Archive for category Electronic Reading
Questions about Russell Peters
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading, Immigration and Diaspora on November 29, 2011
I’ve never felt as ambivalent about a comic as I have Russell Peters. Mainly, I’m just unsure what his humour about accents and ethnicity really does. On the one hand, you have this sort of view, articulated by Professor Amardeep Singh:
At his best, Russell Peters airs out some intra-community dirty laundry. He plays with the mixture of embarrassment and pride that tends to circulate amongst members of various ethnic groups, especially immigrant ethnic groups. While many people might feel isolated within a particular ethnic niche, Russell Peters manages to draw people out, and create a certain amount of cross-ethnic solidarity.
But sometimes, I can’t help but think Peters never feels what Dave Chappelle must have felt looking at white people laughing at his jokes i.e. “wait, is this ‘laughing with’ or ‘laughing at’? This is creepy.”
I’ve never been sure if Peters’ humour works to undercut or reinforce prejudice. Or maybe it’s both? I have no idea. So, instead, here are some questions in the hopes someone could provide some clarity?
- What exactly is funny about accents? Why is it funny to hear otherwise, uh, “normal” (i.e. familiar) words pronounced in a different fashion?
- We’d probably get creeped out if a white comic were to imitate a “Chinese” accent – but we seem to be okay with Peters doing it. How come? Also, does that okayness work differently depending on who’s laughing?
- What are accents used to signify in humour? When Raj from Big Bang Theory does the classic “says a typical American phrase in an Indian accent” joke (“oh vow, that is awe-some, dood), we know that the humour works through the unexpected. But what does the fact that we don’t expect contemporary slang out of the mouth of an immigrant say/mean etc.?
- At what point does an accent go from being “haha, they don’t really get the language” (Indian, Chinese etc.) to “haha, their version of the language sounds really different from mine” (Scottish, Australian etc.)?
- Similarly, when does an accent go from being “different”, “bad” etc. to being desired or sexy? This is about more than race, too – Stephen Colbert consciously dropped his Southern accent because he felt it had become a marker of stupidity.
- Is there a difference between 2nd generation immigrants like Peters doing accents, versus a 1st gen immigrant like Papa CJ? Is this a “I was born here” vs. a “fresh off the boat” thing?
All I guess I’m saying is that I occasionally find myself creeped out by Peters’ humour. Isn’t it just reinforcing the dichotomy between normal and abnormal, native and foreigner? But, I often find myself laughing at it, too. Like, a lot. And how many times in my life have I used an Indian accent to crack a joke?
So… internalized racism? It’s just a joke, get over it, Nav? It’s a self-reflexive invocation of difference and therefore its inherent irony is a form of critique?
Help me out friends!
The Oscilloscope and the Datatext
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading on July 3, 2011
Repetition is a simple fact of life on social networks and news aggregators like Google Reader. Just a simple fact of life. Repetition is– Okay, I’ll stop.
It is true, though. Whether the latest news about Apple, the most recent viral video or a controversial news story, Twitter, Facebook and RSS readers light up with these links over and over again. Often, you feel as if this is most decidedly a bug and not a feature. Each day, quite literally 20 or 30 times, you read the same story or reaction, and it can occasionally be quite frustrating.
Of course, people are working on fixing this now. Both Summify and the still private Percolate aim to algorithmize (what? totally a word.) that repetition by reading what numerous people are sharing and linking to and then sending you a summary.
It’s a fun idea. After all, it turns that flood of information and repetition into a kind of oscilloscope. Insert your RSS and social feeds here and then read the resultant waves and spikes.
What appeals to me about the idea of this fictional oscilloscope is the numerous ways you could read the results. They’re what you might call a ‘datatext’: half data, half text. Like data, the waves of the ‘information oscilloscope’ lend themselves easily to reconfiguration, weird, oblique readings that catch patterns that others miss.
But like a text, it is a weaving together of narratives. The waves of repetition are a way of understanding symptoms, laying your social graph and choice of feeds upon a cool, firm leather couch and then watching the pulsations of the dreams, hopes and anxieties of your newly created social cyborg.
Repetition is a way of reading social thought and its pregnant psychoanalytic surges.
But if my information oscilloscope is imaginary, it itself betrays a much-repeated thought of mine: the ebb and flow of the social, connected web becomes a way to read the anxieties of the brains you have chosen to plug into.
Thought of this way, there is another response to the flood than consumption, digestion and analysis, a sentence that leaves ‘analysis’ in a rather unfortunate, if somewhat accurate, metaphorical position. It is sympathy. The oscilloscope is a way of reading the social-graph-as-datatext as an expression of hope and fear.
It’s Ernst Bloch plugged into the web. It is weaving human narratives from the faint traces of emotion we leave hovering around the edges of our words – the thump of what makes us shudder and sing laid out in clean green lines.
In Which Information Masters You
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading on April 22, 2011
So, over at Toronto Standard (when the swanky HTML5-tastic design gets sorted, I’ll introduce y’all for real) I wrote a piece called ‘Masters of Data‘ about our changing relationship to information. For regular SiW readers, I don’t think it’ll be radically new, but it was a fun thing to do. I was also fortunate enough to speak to some cool people for the article, including friend of Scrawled in Wax Joanne McNeil, who most of you are probably familiar with.
I’m okay with how the piece turned out, but as with any article, there were some things that I wanted to talk about that didn’t make it in. Foremost among them was that, talking to all these smart people about how they keep themselves well-informed, they all circled around to a similar idea: those who are really good sifting through tonnes of information are the people who do stuff with it. They don’t just read; they write. They’re journalists, bloggers, um… tumblr-ers – well, you get the idea. It’s these people who seem to have ‘mastered the flood’. And I was intrigued.
For some reason, I’ve always tended to express how I thought of this glut of stuff online in aquatic terms – the ocean, the flood, the torrent. Maybe because of this, I started to think of it like fishing. I know, bear with me. But it seems our prior model of information was a lone person, standing at the shore of a sea of knowledge. Since the advent of print, the paperback, libraries etc. we’ve had access to massive amounts of knowledge, but only a comparatively small amount of it at once. You could get fish, but you’d either have to make do with what you could reach from the shore, or rely on those with large fishing vessels of their own to bring you their catch. In this incredibly smart, nimble metaphor, those fishing vessels are editors or authors or interlocutors. I think.
But in this awful analogy, the web gives you your own boat. You still have the same limitations, though. Being human, you can only deal with so much at once. But you can also scoot around (yeah, I just typed ‘scoot’) from one spot to another much faster than you could before. If you want, you can strap on your diving gear and go deep down into something. But you can also ricochet from one spot to the next, only staying on the surface.
The sea of knowledge has always pre-existed and overwhelmed us. But before, our only choice was to accumulate knowledge standing at the shore, slowly adding to a storehouse as it got larger and larger. The idea was that gaining all this knowledge would provide you with the perspective you needed to understand the world and life. This is why being well-read was so key; it was only through plowing through many books that you could acquire the kind of scope and comparative basis needed to understand something like a modern political trend or social phenomenon.
I don’t think that part of things has changed. The people who I think are doing smart thinking are still those who have a background in ‘deep thought’. But it seems interesting that Joanne, Mathew and Noah – and lots more – all said that there’s something about being forced to reconfigure and re-present all that information we get online that really helps. What’s more, they all said those who write are not only good at filtering all that stuff, they’re also at a cultural advantage. These ‘masters’, as I’ve called them, have a skill that lets them get ahead.
There’s something here about what the web as a persistently accessible storehouse of information does to the idea of staying well-informed or being smart. We know that the need to memorize facts and figures is less important because they’re simply there in the persistent ether of human knowledge that, quite literally, floats by our head. But the very existence of that ‘always there network’ means that it’s almost as if being well-read has to become something like ‘being well-written’. Given an almost limitless amount of information and data, it’s those who reconfigure that information into new, unexpected assemblages that get ahead. You are no longer on the shore, producing linear narratives. No, our new relationship to epistemology can be summed up by saying that you, my friend, are on a boat.
Given the omnipresent accessibility of knowledge, data, facts, one’s task is still to make sense of it. But the change isn’t just the now cliched division between narrative and database – between linear chains of meaning and non-linear networks of information. It’s that knowledge has always been a non-linear network, shaped into recognizable forms by ideology and experientially presented to us in a generally linear narrative form. What the web changes is not how humans produce meaning – which will always inevitably on some level be narratival and textual – it’s that one’s position in relation to that network has changed, as has the capacity to witness ‘units’ of knowledge outside of familiar narratives of meaning. No longer on the shore, you sit both in and atop the ocean the knowledge, dipping in and out almost against your will.
In many ways, this inversion of position is analogous to many trends in 20th century ideas. Identity isn’t something inside you; it’s something outside that you step into (if ambivalently). You don’t choose ideology; ideology chooses you. And so it goes.
* * *
A couple of years ago, my friends Majero Bouman and Dunja Baus created a holographic poetry project for a symposium honouring professor Barbara Godard. Here’s the description:
“3 Words” is a 2×2.5 foot laser lit pulse hologram. It acts as a window frame onto a 4x4x4 foot scene of suspended letters in suggestive relation. As the “reader” moves his or her body across the frame to view different angles and elements of the scene, the letters move in parallax, at times obscuring one another, at times revealing phonetic and associative elements of their arrangement in space-time.
You would step up to a window through which you view the installation. And true enough, as you moved your head, you’d see different words and arrangements of letters that, put into a new context and new relation to each other, would evoke new ideas. By putting words and letters into a virtual three-dimensional space, you could, instead of putting letters together in linear chains, assemble then in ‘unintended’ ways.
I guess all I’m saying is this: what if, rather than just one window in a temporary art installation in a dance studio in Toronto, that holographic poem was all around us all the time?
Reading has always been an act of writing. But we’ve often experienced those moments as temporally singular and fleeting. Sitting in bed with a book, we produce our relation to a narrative in that strangely rhythmic emotional pulsation that occurs as each word we read slips into the past.
But presented with a never-ending overlapped network of narratives, an array of tabs, windows, flashing notifications from Tweetdeck, and chimes on one’s phone, the inherently inscriptive act of interpretation finds its manifestation in writings that are ever slightly less evanescent. Far from the profoundly odd temporal strangeness of reading alone, our relationship is not subject-to-book, productive and creative, but a reconfiguration. We gather things in Storify. We write blog posts full of links. We take apart the lego spaceship we just built and put it back together again, knowing quite well we mean for it not to be the same.
What do I think the web has done to our relationship to knowledge? I guess I think it’s made it three dimensional and rhizomatic in a way that is both immediate and materially ‘experiencable’. Knowledge has always potentially been that – it’s always been this set of relations you could reconfigure. But you had to literally or figuratively tear pages out of books and throw them into the air. The web just makes that process easier.
That Thing You Really Like is Dead
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on February 12, 2011
“X is dead” has become a common trope in the tech world. Whether it’s print, the blog or the album, to say something is dead has become shorthand for expressing some of the significant transitions of form or infrastructure engendered by all this fancy new tech.
Certain writers – like the intellectuo-sphere triumvirate of Madrigal, Carmody and Battles – deliberately stay clear of the term, and for good reason. Old forms and practices rarely die out completely – they just lessen in importance. Even if the newspaper or the printed book is ‘dead’, it’s not like those with an affinity for making them or reading them will, with absurd Simpsons-esque rashness, suddenly set fire to their printing presses. It’s just that their centrality to our day-to-day life will diminish.
More to the point, saying ‘x is dead’ also seems to support those who argue that our culture is being dumbed down. It grabs attention at the expense of nuance, turning an entire conversation amongst professionals into little more than supermarket-tabloid style journalism.
Still – in my limited time and scope as a ‘tech blogger’, I’ve noticed that my more successful posts are the ones with the inflammatory headlines. But though my choice of headline is, of course, partly motivated by a narcissistic desire to have ‘people read my stuff’, I’m starting to wonder if the incendiary nature of blog rhetoric and headlines isn’t about the cultural functioning of the web.
I’m wondering this because, as I’ve argued before, I’m starting to see a great deal of overlap between Walter Ong’s analysis of oral cultures and the web.
Part of this has to do with the superficial similarity between networks and oral culture. Twitter, for example, is remarkably ‘oral-like’: when you tweet, you frequently enter into an ongoing conversation rather than generate one with an assumed reader; it is highly communal, and resistant to domination by one individual or even idea, much like the homeostatic nature of oral cultures.
But another aspect of orality Ong highlights is agonism: the deliberately confrontational nature of oral expression rooted in conflict.
Ong’s reasoning for this is, at times, not very good, as he talks about how oral-only cultures are more connected to the human lifeworld than written ones. To which I say: “bleh” – and I think Derrida agrees with me. Once your relationship to the world is bound up in language, it’s… well, bound up in language. The spoken word is, at least in the abstract, no closer to thing it refers to than the written one.
But if one accepts that there are some similarities between the way an oral-only culture and Twitter or blog conversations culture, maybe there is still some use to the idea.
Ong argues:
…[O]rality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs, and riddles are not sued simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or contradictory one. Bragging about one’s own prowess and/or verbal tongue-lashings of an opponent figure regularly in encounters between between characters in narrative: in the Iliad, in Beowulf, throughout Medieval European romance…
[...]
Violence in oral art forms is also connected to the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high-both attractions and, even more, antagonisms
If we assume that relationships of ideas on blogs are ongoing conversations that, in some way, have an oral character, then maybe histrionic, hyperbolic headlines – “WHY THE PRINTED BOOK IS DEAD FOREVER!” – make a bit more sense. After all, the attempt to grab attention may not just be crass commercialism, but a kind of repeated trope expressed in order to initiate discussion.
In a sense, this is what makes someone ‘good at Twitter’. No-one can really express brilliant, complex ideas in under 140 characters. But what Twitter can do well (and blogs do in an expanded sense) is to encourage an agonistic conversation in which hyperbole forms both the peaks and anchors of a dynamic, ongoing, many-voiced conversation. It is not so much titles like “x is dead” destroy nuance as much as they form firm, centralized nodes in an otherwise messy, unstable mass of ideas. What theorists and theories are to modern thought – “I guess the post-structuralist response to this would be…” – pithy, over-the-top headlines are to the modern blogosphere: a kind of shorthand for those who are already in the know.
Much of this has to do with the difference between what you might call a ‘logocentrism of print’ vs. the rhizomatic nature of the web. To crassly express an idea like “Print is dead” on paper seems simplistic because the printed article or book should stand alone as an independent argument. As much as you are able to express about an idea should be contained in the space of the page, or article or book, and it should, like all good written works, function in the absence of its author.
The web page or social media conversation as they currently exist resist such ‘independence’. Because they, in terms of their material experience, lend themselves more immediately to being one part of the always-already multiple, the hyperbolic headline isn’t meant to stand alone as much as it is meant to stand out. Drawing you in, you then read the rest of a post or engage with those ideas in the comments/Twitter window etc. Agonism is an anchor on a medium that refuses to sit still.
Of course, newer developments like Readability or Instapaper suggest that the capacity for a kind of experience of text as singular, independent etc. are not alien to the screen; they are, instead, more likely a function of the relationship between screens and networks on the web.
Whether or not this tendency toward agonism helps or hinders ‘a dumbing down’ remains to be seen. But, as an example, the recent flurry of activity around the revolution in Egypt provided more than a few over-the-top headlines. The aggregate content of the discussion, however, doesn’t have seemed to suffer for it; quite to the contrary, merely witnessing the heated argument online provided one with far more perspective and insight than most print readers could have ever dreamed of.
A Chrome Frame
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, newspapers on December 7, 2010
Okay, so I just realised that the newly unveiled Chrome Web Store – that in the future will form the basis of ChromeOS notebooks – can be tried out now simply using the Chrome browser.
And, after briefly toying around with it, I’m thinking wowowowowow. I like it. A lot.
First, apps are all done in HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Last week, at more than one conference, I heard unending talk about how hard it is for news and media organizations to develop apps for various platforms. Any serious entity has to now at least make something for iOS, Android and Blackberry, to make no mention of the possible need for WinPho7 and WebOS – in addition to their web and print offerings . But if you can just make the whole thing a web app, then why not?
(I’m aware this isn’t strictly related to the Chrome Web Store, but it certainly shows the potential of how great these kinds of apps can be.)
But more to the point, I really like the emphasis on web/screen/touch focused design. The NYT and Salon apps both use the grid approach, which is so much cleaner and easier to approach than either of those publications’ websites. I’d argue that if you look at the homepage of the Times or the Globe and Mail, they still feel like the front page of a newspaper: a mass of content thrown at you, organized into blocks and columns, and encouraging you to click on stories from various sections.
It’s the mentality of paper, transferred to the web because it assumes that your attention is constrained by the aesthetic object ‘the newspaper’. But it isn’t at all. How many of us, after reading one or two stories at one site, click away to another – often because of the very information contained in the stories we read.
The grid does something else. If newspapers or books focus attention because of some kind of unity of materiality and form that results in ‘the newspaper’ or ‘the book’ – “I am now reading the newspaper” in the singular – then the grid or other screen-focused designs focus this through screen-based aesthetics.
I know I’ve mentioned this five-hundred times, but I keep coming back to Robin’s assertion that the web, in its most open form (i.e. the browser, stock HTML, text etc.) is bad at frames. It’s bad at producing an experiential frame for delimiting the experience of content when the medium itself, by its nature, veers toward the limitless and unbounded. This is what the iPad is great at, and this what Chrome apps (and web apps in general) seem to be aiming for: the circumscription of attention through the creation of new aesthetic forms.
Yeah, I dig this a lot.
Edit: I should add that when I talk about ‘the grid’, I also mean the way these sites react when you click on a story: they often then take up the full screen, without any clutter around them. I guess this is what I mean when I talk about ‘designed with the screen in mind’. It also seems like an interface crying out for a tablet, but Google seem pretty set on the idea that this is for netbooks and Android is for tablets. To me, that’s a mistake.
What’s At Stake When Indie Bookstores Fade?
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading, Literature, web culture on June 24, 2010
Courtesy of Flickr user erikheidstra
In what seems an all too familiar scenario, the Toronto Twitter-literati (Twiliterati?) are buzzing about the potential closure of yet another indie bookstore. People are bummed, and yet mobilizing. But beyond the usual empathy for those who may lose their livelihoods, it seems many are also sad to see what feels like another sign of the decline of independent publishing – and perhaps ‘book culture’ too.
Whether or not this is true – if in fact it’s harder to publish now; that less books are published; or that less people read today – is a discussion for another day. For now, the right question to ask seems to be this: what do we lose or gain if and when the indie bookstore becomes a thing of the past?
The benefit of the indie bookstore is – or perhaps was – very much about the ‘indie’ part of its name: it carried books you wouldn’t find at your local Chapters or Borders because they would sell too few copies to be economically viable to those large chains. That advantage has, of course, since evaporated. Though the economic benefits of the long tail may be up for debate, it’s clear that it’s often easier and cheaper for most people to find an obscure book online than schlep one’s way to a small bookstore.
But moreover, when Pages, perhaps the most prominent Toronto indie bookstore, closed earlier this year, it was clear that people weren’t simply sad about the loss of a place to buy books. Rather, it was that Pages was also a focal point for literary culture, deeply invested in both the book as an idea but also as genuine part of people’s lives. Pages ran reading series and supported both independent authors and presses to an impressive degree. To lose it wasn’t just about a bookstore; it was about a losing a home for books in a big, techno-friendly city.
But at the same time, the shutdown of these stores and the ensuing reaction also reveals the centrality of ‘the shop’ and ‘commerce’ to book culture. Without these stores, the community of independent presses and their readers – the people who, to deliberately invoke a mostly false dichotomy, read literature rather than romance novels, poetry rather than gossip blogs – have no place to meet.
To try and position this as some kind of marker of the inherent capitalist corruption of ‘like everything man’ would, of course, be naive. The indie bookstore forms an important node in the economic network that sustains independent publishing, providing a distribution point for a variety of small, often economically tenuous presses, while quite literally forming a physical place for aggregating both financial and cultural transactions that support ‘the industry’. This is the simple materiality of, well, everything.
But if the small book shop had two advantages – a specialized inventory and a dedicated community that it both relied upon and nurtured – and we know one is gone for certain, then are what the options in the face of an economic and possibly cultural inevitably?
Well, I have two suggestions, both of which are probably completely naive and idiotic. But stupid ideas are what the internet is for. So:
- The standalone indie bookstore ends in favour of the indie bookstore-slash-coffee shop/bar/clothing store/dry cleaner/dog grooming salon/whatever. I know, I know – but this is the new media shtick, right? When the marginal cost of something falls to zero – or people just start buying from elsewhere or not at all – you produce a new revenue stream by encouraging spending on once peripheral things. If the indie bookstore’s specialization is no longer a unique value, it seems that its capacity to foster a community of readers still is. So, in some sense, I mean ‘coffee shop’ or ‘bar’ somewhat metaphorically; all I’m saying is give people a reason to gather that also produces a new, supplementary revenue stream.
- ‘Course, if that now-hackneyed idea fails, there is always this: the increased cultural import of the library – not just as a place for kids to study or old people to learn how to use Google, but as a place that serves as a cultural home for literacy and literature. The benefit here is that you have a space that does not, in explicit terms anyway, run by strictly capitalist principles of supply & demand. Author readings, book sales etc. could be motivated less by market reactions and ‘saleable ideas’ than literary innovation (which, one hopes, will also sometimes be about form rather than simply content).
Naturally, this is partly motivated by my enjoyment of drinking various beverages with literary types (’cause apparently, I don’t do that enough?). But it seems that even if, through the rise of the web and ebooks, reading itself becomes less attached to the physical, it stands to reason that communities of readers are less likely to become equally ‘immaterial’.
We need a place to hang out, right?
Richard Nash: “Novels Break Algorithms”
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Writing and Prose on April 17, 2010
As Richard Nash points out on his blog, this is “the speech Chris Anderson of Wired says is the best he’s ever seen on book publishing…”
Nash, who was kind enough to once leave a couple of comments here, spends about half-an-hour talking about the future of book publishing at an event at Toronto’s Mars Centre.
It’s interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it rather forcefully argues that people will be reading more and not less, so much so, that supply is no longer the problem in the publishing world – it’s demand.
It also contains the strangely reassuring phrase “novels break algorithms”, an idea I think appeals to our sense that there is something ‘beyond’ about art that exists somehow above or separately from both pop culture and technology.
It really is excellent, and if you’re interested in what will happen to ‘the book’, it’s well worth the time. The video itself is just Richard standing at a podium speaking , so you can just put it on and listen to while doing something else.
(Sorta’ related: for reasons I can’t quite figure out, this post I wrote a couple of days ago on the economics of scarcity vs. the economics of abundance got a lot traction).
iCan Think Beyond This
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading on January 29, 2010
Perhaps it’s just me, but I think that Apple keynotes and the buzz that surrounds them are: a) a strangely pleasing (and increasingly rare) collective experience; b) among the most fascinating cultural moments of the contemporary age. The breathless excitement, the hyperbolic, histrionic reactions, good and bad, the desire, the lust, the defensive need to deride – GOD! – the sheer mad rush of it all. It fascinates me and has for a long time.
That said, I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that, after the dust settles, the reactions that follow these kinds of events can often feel stale and tired. While I agree that there is always cause for skepticism when a corporation launches new products, ones we may or may not need, at the same time, we have recently seen companies introduce what almost amount to new cultural forms – or, at the very least, new cultural containers. To react to these events solely from leftist wariness, a resistanc rooted in ludditism or a strictly market-based perspective – well, more than anything, it just feels disappointing. Narrow. The status-quo.
Fortunately, for every ‘my moleskine is good enough’ tweet and Blodget-esque post on sales projections, there are people writing who, to me anyway, have a decidedly broader, more intriguing perspective. And interestingly, what some have focused on isn’t so much the possibility afforded by the iPad itself, as the potential for newness in a touchscreen tablet, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, that you can hold in your hand like a book, magazine, slate or sketchpad. It’s this simple physicality (but not just that) that seems most promising.
First up (and, for this blog, most predictably) is Snarkmarketeer Robin, who I sorta’-but-not-really prodded to respond to the iPad. He gave just the kind of answer I expected – and I mean that with all the admiration I usually direct his way. And I think where it ends is most interesting, because what Sloan demands is that new forms create new content:
For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.
Jeez, if only we had a frame. [...]
In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub version of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple succeeded at inventing a new class of device… but we failed at inventing a new class of content.
In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art.
Joanne at Tomorrow Museum adds to this notion by suggesting that the limitations of the iPad that are being used to condemn it elsewhere are, in fact, a benefit.
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. [...]
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
[Emphasis mine]
Now, what Shirky says is true: part of the web’s grand potential lies in the fact that the former consumers of media are now producers of media. But the tablet produces a space in which one can read and watch and listen without the constant, jittery potential to react immediately. And it’s not that one wants to do away with that; our laptops and desktops are still here. There’s still a benefit to that kind of immediacy and ebb & flow. It’s that something like the iPad creates a form that, at least at this point, seems to allow for a greater emphasis on aesthetics, whether that’s language, the visual, the aural, or some combination we haven’t envisioned yet.
But though we can’t quite envision everything that tablets and touchscreens will one day do, I’ll end with some good guesses that rethink the place of both frequency and print.
But of course, as for my take on the notion of the tablet?… Briefly:
- Networks are the future – and networks are composed of nodes. But the fun part is that the malleability of a touch-screen interface means that a tablet can be a node for a variety of different networks: a home theater system; a collaborative art project; a museum guide; a new kind of concert experience – anything, really. The adaptability of a screen that you can touch and manipulate means that a tablet is, rather than a new product like a TV or a radio, is instead part of the blank infrastructure waiting to be filled with ideas.
- My most recent post was very clunky and vague, but what I wondered there was how forms may change not so much in response to material shifts, but in a changing relation to structures of knowledge – perhaps even the idea of structures of knowledge themselves. So I still wonder what the truly ‘interactive’ magazine that seems well-suited to the tablet will look like if, for example, the magazine is no longer for ‘telling you about the world’.
- Terribly anecdotal and personal, but I’m still excited about the iPad specifically for the same reason I was when the rumours first surfaced: it’s the perfect thing for my 71 year old Dad. While there are good reasons to decry Apple’s closed system, there’s something to be said for the computer that is just a consumer electronic device that anyone can use. Sure it’s limited and no Flash is just dumb; but I could email my Dad things to read; he could watch YouTube clips of Qawwalis; or obsess over Google Maps by looking at the layout of Punjab or the hill stations he grew up in. That seems ideal, particularly if part of the forward movement of tech is expanding its reach to groups that may otherwise be excluded (though no, I’m not insane, and the irony isn’t lost on me: I totally agree with Anil’s point that Apple “explicitly don’t give a shit about poor people”)
Magazines as Machines
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading on January 26, 2010
How will the cultural function of the magazine change as the magazine as a cultural artefact changes?
Recently, Tim Maly twittered a link to an older post on experiments in the conception of the magazine. Near the beginning of the post is the caption “we broke your businesses. now we want your machines”. This seems as good a place to start as any.
The argument, unsurprisingly, is that if the business model of print undergoing change, then the next logical step is that the web will claim and then reshape the means of production. It’s not that the web really wants the machines of print. It that it wants to invent new ones.
I’m not sure what I was drinking on that particular day, but this mention of ‘machines’ made me immediately jump to how philosophers Deleuze and Guattari used the word. One of D&G’s big ideas was that binary, dualistic thinking meant we frequently see objects and ideas as distinct and separate rather than considering them in light of all the other things that go into both making and sustaining their existence. The machine is an assemblage of numerous parts that all work together and so, to D&G, it worked as a good metaphor to reconsider the interconnectedness of stuff, of how physical and social relations all worked interdependently.
Magazines are a pretty good example of this. Think about it for a sec and you’ll see that there are variety of things that went into the magazine arriving at your front door. The paper the magazine is printed on comes from a huge network of forests and pulping and refinenement.The equipment used to print magazines is itself composed of materials – steel, aluminium, rubber, plastic – which all have huge industries behind them. The trucks or trains or planes the magazine was distributed on are connected to huge networks of infrastructure, whether roads, the electrical system, the petroleum industry or airports. One could go on forever. A magazine is simply one node in a massive network that has no beginning and no end.
But it isn’t just these material networks that sustain the printed magazine; there are cultural machines too. If ‘culture’ is a way of describing the relations between people and the world they inhabit, then the magazine as an artefact performs a kind of cultural function because culture demands it. The magazine works to both constitute reality in a certain way (this here is an article that will tell you something about the world and that is a good thing) but is also itself constituted by cultural forces (we need a form to tell us about the world that is more contemporary than a book but deeper and more rigorous than a newspaper).
Of course, both the material and the cultural networks that sustain magazines are changing. And in that matrix – which in my mind looks like a much bigger version of those molecule diagrams in textbooks – the magazine is but one node sustained by all the other things. And as those other things start to change – to twist and pull and morph into the new things, or simply cease to be – then the magazine is also stretched and pulled, forcing it to change too.
On ‘the material side’, the very fact of the web means a change in relations of distribution, economics etc. This we know. But what about information and opinion i.e. culture? After all, in much the same way that we flip through newspapers and news sites to appraise ourselves of what is going on in the world, we often turn to magazines to make sense of that world in a broader and more comprehensive sense. We also look to magazines to delve into our own specialised interests.
One can imagine that the latter of these two cultural functions might remain much the same. It isn’t hard to envision Car and Driver or Wallpaper in tablet form; in fact, their reliance on photo and video mean they seem perfectly suited to the Jesus slate and other related products.
But what of ‘making sense’? If the magazine performs a cultural function because of how it fits into a cultural network that periodically requires that someone step back and ‘take stock’ – what will change about that?
‘Cause right now, it seems we still often wait for magazines to proclaim their opinions, even on ‘matters internet’; just as recently as last month, certain parts of the web exploded after NYMag put out a story on the the warm and fuzzy web. Here was a voice from a place of authority – the magazine – speaking about the new. And that isn’t just prejudice; there are a variety of material and cultural machines in place that result in making it difficult to speak at the level of magazine. With all those barriers in place, with all those matrix-al paths to traverse, the magazine still speaks loudly because it takes a lot to have one’s voice heard. If all those trees must be cut, all those salaries must be paid, then you better damn well have something to say if you are to write in one. That overlap of culture and economics means that the really good ideas, the really thought-provoking stuff, only appears there – or at least seems that way.
But anyone who exists in the world of Snarmarkets, Quiet Babylons, 3quarksdailys and a million other sites know that the magazine is no longer the only place to get the good stuff. You can, if you so choose, be drenched in so much smart, brilliant stuff, you may feel compelled to never write again. If the magazine, bound between two covers, was once the place for either specialised interests or in-depth thinking about the now, it is no longer the only vehicle for that – and it doesn’t quite seem like the best one either.
So, on the cusp of a historical moment, we are left with a brilliantly optimistic question: what is the magazine?
Because, sure, it may just fade into metpahor, becoming a way of structuring media organisations that perform a loosely similar function online. To me, though, that seems less hopeful. What if, rather, as the social relations to information and opinion change, the magazine becomes, say, a locus of real-time debate, one in which conversation beween smart people becomes a live-for-it’s-not-really-tv spectator sport? Or what if the magazine becomes a curated collection of videos – maybe like Ryeberg; but maybe like Tumblr, where the scattered images are gathered under nothing more than a leading title.
What if the thing we have turned to make sense of our world – to broaden ourselves, to edify ourselves, to ground our perspectives – changes so that, instead being the thing that marks out our place in the world by telling us about it, become the mechanism through which we establish our relationship to the world by doing away with editorial voice? That the screen of the tablet would no longer just metpahorically be a window to the world because you could climb through it and run around?
What if magazines were no longer the thing we wanted to ‘say something’ but, rather, the space through which we spoke ourselves into being?
This is all ludicrously and frustratingly vague, but I’m having trouble seeing past the horizon of form. But what if that lack of answers is precisely what the new machines demand?
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).
