Archive for May, 2009
Mario’s Music: The Language of Play and The Video Game Stigma
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology, Gaming Theory, Video Games on May 29, 2009
While grad school certainly has its drawbacks, one of its many perks is the sheer pleasure of ‘just chatting’. Often, perhaps as a group of us watch the sun fade over pitchers of beer, it is a distinct pleasure to discuss books, film and TV with people who are smart and engaged.
Yet, for all the open-minded exchange of ideas, one thing I have found you cannot discuss – at least not without drawing uncomfortable looks – is video games. Naturally, this isn’t universally the case; I do have a couple of friends sympathetic to the potential gaming holds. But, all too often, when you find yourself among arty or literary intellectuals, uttering the term “video games” is akin to saying you sexually fantasise about your eighteen year-old students: “Ew!”, goes the response.
This stigma attached to video games was on my mind recently when, while studying for a field exam, I was taking breaks by playing Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy. While I initially found the game hard to get into, I soon found myself surprised, and then amazed, by the sophistication and complexity of what Shigeru Miyamato and his team had achieved. But while I wanted to talk to my friends about this gem, I felt as if I couldn’t.
Part of this has to do with how hard it is to translate gaming for someone who isn’t familiar with the form. Show a clip of Mario Galaxy to your average lit major, and an argument for any intellectual depth will quickly be brushed aside – a reaction that I actually think is quite understandable. After all, the game is filled with walking mushrooms, carnivorous plants and a lead character whose excited utterances are perhaps a shade too cute. On the surface, the game seems like ‘it’s for kids’.
In many ways, this frequent use of objects and themes that have a childish association has cemented gaming as an infantile pursuit. Even when the aesthetics of a game change to something more ‘mature’, video gaming is still haunted by an adolescent affection for violence, simplistic plots and weak characterisation. Though this in no way represents all gaming, it has certainly informed the perception of games among the literati – namely that art is for clever grown-ups and games are for those yet to reach that vaunted status.
But, as I’ve argued so frequently, games live and die by interaction and play, the experience of actually controlling a character or object in a game, moving through the game’s process of challenge and reward. Read the rest of this entry »
The Funniest Venn Diagrams Ever
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture, Rambles, Uncategorized on May 27, 2009
Update: The creator of these Venn Diagrams seems to have taken them down off his Flickr. If I know the internets at all, it’s because he got a huge response and pulled them down to sell them for $ later.
I know SiW has been all over the place recently, but what can I say? I’ve been reading Deleuze & Guattari. They’ll do that to you.
Anyway, these really are the funniest Venn Diagrams I’ve ever seen. They’re by someone named ‘Frank-c‘ and the rest of his Flickr also seems worth checking out.
The entire set can be found here and made me laugh – out loud even – more than once.
5 Reasons Beatboxing is, like, Totally Awesome (Plus 2 Great Videos)
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture, Rambles on May 25, 2009
I seem to have stumbled across a lot of beatboxing lately and, in the process of being blown away, have had these thoughts floating around my head:
- Like sex, the fact that the people doing it look ridiculous does nothing to take away from its general degree of awesomeness.
- It’s like the proto-web cultural form in that it has extremely low barriers to entry. As far as I can tell, all you need are lips, a mouth and a tongue – though it seems having an obscene amount of talent also helps.
- It, in a very literal sense, makes music bodily. More than that, it uses the body to replicate electronic sounds, creating this strange historical loop of: physical music –> electronic music –> physical music. In returns music to something organic, but in a way that isn’t about a misguided kind of nostalgia (“let’s return to what was once true”), but is instead about access, talent, art etc.
- At the same time, it doesn’t work quite as well without technology. Because the low frequency sounds our mouths produce don’t have nearly enough volume to travel very far, a microphone is necessary for the full effect (though it’s true that some consider it a form of ‘cheating’). So our historical loop gets complicated: the human body is used to recreate electronic sounds that, in order to be fully realised, require technology. Fun, huh?
- Because it’s about a Police-Academy-ish sort of mimicry (yes, I just typed that), it does funny things with identity: it’s about performance, about upsetting expectations attached to certain bodies. It also complicates the already difficult idea of ‘appropriating culture’. The fact that it is a pastiche art-form that (usually) works without language makes this harder to associate with one group, which is interesting and weird and problematic and awesome all at the same time.
Anyhoo, here are two great beatboxing vids. The first is Julia Dales, who is from Ottawa, and just won the wildcard spot in the Beatbox Battle World Championship – and is seventeen!
And this one you’ve probably seen, but just in case, is by legendary Beardyman, with Nathan “Flutebox” Lee, and is un-freaking-believable.
Wax Interlude: Kiran Ahluwalia
Posted by Nav in Wax Interlude on May 21, 2009
For no particular reason, a ‘video’ of my favourite song right now. And by video, what I mean is a photograph with music playing in the background. Anyway, the song is called “Merey Mathay” by Kiran Ahluwalia off the album Wanderlust. It’s in Punjabi, but beyond that I can’t tell you very much, as I’m still struggling to learn the language.
Anyway, it’s always struck me as odd that, when I listen to ‘Western’ music, I prefer somewhat darker, quieter, more introspective fare, but when I listen to ‘Indian’ music I generally like the cheesy, the melodramatic or, in this case, the irrepressibly happy. There’s something sorta’ interesting about that, especially, I think, because the reasons remain entirely mysterious to me. Enjoy!
Web Audiences and Audienceship
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology, Diaspora, Immigration, Theorizing the Web on May 20, 2009
It occurs to me that I probably wrote my slightly silly previous post on The Big Bang Theory because it speaks to a pet obsession of mine: the relationship between public representation and private identity. So, I found this post by MIT grad student Xiaochang Li very relevant, as it touches on the relationship between (not-so) mass culture and the identity of those who watch/read it.
In her post, she marks out a difference between audiences – e.g. ‘a working class audience’, ‘an Asian-American audience’ – and what she terms ‘audienceship’, which Li argues “steers us away from the audience as a category of person and towards audience as a sort of situation that describes particular sets of practices and engagements with texts and cultural materials”. That’s clever and useful, particularly given the increasingly multiple identities of global consumers of media.
Put it slightly trite terms, it’s not that ‘different people’ watch The Big Bang Theory but that individuals become different people when they watch that show – just not ‘actually’. It speaks to the idea that we engage with culture in specific moments and, though identity never stops informing who we are, each time we do, there is a situational and temporal uniqueness at play. And if the difference of new media is that it is participatory, that specificity is useful, particularly as it relates it the idea of citizenship:
But there is, I think, something compelling about that linkage, as new media forms and platforms make audience an increasingly public act, both in terms of visibility and in terms of the public sphere. I’m still sorting through some of these things, but it strikes me that many of the audienceships that I look at — particularly in the fan-driven online circulation of transnational media content — are not only collective imaginaries, but collaborative ones, communities of sentiment that are radically involved in creating, selecting, curating, and distributing the very text and images that shape them.
What is even more interesting to me is that she suggests that if you think about being part of an audience as constituting identity, then audienceships are also “publics”, fluid groups of people who are always potential political subjects when they are engaged with global online media.
It’s good stuff and it’s a good, if unabashedly academic blog. Worth the read.
The Big Bang Theory: Bastard Child of the Web
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology, Diaspora, Immigration, Theorizing the Web on May 20, 2009
For those of us who, perhaps reluctantly, fall into the category of ‘the geeky and the nerdy’, it’s clear the web has done a lot to put our formerly derided pursuits and personalities into the limelight. Maybe for this reason – or possibly because my brain fell out of my ass and I just didn’t notice – I’ve recently been watching a lot of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory.
Though in most ways it’s a pretty straightforward (and quite good) American sitcom, it’s one of those shows that probably wouldn’t have existed prior to the web. It’s hard to imagine a show about four unabashedly nerdy, video-game-playing, comic-book-reading scientists succeeding, say, in the early nineties. With the rise of ‘geek chic’ and a general acceptance that nerds have some sort of use, however, things have changed.
Yet, The Big Bang Theory is hardly the most interesting of the web’s cultural progeny, especially when you compare it to the exciting, often cutting-edge stuff that goes on online. What is intriguing, however, is the way in which the show highlights some of the contradictions of geeky web culture.
On one hand, the show features the classic American liberal-humanist tropes about identity, honesty and egalitarianism. The moment Penney reminds Leonard that liking comic books, toys and games is what makes him who he is – and goshdarnit, he’s a great guy – the show simply repeats the ‘accept who you are’ mantra of a million other sitcoms.
More encouragingly, the slow development of Sheldon (who most likely has Asperger’s, and is played very well by Jim Parsons) is a fine example of what comedy does well: he exaggerates human foibles (fastidiousness, a lack of empathy) to produce a comic effect. You don’t want to be Sheldon, but you can learn lessons from him. In this sense, the show speaks to the egalitarian ideals we used to cling to when the term “information superhighway” was still being bandied about: these geeks may be different, but underneath, aren’t we all kinda’ the same?
At the same time, if Big Bang is a child of the web, it also showcases some of its worst tendencies. Raj, the Indian import scientist, is probably the best example. Due to some inexplicable neurosis, he is mute around women. Taken alone, it’s a bit funny; when considered in light of the constant feminisation and de-sexualisation of Asian men, it’s a little weird.
It’s also uncomfortably similar to the vaguely xenophobic, classist tone of sites like Buzzfeed (I know that’s a pretty unsubstantiated accusation, but I’m slowly collecting evidence). If one part of web culture is bringing difference to light, another part is holding it up to ridicule.
Yeah, it’s all ironic and we’re all so over sincerity and politics, but the ridicule at the core of a lot of web culture assumes a lot about its audience: namely that they’re largely white, educated and culturally-savvy. Anyone who isn’t, is made fun of, and The Big Bang Theory walks a fine, ambivalent line between challenging and reinforcing stereotypes.
While I don’t in any serious sense consider ‘geek’ an identity category, the show is invoking the much more general idea of ‘difference’ and does some weird things with it.
Anyhoo, I’ve just been watching it a lot and thought I’d spit out some initial reactions. Anyone else have any thoughts?
Note: the image in this post comes from Deviantart user ~petite-madame.
Rich on the Future of *yawn* The News – and, um, Truth Too?
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Electronic Reading, news, newspapers, Theorizing the Web on May 10, 2009
Update: another good round-up of the problems facing the newspaper and journalism businesses can be found here at Mindy McAdam’s blog.
It’s true that there’s nothing terribly revelatory about Frank Rich’s column “The American Press on Suicide Watch” in the NYT. But as Mathew Ingram twittered this morning, it’s a good, clear summation of how we now find ourselves in this unending, ubiquitous discussion about ‘the news’. If you haven’t been following the drama, this is certainly a good place to start.
But the conversation this article summarises has also been interesting from a cultural perspective. One of the reasons ‘the news’ has piqued my interest is how the debate has circled around a particular idea of truth. After all, we exist in a moment when we have finally seen postmodern notions of truth begin to manifest in a broad, widespread way on the internet. What but the web is more emblematic of either, in a ‘mainstream sense’, the subjectivity of truth or, from a more cynical perspective, the often interchangeable relationship between power and knowledge, truth and materiality?
But at its core, the idea that the press is central to democracy rests on the more traditional idea that ‘the truth needs to come out’ and that there is no institution better suited to accomplish this than ‘the news biz’. Fair enough. The 20th century has seen numerous examples of the import of this idea, whether in Watergate or, as an inverse example anyway, the lead-up to the Iraq war. As such, it would be silly and facile to fall back on easy, academic statements like “there’s, like, no truth man”. Sure, in an abstract sense it might be true, but then, midway through this sentence, the practical problem with such an approach is already apparent.
Yet, at the same time, Rich’s insistence on a sharp division between reportage and opinion is overly stark, his assertion that the opinionated nature of blogging is just ‘bloviating’, unsettling. A good example of why is the recent focus on Somali pirates. The dramatic ‘rescue’ of an American crew from a ‘lawless band of pirates’ was cast in black-and-white terms in which the marines led a heroic and brutally efficient mission (one CNN story simply celebrated what amazing skill it must have taken to snipe two of the pirates simultaneously). But what became clear shortly after was that mainstream outlets like CNN missed part of the story, whether the history of ‘pirating’ in Somalia or the importance of the pirates to contemporary Somalian culture. Missing half of the information while presenting itself as ‘objective’, the traditional media failed. Perhaps just as importantly, they did not fail because there was too much opinion; it’s that there wasn’t enough of it.
In many ways, Rich is quite right: the news business is in trouble, but it is often invaluable to making us more informed and safer and we need to figure out a way to fund it. But when he argues that blogging and the web can, at best, only overtake the mundane minutiae of reporting – the town council meeting, for example – he misses the fact that the expansion of voices and, yes, opinions, has provided us with more, not less, information and, furthermore, that it is often from perspectives that heretofore have been silenced. This, it seems, is important.
I don’t have any grand ideas for the news. It’s not my thing; it’s not my area. What I can suggest though, is that the focus should not either be on saving traditional media or simply making the news participatory and ‘two-point-oh-y’. Instead, we should be aiming to meld old and new media to make the news more complete, to see the web’s low barriers of entry as working to improve, rather than destroy journalism. After all, we may never be able to ‘get the truth’, but the more voices we have, the closer we might be able to get.
More “Future of Liberal Democracy” Stuff
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Diaspora, Immigration, Immigration and Diaspora on May 10, 2009
Bit of a departure in topic for SiW, but this is really worth the read. Famed Marxist critic Terry Eagleton writes on “Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism” in Commonweal. It’s good stuff: it starts by wondering why we all seem to be talking about God more, but goes on to think about multiculturalism and, more interestingly, does a really interesting refiguring of the ‘clash of civilizations’ shtick. It’s long, but worth your time. Here’s a bit of’ the payoff at the end:
The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.
By the way, if you are ever looking to get a relatively quick gloss of some recent academic theory, Eagleton’s Literary Theory isn’t too bad a place to start.
(Oh, my second ‘by the way’: I read this on the subway this morning using Instapaper on the iPhone. It really is amazing.)
