Archive for October, 2009
Unboxing a Bad Column
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, eBooks, Electronic Reading, newspapers, Pop Culture on October 30, 2009
I know I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for the unboxing column or post. Unboxing, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon of documenting taking a new, usually technological product out of its box, paying close attention to the packaging and conveying the feeling of ‘getting new gear’.
It’s the sort of thing dying for a good, insightful piece about the contemporary fetishisation of tech, and the blurring of identity, branding and desire. Alas, so far, we’ve all come up a bit short. I even know the perfect person to write it: a close friend, whose dissertation includes the ideal mix of the psychoanalysis of Lacan, the material bent of Marxism and the ‘hope’ of Ernst Bloch – but, alas, I can’t seem to convince him.
Of course, all that said, you know who really shouldn’t write a column on unboxing? Russell Smith. At least, that’s the impression I get reading his infuriating and exasperatingly stupid column this week.
I could tell you what the column is about. But then, I’m sure that without even reading the piece, you’ve already guessed its approach: it’s about boys and their toys and how sad it all is. It’s trite, supercilious fluff and takes the classic newspaper columnist approach and decries how ‘everything has gone wrong’ and how we should all shake our heads because, and I quote “oh, come on, every single thing about this is horribly sad.”
Rather than trying to understand the unboxing phenomenon (sorry, throwing out the word ‘fetish’ doesn’t count), Smith simply seeks to pass judgement. Instead of dealing with some of the reasons that cause people to so grossly idolise objects, so lubriciously love their stuff, Smith simply jumps to the part where he essentially tells you that he is not like this.
But not only is it bad writing. By jumping to evaluation, Smith is simply seeking to assert his position of intellectual authority. And while all analytic writing tries to do that on some level, there’s a distinction between clarifying and condescending, between smart, empathetic critique and simplistic condemnation. If you don’t explain why someone should hate something, instead relying on an assumed set of values that prioritises ‘that which came before’, you’re not a writer – you’re just an ass. You focus on judgment and miss any sort of actual analysis.
You might even delineate the distinction by trying to describe his column:
- Descriptive: Russell Smith is a contemporary culture columnist who has written on ‘unboxing’.
- Analytic: Russell Smith’s approach to unboxing reveals that he is invested in maintaining the privilege of ‘the writer’ and ‘the intellectual’ against the increasingly vocal, technophillic masses.
- Evaluative: Russell Smith is a fuckwad.
See how that works? The really useful part is the one in the middle – and it’s the part that Smith missed.
Why am I so worked up about this? Well for one, it highlights the all-too-common approach of non-techie media to ‘geek culture’. Too often, they attempt to understand cultural phenomena outside of the context of late capitalism, postmodernism etc., appealing to their readers’ most basic sense of ‘what is good and right and true’ – here meaning anything from ‘don’t play with toys’ to ‘go and read a book already!’ – to condemn a practice that requires a far more nuanced critique.
But it’s also another attempt to construct a relationship between print and authority, cementing a link between whose opinion counts and the medium it appears on. If the web has disrupted the concept of expertise, then columns decrying the brevity of Twitter, the narcissism of Foursquare, the emptiness of video games etc. are attempts to reassert the link between authoritative publications and authoritative voices. Smith’s column is an example of the very worst, precisely because it fails at doing analysis better than it appears elsewhere, displaying how simplistic analysis and kneejerk commentary have become the domain of print rather than the web.
To be clear, I think unboxing is a strange thing, something that should be criticised, if not occasionally vilified. But what Smith misses is that the loving affection given to the physical object is as much a historical reaction to digitization as it is an insidious effect of capitalist fetishism. Publicly salivating over your new iPhone may be a slightly sick, perverse attempt to recoup wonder; at the same time, it might also be the modern equivalent to ‘the smell of books’ or ‘the feel of paper”: a physical, sensual reminder of the wonder the medium can hold.
And the unboxing of the New Liberal Arts book shows how fetishising the object, when not co-opted by the dehumanising effects of capitalism, can actually bring one into a community, connecting one to others. It’s Penumbra’s fellowship, made manifest.
But, of course, we cannot claim that there is some good in all this newness; we cannot strive to find the hope in the slightly sad, intensely materialistic videos of geeks. We have to find a way to condemn.We have to find a way to instill fear. We have to find a way to reassure our readers that the things they believe still hold true.
After all, we have dead trees to sell.
Debating the Ebook (Again? Oh shut up.)
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on October 21, 2009
Thanks to Tim suggesting AAAARG.ORG, a repository of critical theory PDFs, I’m now sorely tempted to buy that cheap(er) Sony Reader so I can read me summa’ that fancy-schmancy aca-ma-demic stuff (if it works, of course). Still, the eBook remains a hotly debated idea, most frequently over whether it actually works as a form unto itself, or if it’s an attempt to simply recreate an ‘obsolete’ form.
Recently, Brian Lam (or, as I say in my mind, “BLAM!”) essentially called them pointless, suggesting that the future of media is a mixture of text, video and audio, which renders the Kindle et al D.O.A. I would agree – were it not for the question of attention. On a very simple level, that’s the appeal of an ebook to me: it’s the convenience and portability of digital with the focus on print. The display does one thing and it does it slowly. When, like me, you can’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes, that seems a distinct, if very specific, advantage.
For this reason and more, I was intrigued by the debate in the NYT today called “Does the Brain Like E-Books?” – in particular, Alan Liu’s suggestion that our notion of reading is still constrained by the kinds of metaphors we use to contain print and images:
My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”
For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.”…
My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.
The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.
Interesting, right? That the new metaphors of containment are about reading spaces and communities of readers.
The rest of the debate is interesting too, but contains far too much for one post. If nothing else though, it encapsulates a lot of the discussion we’ve been having over the past year or so.
Swells of Happiness: Abida Parveen Sings the Poetry of Kabir
Posted by Nav in Music, Wax Interlude on October 19, 2009
Abida Parveen has been a constant in my life, albeit in a strange way. My father is an enormous fan of hers, so the impossibly deep, resonant sound of her voice always hovered in my house as we grew up. Her music would be played late at night when friends came over, and when the basmati rice, black daal and chicken curry had been put away, my parents and their peers would sit lazy and full, sipping whisky and talking softly, bobbing their heads to a rhythm I could never quite latch on to.
Like so many aspects of my parents’ culture and tastes, it spoke to a past that they shared but which I had no access to. To this day, songs that can bring my mother to tears or a wistful look to my father’s face remain like doorways obscured by darkness. If I might peer through them – if I might somehow find the key that suddenly makes the language and references clear – I too might partake of the subdued ecstasy of the ghazal. Alas, for the time being, they are closed.
Still – this past weekend, we drove up north*. As we raced across Algonquin Park, an enormous, open area in central Ontario, we listened to Abida as the unending sea of green pine and sugar maple all aflame blurred past. It was a wonderfully incongruous moment, the hypnotic sound of Parveen’s voice inexplicably providing what, at the time, seemed the only suitable soundtrack for the landscape.
If I might be so bold, my suggestion for this song is that you put it on while you are doing something else that doesn’t require too much attention, so that, perhaps, you might lose yourself in it for a while. Sitting in a car on long open roads works. The train would too. Or maybe you might simply stare out of a window, watching nothing in particular – clouds, leaves, drops of rain. Of course, if you too can sit, lazy and full while sipping whisky, then all the better…
*“Driving up north” is a common refrain in Southern Ontario and generally means you are escaping the city to go a cottage.
NB: The singing doesn’t start until a minute in. Part 2 of the song is here. If you’d like the entire thing uncut, it’s available here on iTunes and eMusic. And, um, dbox too.
Stories About Our Time: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, eBooks, Electronic Reading on October 8, 2009
How do we construct narratives about the digital age? And what themes and ideas will characterise ‘dot com fiction’?
“Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore” is a cracking work of short fiction written by Robin Sloan, one of the three people behind what is probably my favourite blog, Snarkmarket. Characterised by Sloan as “a short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation”, the piece is part fantasy, part sci-fi – and all good. It’s also possibly one of the few pieces that would fit Margaret Atwood’s otherwise condescending term ‘speculative fiction’.
For good reason, much of the reaction from the ‘sphere has been glowing praise. So far, however, I haven’t seen much in the way of a literary or analytic response. And while there are many people who argue that ‘analysing’ literature is to deny the pleasure of reading, I’ve never found it to be the case. The more I love a work of fiction – the more it works that strange, inarticulable magic on me – the more I enjoy diving into it and expressing all of the things it made me think.
So what follows are some of my scattered thoughts about the story. It will spoil the story if you haven’t read it, so you might want to do that first; it’s both very quick and well worth the half-an-hour of your time. And for those of you who, like me, have real problems with your attention spans, there’s a great audio version on Escape Pod that makes a bus ride so much better.
So:
- The paragraphs are short. Like a good blog post, the story is full of quick, punchy graphs. The prose too is very clear, but in 1st person. I don’t think this is a story that would have made sense with long paragraphs of description written in 3rd person omniscient. I think there’s a reason for that.
- The conceit of the story is, of course, that books and their readers are hiding a secret and that the protagonist teases it out using computers. Put another way: the aggregation of information in books by computers reveals a piece of information (or, content) that ‘supersedes’ its forms.
- This happens via a three-dimensional visualisation of ostensibly ‘two-dimensional’ texts. The clear implication is that, though Penumbra intends his face to be found, it can only happen through print’s ‘successor’.
- No. Wait, that’s wrong. It’s not that the information can only be found using computers; it’s that it can only happen so quickly using computers. That it has happened so fast means a change has been initiated. It’s not that print has been rendered obsolete; rather, it’s function and position in society has changed.
- The description of the Google campus and the book scanner seem to reinforce this idea; “Mr. Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore”.
- Yet, the text goes to great lengths to neither celebrate nor prioritise computerization over print; in fact, there is a suggestion that while computers are great at giving answers they, like all other forms of technology, aren’t so great at asking questions.
- Another way of framing that idea might be: digital information can be organised in non-linear, constantly shifting ways; but in order for that information to remain relevant to people, those networked systems of thinking have to simultaneously become textual (i.e. ‘a text’ is an ordering of signs meant to render something comprehensible). For information to have meaning, there must be a constant blurring print and screen, narrative and database.
- I can’t tell if it was deliberate, but there are a couple of points at which the main character seems to be saying something, but there are no quotation marks. Collapse of print and speech? A textual gesture to a new post-textual mode in which writing becomes performative? (Am I just getting silly now?)
- Of course, the way the text ends is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of print or digital; it’s something else. On the one hand, the immense power of digital is on display; on the other, its fleetingness, its tendency to evaporate the moment it has been created is all too clear as well. But Penumbra also suggests that longevity – to make something that lasts – isn’t the sole domain of the book. So we’re left with the contrast of a particular set of values and investments and their technological predications.
- So it’s interesting that the text rests on ideas about the author: on one hand, the Google Book Scanner peels information off the page and turns it into impersonal data, a fitting digital metahpor for the death of the author (neat point: the death happens for the same reason as it did ‘in Barthes’: language/information operate independently of their author); on the other is the idea that an author speaks, and lives through speaking. After all, the main character tries to understand Penumbra by ‘piecing together’ the information he finds about him. The fellowship is about sustaining life through passing yourself on through books. Is the author dead? Or does something about the endlessly iterative nature of digital texts do something to the now clichéd post-structuralist idea? (though it’s worth pointing out that Foucault’s idea of the author function is still at work here – and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing)
- At the end of the text, the protagonist wonders how he will make himself last and, half-jokingly, mentions “Super Book Store Bros.”. What’s interesting about that, is that the video game is (to me, anyway) the next phase of narrative. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that will last (assuming, of course, that narrative doesn’t become less and less relevant).
- The piece is a story about historical transition, a moment in time between two epochs (in Western societies, anyway). It seems hopeful. This pleases me.
There’s more to be said, of course. But even I get tired of my own overly-simplistic wankery sometimes. If you wanna’ chat about this in the comments, I’d be totally up for it.
More notes. If you somehow don’t know, Robin used this story as a springboard to write a whole book. You can find out about it – and possibly contribute? – here. As part of the project, Robin, almost on a dare, also wrote a story on his flight from SF to NYC. As someone who has had a couple of unfinished stories kicking around for 3 or 4 years now, this makes me feel totally at ease with myself… 
Bursts of Happiness: Bibio
Posted by Nav in Music, Wax Interlude on October 6, 2009
Wax Interludes? Pfft. That’s so last week. And really, interludes? Those are just distractions. And that’s not what this is. This is a burst of irrepressible happiness. Bibio. Ambivalence Avenue. When, as you stare off at the horizon, sun glinting through the rapidly reddening leaves, you feel yourself suddenly overcome with joy, you can thank me then 
P.S. Lately, I’ve been adding to my cadre of friends with whom I share music using Dropbox. And Dropbox really is the greatest app ever. If you want in, let me know. Sharing is caring!
P.P.S. If you’re wondering what’s induced this effusiveness, your answer lies here.
So this Google Wave thing…
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on October 1, 2009
…seems kinda’ pointless if you use it alone. Wanna’ be my Google Wave friend – whether you already have an account or need an invite? One only gets 8, I believe.
(Note: so far, I’m a little baffled by it. I can totally understand how in a business context it could be amazing. For schlubs like me, however, I’m not quite clear on what benefits it’s going to have.)
