40 years ago today, a group of friends got together in Baton Rouge for a party they called the Concert for Pangladesh.
No one really remembers where the name came from, but it likely was divine pangolin intervention bestowed upon Bill Mallory who was listening to side 3 of the Concert for Bangladesh.
Bennet Rhodes
woo, that was an incredibly long post which i'm anxious to read later in the evening.
however, all you had to do regarding the derivation of the name Pangladesh was ask someone where Pangladesh comes from. we woulda told ya, right Jody Mallory?
here's my version. i'm sure someone will correct it, and by the end there will be an entire treatise ready to go.
THIS is a Pangolin; however, in Shit Dogeze or Leisure Landing linguistics, its philology begins from its root, probably coined by either Jimmy Strickland or Bill Mallory, or any of a number of LL habitues.
its meaning, nothing more (or, read on for how much more) than a codeword for 'Coca Cola,' but not just a simple codeword; a Steganography, which had as its secret meaning, 'a joint'.
(Whereas cryptography is the practice of protecting the contents of a message alone, steganography is concerned with concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent as well as concealing the contents of the message.)
used in a sentence:
a leisure landing employee says to another, or to an otherwise 'known' layperson,
"let's go outside and have a Pangolin.'
this would act as both the cover to the unintended listener in the presence of third parties (called adversaries), and a signifier to its intended subject.
generally, it is about constructing and analyzing communications protocols that block adversaries.
there were, of course, many steganographic conveyances, some of which have been explored and may still be available for research on the Internet, but many never before revealed as to their true meaning to this day.
i remember seeing a wonderful post on the subject ten years ago in a thread or a comment, but can't remember now where it was.
hope this helps, Bennet Rhodes.
And most importantly, try to remember that Jimmy Strickland would have been its most ardent champion; his obsession, compulsion and fascination with James Bond was without compare or reservation, and known by all who were lucky enough to have met him once, or known him in the beautiful world he inhabited comprising Leisure Landing and his mother's house (where his records lived).
Doug Meetoh, and BTW, he was at every Pangladesh, or at least the one from the flyer below.
Social steganography: how teens smuggle meaning past the authority figures in their lives
Danah Boyd has a great summary of the new Pew report on Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. The whole thing is worth a read -- especially her thoughts on race and social media use -- but the most interesting stuff was about "social steganography" --
smuggling meaning past grown-ups through the clever use of in-jokes and obscure references (this is also something that Chinese net-users do to get past their national censors):
My favorite finding of Pew’s is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%). This is the practice that I’ve seen significantly rise since I first started doing work on teens’ engagement with social media. It’s the source of what Alice Marwick and I describe as “social steganography” in our paper on teen privacy practices.
While adults are often anxious about shared data that might be used by government agencies, advertisers, or evil older men, teens are much more attentive to those who hold immediate power over them – parents, teachers, college admissions officers, army recruiters, etc. To adults, services like Facebook that may seem “private” because you can use privacy tools, but they don’t feel that way to youth who feel like their privacy is invaded on a daily basis. (This, BTW, is part of why teens feel like Twitter is more intimate than Facebook. And why you see data like Pew’s that show that teens on Facebook have, on average 300 friends while, on Twitter, they have 79 friends.) Most teens aren’t worried about strangers; their worried about getting into trouble.
Over the last few years, I’ve watched as teens have given up on controlling access to content. It’s too hard, too frustrating, and technology simply can’t fix the power issues. Instead, what they’ve been doing is focusing on controlling access to meaning. A comment might look like it means one thing, when in fact it means something quite different. By cloaking their accessible content, teens reclaim power over those who they know who are surveilling them. This practice is still only really emerging en masse, so I was delighted that Pew could put numbers to it.
I should note that, as Instagram grows, I’m seeing more and more of this. A picture of a doughnut may not be about donuts. While adults worry about how teens’ demographic data might be used, teens are becoming much more savvy at finding ways to encode their content and achieve privacy in public.
thoughts on Pew’s latest report: notable findings on race and privacy