I love the LA Times Festival of Books. I’ve gone to this event for years now (I’d say somewhere between five and ten years – probably closer to ten years versus five years). I spend most of my time at various panel discussions. In my first few years, I’d just go to the stand-by line thirty minutes before a panel started -- I would always get in this way. That would limit how many panels I could attend in a day and would also limit my exploration of the various retail booths. (I never seriously tried buying tickets online since I’d tried that a couple times in the past and everything was always sold out.) The last couple of years I've switched strategies. I show up at the early hour of 8 a.m. and get my tickets via the Festival Ticketmaster booth, which starts giving away tickets at 9 a.m. It makes for a long day, but it also reduces my concern about getting into panels I really want to see. I can explore the Festival more and need only worry about showing up ten minutes before the panel starts.
Saturday, Panel 1
The first panel discussion I attended was at 10:30 a.m. It was called “Status Update: Social Networking & New Media.” The moderator was Andrew Nystrom. The panelists were Otis Chandler, Will Wheaton and Sara Wolf.
Stealing from the LA Times guide, here are the brief bios.
Andrew Nystrom. Nystrom, on Twitter at @latimesnystrom, is the Times’ senior producer for social and emerging media. His “Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks” hiking guide won a National Outdoor Book Award for Best Adventure Guidebook.
Otis Chandler. Chandler is the founder of goodreads.com. He is a software engineer at heart and loves tinkering on this website to make it the best product possible. He graduated from Stanford University. Along with a passion for building websites, he’s also a voracious reader. (My comment: an html link to his site is just a bit further down this blog page. For some reason, I was getting an error when putting an html link in this section.)
Wil Wheaton. Wheaton’s acting career began with roles in “Stand By Me” and “Star Trek.” He is also an author, blogger, voice actor and social commentator. With more than 300,000 rollovers on twitter, Wheaton is one of the best-known users of social media. His latest book is “Sunken Treasure.”
Sara Wolf. Wolf is co-editor of Itch, an evolving art project/artist forum/journal/zine. She is also a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures and a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Otis Chandler had a theory that reading was broken when he started up goodreads.com. He wanted to make reading a social experience by holding conversations via the web. He stated that there is peer pressure to watch certain television shows like American Idol, because it is water cooler talk. He’s trying to create that same atmosphere via the web where people see what others are reading and therefore wish to join in on the discussion of these books. He said that twitter asks what are you doing now. He said that his site asks what are you reading now. He mentioned that the interesting thing about his website is that it allows you to permanently keep your thoughts online about books so that in the future you can reference them – as well as your friends checking out your thoughts in the present.
Wil Wheaton discussed how twitter and his blog allow him to work outside of corporate publishing. He argued that early adopters of new technology create interesting communities, but then those on the corporate side or individuals who want to make money (spammers) come in and mess it up. His one warning about technology is that once you put something up, it’ll be up forever. He warns his children that they must be careful regarding what they post on Facebook. He said a great advantage of technology is that you don’t need to be in the same space with an individual to share moments. He mentioned that he had an over-sharing moment on twitter where he thought he had sent a text to his wife with a benign “I Love You” comment, but he instead posted this on twitter.
Sara Wolf has the smallest audience of the three panelists. She has a website/facebook called Itch. The focus of this site is on dance. The Facebook site has about 400 friends. There are three editors and they publish about three times a year. She likes her small community. There are shared conversations where a certain individual might post an item and then everyone jumps in to share a conversation.
Some thoughts. There was a contrast between Wil Wheaton and Sara Wolf. Sara mentioned a wish that she could write under a pen name. Wil Wheaton (based on the moderator) is around the 31st most followed individual on twitter. Sara Wolf has a community of only around 400. I obviously have more in common with Sara Wolf versus Wil Wheaton. I have even fewer readers than Sara Wolf and I blog under a pen name. I don’t twitter, but if I did I probably would also want to do it under a pen name.
This blog that I write shows that I have some interest in technology and communication. This is why I went to this specific panel. It was interesting, but not blow away interesting.
Saturday, Panel 2
The second panel I attended was at noon. It was titled “History: The Fight for Rights.” The moderator was Scott Kraft. The panelists were Ernest Freeberg, Randy Shaw and Thomas J. Sugrue.
Stealing from the LA Times guide again, here are the brief bios.
Scott Kraft. Kraft is senior writer for the Los Angeles Times, specializing in national and foreign topics. As national editor of The Times from 1997 to 2008, he directed the coverage of three presidential campaigns, and reporters who reported to him won four Pulitzer Prizes. (Sorry, no html link for Scott Kraft. I couldn't really find a decent website.)
Ernest Freeberg. Freeberg’s book, “Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent,” is a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in Biography. Freeberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee.
Randy Shaw. Shaw is director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic and editor of the online daily newspaper BeyoondChron.org. Shaw, the author of two previous books, has now written “Beyond the Fields,” a chronicle of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement.
Thomas J. Sugrue. Sugrue is a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in the history of race, politics and society in 20th century America. Sugrue’s latest work, “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North” is a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in History.
Freeberg talked about Eugene Debs. He ran for the 1920 presidency as a Socialist. He got one million votes. The votes were likely protest votes against the US involvement in World War I. It wasn’t likely an indication of a growing socialist movement. He ran for the White House from prison. He had argued that war benefited the rich and hurt the poor. This was considered anti-American and he was sent to jail for ten years. During World War I, Americans were divided about its involvement in the war. The government passed acts to limit rights, basically silencing pacifists. Debs crossed the line and was tossed into jail. The action started modern civil liberties. The ACLU came out from this action. Freeberg said that in current times, reaction to attacks on free speech (such as laws passed after 9/11) are much quicker. We are much more vigilant.
Sugrue discussed the Civil Rights struggle in the North. He mentioned that many hotels, restaurants and theatres were segregated in the North. In the North, blacks were often made to sit in the balconies of theatres. Blacks and whites children also had separate classrooms and playgrounds though they were both in the same school. These were the similarities between North and South; however, a difference was the fact that blacks had the right to vote in the North. He mentioned that even though Obama won the elections, it only represents a partial end of race. Change needs to come from the bottom. There is still inequalities in poverty, home ownership. Blacks have 1/10 the wealth of whites. Latinos have 1/14 the wealth of whites. He also warned that even though Latinos voted for Obama, there are still signs that new immigrants (Latinos/Asians) are anti-black.
Shaw discussed the United Farm Workers (UFW). His discussion was more about individual stories. A very interesting story was about a young teen girl. Her sister asked her to go buy a marker from the store. She got there and was met by some UFW protesters who asked her not to buy from this store. She had a dilemma. Her sister needed a marker, yet she wanted to support the UFW. She went inside and stole the marker. She later asked her parents if she could drop out of high school to work with the UFW. They allowed her to do this. She quickly took on more responsibilities. At fifteen, they wanted her to be a team leader, but as a team leader she needed to drive a car and she was too young to do so. She eventually joined Obama’s election campaign. Sorry, I wish I could recall the name of the young lady -- well, now probably in her mature years.
Some thoughts: Okay, here's a theme that ran throughout the event. Every single panel I went to only had white moderators and panelists. I saw a total of 25 people on stage throughout the two day festival. All were white. Only two were women. Now I'm not a supporter of affirmative action (as dictated by law), but considering how diverse Los Angeles is, doesn't it seem strange that I'd go to a number of panels over the two day weekend and see no Asians, Latinos or Blacks? And when talking about Civil Rights, wouldn't you think there should be someone who is Asian, Latino or Black? Just a thought. I admit there were probably other panels that were more diverse. Maybe it was just my choices this year. In the past, I'll admit that panels were more diverse, but this year's lack of diversity stunned me. Considering that many of the people that go to the LA Times Festival of Books are even more liberal than Obama or even Nader, I wonder if they ever complain about this to the LA Times? The question for me, of course, is: did the lack of diversity for this specific panel make it less interesting? Actually, no. It was a very interesting panel discussion.
Anyways, I'll post more insights about my time at the Festival of Books over the next few days.
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