Archive for March, 2009
Obama, Futuristic President. Internet, Futuristic Symbol
Posted by Nav in Theorizing the Web on March 30, 2009
What role does the internet play in our collective imagination?
You must remember the buzz, the palpable sense of excitement, on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration. Even here in Toronto, there was a rare sense of optimism and glee in the air as we gathered around our televisions and laptops, witnessing history.
Regardless of what you thought of Obama’s election, it was a day for pomp and ceremony, for symbols and symbolic gestures. And to me, there was one slightly nerdy symbol that stuck out. Early in the day, my pal Rex of Fimoculous fame posted a ‘before and after’ pic of Whitehouse.gov as it transitioned from the Bush to Obama administration. By the end of the day, the Flickr page had over 200,000 views. It is now at 310,000. While Fimoculous is notoriously influential, a couple of hundred thousand visits was surprising and significant.
It was, to my mind, an interesting moment. Clearly, for ‘progressive’ Americans it had been long 8 years; signs of change were necessary and, let’s be honest, the day had a definite ‘don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out’ vibe. But what was particularly intriguing was that one of the symbols of difference was the new website. It did, after all, signify more than just a change in who was running the place.
If for some the Bush administration has now become associated with ‘the old guard’, then Obama is President 2.0, a man who not only represents new ideas, but is using new technologies to disseminate them. The comparatively slick, uncluttered design of the new Whitehouse.gov suggested that this government was leading America boldly into the future. And in our world, the future and the web are becoming inextricably linked.
What role does the internet play in our collective imagination? Let’s say that, for the sake of ‘fun’ – or because you write a really nerdy blog – you made a mental map of some of the signs and symbols of contemporary society. You might have politics or large corporations as the symbol of power, an idea often captured in images of political buildings or corporate HQs. Television might be where you’d ‘locate’ the swirl of pop culture. For symbols of the past, you might look to factories, suburbs from the fifties or – as much as it pains me to say – leather-bound books of poetry. It’s not that any of this is ‘true’ in any real way. We just come to associate certain cultural items with particular themes and ideas.
And the internet? Where would it fit in this map of symbols? If you look at current phenomena like Twitter, the web is almost literally the place where ‘the contemporary happens’. Taken as an aggregate whole, Twitter is like a near real-time document of the social. But in a more metaphorical sense, the web is also a symbol of how the present is slipping into the future, a way of locating or symbolising the dizzying pace of change, a happening that not only takes place on the internet, but that the internet is also coming to represent.
If you’re looking for evidence, then TV is a good place to start. Jimmy Fallon’s pretty successful launch owes a lot to his successful use of social media, but also to how the same strategy associated the new show and host with the cutting-edge world of the web. 30 Rock is another good example; few shows have more effectively co-opted the rapid-fire pace of internet conversation, its droll, resigned irony – or, it must be said, its vaguely urban, classist elitism (what are the depictions of Kenneth or South Asian New Yorkers but stereotypes reassuring to wealthy hipsters?).
But the fact that 30 Rock is so subtly web savvy probably forms a large chunk of the reason it has become the hipster sitcom of choice, the one that ‘speaks to a generation’ – or, more accurately, a ‘25-34 demographic’. Put simply, if you want to associate something with the new and contemporary, slip in a connection to the web or, failing that, just appropriate its culture.
But if the web is now the symbol of the bleeding edge, the next question to ask is what this symbol actually means. If the web is the sign of how we move into the future, then where are we going? Who has access to the web and its culture and who gets left out? And is the web still a symbol of a new, democratic future? Or is something more sinister lingering on the horizon?
Scrawled in Wax is Back and it’s… Ugly?
Clearly, it has been a long hiatus from blogging – much longer than I expected it to be. For three arduous, ambivalent months, the union representing TA’s and contract faculty at Toronto’s York University (of which I am a member) was on strike. The reasons, as always, are complex, but it essentially boiled down to localised issues of wages and job security, and broader issues like the increasing corporatisation of the university and the casualisation of the labour therein. My field exam was consequently delayed and I’ve only written and defended in the past couple of weeks.
While I don’t think this is the place to discuss the strike – and there is much still to discuss – it will inevitably inform my writing here. Though I have often critiqued capitalism and power on this blog, I had previously experienced their effects in abstract, impersonal ways. Having now come face-to-face with the dehumanising impact of right-wing, free-market approaches – and, it must be said, an overwhelming public contempt for both academia and leftist politics – I imagine Scrawled in Wax will now perhaps become more unabashedly Marxist and a little less uncritical of the consumerism that lies at the core of much of technology and the web.
As such, I’m looking forward to getting back to this, hopefully reinvigorated. A lot has been going on: the newspaper is forever changed, perhaps soon to be obsolete; video games, increasingly innovative and artistic, are becoming a more and more important cultural form; Twitter has finally gone mainstream; and a larger and larger number of people are theorising the social and cultural effects of what I continue to argue is our Gutenberg moment, a fundamental historical shift of which we are merely at the beginning. Certainly, it is intimidating and overwhelming; but it is exciting too, and I feel lucky to have been born in this time.
While this blog has always focused on the overlap of technology and culture, I’d also like to branch out a bit in terms of subject matter, to a more pastiche-like approach that might encompass my other interests: food, literature, immigration and diaspora, creativity. For years now, I have shied away from calling myself a writer, but I think it might be time to ‘reclaim that mantle’, so to speak. Still – if my attempts to emulate Snarkmarket or Diana Kimball fail miserably, then please don’t be shy to let me know what I might leave out or refine, or vice versa. I figure the worst I can do is try.
And those few of you who read this blog before: the new design? Is it ugly? Do you care at all? Given my knowledge base, there is little I can do about how generic it looks, but I don’t know how I feel about that somewhat garish header. Let me know what you think and, particularly if you’re familiar with this sort of thing, perhaps suggest things I might do to improve it.
I hope that, in the coming months, I can create content compelling enough to give you reason to return here, discuss what you find and perhaps comment on and link to posts you might enjoy. As always, my appreciation for your attention is sincere and profound. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to loosen these academics shackles once more and get back to being a geek. 
