for the New York Times or studying at MIT by being boring. Maybe there is more to it than meet the eye and the digital world is far from being mature to represent lives and share experiences.

On a sunny Monday in Cambridge, I sat down with Nieman fellow Celeste LeCompte to interview her. Based on my last-minute Googling, I’d discovered that she had an interest in robotics, the environment, and China. Hoping to get the scoop about Environmental issues in China or the experience of being a foreigner traveling in the country, I came prepared to learn some interesting details about that. Instead, a fascinating story about the parallels between the Maker movement in the China and US, along with the discussion of what exactly it means to be a “Maker”, emerged. Thank you, Celeste!