You know, generally speaking, I was alright with the iHype – I knew there was nothing I could do about it, while my quasi-Marxist complaints about commodity fetishism were bound to fall on deaf ears. Hell, I was even cool with the lineups – sure it’s materialistic, but shared experiences and false hardships are often very enjoyable, so let people have their fun. But when Crave decided to post a full story about how there was no iPhone lineup at a given store – not something in the lineup, or something at the store, but a report on the lack of a lineup at one store – that’s when I realised this was just too fucking much.

There’s a lot to write about re this whole iPhone thing – about commodities, geek culture, conspicuous consumerism and even false consciousness of a sort – but it’ll just get lost in the madness. So, for the time being, iPhone: fuck off.

Useless Crave Bit

I’m sure there’s a good reason that this ad ‘just feels right’ – but, for now, I have no answers. Enjoy.

How Time magazine scooped me on the latest social network Wis.dm, I have no idea. They did, however – and now I just have to live with the shame. But, moving on… In their piece entitled “Is Wis.dm Your Next Web Obsession?”, Time takes a look at Wis.dm’s rather novel approach to Web 2.0. Wis.dm is a social network built around the very simple concept of people asking and answering questions. On the site, there are categories of questions that have yes/no answer buttons and a space underneath for comments. Questions range from the very straightforward (“Do you like orange juice?”) to the awkward (“Is cybersex cheating?”) to the thought provoking (“Are humans polygamist by nature?”). Okay, mildly thought provoking. Naturally, pressing yes or no is just the beginning; many questions seem to invite commentary and discussion.

Wis.dm differs from most recent Web 2.0 trends in that it generally works irrespective of whether you know people on the network or not. While sites like Facebook and Twitter function precisely through cementing pre-existing connections, Wis.dm works just as well anonymously – indeed, that’s half the fun.

It sounds deceptively simple – and, at first glance, boring. But it is, in fact, neither. You quickly get caught up in answering and then asking questions. The key lies in both asking intriguing questions and coming up with intelligent or challenging responses. There is a surprisingly addictive feel to the whole thing, and one gets into a groove of constant clicking and typing rather quickly.

Of course, the condescending academic in me (yes, I admit it) wants to complain about the reduction of complex ideas to yes/no answers and the truncated, oversimplified nature of online discussion. And it’s true: most of the questions up there are facile. People ask whether religion is the cause of all evil, or whether all opinions are equally valid, queries which ultimately defy yes/no answers and, let’s face it, are kinda’ stupid.

What is fascinating about the network, however, is how much the questions reveal about the person asking them. When someone asks “Does the Media portray women and minorities accurately”, you can probably learn just as much about the beliefs of the asker as those who respond: in this case, that the individual believes that there is an accurate way to depict groups and that the issues surrounding women and minorities are part and parcel of the same problem.

But Wis.dm is a social network, and it is in this respect that it might fail. Ultimately, I’m not sure Wis.dm is cohesive or coherent enough as a destination to encourage people to form or solidify connections. The questions and those who ask and answer them feel too scattered – there is little to gather around here other than a general sense of curiosity and a desire for ‘self-expression’. As such, Wis.dm feels like another fleeting idea, a temporary project in search of a permanent home.

However, integrated into other networks like Facebook, its bite-size, addictive quality may make a lot more sense and ultimately succeed. There, a platform like Facebook provides the social infrastructure and familiar faces and Wis.dm provides the entertainment. As Mr. Ingram pointed to, the trend towards widgets and cross-platform integration is growing very quickly, and is becoming its own mini-economy. If Wis.dm can learn to capitalise on this new trend of the platform-neutral widget, it may be one of the first sites to succeed off the back and backbone of another ecosystem.

Now, I’m off to think up some more questions.

Time Piece on Wis.dm
Wis.dm
My, umm, Wis.dm

And, if I might say, I’m smarter than the average bear. A few days back, I pointed to – and agreed with – Mossberg’s post about how iTunes represented a trojan horse of sorts: that by inserting both its own networking and the Mac aesthetic/interface into Windows, Apple had gotten at least one foot into the world of ‘PC Guy‘. Today’s rather surprising announcement of Safari for Windows seems to suggest that Mossberg had gotten it right (which is just one more reason to hate him): Apple are slowly looking to either creep into Windows territory, or blur the very division between a Mac and Windows systems.

Many have suggested that by porting Safari to Windows, Apple have created a platform for the iPhone and its AJAX-based apps – and that alone is very smart. However, if Apple can get another few million people using Safari, I think Nav’s – umm, I mean, Mossberg’s – trojan-horse theory will prove very prescient. What will the end result be? Mac hardware sales will jump. And with a billion PCs around at the moment, even a two or three percent spike could see Apple’s revenue rise significantly. So it seems like Mossberg isn’t the only genius around…

As one of the six people on earth who uses a Sony MP3 player and its companion Sonicstage, I have often looked at iTunes with the sort of envy usually reserved for a male friend with an impossibly smart and hot girlfriend. But while almost everyone either thinks of iTunes as either ‘the thing you use to get stuff on an iPod’, or increasingly ubiquitous jukebox software, it’s good ole’ Walt Mossberg who has seen what iTunes actually is:

…iTunes is much more than a companion to the iPod, much more than a media playback program and even more than a front door to Apple’s online download service. It’s a sort of miniplatform hiding right within Windows that allows Apple and other companies to connect a host of hardware and software, and to create media-sharing networks without engaging with Windows itself or with Microsoft’s built-in Windows Media Player.

I’ve said this a hundred times already – but I’m no Walt Mossberg. It is, however, very true – iTunes is a platform, a model that renders one’s Windows and Microsoft experience obsolete or, worse, undesirable. It is a Trojan Horse of the smartest kind and has introduced millions of people to the world of Mac and its aesthetic and interface.

The one part that Mossberg hasn’t written about here is the connection between iTunes and zeitgeist. iTunes is a vital part of contemporary culture; among the many things it marks is the shift from the weary resignation of the 90′s to the ironic resignation of 00′s. We don’t say we live in ‘iPod culture’ for no reason. When you open up iTunes you also engage in a world of Macbooks, Starbucks lattes, irony and shoegazer rock. I realise that sounds like an enormous stretch – but self-identification and understanding contexts through brands is hardly a revolutionary idea: who are you today if not a conglomeration of the commodities you consume? The iPod-iTunes combo is so successful not just because it’s so good at what it does but, more importantly, because it has become a marker of one’s participation in the zeitgeist of the age. This also helps to explain the utter dominance of iPod-iTunes: even though there are other ecosystems that do certain things better – it feels better to live in what feels like the ‘contemporary’.

There’s much more to be said about this, but for now, you’ll have to roll with Mossberg.

Link to Mossberg Article and a Slew of Annoying, Poorly Written Headlines

I have a weird thing for interfaces – I just love it when something works seamlessly and intuitively. But beyond that, interfaces are the meeting point of user and technology, the line at which the human capacity for creativity and technology’s capacity for creating new modes and forms meet. As such, I think new interfaces don’t just allow for new levels of efficiency, they simply allow for ‘new things’. And while I am still completely in awe of the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, particularly in light of the new commercials, I think it only represents the tip of the iceberg, particularly when compared to Microsoft’s new Surface project.

The difference, I think, lies in the confluence of the technology in use and the aim of that technology. The iPhone aims to simplify and streamline the experience of a multimedia media phone with its touchscreen interface, allowing one to cleanly move back and forth between video, music, photos and communication. With Microsoft’s Surface, however, the use of infrared cameras to detect movement on the tabletop screen aims to replicate how we are accustomed to dealing with physical objects. To wit, Surface challenges what technology can do, rather than making what it does already more efficient. Paradoxically then, in becoming more invisible through making technology mimic pre-technological habits and behaviours, tech has become infinitely more sophisticated and conducive to creativity.

Anyway, there’s only so much words can do here – check out the video below. It’ll, like, totally blow your mind and stuff.

Among the many reasons for my totally-not-homoerotic e-crush on Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous (he also works for some other company I’ve never heard of), one is that while he is unabashed proponent of the interwebs, he can not only claim to have read people like Derrida and Baudrillard, I get the sense he actually knows what they’re on about too. But as much respect I have for him, I just can’t get behind his new ‘Predictions as a form of Narrative‘ theory.

Linked to the launch of a new product on MSNBC called iPredict, Sorgatz argues that plotting, analysing and predicting trends is a new mode of narrativising the scores of data we are swamped by. By examining how sets of data both interact with each other and examining what that can tell us about the future, we are able to then make sense and position the news we come across. Sorgatz “contend[s] that every news story has an interrogative kernel hidden inside — a question about the future”, and that, “[a]lthough news is immediately a historical account, it is also implicitly a gamble on the future, a suggestion of where things will be”. The examples given run from the mundane, such as whether Harry Potter will die in book seven (no he won’t!) to the serious, such as how 12 deaths in Iraq augur the situation there.

I cannot help, however, be skeptical about Sorgatz’ assertions, particularly in relation to the ‘units of data’ themselves. In the narrativisation of 12 deaths as markers from which to make a prediction, how do we avoid evacuating those deaths of meaning, leaving them as only empty signifiers in a matrix of trends, devoid of the same political import that led them into iPredict in the first place? It seems the ramifications of such an approach is to appropriate the discursive significance of events, but rob them of their subjective relevance; to wit, this new statistic will change how I view the war, but does little to counter the already numbing effect that repeated news stories of death and destruction already have. Yes, all statistics engage in this sort of displacement, and that doesn’t make them any less necessary. But if, for example, the trends contained in my Jaiku feed paint a picture of who I am, who am I outside of the commoditised music, articles and websites I consume? What exactly in this systemisation of trends is not ready for cooptation, as data itself becomes subject to its own exchange value in an economy – in all senses of the word – of information?

Similarly, the narrativisation of particular trends gets one into the messy questions of the appropriation of voice that we in literary studies are immersed in (and possibly suffocated by). In much the same way that we might ask what are the discursive predications and effects when one turns a person into a character, what happens when a set of people or behaviour becomes a data matrix or category within trends. If a statistic about, say, the rising disparity between rich and poor in India is used as a predictor of economic health or social tension, how are we to avoid the already present displacement of non-Western voices and perspectives? It seems that we again run the risk of cementing the West as the discursive centre and arbiter of global systems of information and power, paradoxically working precisely through the democracy of information and data on the Web.

It’s very possible that, as usual, I’m either being naive or just not getting the broader picture here. Perhaps matching one’s personal take on trends with broader public trends might allow one to discursively position oneself more clearly in increasingly ambiguous times. It is also possible that all forms of narrativisation thwart subjectivity and connection, and that this will actually improve the problems of voice, representation and resistance ihnherent in all commodified systems of information like ‘the News’. Right now though, I remain wary of the potential this particular trend to liberate or ameliorate the already problematic conversion of people into bits of data.

Link to Full Article on Fimoculous
iPredict on MSNBC

By way of the always-great Matthew Ingram comes Ryan Sholin’s very smart post on how newspapers are still getting it wrong when it comes to new systems of delivery and revenue. It seems traditional forms of media are, to put it mildly, still finding their way when it comes to this whole Web 2.0 thingy and, as in many cases where huge amounts of money are concerned, they are attempting to force outdated and outmoded models of business onto a new infrastructure.

In a similar vein, Techfold takes last.fm to task for their ‘sell-out’ to CBS. In the posting, the writer argues that in relenting control to an entity like CBS, last.fm relenquish the capacity to influence new developments in ways conducive to the processes and ideals of New Media. Instead, they allow Web 2.0 to become hijacked by the concerns of ‘Big Media’: centralisation, the recreation of traditional revenue streams and a sort of discursive and political uniformity.

But the way forward is stated very succinctly by Sholin:

10. Okay, here comes the big one: THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it’s being done at newspapers like the Washington Post and the Lawrence Journal-World and the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Petersburg Times and the Bakersfield Californian and all sorts of papers of all sizes. You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. So let’s stop writing and groaning about how things used to be different, and let’s start building our own piece of the new world of newspapers brick by brick, story by story.

Naturally, this is much easier said than done. But the insane pace of media/Web 2.0 acquisitions suggest that Sholin’s sort of mentality is vital if the new wave of media is to maintain any sense of resistance to the overly corporatised and centralised vision of media at places like CBS.