Archive for February, 2008
Wait, So Now I’m a White Guy Shooting Brown People? Identity and Race in Gaming
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 28, 2008
Sometime in the early nineties – at about the time I was moving from Tone Loc and Public Enemy to Soundgarden – I went through a brief phase in which I would rush home from school to play the PC game Wing Commander II. Although now I wish I had stayed at school and tried to make out with girls, WC2 then seemed like the awesomest thing ever because it was one of the first games to prioritize narrative, particularly as one’s actions in the game affected which part of the story one saw next. Sure, replaying the game now it seems almost ludicrously cheesy – your anthropomorphic lion enemies uttering lines that that would make George Lucas cringe – but at the time it was incredibly compelling because it seemed as if I was part of the story, that it was me and my actions that were driving the plot forward.
But when playing such a game, who exactly is the “I” being referred to? After all, in Wing Commander II, my character was a white guy with brown hair – probably the inverse of what I’ll look like in thirty years (pic). So when my fourteen year-old self said “I just beat that guy” or “I just won the game”, was “I” a white guy or a brown guy? Obviously, my (white) character’s identity was decided for me; but without (brown) me, he would have done nothing. And it was precisely this weirdness of me/not-me that was going through my head as I recently played through Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a game created by UK team Naughty Dog. The title, which is rooted in Indiana Jones-style pulp adventure, features protagonist Nathan Drake who, Naughty Dog have claimed, is supposed to be a sort of everyman. While it certainly isn’t a criticism, the fact that Drake is white is significant, not least because most of the people he shoots at are not white. One imagines that when he is not adventuring, Nathan Drake is into irony, Mos Def and threatening to move to Canada. But more generally, as I, a ‘brown guy’, played the game, when “I” jumped off a ledge, ran through a forest or shot at a dark-skinned guy, who exactly was this “I”?
I admit, this may seem ludicrous – what possible difference does all this make? Well, one answer is that player-character identification is one of the primary mechanisms of meaning or relevance in gaming. Similar to how film and literature often work ‘to mean’ by creating empathy with the protagonist, as video game narratives become more sophisticated, the mutually dependent space between the player and the character becomes more central to reading games as cultural artefacts rather than mere distractions. And, using race as one way to think through this relationship, it bears asking a slightly different question: what race am I when “I” am both myself and Nathan Drake.
It begins to broach the absurd, but when playing Uncharted, I ‘felt’ neither white nor brown, neither Drake nor myself. Perhaps just as importantly, when not playing the game the division was obviously clear, but when immersed in the title, it was not. In the playing, “I” was a composite of separate but connected things: my own identity, a representation on a screen, and the actions performed by both ‘me’ and my ‘character’, a sort of me/not-me. And rather than becoming the reader-writer of a book – the interactive reader who through interpretation creates, as much as receives, meaning – I was something else. A reader produces meaning using the same tools as the writer – language, images, symbols etc. The meaning I made came from what I did, from the performance and enactment of the of the story in microscopically unique ways. The story did not change or become unique but my playing and experience of the story did. When I first moved in this direction, then moved this way and performed this action, all of this changed my experience of what “I” did, even though the constraints of narrative in the game were fixed. The difference here is subtle, but important: a filmic or literary story is about recreating things or ‘objects’; playing a game is about reproducing identities or ‘subjects’. In movies, characters are still objects, little collections of signs and symbols to be understood and perhaps related to. In games, characters are identities waiting to be performed.
And performing identities is never straightforward: if I wore a dress and ‘acted girly’, doing that in my hairy, somewhat manly body would still produce something not quite boy nor girl, straight nor gay; I’d be ‘trans’ in a very interesting way. And so, upsetting millions of teenage misogynists and homophobes everywhere, it seems fair to say that when we play games we are, in fact, transvestites of a sort, occupying other identities in a way that both submits to and plays with the categories of identity at work. And so it seems it’s time to pull out one of those infuriating answers – in this case, to the question “Am I brown or white when I play a game?”: well, yes, both of those and none, exactly those things and of course, something else entirely.
But I don’t think this is just academic wordfuckery. There’s something neat here to hold on to – the production of identities in playing games is perhaps the first chance to do something new and relevant precisely because it ‘isn’t real’. In real life, as much as I might like to try it out, I can’t walk down the street and pretend to be white. In gaming however, I can temporarily and provisionally occupy a space that is not myself in a manner fundamentally different from empathising with someone. Because of the weird temporal aspect of it – that the I/not-I only exists while one is both literally and figuratively ‘playing’ – it is, I will argue, more experiential than intellectual. Put another way, you get what it feels like rather than having to think about it. And I think there’s the beginning of an interesting way to look at gaming – as performances of particular identities that combine the player and character. Rather than an attempt to simulate somebody else’s vision or story, playing a game is an odd, dynamic experience in which you both submit to becoming somebody else and also insist on making that somebody else ‘you’. This approach, I believe, has ramifications to how we read and interpret games. Those, however, will have to wait for another time. If you have any thoughts or see where I’ve gone wrong, him the comments and let me know.
Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe: What Exactly are You So Angry About?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 18, 2008
So, in a recreation of Bert Stern’s now famous snaps of Marilyn Monroe, Lindsay Lohan and Stern have done a nearly identical shoot for New York Magazine – and people are pissed. Looking at the photos – both the original and new – I gotta’ say, I’m having a hard time figuring out why people are so annoyed. But one thing that seems to be driving the outrage is some sense of sacrilege: that Lohan and Stern’s attempt to make parallels between Marilyn and Lindsay are an affront to the memory of a legend. As Jason puts it, the shoot “only serves to underscore how unlike (and inferior) Lohan is compared to Monroe”. And I think I can sum up my measured, intellectual response by saying: fuck off.
It would be facile to say that Marilyn Monroe ‘was no big deal’ – that she was just an empty pinup with no cultural significance. Marilyn projected female sexuality into the public consciousness in a way that hadn’t been done before and, while there are those who would scream about this, you could argue that there’s a sort of feminism at work. Furthermore, she obviously had something – something that elicited some form of desire in almost everyone who saw her. But, to argue that Lindsay Lohan’s shoot sullies the memory of Marilyn Monroe is to miss the fact that LinLo, Britney, Paris and every other modern starlet are simply the seeds ‘Marilyn’ sewed come to fruition.
Why was Marilyn famous? For both being and becoming the “ideal woman”. How did she become this? Through the display, suggestion and allusion to her sexuality. Why are young starlets so coveted (and condemned) today? Because of the display, suggestion and allusion to their sexuality and, consequently, their desirability as ‘ideal people’, people who have the qualities and lives ‘everybody wants’. I feel it’s pertinent here to say that one of things that ‘everyone wants’, both then and now, is nice, big tits.
What is missed in the condemnation is that LinLo is simply the dream of Marilyn Monroe realised, the uneasy relationship between public desire and private self-destruction made (even more) mass-market and instantly consumable, the fantasy of innocence now too obviously fake to hold on to. When Stern says the shoot was “like visiting an old street”, you catch a glimmer of how these images work: through echo, through reflection, through refraction and through the impossibility of ever seeing behind them. It is the very scattering and diffusion of the images across time and memory – the impossibility of locking them down to a “real person”, to a being beyond the images – that deflates the criticism aimed at them. LinLo could not sully the memory of Marilyn Monroe because it already is sullied beyond repair. The images of Marilyn, far from being preserved in an age of innocence, are now simply a historical precursor to Rex’s assertion that now more than ever, fame = fucked up. And all attempts to preserve Monroe are attempts to posit the past as innocent and the present as corrupt. But whatever it is one perceives as corrupt – whether fame without talent, female objectification or the circulation of images with no connection to reality – it certainly didn’t start or end with Lindsay Lohan. And indeed, you can no longer talk about starting and ending the process – we’re already in it; and Monroe’s memory cannot be rescued or recuperated because these images are just added to the heap, to the mass of already corrupted pictures and ideas swirling out there in the cultural ether. So, Jason and others: what exactly are you so angry about?
[Addendum]: For some reason, I was angry when I wrote this. For the record though, I like kottke.org and, from what little I know from the interwebs, its author seems like a decent guy.
The HD Format War and the Limits of the Free Market
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 16, 2008
How Blu-Ray’s win demonstrates the flaw of the not-always-free market.
Well, it looks like we can now call it – the terribly named HD “format war” seems to be over or very very close to over as main player Toshiba is looking to shut down production of HD-DVD players. This is, in broad terms, good news, partly because it means titles will shortly be available in a soon-to-be-universal format and partly because every idiot who said “porn will decide things” as if it were still 1985 has been proved to be, well, an idiot.
So the HD-watching, PS3-owning geek in me is happy. My inner cultural critic is, however, less so. Why? Well, to my mind the HD format war is yet another example that highlights the limits of the free market. In theory, the market is supposed to operate through a combination of entrepreneurship, innovation and choice: companies create products and services, advertise them and the consumer then chooses which best serves their needs. The market ‘works’ because consumers, reacting to their wants and needs, elicit competition between companies and the cream rises to the proverbial top. The market drives innovation while serving the needs of the individuals who comprise it. While I am far from a being expert on free market economics, this seems pretty inarguable.
So, if this is how things are supposed to work, the question is whether or not this happened in the HD format wars – and my short answer is: no, no it didn’t. While the potential technical specifications of the two formats were identical, the key lay in how they were implemented. Simply put, HD-DVD had their platform tech finalised and in place while Blu-Ray did not. This means that anyone buying a Blu-Ray player, even now, won’t be able to access features on discs coming in a year or so (unless it’s a Playstation 3) that one could get with HD-DVD. One might be tempted to say “fine, early adopters caveat emptor and all that – but what really decides things is what movies are available” and here, Blu-Ray had won, so to speak, before it had actually won as it had more studios producing in that format from the start.
But how did Blu-Ray get more movie studios on-board? Simple: through back-room deals and corporate self-interest. When Warner switched, they did so in response to their own atrophying DVD sales and the slow uptake of HD discs. Best-Buy, Wal-Mart and Netflix made the switch to Blu for the same reasons. And why, when forced to pick between two formats, did they go Blu? Because Sony used the PS3 to get Blu-Ray into homes, drastically increasing Blu-Ray’s user base through designing a product that was meant to do exactly that. It was not consumer choice that necessitated the switch to Sony’s format. Rather, it was the need to push consumers towards a choice so that one cash-cow could replace another, to effectively choose for consumers what they wanted to buy.
While one might claim that Sony & Co. ‘won’ through the good ole’ capitalist values of wheelin’ n dealin’, my point here is that there are limits to the issue of choice in the free market. When we eventually buy Blu-Ray en masse, we will be doing so only in part because the ‘market spoke’; we will also be doing so because of choices made in the best interests of Sony, Blu-Ray manufacturers and retailers, choices made by those very organisations. The free market principle of choice is constrained by the simple fact that what one chooses from is determined by forces much bigger than the individual consumer. Furthermore, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the market is not something that simply reacts to tastes but also produces them, shaping consumer choice by determining what is available and how it is marketed. The simple fact that one needs to be convinced that there is a big enough difference between standard-def DVDs and high-def discs may be but one example of this trend.
The image in this post came from silencematters on Flickr.
Online Democracies: Is Control Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 15, 2008
Surprising no-one, democratic experiments like Wikipedia and eBay require top-down control. But what if control works most effectively when it comes from the bottom?
There was a little micro-flurry of discussion recently about the limits of crowd-sourced initiatives online. Nick Carr, Kevin Kelly and even everyone’s favourite luddite Andrew Keen had something to say about the benefits and drawbacks of sites that aim at a sort of pure, self-governed democracy. I’ll leave it to you to pick out the details of each piece, but if I might try and crystallise, Carr and Keen are both responding to recent changes to eBay’s notoriously broken feedback system, while Kelly is simply thinking about ‘bottom-up systems’ in general.
As a quick summary, Kelly’s long post argues that bottom-up systems require a balance of the ‘hive mind’ and top-down control. His metaphor essentially boils down to the crowd possessing an enormous amount of processing power that takes time to develop and sift through which, consequently, requires top-down control to act as a consolidating force to speed up the process. Carr (whose Big Switch I swear I’ll review soon) responds to Kelly by arguing that top-down control is necessary not to amalgamate or speed-up but to impose order, to provide a network of reassurance and restriction that mitigates the fact that crowds are basically groups of self-interested individuals. As for Keen, he somehow ends up talking about the dictatorship of the consumer which, as I understand it, is a product of people having the temerity to express themselves.
But what is most interesting is the idea of opposition at the root of the top/bottom dichotomy. Democracies ostensibly find freedom in that opposition – that governments exert control through laws and policies and the people/the courts/the press etc. resist and protest when the government oversteps its bounds. In many cases, this model of ‘checks and balances’ transfers over to online democracies in which there is an ideologocal struggle between top and bottom for control. A common example is the arguments on Wikipedia over notability in which what is and what is not ‘notable’ is of course a product of how one defines the term. Similarly, eBay’s change in rules is one side of this equation: of the top responding to unease in the bottom.
But to what are the limits of checks and balances? Both Carr and Keen argue that at certain points, self-policing breaks down and in this I agree. Where we diverge, however, is at the point where control is seen as an external imposition on the crowd. Control in democracies has always been only partly about the top-down; the other half stems from turning the crowd into its own policing mechanism. What I don’t mean is that the crowd looks after itself or becomes self-governing; rather, the bottom internalises the rules of the top and then enforces them on behalf of the ‘top’. A clear example in contemporary society would be the tendency of young women to enforce standards of beauty and femininity for each other. The ideas of the top are not propagated in some grand top-down mechanism but rather, filter and spread through day-to-day interactions in the crowd itself. In fact, thought of this way, the very division between top and bottom becomes difficult to maintain as the two are inextricably linked in systems of control.
And all of this is a very long-winded way to say that the limits of online democracies are the same as their real-world counterparts: control works best when we are taught to control ourselves and the people around us. It all sounds very paranoid, but the big question, of course, is whose interests are served and it’s here that things get very murky. There is nothing inherently negative about systems of control – driving would be really difficult without them. But is the crowd-sourced a genuine alternate space or does it work through a false sense of control? Will something like CNN’s iReport produce unexpected journalism or end up reproducing the usual ideologies we get in the news anyway, precisely because that’s how we think anyway? It’s far too broad a question to answer here and, even if I had the space or time, I still don’t think I could. It is, however, something worth thinking about as “citizen-based” and “crowd-sourced” initiatives are only set to expand.
Tuesday Scrawl: Why Bananas Spell Trouble for Atheists and More…
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 12, 2008
Did you know that bananas prove the existence of God? No? Well, you obviously haven’t seen The Atheist’s Nightmare: The Banana, starring everyone’s favourite actor-gone-nutjob Kirk Cameron. Religion is one thing – this is… well, I have no fucking idea really. (Also, try and not snicker when he points out that “the banana is perfectly curved to fit in the mouth”).
You know how white people are always saying that henna is so cool and so earthy and so ‘traditional’? Check out these pics using it to advertise by writing on some unknown woman’s hands. (Also, corporations literally inscribing upon the body? OMG! The marxist lit theory student in me just got his keyboard sticky).
Ever wonder why Leno, despite being stupid and banal, still triumphs over the smarter and funnier Letterman? This piece on the NY Mag site argues it’s because the talk show format is meant to reward mediocrity – which Leno absolutely excels at.
Vanity Fair put up a 4,000-word piece on “The Next Great Chapter in the Star Wars Saga“ which, as it turns out, is the new Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed. While it’s great to see the form starting to be taken seriously, was choosing a Star Wars game really the best way to introduce the sophistication of modern games to a mainstream audience? That ain’t doing much do dispel the greasy geek myth.
I know, I know – everyone thinks you can do the Panjabi folk dance bhangra anywhere you please. Turns out, that is very very wrong.
For my obligatory weekly link to Slate, here’s a history of the verb “to pimp”. So… at least something good came of that crack made about Chelsea?
I’ve never really liked Sarah Slean before but new single “Get Home” is simply stunning.
Finally, because you’re all so desperate for an example of URL brinkmanship, here ya’ go. The second to last one works and is kinda’ funny.
Books and Blogs: Vertical versus Lateral Thinking
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 11, 2008
For all of the praise we heap upon our beloved internets, one of the most serious and difficult-to-argue critiques of online culture is the change it has wrought on literacy and sustained thought. Many commentators suggest that blogging and other forms of online media reward short attention spans with shallow analysis, foresaking the depth and rigour of books for convenience. A couple of days ago, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 put forth an intriguing response to these criticisms in a post entitled The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought. In it, he argues that such criticism unfairly and inappropriately prioritises the linear, vertical thinking of the book over what he calls the ‘networked’ or lateral thinking of the internet.
Networked thinking, Karp suggests, is about making lateral moves in thought through the link-based nature of the web, connecting ideas to each other in new, unique ways. The emphasis, rather than ‘digging through to find the truth’, is on oblique, often unseen tangents that examine how information and ideas are interdependent or mutually enabling, linked in complex horizontal networks rather than vertical hierarchies based on sophistication or importance. It’s a fascinating idea, one that seriously challenges common thinking and also my own conceptions of the continuing need for ‘deep thought‘. Indeed, one of the most promising ideas out of Karp’s post is that the web, like the book before it, is starting to change not just what people think, but how – that lateral, networked thought is a new mode enabled by the technological shift engendered by the ‘net.
I do, however, think that the contrast posited by Karp between books and blogs may be too distinct. After all, when Karp argues that books are linear, one assumes that he is not talking about books of fiction which, especially over the past century, have seen a radical shift away from linearity. It is difficult to read The Wasteland or a novel by Ondaajte and still talk about them being linear in any straightforward sense. What’s more, the kind of lateral thinking proposed is something that was at least foreshadowed by a new understanding of language in the twentieth century that argued that words are always moving laterally – and will never stop. That’s not to say that books were ‘doing networked thought before blogs were even a twinkle in your father’s eye’. Instead, what’s more interesting to think about is that there may be a common cause at the root of the analogous shift towards the lateral and non-linear in both literature and the interent. I think there is an argument to be made that vertical thinking works best in relation to fixed hierarchies of meaning – that getting to the core of an idea only makes sense when one believes there is actually a centre to get to. Thought of that way, the internet, in addition to being a catalyst for a new way of thinking, can simultaneously be thought of as a historical response to a change in how we think of truth and knowledge in light of postmodernity.
There is, of course, much more to be said about all this, particularly how the lateral mode of thinking may impinge too far on what Mathew Ingram calls books’ capacity “for relaxation and thoughtful reflection, and… escapism as well”. For the time being though, if you have any thoughts or responses, please feel free to leave a comment.
Fimoculous on Wired’s 15th: How Cloudy was their Crystal Ball?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 8, 2008
I know I’ve been linking to Fimoculous a lot lately. I think it’s partly out of a sense of karmic duty – and partly just lingering regret over a missed opportunity to hang out with Rex and Anil Dash when they were in Toronto last year. But I felt I had to link to Rex’s piece on Wired‘s 15th anniversary if for no other reason than it exemplifies that Sorgatz is at his best when he’s a cultural critic. The article outlines the significance of Wired as a cultural linchpin and historical marker of the early internet age, examining how, among other things, the magazine consolidated and nurtured the then-tiny ‘geek culture’ and became its most mainstream mouthpiece. It’s an amazing read even if you, like me, only read Wired sporadically, and to steal from Mathew Ingram’s response, it contains just the right amount of nostalgia and critical distance.
Of course, this wouldn’t be Scrawled in Wax if I didn’t perform some half-assed ‘analysis’ and so, in a salute to never learning from my mistakes, here are some generally random tangents that struck me as I read the piece.
1) Who gets to decide what’s Wired and Tired? In many ways, the ‘Wired and Tired’ section hailed the rise of a technocractic elite. While the theory of influentials has recently been challenged, a ‘technorati’ was/is only possible due to the ever-increasing economic and cultural import of technology. Why do Apple announcements get so much play in the mainstream press? Because they are not merely product launches – they are cultural events. They speak to the growing confluence of technology and popular culture in ways far more intricate than the staff of Wired – or any of us – could have imagined. People like Gates and Jobs and their ‘Web 2.0′ successors influence our day-to-day lives in microscopic ways – from how we communicate to how we listen to music, these people are forces of culture as much as they of business.
2) Negroponte’s misguided “HDTV is irrelevant” bit: What Negroponte couldn’t have foreseen was twofold: 1) the brief ‘anti-mainstream’ bent of the early nineties would go up in smoke (around Cobain’s death?) and consumerism would hit new the-eighties-tweren’t-nothin’ heights – people wanted stuff more than ever before, and they wanted to make sure others saw it; 2) related: no-one could have guessed that technology would become the marker of both financial and cultural success. Seriously, what point is a Benz if it isn’t full of gadgets and if you aren’t driving the thing home to a 60″ plasma? Nobody knew that people would start to care much more about identifying through items of technology rather than what technology would allow them to do. (There are other things to be said about wealth producing elevated expectations and home-theatre becoming a viable alternative to cinema but you’ll have to look to another blog for those.)
3) So why did the age of hyper-personalisation never arrive? The hyper-personalised age never arrived because its proponents missed one simple fact: differentiating oneself has its limits. Why, I suppose, depends upon how cynical you want to get. The positive spin? The example of watching a baseball game from your very own angle is simply too personal, robbing individuals of the pleasure of collective experience. The negative take is that mass-commodity-culture performs an odd double move of celebrating individualism while promoting conformity. Perhaps customising a Netvibes page is about as much personalisation as people want, preferring instead to buy the same clothes as everyone else and then choosing to wear them with a different hat.
4) Can we still talk of a clash between culture and technology? One of Wired’s most prominent tropes was and is that of “the clash of culture and technology”. But the thing that struck me – and I’m pretty sure I’ve read Rex say the same thing – is that the dichotomy itself is becoming outmoded: that technology is culture and vice versa. While one can debate the relative merits or pitfalls of that fact, I think their inextricability is pretty incontrovertible in the richer parts of the world.
If you have any thoughts about these ideas or the article, hit the comments and engage in some half-assed ‘analysis’ of your own 
Heidi Montag’s Video: Sincere Expression? Or Parody? Yes.
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on February 6, 2008
Picture, if you will, that you have no idea who Heidi Montag is. Visualise it. Just pretend. Then, watch this video. [as always, via]
Okay, are you back? Good. Your brain hurts? Fine. You say your eyes are bleeding? No, no – those are just tears. Brush them aside and stick with me now. So: as you watched the video – pretending, as you did, that you do not know who Heidi Montag is – how might you tell if it was a genuine music video that would air on Much or MTV? Or, perhaps the better question is – if you didn’t know who the star of the piece was, could you tell that it wasn’t a parody of pop videos from Mad TV or SNL?
If, dear reader – and both of you are very dear to me – you might permit me some wankery and entertain my thesis: you wouldn’t. Perhaps it sounds funny or oblique, but when we engage with pop culture, by what mechanisms do we determine what is sincere and what is parodic or ironic? For me, I usually look for two things that mark out parody: exaggerations; and references to other pop culture phenomena. And how is one supposed to read the fact that Montag is so unironically marketing her sexuality and new and improved body? Her overtly – and I use the term very loosely – ‘sexy’ gyrations seem so forced, so over-the-top, so blatant, that without knowing who she is, couldn’t someone believe that they were watching a MadTV skit? After all, it is precisely those types of exaggerations that make parodies funny. They highlight the ridiculous in order to ridicule. And what of references to other phenomena? Well, c’mon:, she’s running on a beach people! Is is just me, or does taking that at face value involve pretending that Baywatch, Pamela Anderson and their status as cultural memes never happened?
What are we to do when ‘sincere’ expressions of culture out-parody parody? If the markers of satire and ironic detachment are some sort of wink or nod at the viewer, what does one do when the frame of reference by which those winks function just evaporates, the object of derision becoming more satirical than satire ever could? On some level, what you require is a line that distinguishes parody and ‘the real’, some sign that what you are watching is either heartfelt or a joke. But when ‘heartfelt’ expression has become so cynical that it seems like parody, so exaggerated that it seems grotesque, what then? We are left in the post-ironic, a phase marked by an inability to pin down whether what we are watching is sincere, ironic, meaningful or just fluff. And I think there’s a lot to be said about what the implications of that are. But for the time being – let us never ever speak of this again…
When Everything Online is a Copy, What’s ‘Authentic’?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 5, 2008
Two essays – one from 2008, one from 1936 – reveal markedly different reactions to technology’s capacity for making copies.
This week, former executive editor of Wired Kevin Kelly has written an interesting, lengthy piece entitled “Better than Free“. The essay is a response to the idea that the internet is at heart a “giant copy machine” which has the ability to almost instantly copy and distribute items. Kelly argues this is a major economic and cultural shift as, rather than focusing on scarcity – that one should buy a limited edition CD or DVD – the online economy has made the infinite number of copies floating around virtually worthless. Value, if it is to be found, must be located elsewhere when copies are almost limitless.
What struck me instantly about Kelly’s essay was that the issues it engages are uncannily similar to those in an essay written in 1936 by cultural critic Walter Benjamin. In the seminal text “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, Benjamin engages how the meaning and function of art may change in light of then-new technology such as improved lithography techniques and film. Of particular interest to Benjamin is how one conceives of ‘the original’ when the ability to make perfect copies has undercut its mythic status – what Benjamin calls its “aura”.
But while both authors are engaging the same question, they come to markedly different conclusions. Kelly argues that the economic value of intangibles must be emphasised. Authenticity, Trust and Personalisation are some of the eight “generatives” that he argues are to be the root of prosperity in the new economy. So, for example, rather than simply buying an album, one pays extra for a mix that is designed for one’s living room or comes with a marker of authenticity like a signature or stamped insignia. What is key to Kelly is how certain ineffable cultural qualities can be made economically valuable to consumers.
Benjamin, on the other hand, focuses on how copies destabilize the very idea of the original and, in doing so, place emphasis on their political and social import rather than their economic value. Instead of having to go le Louvre to see the original Mona Lisa, when people in Singapore and Vancouver can watch the same film, everyone gets to base their reactions on the same object. The lack of an authentic original chips away at the hierarchies based on who gets access to culture and the rituals associated with it – i.e. the reverence we give to the ‘real thing’. The “aura” – a weird sort of ‘magical value’ attached to the original object – is no longer there. Freed from the rituals associated with this aura, Benjamin argues, one is free to politicise art and culture, to position it as a manifestation of society rather than a work of genius or a unique gift only available to a few. The benefit is clear: if everyone gets to engage with culture, then the democratic and transformative potential of art is greatly expanded.
Admittedly, the two essays are remarkably different in approach – Kelly is thinking of how to create value while Benjamin is trying to understand what happens when a particular sort of value disappears. Still, as much as I am trying to remain neutral, there is something significant in Kelly’s choice to think through this in terms of economic value. Yes, the historical context is quite different and Benjamin’s odd mix of mysticism and Marxism is still a bit startling even today. But it does say a lot about the twenty-first century. Even on a site like Kelly’s, which he claims is dedicated to understanding the relationship of technology to culture, the only real choice is to talk about how to monetize the things we either think are valuable (e.g. personalization) or fetishise (e.g. authenticity). While I am, as always, stuck for alternatives it is, at the very least, food for thought.
End o’ Week Scrawl: Bill Cosby raps, 2 girls and 1 cup and other abominations.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on February 1, 2008
Well, it’s a snowy snowy day in Toronto. Schools are closed and flights are delayed – so here are some links that’ll hopefully keep you entertained in the meanwhile. We return to our regular schedule of verbose wanking soon…
Why is new bookmarking service Instapaper so great? Well, it’s del.icio.us minus all the useless crap. You save something and there it is. No tagging, no socialising – that’s it. Every other startup please take note. [via Tony's Twitter] (As it turns out, I can’t remember where I saw this first – but Rex makes a neat point about it here).
Think there’s nothing interesting mainstream media can do with things like 2 girls 1 cup? This oblique approach from Slate that gauges people’s reactions without showing the dreaded images gets pretty close. (btw, if you have no idea what this is, leave it that way. It’s for the best, trust me.)
Speaking of Slate… This essay argues that the sudden rash of beautiful Russian women tennis players isn’t some cosmic accident. It is, rather, about the relationship between success, beauty and capitalism: if there’s no market for you to sell your beauty, you don’t get famous because of it. Smart eh?
Yes, yes, advertising is evil… But man-oh-man is this collection of ads ever great.
Dear Bill Cosby: the only way your exhortations to black youth could be any more useless would be if you put them on your own rap album. Well, shit.
Thought Ellen Page couldn’t get any cuter? If this video of her and Michael Cera singing about Diablo Cody doesn’t make you fall for her, you have no soul. [via]
And finally, remember that whole Fox News Mass Effect nonsense? This is by far the funniest response I’ve seen. Choice bit: “We recommend instead the game Intelligent Design Wars, which is just like Geometry Wars, except that the credits read, “We don’t know who made this. (But it was probably God.)”
