Archive for August, 2008
Why the Internet Will Replace God
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 29, 2008
What the Web’s ubiquity and omnipresence means for human consciousness.
Organising principles are funny things. In order for us to ‘make sense to ourselves’, we need broad, overarching perspectives within which to locate and position our sense of who we are. Yet, we are frequently unaware of the centrality of the outlooks that shape and determine our views on life, often coming to think of them only at the times they are challenged. Perhaps the clearest example of this idea is religion. In Western societies, for example, there was a time when the ethos of Christianity permeated all aspects of life; from day-to-day activity to how entire empires were run, religion was the set of guiding principles and philosophical precepts that systemitised experience.
Religion, in a very real sense then, ‘existed in people’s minds’. It was – and for those who are religious, still is – an omnipresent world view that makes sense of things, functioning in the way that any and all ideology does: as a sort of operating system for consciousness. But while religion was the dominant organizing principle for centuries, in various parts of the world we have now spent a century – maybe a century and a half – working under different systems of rules. Things like nationalism, science, democratic-capitalism and, perhaps most importantly, individualism, have come to be the new lenses through which we see the world, the overlays we use to give shape to our lives.
As such, to ‘makes sense of oneself to oneself’ in the contemporary era is to focus on our immediate sphere: our careers, families, love life, friends, and so on. To position and locate the relative worth of these things, we often project a vision of them into consciousness or imagination and then judge them based upon rough, general criteria: success, status, happiness, intimacy, fulfilment etc. Rather than conceiving of my life on Earth as either a fleeting movement toward God or a series of many rebirths, I approach my life in broadly materialist terms – i.e. this world is all there is – and judge its progress by some of the criteria that I and society have deemed important.
So, where does the Web fit in all this? Well, increasingly, one of these criteria that is becoming important to me – and I’m sure I’m not alone in this – is the status, worth and ‘reputation’ of my online presence. How ‘well my blog is doing’, how ‘good my Twitters are’, or whether my Facebook status updates are ever funny or interesting – these are all starting to occupy a position in my mind, forming part of my self and self-image.
In the ‘post-religion’/pre-internet age (I use ‘post-religion’ loosely), the individualism at the core of our time meant that when one envisioned oneself, it looked a bit like a flow chart with a single body, the individual, at the centre and various important things – family, friends, career etc. – spanning out to the sides. In the ‘religious age’ (again, I realise it’s not really ‘over’ as such), such a flow chart would have to be underpinned by God and by the Christian world view, with many of the points on the chart being determined in relation to the Bible etc.
So we have a historical progression of organising principles from a sort of religious communalism to a capitalist individualism. But I’m suggesting that the internet will form part a new sort of system of thought through which humans organise their existences as its place and function within human consciousness changes as a result of sheer ubiquity. Here’s why:
1) The internet is the new social, an abstract, virtual space in which one’s ‘ self and friends and family are’. Conceptions of the social have always been abstract and virtual – to wit, your friends and family are ‘there with you’ even when they’re not. The internet provides a place for those people to exist at all times, anywhere.
2) As such, as a very smart person recently said to me, the internet, particularly lifestreaming, is a place to make yourself and others present. Although it’s a metaphor I’ve used many times, it bears repeating: one’s online identity is a ‘fixed’ pivot point around which one’s ‘real self’ moves and orients. But furthermore, so are the online presences of those one is close to, particularly when one considers the mobile internet and the fact that we can ‘be online anywhere’. Bodies are often absent, even when they’re ‘there’ (ever hang out with someone, feel totally unimpressed, and later find out they’re a playwright, or an awesome blogger, or whatever else? That’s what I mean). The internet makes individuals marginally present.
3) The internet is the new public space. As a persistent combination of network and text (by text, I mean both repository of knowledge but also an infinite collection of personal and collective narratives; by network I mean a dynamically evolving collection of these narratives and sites) the Web is a place where the public space, rather than being an entirely abstract thing that involves things as disparate as people’s conversations and municipal meetings, is instead the location in and on which to ‘find culture’. Culture is always virtual, always something one has to imagine and project so that when someone asks you “what is Canadian/American/whatever culture?”, you form a story of it in your head. The Web gives shape and place to this always-already virtual culture.
As such, if the Web is the site at which we will increasingly locate the social and public sphere, those things by which we determine some of the meaning of our lives, then the place of the internet within human consciousness will continue to expand, perhaps to the point that the space of the internet – the life that we lead that is in some way informed, inflected and shaped by the online presence of both ourselves and those who are important to us – will begin to constitute an organising principle, a way in which to form and shape our lives, evaluate the difference between good and bad, locate the system of thought through which we make sense of ourselves to ourselves.
Of course, while the internet has no inherent ideology, I guess I’m arguing it will become the ‘place’ where we put culture, coming not only to occupy a position in consciousness but becoming equivalent to religion or nationalism or democracy in shaping our views of ourselves. Who I am will increasingly be a question not simply of who I feel I am, but which visions and versions of myself I project into the new public text of the Web, and how I judge my life, how I determine the worth of things will often route themselves through consciousness via the internet. But the Web, more than being a repository of knowledge, will begin to constitute a dynamic, ongoing social sphere. Imagine being at a party and coming upon a lively group of people chatting about a topic you are knowledgeable about. You will want to inject your views into the discussion but also learn from the constant back and forth, the shifts and changes in idea. The Web is this ongoing conversation and its dynamic, omnipresent nature means that it could become the epistemological successor to the book: the place where human knowledge and sociality not only ‘happens’, but is stored.
So, I am obviously not really arguing that the Web will replace God. I am, however, suggesting that in much the same way that the printed book reshaped consciousness such that knowledge no longer had to be ‘carried in one’s mind’ and located ideas (and selves) ‘elsewhere’, the internet will extend and morph this change into something entirely new. Selves will exist online as much as they do in bodies and, as a result, individuals will increasingly see themselves through the culture, projections and identities that exist online.
My final point – and like all this, it’s entirely provisional and likely to change – is that if we have moved from communalism to individualism, the potentially social, mutliple nature of the internet means we may return to a new sort of communalism, an emphasis on community and the social sphere.
Wax Scrawls: Melancholy, Solitude and Unleashing the Douchebag Within
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 26, 2008
I didn’t love this poem “I Google You” (parts of it rhyme!), but the simple fact that it was written still seems kinda’ cool to me. [Update: Hm. I might take that back. There's something about the consciously futile yearning in it that's actually sorta' great. I'm also just generally fascinated now with how to make art out of the contemporary e-moment. Yes, that is some foreshadowing of the downfall of this blog.]
Lifehacker: Debunking the Myth of Multitasking. Still – as someone who can’t focus on anything for more than five minutes, multitasking is often the only way I can feel productive. You?
Clive Thompson on how “Games Give Free Rein to the Douchebag Within“. Theorists often point to the creation of a provisional ‘second self’ in gaming, but Thompson wonders why his avatar self is, well, such a dick. My response? One’s second self doesn’t make sense unless you consider the unconscious and the projections involved in creating identity. Why else is the hyper-masculine, ultra-violent avatar so popular amongst skinny teenage boys? The obvious question though is whether or not this is cathartic in a healthy way: if I act out my masculine fantasies in a game does this provide a constructive outlet for them or encourage their entrance into ‘my real life’?
In Praise of Melancholy. “What can we call this fit but a meaningful experience of generative melancholy, of that strange feeling that sadness connects us to life’s vibrant pulses? Alienated from home and happiness, we sense what is most essential: not comfort or contentment but authentic participation in life’s grim interplay between stinking corpses and singing lemurs. This “fit” shivers our souls.” It’s a long read, but interesting, particularly because it takes pains to distinguish between the paralysis of depression and the potentially productive, mutual relationship between sadness and introspection.
Speaking of sadness, this piece in The Smart Set looks at a new book that analyses the destructive effects of loneliness. Some of them are obvious, but apparently the book also focuses on how to return to being social after extended periods of self-imposed solitude.
Finally, a new BBC sketch show called Wrong Door looks pretty damn funny, particularly if this YouTube trailer is anything to go by. [via MeFi]
Wax Scrawls: Controversial Games and Why Blatchford Doesn’t Get Postmodernity
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 23, 2008
Christie Blatchford caused a minor Toronto Twitter-storm recently with her article “I’m Not Blogging This, Mark My Words” in which she decries blogging as the end of journalism. I’ll leave it to Mathew to piece together what’s wrong with her argument, but let me quickly look at the ‘journalism wasn’t supposed to be a conversation’ line: Blatchford’s assumption here is that journalism is the dissemination of information from the mouths of professionals ‘in the know’. It’s a perspective that assumes the possibility of a singular, unitary version of events, much like a view of history that is underpinned by a belief in ‘one, true narrative’ (you know, the one written by the people who weren’t killed or silenced). The conversation of blogging and comments could be seen in much the same way that historiography is seen as an ‘antidote’ to history. The debate the article sets up is useful, however, because it it highlights both the closed-mindedness of the old guard, but also some of the benefits of a ‘more traditional’ approach to journalism.
Photosynth is an experimental project from Microsoft that makes photographs interactive i.e. you can see parts of a building from different angles or zoom in to certain parts. It unfortunately requires you to install a browser plug-in but it’s worth it – it’s way cooler than my description makes it sound.
The CBC have revamped Radio 2 to try and make it “as interesting and adventurous as what you have on your iPod”. Um, great, but if that’s your aim, why wouldn’t I just keep listening to my iPod? How about you play to your strengths i.e. the communal, shared experience of radio or using an established community to push podcasting further into the mainstream?
A good, unabashedly leftist take on the recent spate of articles on ‘the hipster’. “The hipster is, and always has been, a demographic for consumption and symptomatic of modern capitalism: we must not get confused between the images we are sold, and real, active sites of cultural resistance.” The sincerity almost sounds naive, until, for a brief, fleeting moment, you remember that there might actually be something beyond resigned irony.
The videogame/art exhbit, Invaders!, raised some hackles: it’s a riff on Space Invaders that has you defending against a wave of ‘alien’ spaceships that are destroying the World Trade Centre towers. Yes, that World Trade Centre. But the interesting part is that, no matter what you as the player do, you fail. The towers burn and come crashing down. As you play the game, a video screen loops clips of Taxi Driver, Die Hard, Independence Day and other similar films. It’s things like this that make me constantly reassert that the involvement of the viewer/reader/player opens up a myriad of possibilities of artistic expression and experience that goes somehow beyond reader-response theory or post-structuralist approaches to meaning as provisional, temporary, subjective, constrained. This example is stark and controversial but this is precisely thing we need to have people start taking the form seriously. [Update: No, this doesn't challenge post-structuralist approaches to meaning; I don't know what I was yapping about. All I meant was that the classic literary-academic response to this is 'well, the reader is always involved in producing meaning'. Yeah, of course, but that doesn't entirely capture what's going on in something like Invaders!"] [Update 2: If you think of a film like No Country for Old Men or a novel like Foucault's Pendulum, you could argue that they work in a similar way to this game/exhibit. But I think the question to ask is whether there is an experiential - and therefore cognitive and emotional - difference to being a 'player' versus a reader or viewer.]
I’ve been digging indie-pop group The Go Find lately, who I heard of through one of Diana Kimball’s tweets. They’re sunny but sorta’ melancholy, which suits me just fine. This song, “New Year”, is one my recent faves.
Totally random Anita Desai quote from “Royalty”: “They sat there a while, breathing deeply. Beside them a small cricket began to chirp and chirp, and after some time it was no longer light that came spilling down the hill, but shadows.”
RushmoreDrive: Can a Bad Idea Can Still Do Something Good?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 16, 2008
“My point, to be rather blunt, is that there is an ethnicity-specific search engine for white people: it’s called Google.”
Yesterday, the always interesting and smart Mathew Ingram wrote on RushmoreDrive, a search engine aimed at, depending on who you ask, African-Americans or ‘blacks’ in general. As with any mention of race in the tech blogosphere – a scene understandably dominated by the liberal-humanist ethos of equality and meritocracy – the site has generated some mild controversy and interesting reactions.
Ingram’s argument against the site is twofold. First is that race is a poor criteria for ranking search results, which seems fair enough. Is the colour of one’s skin a good predictor for what information one wants? If I as an ‘anglo-Indian-Canadian’ type in the term ‘popular song’ or ‘wedding practices’, could you (or even I) guess which results I’d prefer? Not really. Secondly, it seems there is an objection to the potential for ‘stereotypical algorithims’ – i.e. that there is something vaguely offensive in the assumption that a certain person, upon typing in ‘Whitney’, would rather find ‘Whitney Houston’ than the ‘Whitney Museum of Art’. Both, to me, are good points.
At the same time, the argument very clearly reminds me of the objections to Black History Month: that it is unfair and divisive because it pushes aside the idea of a sorta’-universal norm for the specificities of difference. But there was a great The Onion story once that started “[w]ith Black History Month over, U.S. citizens are putting aside thoughts of Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver to resume the traditional observation of White History Year.” When Ingram asks “Is it really that huge an inconvenience if someone searches for the word “Whitney” and gets something that is allegedly “white” like a museum of art, and what they were really searching for — Whitney Houston — is in fourth place?” he seems to ignore the aggregate effect of these microscopic things: that they are reflective of a norm that prioritises and normalises the concerns and interests of a white majority. If you’re white, then it may not seem like a big deal. If you’ve spent you’re entire life finding a significant portion of both your life and your identity not existing in the shared common space of the public sphere, its significance is somewhat more ominous.
In some sense, this is the simple products of numbers. In both Canada and the U.S., whites are in the majority and any search engine based on those numbers will reflect that. This is unavoidable and has obvious benefits. And while it is often ‘stereotypical’ to assume some sort of linkage between race and interests, we also need to also acknowledge that race, ethnicity (and sex, gender, class etc.) are factors that influence how one perceives both oneself and one’s position in society. To argue otherwise is to deny the real differences in culture and outlook that define a truly pluralist society.
If I were to search for ‘wedding traditions’, I’d likely get ‘something borrowed etc’. rather than the sangeet or the doli. My point, to be rather blunt, is that there is an ethnicity-specific search engine for white people: it’s called Google. And while the actual algorithmic approach of something like RushmoreDrive seems a half-assed solution at best – how are the interests of ‘black people’ determined? – even as it fails, it points out something fundamentally off about search engine results in a multicultural society.
Yet something like RushmoreDrive is still somewhat useful if we assume it isn’t one’s default search engine because of identity – “I am black, therefore I shall use RushmoreDrive” – but is instead another alternative when one is looking for specific results. In much the same way that I use google.co.uk when I need British results, perhaps search engines that do not assume that my interests are ‘normal like everyone else’s’ are just what I need.
Wax Scrawls: Toronto, Fake Testicles and Good Ole’ Mr. Carver
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 15, 2008
Wax Scrawls is a recurring feature on Scrawled in Wax in which usually I link to ‘non-techy’ things I hope you’ll find interesting or, in the case of today, a post in which, feeling fuzzy-headed from beer, I link to shit and then ramble about it. Um… enjoy?
If I could get Toronto-centric for a moment… There was a delegation from San Francisco that came to do a sort of comparative study of Toronto and their thoughts are presented in this issue of SPUR Urbanist (via the always great Spacing magazine). It’s interesting for a number of reasons and, if you live here, it’ll make you feel both fortunate and pessimistic. Speaking of Spacing, they also link to what they’re calling ‘Thunderdusk‘ – i.e. yesterday’s weird combination of a thunderstorm and a brilliant sunset which some have gone so far as to call ‘”the sunset of the century”. I dunno’ about that, but the pics are pretty great.
The video for “Lights Out” by Santogold, one of my favourite tracks from the album. [Thanks, Rex.]
The Guardian has a piece on whether Raymond Carver is the ‘king of the dirty realists’. From someone who reads as little as I do it may not mean much, but Carver is probably my favourite writer and his spare, aching stories can break me in two like nothing else. As I twittered recently, my aim in life is to meld him and Owen Ashworth of CFTPA into a bloggy, tumbly collection of short stories. If it were published, I expect shortly thereafter I’d fill my pockets with stones and walk into a river. Oh also, if for some reason you’re interested, my favourite writer right now is Zulfikar Ghose.
This is the website for neuticles. What are neuticles, you ask? They’re plastic balls to replace the ones you remove from your dog. Yeah. Beer and blogging: it’s a great combination. (And since we’re on the topic, it seems that ‘beer goggles’ are actually based in science).
I don’t know what the story of blog I Wrote This For You is, but it’s sorta’ heartbreaking.
That ‘answering machine’ muxtape I was working on is now up to a massive six songs. Thanks to Vanessa and Matthew for suggestions and if you have any more songs with answering machine messages in them, please send them in. In the meantime, the Jenny Owen Youngs and Throw Me the Statue tracks especially are worth listening to.
And to end, since I am finally getting my ass out of the suburbs again, it seems appropriate to link to this Freakonomics piece discussing the future of the our extra-urban wastelands spaces. It’s grim but fascinating.
“If You Didn’t Twitter It, Did it Actually Happen?”: The ‘If a Tree Falls’ For Our Age? [Updated]
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 14, 2008
Today, someone twittered the following: “Existential question: when I do not post to the social network, does it still exist? Mind-blowing, right? ” On first glance, this seemed like an in-joke for those of us who spend a lot – perhaps too much – time online. Yet it quickly struck me that this might be a rather useful question to ask as something like a mini-culmination of a lot of my thinking lately (yeah, I just said that). If you do not ‘make yourself present’ online, if you do not document yourself in the new public space, do you exist?
Let’s take a look at the original “If a tree falls…” question. At root, it is about the relationship of the individual to objective reality, of something between human perception and a reality that might transcend us. Does something occur outside of human apprehension and, even when we accept that it might, does it matter to us when we entirely unaware of its happening?
The question’s concerns are largely those of late Enlightenment philosophy: what can we know?; how much can we know?; and what are the limits and preconditions of knowledge? But while these issues are of course still up for debate, they seem to of less concern to us now. We have generally reconciled ourselves to the idea that subjectivity constrains what we might know and is roughly the determining factor when it comes to the limits of human knowledge. While it is ultimately a subject of faith, we seem to have agreed that in order to function, we have to accept that the universe will continue to work according to the laws of physics and will sustain its existence from day-to-day.
So, if these are the issues surrounding “If a tree falls…?”, then what are those for “If you didn’t Twitter it…?”? If the original question grappled with the relationship between the individual and objective reality, ‘did you post it to a social network?’ deals with the relationship between the individual and the social, the private and the public, the singular person and the multiplicity of the new public space.
Humans are inherently social. The entire process of becoming human – the entrance into language, culture, belief systems etc. – happens through interaction with other human beings. The social, in both the literal and the abstract, is (one could argue) the fundamental aspect of being human. Now, if the social is about both the current and latent connection with others – i.e. actually connecting with others in real-time or feeling like one can – then the internet represents the deferral and displacement of the social into an abstract, virtual space that one orients one’s physical self in relation to. “If a tree falls” is a threat to human subjectivity because it points to its limits; “If you didn’t Twitter it…” is a threat to human individuality because it lays bare the need for the other.
So the real question isn’t so much “If I didn’t Twitter it, did it happen?” as much as it is “If I never Twittered it, did it matter?”. When the social is, as I tend to argue, the persistent network and text of the internet, the omnipresent virtual space that has become society-by-proxy, we are increasingly moving toward a time when one must write one’s-self into the online public space in order to ‘make oneself real’. In much the same way that “If a tree falls…” is a question for the Enlightenment and its new concern with subjectivity, then “If I didn’t Twitter it…” is a question for our time and our new concern the virtual-social.
[Update]: When I said ‘our new concern with the virtual-social’, I guess I meant the the movement of what constitutes the social into the deferred abstract space of the internet. It should be noted that I am not talking about ‘screens’ per se – that people are to be found on LCD monitors. Rather, what I mean is the place of the social and the Other in consciousness and the imagination will increasingly be ‘found’ (i.e. not found) in the virtual. As an analogy, think of religion as an ordering principle – you cannot find it anywhere, but it is nonetheless a system that organises life: how we see ourselves, how we apprehend the world, how we confront and perceive each other are all inflected, coloured and determined by this thing that exists and yet cannot be actually pinned down to a location. And if it sounds like I’m hyperbolically saying that the internet will replace God, then so be it: in the case of the internet, I’d rather err on the side of hyperbole than conservative caution.
Wax Scrawls: Suburban Moms, Virgins and Whisky (but, surprisingly, no porn this time)
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 12, 2008
An NYT piece on the suburban blogosphere. In a class once, poet Priscilla Uppal commented on the stunning lack of literature from the suburbs; how odd, she said, that the place where so many of us live(d) and grew up was only to be found in art when it was being condemned. So if the Web is a new platform that ‘allows previously silenced voices to speak’, then it is perhaps unsurprising that these perspectives are starting to bubble up. ‘Course, whenever you mention ‘speaking’, the standard ‘lefty grad school’ reaction is to mention its partner ‘hearing’. The cynical response to the democratising power of the ‘net is that unless you speak in accordance with the structures of power, in both a language and ideology that other people recognise as ‘right and proper’, you are doomed to remain powerless. What this perspective often misses is the capacity of the Web to produce ideological communities that are consciously resistant to the mainstream or dominant mechanism of power (maleness, whiteness, straightness etc). That may not necessarily translate into political power – but finding community is certainly a start (and, as this New Yorker piece argues, competition between small lobby groups may actually constitute the political process)
More fun trivia: The Top 10 Literary Virgins. Yeats was ‘virtually celibate until his thirties’ (so I guess he was the rough slouching beast?) and E.M. Forster had finished all his major work before he, er, got some in his late-thirties. This winter, when I will inevitably be sitting at home writing alone on a Saturday night, I’m gonna’ remember this and hope that it keeps me warm.
There’s nothing overly special to this article about using video games to help kids ‘fight their cancer’. But I like the metaphor. Video games are arenas within which to produce narratives and produce provisional identities. In this case, the child envisions moving into themselves by going ‘ through the screen’ to project a fiction of eradicating their terminal illness. So you see outward, to see inward, to imagine the impossible – and make yourself feel better in the process. Neat.
DJ Greg “Girl Talk” Gillis is planning a ‘final show’ on December 21, 2012, the final day of the Mayan calendar. Also, I can’t decide what’s more surprising – that he’s playing Lollapalooza or that Lollapalooza still exists.
The Walrus have a very funny take on a whisky tasting. Chivas Regal (blech!) tastes like “lawn mower clippings, blotter acid, honey-flavoured breakfast cereal — and oak, right? I can definitely taste the oak. If bark were a drink, this stuff right here would be it”, while Laphroaig, my favourite single malt, is described thusly: “Greek salad, souvlaki, french fries, onion rings, ketchup, root beer, Peanut Buster Parfait. Oh, wait — that’s what I had for dinner. After the first sip I barfed a little in my mouth.”
Finally, I don’t know if this picture is actually cute, ‘shopped or just something really ominous before a lot of husky blood gets spilled. Oh also, this makes me smile for warm reasons, while this pleases me for more condescending ones.
Wax Scrawls: Liminal Spaces, Transcendent Music and Kafka’s Porn
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 11, 2008
Wax Scrawls is a constantly morphing feature on Scrawled in Wax in which I either link to things I find interesting and fall out of the general focus of my blog, or are just little random thoughts or happenings from my life. Enjoy!
I went to see renowned sitarist Irshad Khan today at Toronto’s Harbourfront. YouTube videos don’t really do him justice, but they’re a start. It isn’t the easiest music in the world to get into, partly because of the way it moves off and deviates from the root note or key and partly because it’s long and often bewilderingly complex. And because the structure of the music is somewhat random – though ragas are ancient and handed down through generations, like jazz, the structured bits are anchors between the improvisation – it can be difficult to ‘feel it’. But today I couldn’t help but think that to really get into it, you need to let yourself go – to abandon yourself to ups and downs and changes in mood and tempo chosen by the musician. Oh, and from previous experience, whisky also helps. Anyway, the show was mind-bogglingly good and if you’re generally curious, you can listen to another sitarist, Niladri Kumar, at the end of my Muxtape.
A Guardian Q&A with Slavoj Zizek [via]. Sample: “Q: What makes you depressed? A: Seeing stupid people happy”. Charming. More insightful – and useful for explaining the tone of the the Q&A – is this Nation piece on the seeming strangeness of Zizek and his approach.
Also, I had no idea who Zizek contemporary and French Marxist philosopher Alan Badiou was, but anyone who argues against art as a mimetic act, instead suggesting that ‘the inaesthetic’ is a-referential, ‘singular and immanent’, is okay in my books. I’ll add it to the list of Things Which I Must Read (and, likely, never will).
Diana Kimball, one of the organisers of ROFLcon, has a remarkable and lovely piece on what she thinks it means “to live in a liminal state between the screen and the sensory world”. It’s not that I think it’s full of revolutionary ideas (though some are very clever). Rather, it’s the fact that she chose to produce a narrative of her thoughts, to form an aesthetic frame in which to map out the movement of conceptions of identity, the self and presence from ’3d-space’ to ‘virtual space’. It’s neat stuff, and I almost wish I could hear an audiobook version of it. [Update]: I forgot to mention – I think this sort of aesthetic/artsy approach to contemporary culture is increasingly the only thing that makes sense to me. Analysis is starting to feel impossible; making stories at least seems doable.
The Times has a piece up about Kafka’s porn collection. Would you like a prim, odd British reaction? Here ya’ go: “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.” Um, what? Why, exactly, is bestiality and ‘girl-on-girl’ action in the same sentence? Anyway, are we really surprised that someone as dark and visual as Kafka was into porn?
Mad Men, The Creative Urge and Why We All Abandon Our Tumblrs
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on August 9, 2008
The thing is, we all sit in front of our screens and create. This, after all, is the grand mantra of internet proselytisers: no longer is creativity the sole domain of an elite class; the barriers of entry to the new public space have become so low and so open that anyone can blog, post photos and videos, create art and share it with everyone. You’ve heard this all a million times I’m sure – this bubbling, bursting excitement, about our new shared space, the breakdown of the barriers between what we once neatly called the private and the public, the democratisation of the creative act. “Me, I’m a Creator / Thrill is to make it up / The rules I break got me a place / Up on the radar”. This line now applies to everyone – though which rules are broken and which adhered to is perhaps more fuzzy than it was before.
In this new era of ‘the universal accessibility to creativity’, bloggers are on the cusp of something, in the thick of the new. I admit, the term ‘blogger’ is starting to lose any coherence it may have once had: given the multiplicity of not only topics but forms, any stability to be found in a definition would have to be remarkably abstract. Yet, what is blogging if not creation?; it may not often be ‘art’ as such, but it certainly falls into the catch-all new media term ‘content’. This is what we are constantly doing, is it not? Sitting around, producing content, stretching our brains to write insightful posts, argue our case, produce new forms or find intriguing, funny, arcane bits of culture? If, as I’ve argued recently, the internet is a blank screen for projecting the self, then it is also a blank canvas for the creation of art and culture. It waits there. We simply have to take advantage of the opportunity.
It was all this that was going through my mind as I raced through season one of Mad Men. Though there is much that fascinates me about the show, one thing that has lingered in my mind is the creative push that runs like an undercurrent in the office of Sterling-Cooper. Ad execs are creators. Like bloggers, what they do on a day-to-day basis is to produce content. True, it may not always be what they might want to do, what ‘their heart desires’ – but it is creativity nonetheless, and as anyone will tell you, some creativity is always better for the soul than none. Yet, like many tech bloggers, the creative urge extends beyond work. When it comes out that Ken Cosgrove has had a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly, it sends veritable shockwaves through the office. While Pete Campbell‘s seething, petulant jealousy is expected, everyone else’s is less so. It later comes out that bohemian Paul Kinsey is a budding, if struggling, playwright. These ‘Mad Men’ (including Peggy) are desperate to create, to make something that means something to people, that extends beyond their solitude to connect with the wider world. It’s the same urge that we all now tap into through the ‘net, in our democratised and newly public creative process.
So what do we tech and internet-culture bloggers do when the analysis, snark and commenting just doesn’t cut it? Where are our short stories? Where is our sudden creative outlet, our desperate attempt to connect? I suppose I mean this somewhat metaphorically, but we all start Tumblrs. We begin them in a rush of optimism – finally, we think, here is a simple, easy place for the art that I stumble across, the random thoughts I have, the snippets of conversation I was so desperate for someone else to hear. The blog – I can’t gush on my blog! – but Tumblr… I can put my brain on my blog and my heart on Tumblr and, neatly demarcated, things will finally make sense. And in a flurry, we post for the first week, maybe the first month, possibly even the first six months. But like annual flowers, we plant them excitedly only to watch them die. Who has the time? The desire to keep it up? We’re searching for something, for the social core that we keep hearing about, the connection we so crave, but somehow, when we find it, it suddenly seems too futile, like too much work to throw ourselves into wholeheartedly.
We create. This post, this blog, all our posts, all our blogs, are creations, outpourings, are like a moment in history expressing itself through us. But is it enough? While we make our ads, we want our short stories. We want something else, something less snarky, something more sincere, something where we are more concerned with being gut-wrenching than disemvoweling. So we start our Tumblrs.
And then we give up. Can we do both? Can we document the profound epistemological shift we are in the midst of and, at the same time, write a novel about the scene? Can we blog about the infinite fragments of internet culture and then, later that night, put them together into something resembling an aesthetic whole? To be entirely frank, I’m not sure what I’m pushing up against here: is it a Carr/Keen/Birkerts sense that the internet is destroying our capacity to ‘think deeply’, to carry on sustained effort? Is there an aesthetic shift afoot, where what constitutes not only art but its function is changing? Can we still speak of aesthetic wholes? I remember a conversation in which I said someone’s Tumblr was like art. His response was that it was something, certainly, but that it wasn’t the big picture; he wanted the big picture. So do I. But I may have lost faith that such a thing is possible. It’s all too much.
What is the undercurrent that pulses and throbs beneath our Sterling-Cooper? How are we going to find an outlet for our creativity and still keep our heads above water? And, after years of pushing it aside, of decades of not finding a place to speak that feels right, will we recognise it when it rears its head again?
Mad Men: Witnessing the Birth of the Modern Age (Part 1)
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on August 6, 2008
Although I initially ignored it, I have become absolutely obsessed with AMC’s Mad Men, watching the entire first season in about a week. But beyond a now insatiable craving to start having scotch and cigarettes with lunch, it was impossible for my mind to stop buzzing throughout each episode. These are some thoughts I’ve collected on the show’s appeal to me and, more specifically, why I think it allows us to ‘witness the birth of contemporary era’ (there may be some minor spoilers).
Don Draper, Ad-Man: producing visions of America, producing visions of himself.
Often, as Don is making ad magic, the camera zooms in on his face and one feels as if one is viewing the creation of poetry. But Draper’s insistent clarity about what is being sold, those ineffable desires that make people want to buy, are as constructed by Don as they are perceived by him. Draper, the man who constitutes the public vision of America for itself, has also entirely created himself, building his life into the image of success that he simultaneously lives and aspires to. His pristine suburban home and Grace Kelly lookalike wife, Betty, only add to the idea that Don’s life is a beautiful fiction – and precisely the same fiction that he sets atop a mythic pedestal for American to strive towards.
Watching the Arrival of Late Capitalism
There are two key ‘advertising moments’ in season one of Mad Men. The first is Don’s mid-meeting realisation that when selling identical products – in this case, cigarettes – what is key is to produce an association between the brand and a desired trait. Lucky Strike smokes are ‘Toasted’ – that’s it. But more to the point is the baffled reaction to a VW ad for the Beetle/Bug that simply reads “Lemon”. The aim of the piece is twofold: to create an image of the brand rather than the product; and to have that image supercede the product in both importance and relevance.
But what is so fascinating about Mad Men is that we can see the struggle to understand this new world. Mired in it as we are, we are often only aware of the oppressive ubiquity of advertising and branding. In Mad Men, it’s almost as if we get a window into those first glimmers of the movement into today, a world in which we mark out our identities with the things we consume.
Retro Aesthetics; or, “Let’s Talk about Christina Hendricks’ Ass”. (Don’t worry – I won’t be as misogynistic as that sounds. )
The first thing most people remark on about Mad Men is its fastidious, obsessive dedication to getting the aesthetic of the sixties right, from the clothing to the hair to the technology. But what struck me was the following scene: Joan Holloway, bending forward in front on a two-way mirror and the men standing behind her in the observation room actually ‘saluting her ass’. The question though is almost one of aesthetics – and I quite deliberately mean to invoke the reduction of the female body to an aesthetic object. We live in an age where skinny women are idolized; what does it do then to watch men watching and ‘approving of’ Hendricks’ body which, as Buzzfeed remarked is, “refreshingly voluptuous”. It’s a strange dynamic – on the one hand, it’s clearly and explicitly sexist; and on the other it stands as an oddly ambiguous challenge to our own, more subtle contemporary forms of sexism.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that a group of guys ogling a woman is somehow a positive feminist move. But it’s not supposed to be. The question is what the effect of us watching them when the ‘object of affection’ (and the pun is intentional there) doesn’t conform to contemporary standards? Ask yourself: which phrase seems more out of place in the contemporary era, more indicative of a lack of understanding of ‘how things work’? “Wow, that woman has a great ass”; or, “I like bigger women”. Alone it’s worth considering, but in light of Mad Men and its representation of a radically different aesthetic and cultural mode, it’s even more so.
That Theme Song…
First, to steal a bit from Adam Lisagor, the way it pares down to the rhythm section just as the shot pulls out to a silhouette of Don is so great it makes me want to take it behind a middle school and quote 30 Rock with it. But the impossibility of distinguishing whether the tune is contemporary or retro is the perfect metaphor for the entire show. Is it about the past or the present? About things that are over or only just beginning? Where exactly is the line between… actually, you know what? You get the point. It’s fucking great.
Part 2 to follow…
