So, it’s late at night. You’re working – I mean, it’s really going. You may have a cup of tea next to you, and you’re typing away like mad. And you need something relaxed – but not too relaxed – to listen to. So, maybe you wanna’ throw on this track, by Lucas Santtana, ’cause it helps you stay focused while still keeping your brain enlivened. That’d be good, right?
Posted in Music, Wax Interlude | Tagged lucas santtana | Leave a Comment »
Perhaps it’s just me, but I think that Apple keynotes and the buzz that surrounds them are: a) a strangely pleasing (and increasingly rare) collective experience; b) among the most fascinating cultural moments of the contemporary age. The breathless excitement, the hyperbolic, histrionic reactions, good and bad, the desire, the lust, the defensive need to deride – GOD! – the sheer mad rush of it all. It fascinates me and has for a long time.
That said, I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that, after the dust settles, the reactions that follow these kinds of events can often feel stale and tired. While I agree that there is always cause for skepticism when a corporation launches new products, ones we may or may not need, at the same time, we have recently seen companies introduce what almost amount to new cultural forms – or, at the very least, new cultural containers. To react to these events solely from leftist wariness, a resistanc rooted in ludditism or a strictly market-based perspective – well, more than anything, it just feels disappointing. Narrow. The status-quo.
Fortunately, for every ‘my moleskine is good enough’ tweet and Blodget-esque post on sales projections, there are people writing who, to me anyway, have a decidedly broader, more intriguing perspective. And interestingly, what some have focused on isn’t so much the possibility afforded by the iPad itself, as the potential for newness in a touchscreen tablet, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, that you can hold in your hand like a book, magazine, slate or sketchpad. It’s this simple physicality (but not just that) that seems most promising.
First up (and, for this blog, most predictably) is Snarkmarketeer Robin, who I sorta’-but-not-really prodded to respond to the iPad. He gave just the kind of answer I expected – and I mean that with all the admiration I usually direct his way. And I think where it ends is most interesting, because what Sloan demands is that new forms create new content:
For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.
Jeez, if only we had a frame. [...]
In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub version of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple succeeded at inventing a new class of device… but we failed at inventing a new class of content.
In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art.
Joanne at Tomorrow Museum adds to this notion by suggesting that the limitations of the iPad that are being used to condemn it elsewhere are, in fact, a benefit.
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. [...]
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
[Emphasis mine]
Now, what Shirky says is true: part of the web’s grand potential lies in the fact that the former consumers of media are now producers of media. But the tablet produces a space in which one can read and watch and listen without the constant, jittery potential to react immediately. And it’s not that one wants to do away with that; our laptops and desktops are still here. There’s still a benefit to that kind of immediacy and ebb & flow. It’s that something like the iPad creates a form that, at least at this point, seems to allow for a greater emphasis on aesthetics, whether that’s language, the visual, the aural, or some combination we haven’t envisioned yet.
But though we can’t quite envision everything that tablets and touchscreens will one day do, I’ll end with some good guesses that rethink the place of both frequency and print.
But of course, as for my take on the notion of the tablet?… Briefly:
Posted in Electronic Reading | 5 Comments »
How will the cultural function of the magazine change as the magazine as a cultural artefact changes?
Recently, Tim Maly twittered a link to an older post on experiments in the conception of the magazine. Near the beginning of the post is the caption “we broke your businesses. now we want your machines”. This seems as good a place to start as any.
The argument, unsurprisingly, is that if the business model of print undergoing change, then the next logical step is that the web will claim and then reshape the means of production. It’s not that the web really wants the machines of print. It that it wants to invent new ones.
I’m not sure what I was drinking on that particular day, but this mention of ‘machines’ made me immediately jump to how philosophers Deleuze and Guattari used the word. One of D&G’s big ideas was that binary, dualistic thinking meant we frequently see objects and ideas as distinct and separate rather than considering them in light of all the other things that go into both making and sustaining their existence. The machine is an assemblage of numerous parts that all work together and so, to D&G, it worked as a good metaphor to reconsider the interconnectedness of stuff, of how physical and social relations all worked interdependently.
Magazines are a pretty good example of this. Think about it for a sec and you’ll see that there are variety of things that went into the magazine arriving at your front door. The paper the magazine is printed on comes from a huge network of forests and pulping and refinenement.The equipment used to print magazines is itself composed of materials – steel, aluminium, rubber, plastic – which all have huge industries behind them. The trucks or trains or planes the magazine was distributed on are connected to huge networks of infrastructure, whether roads, the electrical system, the petroleum industry or airports. One could go on forever. A magazine is simply one node in a massive network that has no beginning and no end.
But it isn’t just these material networks that sustain the printed magazine; there are cultural machines too. If ‘culture’ is a way of describing the relations between people and the world they inhabit, then the magazine as an artefact performs a kind of cultural function because culture demands it. The magazine works to both constitute reality in a certain way (this here is an article that will tell you something about the world and that is a good thing) but is also itself constituted by cultural forces (we need a form to tell us about the world that is more contemporary than a book but deeper and more rigorous than a newspaper).
Of course, both the material and the cultural networks that sustain magazines are changing. And in that matrix – which in my mind looks like a much bigger version of those molecule diagrams in textbooks – the magazine is but one node sustained by all the other things. And as those other things start to change – to twist and pull and morph into the new things, or simply cease to be – then the magazine is also stretched and pulled, forcing it to change too.
On ‘the material side’, the very fact of the web means a change in relations of distribution, economics etc. This we know. But what about information and opinion i.e. culture? After all, in much the same way that we flip through newspapers and news sites to appraise ourselves of what is going on in the world, we often turn to magazines to make sense of that world in a broader and more comprehensive sense. We also look to magazines to delve into our own specialised interests.
One can imagine that the latter of these two cultural functions might remain much the same. It isn’t hard to envision Car and Driver or Wallpaper in tablet form; in fact, their reliance on photo and video mean they seem perfectly suited to the Jesus slate and other related products.
But what of ‘making sense’? If the magazine performs a cultural function because of how it fits into a cultural network that periodically requires that someone step back and ‘take stock’ – what will change about that?
‘Cause right now, it seems we still often wait for magazines to proclaim their opinions, even on ‘matters internet’; just as recently as last month, certain parts of the web exploded after NYMag put out a story on the the warm and fuzzy web. Here was a voice from a place of authority – the magazine – speaking about the new. And that isn’t just prejudice; there are a variety of material and cultural machines in place that result in making it difficult to speak at the level of magazine. With all those barriers in place, with all those matrix-al paths to traverse, the magazine still speaks loudly because it takes a lot to have one’s voice heard. If all those trees must be cut, all those salaries must be paid, then you better damn well have something to say if you are to write in one. That overlap of culture and economics means that the really good ideas, the really thought-provoking stuff, only appears there – or at least seems that way.
But anyone who exists in the world of Snarmarkets, Quiet Babylons, 3quarksdailys and a million other sites know that the magazine is no longer the only place to get the good stuff. You can, if you so choose, be drenched in so much smart, brilliant stuff, you may feel compelled to never write again. If the magazine, bound between two covers, was once the place for either specialised interests or in-depth thinking about the now, it is no longer the only vehicle for that – and it doesn’t quite seem like the best one either.
So, on the cusp of a historical moment, we are left with a brilliantly optimistic question: what is the magazine?
Because, sure, it may just fade into metpahor, becoming a way of structuring media organisations that perform a loosely similar function online. To me, though, that seems less hopeful. What if, rather, as the social relations to information and opinion change, the magazine becomes, say, a locus of real-time debate, one in which conversation beween smart people becomes a live-for-it’s-not-really-tv spectator sport? Or what if the magazine becomes a curated collection of videos – maybe like Ryeberg; but maybe like Tumblr, where the scattered images are gathered under nothing more than a leading title.
What if the thing we have turned to make sense of our world – to broaden ourselves, to edify ourselves, to ground our perspectives – changes so that, instead being the thing that marks out our place in the world by telling us about it, become the mechanism through which we establish our relationship to the world by doing away with editorial voice? That the screen of the tablet would no longer just metpahorically be a window to the world because you could climb through it and run around?
What if magazines were no longer the thing we wanted to ’say something’ but, rather, the space through which we spoke ourselves into being?
This is all ludicrously and frustratingly vague, but I’m having trouble seeing past the horizon of form. But what if that lack of answers is precisely what the new machines demand?
Posted in Electronic Reading | 3 Comments »
The new Massive Attack single. Yes, you’re quite right: I never really expected to type that.
Posted in Music | Tagged heligoland, massive attack | 1 Comment »
Look mom! I’m crowdsourcing!
So, here’s the deal: I have to give a short presentation next week on web apps and software that will make life easier for people doing a dissertation in English. There are some obvious things I’d recommend – Dropbox, Evernote, Scrivener/PageFour – but I wanted to see if anyone out there had some recommendations for services or software they think would help with the following things:
Free is good, as is foolproof. Any help would be much appreciated!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged academics, evernote, scrivener, writing software | 8 Comments »
Quick thought. Here’s a CNN article on people feeling blue after seeing Avatar because their own lives now seem so impossibly plain. It might be total bunk, and probably is, but it got me thinking.
Let’s assume people really do feel ‘let down by life’ after seeing the film. I wonder what this has to do with 3D. Here’s why: what if escapism has, in 3D, gained a kind of ‘materiality’ or a sort ‘presence’ (I use those terms very much sous rature) in which what was once distanced, both metaphorically and literally – on the screen ‘over there’ – has now come too close, has now ‘entered’ (penetrated?) one’s field of vision and consciousness. What if 3D film, in pushing the image past the flat mimetic mirror into your life has become the culmination of the simulacrum (the film is, after all, for all its sci-fi, new world hubbub, referential), the thing that, in a way that moves beyond Baudrillard’s initial idea, supercedes the real by rendering the real ‘2 dimensional’?
More to the point, what if the ‘Avatar blues’ are themselves the apotheosis of the spectacle? If we, unaccustomed to 3D, are thrust into it – as it thrusts itself into us (yes, I know, loaded language) – perhaps we are less equipped to deal with a mimetic or representational form that literally occupies our filed of view.
To see something grand on a screen is one thing.
What if, to be placed in something grand, is to produce a simulated memory of being there?
Murky, messy thoughts. I apologise. But even if this is all nonsense, something here still seems worth thinking about in more and clearer detail. Really, the interesting thing is going to be how we reshape the idea of film – the gaze, the shot, authorial intent – in response to this new technology.
My initial thoughts on 3D film from way back can be found here.
Posted in Culture of Technology | Tagged avatar | 5 Comments »
No, not really. We’ll get to a much longer, rigorous post on the semiotics of video games. But let’s at least start here, with a quote from video game theorist Gonzalo Frasca:
Traditional media are representational, not simulational. They excel at producing both descriptions of traits and sequences of events (narrative). A photograph of a plane will tell us information about its shape and color, but it will not fly or crash when manipulated. A flight simulator or a simple toy plane are not only signs, but machines that generate signs according to rules that model some of the behaviors of a real plane. A film about a plane landing is a narrative: an observer could interpret it in different ways (i.e. “it’s a normal landing” or “it’s an emergency landing”) but she cannot manipulate it and influence on how the plane will land since film sequences are fixed and unalterable. On the other hand, the flight simulator allows the player to perform actions that will modify the behavior of the system in a way that is similar to the behavior of the actual plane.
So one key difference between representational media – literature, film etc. – and simulative media is that of modeling behaviours and rules into a system, rather than just aesthetic objects. To produce ‘a scene’ in representational media is to arrange aesthetic objects (whether visual, linguistic, filmic etc.) in a particular spatial, temporal ways. To produce an arena in simulative media is to strucutre a system of rules and behaviours that then allow for action within that arena. So, getting back to our view of a plane in both film and a game:
To an external observer, the sequence of signs produced by both the film and the simulation could look exactly the same. This is what many supporters of the narrative paradigm fail to understand: their semiotic sequences might be identical, but simulation cannot be understood just through its output.
So that’s the start. The next step is to figure out how meaning-making happens within the simulative space. Because if one cannot interpret the game by representation alone – by only looking to what is shown – then we need to think about how pressing buttons in a particular context produces meaning.
Think of it this way. You’re playing, say, a third-person shooter and you’re in a groove. ‘You’ are ducking behind cover, seamlessly switching weapons and reloading, both becoming your avatar and superceding it in a feeling of mastery and control. There are at least two things going on: one where you identify with the avatar on screen that is ‘you’; and another physical experience of pressing buttons to make your avatar-self do things. Both are loaded with a kind of cultural weight, the actions on-screen and the feeling of pressing buttons to make things happen. How we interpret that – how we mentally relate to that tripartite construct of the audio-visual, the interactive and identification – seems key to how video games mean.
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tagline: “Where post-grad meets post-race”
The folks who brought and continue to bring you SiW fave Slaughterhouse 90210 have now started a new Tumlbr called – wait for it – Fetishizing the Other. The site consists of a variety of unannotated images of some kind of ‘other’ – a racial minority, ‘the poor’, or another kind of subjugated figure – and, well, nothing else.
Edit: I got so caught up with my usual “Tumblr=postmodernism” schtick, I forgot to talk about the actual site. So:
As I said in the comments, Tumblr is so often a place for a kind of distanced, aestheticised nostalgia – full of “hazy photography of models in sundresses; arty experiments in design and typefaces; literary quotes and other fragments” is how I once put it. This Tumblr takes that kind of nostalgia – that affection for the weird, the quirky etc. – and casts a critical light on it. It takes those same out-of-context images and, solely through the use of a site name, critiques that same post-ironic blankness – “we refuse to judge” – that has become so central to both the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of Tumblr as ‘a culture’ (or cultural artefact).
So what is particularly interesting about this site is that challenges the aesthetic of what I often call ‘the hipster web’ – the Buzzfeed-y world of Tumblrs and ironic single-serving sites. If one of the tropes of Tumblr is collapsing past and present, this site not only looks at our racist past, but also suggests that it isn’t as far gone as we think – or gone at all.
Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I know I’ve endlessly yapped about Tumblr, but the thing that has always intrigued me about it is the way it crystallises how images in the contemporary (North American) context are ‘overdetermined’. I think the term stems from psychoanalysis, and regardless of what it ‘actually’ means, I’ve always used it to refer to an object or idea that is oversaturated with potential interpretations, simultaneously meaning more than one thing and remaining impossible to pin down to just one of the meanings. An overdetermined image constantly hovers in the potential of its semiotic multiplicity.
It’s for this reason that I’ve argued that few things are more endemic, or more a paragon of ‘the present’ than Tumblr. Fetishing the Other, after all, simply presents a series of images devoid of context, explanation or an explicit editorial bent (other than the title, of course). Its authors, however, know that you’ll be able to produce a particular kind of interpretation – here, one critical of the way in which difference is made exotic – simply because you, like them, have spent your life being bombarded with both images and a slew of interpretations of those images. We live in a world where things mean multiply, all the time. And so Tumblr, as the stripped-down, context-less blog, simply functions on the interpretive saturation that, in my mind, defines ‘post-post-modernity’ – or whatever the fuck you want to call the current moment.
I feel like I’ve repeated this too often, but it just fascinates me. Hopefully though, this repetition means that a better, more intriguing idea is around the corner. That’s the way it works, right? You repeat one interpretation over and over again until it finally hits you how boring it is, and then you move on to a better, more nuanced one that, at least for a while, feels right.
Posted in Cultural Theory, Theorizing the Web, web culture | Tagged fetishizing the other, post-race, tumblr | 4 Comments »
I know my Snarkfriends have already linked to the magic of Pomplamoose (of Single Ladies cover fame), calling their unique style ‘production-as-performance‘ videos (i.e. their videos are simply their recording process, but far more charming and engaging than that sounds). Anyway, as some of you know, I actually kinda’ dig Christmas music and the group has created their own Christmas song called “Always in Season”, which is pretty fucking delightful. I can’t, however, embed the vid because Pomplamoose are instead asking fans to donate money to World Vision (to buy a goat) and, in return, get both this track and another as a ‘reward’ of sorts.
Here’s the link. There’s a (very cute) explanation of the whole charity thing at the end of the music vid.
Posted in Music | Tagged pomplamoose | Leave a Comment »
Because for a couple of years the question was always “how many feeds is too much?”. But now it seems like the wrong thing to ask.
Yesterday, buried in my post (and then splayed on Twitter) was the tidbit that Joanne Mcneil of Tomorrow Museum fame has 749 RSS feeds in Google Reader. For those of you less familiar with RSS, that means that Joanne keeps track of the happenings on 749 different websites and blogs. That’s, like, a lot. And it’s got me thinking.
Earlier this year, the trends feature in Google Reader indicated I was reading about 9000-10,000 items a month. As it began to dawn on me just how much time I was wasting – and how it was affecting my so-called academic career – I cut down, to the extent that I’m now at the stats you see above.
To be suddenly faced with this collected information – this aggregated report of both my habits and my time – was a strange thing. It put into stark relief just how central this unending flow of data and text has become to my existence, and just how much of that existence it is consuming. But far more unsettling is the following question: is this a good thing? Am I improving myself by reading this much online? Or am I wasting my (already limited) intellect away?
It’s a tough question. Robin’s comment over at Snarkmarket suggests that the glut of information represented by RSS readers is akin to a giant stream of zeitgeist or human thought. One dips one finger in it somewhat at random, picking out thing that interest one while, at other times, finding things entirely by chance. The key to all this is to frequently allow oneself to hi “Mark all as Read” – i.e. acknowledge that there is too much and continue to let it flow over you in a rush, discarding the ephemera with the new hope “if it’s important, it will find me”.
Yet at the same time, there is a practical concern of both time and attention. If, even with this ease of abandoning all the things one is missing, I’m spending around 3 hours a day reading everything from Buzzfeed to Torontoist to Hilobrow to the London Review of Books, am I robbing myself? After all, I’ve frequently argued that my reading – and maybe reading in general – differs from screen to page in that the screen works for short, intense bursts and the page for longer, more introspective reading. What would my life be like if I were to spend those 3 hours slowly poring over Kant’s second critique, Harraway’s Manifesto or Derrida’s thoughts on writing and the book? (Or is that a false choice?)
I ask this – and also invoke it mainly so that I can lament the loss – because I was once a ‘promising academic’: you know, publishable papers in my MA, professors who said they had nothing more to teach me, people convinced that my ideas were actually quotes from Spivak, that kinda’ thing. I am no longer ‘promising’ – and am in fact struggling with the most basic of ideas – and I am genuinely concerned if the type of non-linear, networked thinking that ‘RSS approach’ promotes – and that I have so vociferously argued in favour of – is incompatible with my choice of profession. Put somewhat differently, has my wholehearted embrace of the screen come at the expense of my facility with the kind of thinking I have at least historically associated with the page, with precisely the opposite of the random associations provoked by having one’s Tumblr feeds next to the the folder marked ‘Smart Stuff’? I’m not asking here whether the web is ruining our capacity to think in general (ugh)? I’m wondering if, in particular contexts that demand intense, specialised forms of thinking, when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, does it irrevocably alter ‘the other side’? Has blogger me killed academic me? And, to deliberately be a little over the top, has Google Reader changed the way my brain is wired?
It’s very possible that such practical problem has a very practical answer: that one deliberately set aside time for ‘quiet reading and writing’ rather than submitting one’s own attention economy to a kind of ‘free market dogma’ in which you simply do what you feel like doing. I honestly don’t know.
How many feeds is not enough? This still feels like the right question. Because zero – or even fifty – is far too little. To be removed from that current would feel like death. But my problem is that my capacity to deal with that much potential information, always hovering just out of reach, has changed my ability to focus on one thing for an extended period of time. It’s a real change. It has already happened. And I’m now wondering whether it’s too late to go back.
Posted in Culture of Technology | 6 Comments »
