Archive for December, 2009
A new (and good) Christmas song (for a good cause)
I know my Snarkfriends have already linked to the magic of Pomplamoose (of Single Ladies cover fame), calling their unique style ‘production-as-performance‘ videos (i.e. their videos are simply their recording process, but far more charming and engaging than that sounds). Anyway, as some of you know, I actually kinda’ dig Christmas music and the group has created their own Christmas song called “Always in Season”, which is pretty fucking delightful. I can’t, however, embed the vid because Pomplamoose are instead asking fans to donate money to World Vision (to buy a goat) and, in return, get both this track and another as a ‘reward’ of sorts.
Here’s the link. There’s a (very cute) explanation of the whole charity thing at the end of the music vid.
How Many Feeds is Not Enough?
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on December 18, 2009
Because for a couple of years the question was always “how many feeds is too much?”. But now it seems like the wrong thing to ask.
Yesterday, buried in my post (and then splayed on Twitter) was the tidbit that Joanne Mcneil of Tomorrow Museum fame has 749 RSS feeds in Google Reader. For those of you less familiar with RSS, that means that Joanne keeps track of the happenings on 749 different websites and blogs. That’s, like, a lot. And it’s got me thinking.
Earlier this year, the trends feature in Google Reader indicated I was reading about 9000-10,000 items a month. As it began to dawn on me just how much time I was wasting – and how it was affecting my so-called academic career – I cut down, to the extent that I’m now at the stats you see above.
To be suddenly faced with this collected information – this aggregated report of both my habits and my time – was a strange thing. It put into stark relief just how central this unending flow of data and text has become to my existence, and just how much of that existence it is consuming. But far more unsettling is the following question: is this a good thing? Am I improving myself by reading this much online? Or am I wasting my (already limited) intellect away?
It’s a tough question. Robin’s comment over at Snarkmarket suggests that the glut of information represented by RSS readers is akin to a giant stream of zeitgeist or human thought. One dips one finger in it somewhat at random, picking out thing that interest one while, at other times, finding things entirely by chance. The key to all this is to frequently allow oneself to hi “Mark all as Read” – i.e. acknowledge that there is too much and continue to let it flow over you in a rush, discarding the ephemera with the new hope “if it’s important, it will find me”.
Yet at the same time, there is a practical concern of both time and attention. If, even with this ease of abandoning all the things one is missing, I’m spending around 3 hours a day reading everything from Buzzfeed to Torontoist to Hilobrow to the London Review of Books, am I robbing myself? After all, I’ve frequently argued that my reading – and maybe reading in general – differs from screen to page in that the screen works for short, intense bursts and the page for longer, more introspective reading. What would my life be like if I were to spend those 3 hours slowly poring over Kant’s second critique, Harraway’s Manifesto or Derrida’s thoughts on writing and the book? (Or is that a false choice?)
I ask this – and also invoke it mainly so that I can lament the loss – because I was once a ‘promising academic’: you know, publishable papers in my MA, professors who said they had nothing more to teach me, people convinced that my ideas were actually quotes from Spivak, that kinda’ thing. I am no longer ‘promising’ – and am in fact struggling with the most basic of ideas – and I am genuinely concerned if the type of non-linear, networked thinking that ‘RSS approach’ promotes – and that I have so vociferously argued in favour of – is incompatible with my choice of profession. Put somewhat differently, has my wholehearted embrace of the screen come at the expense of my facility with the kind of thinking I have at least historically associated with the page, with precisely the opposite of the random associations provoked by having one’s Tumblr feeds next to the the folder marked ‘Smart Stuff’? I’m not asking here whether the web is ruining our capacity to think in general (ugh)? I’m wondering if, in particular contexts that demand intense, specialised forms of thinking, when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, does it irrevocably alter ‘the other side’? Has blogger me killed academic me? And, to deliberately be a little over the top, has Google Reader changed the way my brain is wired?
It’s very possible that such practical problem has a very practical answer: that one deliberately set aside time for ‘quiet reading and writing’ rather than submitting one’s own attention economy to a kind of ‘free market dogma’ in which you simply do what you feel like doing. I honestly don’t know.
How many feeds is not enough? This still feels like the right question. Because zero – or even fifty – is far too little. To be removed from that current would feel like death. But my problem is that my capacity to deal with that much potential information, always hovering just out of reach, has changed my ability to focus on one thing for an extended period of time. It’s a real change. It has already happened. And I’m now wondering whether it’s too late to go back.
The Best Blogs of 2009
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web, web culture on December 17, 2009
Oh, as if I wasn’t gonna’ link to this.
So, some smart people – some of whose work I read religiously and really like – got together and talked about the best new blogs of the year. It makes for a fun read, particularly because you immediately get the sense you’re listening to informed people treating the form with care, respect and insight.
As I read it, what struck me as both odd and funny was that, in a sense, ‘blogs’ seem almost passe. Don’t mistake me – it’s not that they’re either unimportant or dying. It’s just that the term no longer captures the zeitgeist in the way it once did. A blog is just another form of publication or communication.
But far from being something sad, to me that seems like cause for hope. After all, it’s at that point that a form stops being a sign for an age that it becomes able to engage with that time without only descending into constant meta- self-reflexivity. Remember years ago, when we all breathlessly chatted about what blogging was and what it was not? That has largely ended. And with that, the cultural force of the form is growing as it starts to turn its critical gaze away from itself and, instead, uses that capacity for meta-commentary – for that constant deconstructive semantic multiplicity enabled by both hyperlinking and the overwhelming glut of context - to engage with the world in a hyper-critical, innovative, rhizomatic way.
The list contains some blogs I talk about here – Slaughterhouse 90210, Hilobrow etc. – and some that I don’t. But I l also love that Rex takes the opportunity to go on about Tumblr. It’s a platform or site or whatever the fuck it is that I also can’t shut up about (here, here, here). But this idea is great:
Tumblr’s make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.
That’s a key element that I’ve missed, as I’ve largely given up on using Tumblr (though I think I’ll be heading back there) and have instead remained a voyeur to the mad exchange of aesthetics and desire that drive the community. I also love that Rex picks Mad Men Footnotes as the paragon of Tumblrdom, particularly the way it makes that it’s-so-Tumblr move of collapsing nostalgia, history, aestheticism and immediacy. That’s still what I love so much about Slaughterhouse 90210, my personal pick for the site that best captures the weirdness of Tumblr. Slaughterhouse too does that thing where it conflates a historical timeline into a messy, always contemporary, singular pile, aesthetically and ideologically reframing both the pop culture artefacts from ‘the present’ and the quotations from ‘the past’ (also neat: the picture is from the present and the text is from the past).
Anyway, the list is full of good stuff and, like Robin, I love the inclusion of Offworld. Go read! It’s a great resource, but it’s also a great way to see how blogging as a form is approached by those who live and breathe it. Oh, also, Joanne Mcneil (who has SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE FEEDS in her GReader! 749!) includes Snarkmarket which, as if you couldn’t guess, would be up in my top three fave blogs of the year (the other two probably being Slaughterhouse and Hilobrow).
The Happiness Project
Though I know there’s probably something a little simplistic and even juvenile about having ‘a favourite band’, if I were forced to pick one – just one band that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life without – it would have to be Do Make Say Think. While I suppose my predilection for postrock dates me a bit (it being a very ‘you were in your twenties at the start of the new millenium’ thing), I’m okay with that. So you can imagine how incredibly stoked I was to see them live for the first time this past weekend.
What was even more enjoyable though, was how surprisingly great the ‘opening act’ were. I say ‘opening act’ because The Happiness Project is just the name for an experimental project headed-up by DMST member Charles Spearin and populated with others from the band.
The project involved Spearin inviting his neighbours over and, as the name suggests, asking them about happiness and seeing what came up. Spearin then took both the melody and cadence of each person’s speech and, with the help of other Do Makes, created music from it. I know it sounds like it could be quite gimmicky – but it has really turned into something beautiful. Spearin has very carefully chosen which parts of the conversation to emphasise, perhaps most affectingly in the story of Vanessa, who was born deaf but had a cochlear implant put in at the age of 30. In describing the experience of learning to hear, she says “all of a sudden / I felt my body / moving inside”, which becomes one of the refrains of the song. It’s pretty astounding stuff. Below is a video from a show in Portland (and here’s another slightly more truncated one from the Music Gallery in Toronto, where you should really wait ’til the end). The album version of that track can be found here.
Sufi mystics often insist that the outward expulsion of breath is an assertion of the divine presence (you deconstructionists, shut up for a sec). It’s for this reason that so many Sufi singers insert a ‘hoo’ at the end of ‘Allah’, which you can see in action in here. I’m not, of course, bringing this up to suggest that The Happiness Project is divine. But this emphasis on both the musicality and sublimity of speech, particularly captured in these quiet, intimate moments between ordinary people – well, it’s a pleasure to behold. The album is available on both iTunes and eMusic.
Note 1: I’m quite used to rock shows. But the DMST show was LOUD – like, insanely so. There were moments of crescendo in which the music descended into a shrill roar, and it felt as if a wall of sound was breaking at the edge of my ears. I totally understand how the experience of being overwhelmed by something – of letting yourself just drown in sound – can be amazing.This, however, was way too much. My ears shouldn’t be ringing two days after a show.
Note 2: I absolutely and definitely have not developed any sort of harmless crush on DMST member Julie Penner – and anyone who tells you I have is a dirty rotten liar.
Bad Mufucker Pt. 2 (Brother Ali)
I’ve been listening to Christmas music for the half the evening because, well, Christmas is a time of the year I kinda’ love the cheese and camp of it all. But a song that contains the line “My nuts done swung / All around the planet / Where the fuck? / Y’all from”? It makes for a fitting antidote:
From US by Brother Ali (h/t to my pal Christian for introducing me to Brother Ali)
Polanski on Tumblr
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on December 11, 2009
Yes of course there’s a Polanski Tumblr. But it isn’t quite what you think. It’s just a series of pictures of scantily clad and naked (young) women in various poses of recline and objectification.
Returning to my central thesis: Tumblr as a cultural phenomenon is doing something weird and interesting and (I think) it’s crucial for us to understand – or at least discuss.
The thing that I’ve been arguing for some time is that Tumblr only works within the overdetermined glut of images that ‘define’ postmodernism. In this instance, you have a series of images that are either: a) artistic, erotic, arousing, or; b) grossly offensive and sexist – all operating under the shadow of a figure who is either: a) a man dedicated to art, or; b) a rapist who happens to make great art.
So it’s only through this pastiche-like (but not) presentation of images that any of this ‘makes sense’. At the same time, there is nothing that prevents this Tumblr from being read as soft-porn. That’s the point. There is no reference point and, while that’s a tired point about ‘postmodernism’, Tumblr is one of the most perfect forms for the expression of the idea.
So there you go. Visit the site. And on the first image you’ll feel very clever. And by the 12th a little creeped out. And that - that inextricability of desire, the image and a broader ideological context – is exactly what Tumblr brings to light.
The Future of Reading: Bookfuturism
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on December 11, 2009
As Tim says in this introductory post to Bookfuturism, there have been few spaces for people who are: a) interested in the future of reading; b) refuse to engage with either an overly conservative ‘books are the basis of humanity’ rhetoric or a ‘books are obsolete artifacts of the past’ one. This void is what Bookfuturism seeks to fill. As he suggests about this artificial, polemical battle between supporters of musty old books or flashy new screens:
They both LIKE arguing against the other. A more sophisticated point-of-view — which is also not just that of the distinterested critic, or the market watcher, or the tech insider — where is the space for that, really? Where is the community? Bookfuturists refuse to endorse either of these fantasies of “the end of the book” — what Jacques Derrida calls “the end as destruction” or “the end as telos or achievement.” We are trying to map an alternative position that is both more self-critical and more engaged with how technological change is actively affecting our culture.
While I don’t think I yet know enough or am articulate enough to contribute directly to the discussion, I know I’ll be reading and occasionally leaving some of my classically off-topic, rambling comments. What I’m most interested in these days is whether electronic reading will attempt to morph the form of the book for electronic purposes or if, instead, we’ll see that the book remains something attached to models of print and it’s notion of a text contained between two covers with an emphasis on narrative cohesion.
Anyway, exciting stuff! Looking forward to it. The home page of site is here.
