Don't Dooce and drive.

Today, I discovered the vastly-detailed world, and life, of Heather B. Armstrong. Writing under the pseudonym 'Dooce', Armstrong has documented the most significant events in the last ten years of her life in an increasingly public domain.



Marketing herself on her easily navigable domain as a snapshot of the modern American mother, she updates her horde of followers about the mundanities of her family life through reflections and photographs.
Who is reading this? What's the big idea? Somebody is. Enough people to garner her multiple Weblog Awards, a million and a half followers on Twitter, an entire online community page of like-minded (read: domestic and desperate) individuals and enough revenue from advertising on her page for her, her husband and children to live very comfortably without day jobs.

But is this reality? Armstrong's forte is little more than giving her baying audience their daily dose of Heather. Except she's shooting her family on a $2,000 Canon 5d. And editing the photographs within an inch of reality. And, if her carefully-produced 'About Me' section is to be believed, Heather is really living the American Dream the old-fashioned way. She's single-handedly found reform (and a generous bundle of income) by means of self-expression, the love of a family and the simpler things in life. Or so her finely-crafted persona tells us.
The truth is, the sort of persona Armstrong has woven is one that appeals to all Western women in earnest. She's the woman you want to meet for a latte, the woman you want to talk about 'women's problems' and PTA, she's the woman you want to meet for playdates with the kids. You'd name her a Godmother if you could.
But you can buy calendars with vomit-inducingly cute photos of her dogs in amusing situations. And she was an honoree on the Forbes list of the '30 most influential women in media' alongside Oprah and Ellen. But there's a painfully cute story behind her pseudonym (Her 'lack' of typing-ability. Can't you just relate?)
The truth is, Armstrong is as much a soap opera (complete with sponsor breaks) as a personal life blog. The depth of her confessions, the topics she touches on and the frankness that won her millions of followers will have been toned down from the day she realised a large number of people were reading, and even more so when it became her source of income. Because we all want to protect our career, and so Armstrong will protect hers. I could be, of course, being terribly cynical and maybe Heather is a pre-packaged PR dream with marketability and sponsorship deals to boot, but what are the odds?

The Places We Live - Multimedia Worlds

Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen has created what is essentially a multimedia installation piece via you browser.



The Places We Live is a gallery of beautifully composed photographs with stark messages about the state of certain communities around the world - namely those in Caracas, Nairobi, Mumbai and Jakarta who are forced to live in favela-esque slum dwellings.
Bendiksen incorporates relevant ambient street sounds to his images to enhance the experience through audio, allowing the images to become immersive and feel alive without motion.
The beautiful photographs, shot in each of the four locations and accessible via an interactive map of the world, are accompanied by educational texts, giving background to the images and making them contextually stark. Often, in my eyes, a hinderance to photography, i feel the background information and use of numbers for scale adds to the cultural experience delivered by the website.



We are reminded, however, that Bendiksen is not producing groundbreaking images of some of the poorest areas on the planet out of righteousness - we are encouraged to purchase a copy of his new book with further images inside. The images are, however, of such a high quality and given so much context through the multimedia aspects of the website that the page works as a fantastic tool to sell books and I, for one, would be very interested in seeing more of Bendiksen's work.
It is interesting, however, to provide a multimedia experience as a means of advertisement for a product that is not in itself multimedia in nature.