While Twitter is by many standards a runaway success, the one minor problem the service seems to have is, um, the seeming lack of a business plan. Today, Dan Farber of CNET (err, CBS|Net?) proposed a rather radical solution to this issue when he suggested that people should pay for Twitter. And while it sounds like I am being snarky, I am in fact not. Quite to the contrary, the concept that all users should pay for a service goes against the dominant idea that ‘free is better’, one espoused by many of the ‘weborati’ including Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly. And while it is common to have a paid premium service that offers additional features such as on Pownce or Flickr, as Farber notes, ‘free’ has become the startup model for at least developing a user-base.

There are practical reasons to admire Farber’s suggestion. First, as a paying customer, one could expect to have some recourse for the numerous outages and errors one currently experiences using Twitter; secondly, having a pay barrier does a lot to ensure a committed, active user-base - and indeed, many argue that this is why the level of discussion on metafilter (which requires a $5 signup fee) has never descended into the kind of stupidity you see on free sites like YouTube.

But another reason to at least consider a pay model for Twitter is that it places more choice in the hands of its users. Social networks are ostensibly about connecting with other people. In an ad-supported service such as Facebook, you pay for the platform and service through viewing ads. This model limits the choice you have as a consumer because you cannot determine where ‘your money’ goes. Instead, if you come upon an advert by a company you are ethically opposed to or learn that the company is funded (or funds) other companies or causes you disagree with, you have little choice but to continue using the service or to simply delete your account. But while this is a choice of sorts, your friends are using the service as are perhaps your business contacts and you, understandably, want to be there too. By basing the economics of a site on advertising, my capacity to ‘vote with my dollars’ is lessened considerably as I cannot actively choose what I support but, rather, have only two passive options available to me: support through viewing ads or not using the service at all.

Conversely, by paying a small user-fee, I actively support what I want to i.e. Twitter and the community I’ve developed there. That is not to say that the almost-coercive aspect of social networking disappears - i.e. when you don’t support a company’s politics or affiliations but you want to be in on what your friends are doing - but it is, in my opinion, a better option as it is creates a one-to-one relationship between a paying user and the company that provides the service. If you don’t like the service or the company, rather than quitting or begrudgingly using it , you don’t sign up in the first place. In contrast, in the ad-supported model, your only option in making sure that ‘your dollars’ are doing what you want them to is to keep daily track of what ads are being served and by whom - which isn’t really an option at all. None of which is to say that I actually want to pay for Twitter. And I’ll admit that the difference is quite small. But all individual’s actions in the face of large, well-funded companies are just that - small. If the only options available to me are viewing ads from oil companies who lobby against climate change legislation, or cosmetics manufacturers who work hard on making people feel bad about themselves - well then, I’d rather cough up $5 a month and at least know where my money is going.

Wax Scrawls is an occasional feature here on Scrawled in Wax where I link to things I hope you’ll find interesting. It probably goes without saying, but I usually can’t help throwing my opinion in as well. If you have any cool things you’d like to submit, please send them to navalang [at] gmail [dot] com .

We all know that book publishing is changing - the question is how and why. This post on Forbes argues that Amazon will revolutionize the distribution of books through ‘vertical integration’ i.e. becoming both publisher and retailer, bypassing traditional publishing houses entirely. Fine - but absolutely baffling is that there is no mention whatsoever of the Kindle or the much lower cost of entry and distribution to electronic publishing - which seems mind-bogglingly short-sighted.

In a solid, smart article, Stephen Marche takes lad magazines’ narrow defintion of female beauty to task. It’s clever stuff, particularly in its focus on how standards of beauty start to create expectations that real people can never live up to, turning dating into something like a game of approximation. What is really interesting though is watching Marche flounder a bit with language - when describing the range of what men find attractive he: a) only talks about women; b) uses the term ‘morbidly obese’ so that, even in an article discussing the range of female beauty, he returns to the continuum that values thinness more than its opposite. Oh, the choice of the Megan Fox picture is absolutely priceless.

I never thought I’d say this about a Sports Illustrated article, but this bit on tennis star Justine Henin’s retirement is remarkably poignant. When explaining why she was quitting - at the age of 25! - world No. 1 Henin simply suggests that the fire inside her had gone out. Know those clips in films when a character sees something thought-provoking, says “huh”, and then stares ahead thinking? That was me after I read this.

I don’t know what it is with me and interfaces, but this app for the iPhone that turns the touch-interface into a old-style rotary dial pad is so great I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.

My pal Matthew outlines why a movie based on the smart, sophisticated video game Bioshock is probably a bad idea.

And finally, my new music recs can be found here on my Muxtape. There, among others, you’ll find a beautiful track by Dirty Three, an absolutely banging one by Santogold and… a track by Ashlee Simpson. Yeah, yeah - blame Rex.

What do Freemasons and a group of ‘hot young white girls’ have to do with each other?

Ok first, a disclaimer: I’ve never sat through an entire episode of The Hills. I have watched parts of it and read articles about it. I’ve even written a post on Heidi Montag. But I’ve never watched a full show and, to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the arcs of the characters’ stories/lives are. So this is simply a theory, and if it’s wrong, I’ll trust you guys will not only call me out but also tell me why.

So. If you’ve never seen the Stonecutters episode of The Simpsons before, it is a nerd classic (secrets, an alien and Patrick Stewart, oh my!) that plays off the myths surrounding The Freemasons. The group has been the subject of many conspiracy theories (such as those in The Da Vinci Code) in which the Freemasons are accused of having secretly wielded power through the ages. This alleged subterfuge of influence was cleverly referenced in the Stonecutters song which, if nothing else, provides a plausible explanation for why Forrest Gump beat out Pulp Fiction for an Oscar. And while the episode was great for many reasons, to me a lot of the enjoyment came from the humorous depiction of what it might be like inside a secret society, one that Homer desperately wants to be a part of.

But if you think of the Stonecutters/Freemasons as symbols of power that are desirable not only for that power, but also secrecy and exclusivity, then I’ll also argue that the appeal of The Hills works in a similar way. First, if one were to make a list of the things that are desired in North American celebrities, the cast seems to have them all: youth; stereotypical attractiveness; wealth (sure they’re working their way up in their jobs, but they’re doing so on TV); success (ditto); and the ‘Californian lifestyle’.

Secondly, there’s a case to be made that the ‘hot young white women’ at the centre of The Hills are a symbol for how desire works on a cultural level - a society reproduces particular values and valued traits and represents those values in the public sphere i.e. TV, movies, music, the ‘net. Like a feedback loop, we absorb these representations and, while it isn’t as straightforward as simple indoctrination, they become a force that we must deal with in some fashion, whether acceptance, rejection or resignation. Thought of this way, The Hills becomes like a documentary on the Freemasons - an inside look into a world that ‘everyone wants to be a part of’ precisely because it depicts the power and cultural capital we desire. Of course, I don’t mean that literally but, rather, am instead suggesting that a ‘reality show’ about ‘hot young white women’ is a focal point for the relationship between public representations and who we privately want to be.

And something worth thinking about is whether or not this show would be as successful if it were about 3 or 4 attractive black women. I think the answer to that is clearly no. While that, like the tales of racist abuse on the Obama campaign trail, isn’t a particularly pleasant thing to have to say, it doesn’t make it less true. But if one does accept that race is a factor in the success of the show - that if it’s about presenting ideal norms and part of those norms is race - what it does it point to is that The Hills‘ success partly works through connecting with the things that “everyone wants”.

But if The Hills is ‘merely’ a sign for our collective cultural desire, then why the backlash? Why the disdain? Well, as I said, it’s not as simple as indoctrination. Instead, The Hills becomes a reference point for cultural debates over materialism, attractiveness, femininity and the general clusterfuck of issues and opinions that is contemporary North America. You can agree or disagree with the ideals and lifestyle of Lauren and Heidi, but what is much more difficult to do is ignore them entirely. And while this possibility of theorizing The Hills certainly isn’t unique - you can do the same to just about any cultural product - the fact that the show is so unabashed about its use of the ‘hot young white women’ symbol marks out an interesting twist, particularly if one thinks about ‘reality TV’ as easy to relate to because the people ‘are just like us’. Because in a sense that last statement may be truer for The Hills than any other show. Rather than representing our conscious aspirations for success and achievement like The Apprentice or Survivor, it instead represents our unconscious desires to witness what goes on in a world that we are not part of. Indeed, in its unreality, nobody is part of that world.

‘Course the real mindfuck would be if The Hills were revealed to be part of a Freemasons conspiracy to undermine our social system. I mean at least that, unlike the show, would be believable.

]]> http://scrawledinwax.com/2008/05/14/what-the-hills-and-the-stonecutters-have-in-common/feed/ Nav \ http://scrawledinwax.com/2008/05/13/twitter-narratives-and-identity/ http://scrawledinwax.com/2008/05/13/twitter-narratives-and-identity/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 19:35:41 +0000 Nav http://scrawledinwax.wordpress.com/?p=265

Trying to explain Twitter to the non-user has become something like the tech world’s Arthurian challenge, a seemingly impossible task that no-one is able to fully complete. And while I love Twitter, the moment I try and describe it to someone not immersed in web culture, I am suddenly struck by how ridiculous the whole thing seems: “You, umm, have 140 characters to, like, say what you’re doing or, err, say something smart or funny”. In my more intellectual moments, I try and describe it as ‘the rebirth of the Nietzschean aphorism’, but in both instances, I’m met with deservedly sceptical looks. Perhaps the best way I’ve heard this difficulty captured is that explaining Twitter is like explaining sex to a virgin - you don’t really ‘get it’ until you’ve done it - which, all things told, isn’t a bad way to think about things.

Of course, that’s not to say that there haven’t been good attempts at explaining Twitter. It’s just that Twitter is so nebulous, so multiple in its potential uses - social tool, news source, microblogging and so on ad infinitum - that it’s become to difficult to explain it in terms of specific functions rather than as a platform with open-ended possibilities. Yet, the one thing that people keep coming back to is, well, the fact that they keep coming back; for some reason, one that I’m not sure we’ve been able to fully figure out yet, Twitter is remarkably compelling. What is perhaps more surprising is that this happens despite it having many uses, some radically different in purpose.

But while the tech set are in love with Twitter - so much so, that some wish to declare it an essential service - the mainstream criticism of Twitter is often its seeming pointlessness, particularly when it shows just how narcissistic people can be. And while this is quite valid - many Twitterers have a habit of describing their most recent meals or worse - it is perhaps this very self-concern that is the reason for Twitter’s success. After all, one thing that Twitter does well is to provide a space into which one can ‘write an identity’ into a public arena. By ‘writing an identity’, I mean locating one’s sense of self ‘elsewhere’, in a virtual space that we can use to not only reflect what we are feeling, thinking and doing, but also the other way round: to invent ourselves through the act of writing.

And what is interesting about the service is the way in which it allows that collection of moments that are one’s ‘tweets’ to become a sort of narrative: if you want get a sense of what I’m thinking and what I’m doing - and in some sense, ‘who I am’ - simply go and read my Twitter. It is, of course, ‘artificial’, ‘limited’ and produced for public consumption. But as Diana Kimball notes, perhaps Twitter has become “the platform on which we’ve chosen to construct our artificial authentic selves”. If identity in the postmodern era has become fractured, ineffable, merely a set of shifting markers, the linking of Twitterers and their tweets is an opportunity to locate one’s identity at a ’site’, a semi-fixed point in relation to which one orients oneself. The persistence of Twitter - the fact that it is there when you are not - is what leads to a sort of presence for identity, a virtual space that works to produce you to others as you produce it. And in this sense of writing oneself, there’s something to the disjointed, microscopic nature of Twitter, the fact that it is only a collection of tiny snippets, that allows its users to piece together stories over time about themselves and those they follow.

But if one aspect of Twitter is its capacity to produce personal narratives, it is also interesting for the narratives of community that it creates. Take a look at anyone’s stream, whether internet celebrity or random user, and you will find a collection of anecdotes and thoughts from a group of people who, while they may have never met, form a sort of ‘community’. But unlike many other online communities that are formed around a common interest, Twitter is simply formed out of the common activity of Twittering. As such, the sorts of communities one finds are often centred around things like humour, tone, snark, geekiness or other traits that usually, by themselves, wouldn’t be enough to gather around. Indeed, what is often so fascinating about Twitter is precisely the communication with people who you wouldn’t normally talk to, whether that means a regular user like me connecting with Mathew Ingram or Molly Wood, or one of the thousands of discontinuous connections and friendships that happen when you stumble randomly across someone’s profile.

In both aspects - whether individual or community - Twitter functions as a sort of fixed point on an otherwise complex and constantly moving web. It is, like many ‘net tools, agnostic and therefore prey to not only the narcissism with which so many people associate Twitter, but also spam, sniping and an overwhelming amount of ‘noise’. But like other web tools, it is also redefining the boundaries of identity, creating a link between an online self and one’s real one, perhaps even blurring the line between the two. While the service itself is still suffering through growing pains and is still struggling with that minor issue of a business plan, it will certainly be interesting to see the stories that Twitter’s individuals and communities will continue to create.

Note: The image used here comes from this post on Consumerist.

Well folks, things actually went according to plan and, by some miracle, I somehow passed my exam. So now that I’m *cough* an ‘expert’ in literary theory (ha!) and I have some time to get to back to blogging, I just thought I’d give you a heads up of where you can expect to see this blog go and what changes are on their way:

1. Some growth. While I know this isn’t really that interesting to anyone but me, hopefully the upside of a larger readership will be not only more comments here but more conversation with other blogs and writers. And this is stupid, but I also just think it’s helpful write your goals down sometimes.
2. Responses to your comments. I sometimes slip in replying to your much-appreciated responses, so I hope to improve that aspect of Scrawled. If you leave a comment, you can be assured of a comment in kind.
3. More unabashed theorizing, ‘inspired’ by cultural/literary theory, but in ‘normal’ language. When you’re in academics, it often becomes hard not to always talk like… hm, what’s the right word? Oh right, a pretentious ass. So while I’m gonna’ stay away from unnecessarily opaque langauge, I do hope to do more ‘analysis’ on the cultural bases of things happening online, in gaming and in pop culture, using ‘theory’ as my perspective. I’ve always felt the problem with academia is that it’s one big circle-jerk in which academics only speak to their peers in a language that takes years to master - hopefully this blog can become my place to resist that.
4. Speaking of unabashed… I am, loosely speaking, a Marxist. If you wanted to get picky, I suppose you could say I’m a ‘post-Marxist’ i.e. while I don’t believe in a violent revolution, or even socialism as a form of government, I am: a) sceptical of late capitalism and the reduction of everything to a commodity or ‘content’; b) concerned with the always-fun topics of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism etc. While I’m not looking for a fight, I do intend to take these issues up, even if it does cause some people to roll their eyes. I say this because there seems to be a distinctly liberal-humanist tone to most Web 2.0/tech blogging, and some diversity in perspective certainly can’t hurt.
5. Last bit of unabashedness: I write about video games because I take them seriously. When I’m a bit more into GTA IV, you can expect to see some thoughts on fantasy and reality, identifying with one’s avatar and that minor problem of what (so far) seems like the game’s misogyny (and no I don’t mean ‘killing hookers’). If you think video games are dumb, childish and destructive, I hope that I might cause you to think about things differently.
6. More frequent posting. Next month, by which time I will have written 3 posts, I will be kicking myself for this one, but I’m aiming to increase the frequency of posting to a few times a week, up from the 1 or 2 post-a-week average I have now.

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of getting back into things and starting again (hence the pic of tulips from my front yard). I ‘ppreciate you reading this blog and (cheesiness alert!) I’ll be working hard to make it an enjoyable place to visit. Next up will be a post on the appeal of and ideas behind everyone’s favourite site/app/thingamajig, Twitter.

Well folks, this should have happened about a month ago, but… Scrawled in Wax will stop updating for a while. I know, I know - you can barely read this for the tears suddenly streaming down your face. You wonder: What shall I do? How will I survive? Be strong, dear reader, be strong. But I can just see it now: as you reach the end of this post, you shall fall on all fours, gnashing your teeth in anguish, screaming up at the sky while striking the ground, demanding to know “why God, why?”, the hollow pit of despair building in your gut like a black hole…

Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Anyway - there is a good reason for what will likely be a five or six week absence. I say ‘likely’ because part of doing a PhD is one’s comprehensive exams and I have one coming up on May 1st and 2nd. If all goes well, the blog will be back with its verbose, poorly thought-out analysis of tech, pop culture and gaming in early May. If I fail, this blog will never update again because, having received final confirmation that I’m not cut out for this academic thing, I will have left to travel the world with a special troupe of circus acrobats who care more about describing somersaults than actually doing them.

If for some reason you care, my upcoming exam is on Literary Theory and Criticism - it involves lots of the major western theory on literature from Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment and 18th century (Locke, Kant, Hegel etc.) onto Marxism and then a slew of 20th century schools like formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and, as if that weren’t enough, also feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Oh, for fun, there’s stuff like Heidegger and the Frankfurt school thrown in there as well. Naturally, if you know me personally or read this blog at all regularly, you know the point of this third paragraph was to elongate the phrase “I am fucked”.

If you feel like contributing something while I’m gone, then… I’ll be very very surprised. But when I get back, hopefully I can dust off this blog and make good on the modest growth it’s seen over the past few months (thanks mainly to a couple of links from Fimoculous). In the meantime, I’ll be probably be obsessively updating my Twitter and, if all gets too much for you, then remember: it’s navalang [at] gmail [dot] com.

We here at Scrawled in Wax appreciate your custom and look forward to serving you in the future… Heh. Seriously though, thanks for reading.

-Nav

As I walked home this evening, the winter sun disappearing behind rows of identical houses, I found myself listening to LCD Soundsystem’s “All of My Friends”. It is that rare, dying breed of a song that sometimes feels as if speaks directly to a generation, to a moment in history. What is most stark about the song - indeed, the reason it felt like a revelation to me when I heard it - is that it describes the thing that postmodernity was supposed to have rendered impossible: shared experience. But when LCD’s James Murphy sings of the drunken late-night adventures of twenty- and thirty-somethings, there was an instant connection for me. The bittersweet tale of finding peace in a future one never envisioned is something that I and many others have found themselves ruefully mulling as, at three in the morning, we realise our buzz is wearing off.

I was thinking all this, walking down a suburban street just north of Toronto. What is the shared experience of pop culture now that everything has become so fragmented, shattered into a million pieces? Even if one considers oneself ‘a media person’, simply checking out random Muxtapes will remind you that millions of people - people just like you - are listening to music you have never even heard of, let alone heard. When pushed, I have to admit: the common experience of “All of My Friends” is a chimera, a localised example, privy to a scattered set of disillusioned, educated child-adults like, well, me and ‘all of my friends’. The ‘meaning’ of the song (as if one could ever speak of such a thing) reveals itself in the random subjectivity of one’s reaction. Like the specificity at the core of “Stuff White People Like“, ‘common experience’ in the postmodern reveals itself to be only a comforting fiction, a way of feeling connected with something that, as it turns out, isn’t as ‘larger than us’ as we hoped.

It all seemed a rather fitting line of thought for the evening. As I returned home, a family member had lit candles in the kitchen. Through the windows that were, for once, naked and uncovered, we could see all the houses around stay dark as the sky became darker. And, like those who lived near us, we sat in the gloom, chatting, inevitably remembering the great blackout of 2003, quietly happy in the thought that we were part of something that millions of others were participating in too.

I was wary of the symbolic core of Earth Hour. I wondered whether it wouldn’t simply speak to those already concerned with sustainability, while it might simply pass by those who consider the problem an issue of marketing or hype rather than science or policy. But, to put the environmental issues aside for a moment, let me consider: what does it mean to feel connected in 2008? If the postmodern fracturing of popular culture has left commonality tattered and torn, then where is the immense power of the shared experience to be found? After all, there’s something in this feeling, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Whatever it is though, I can’t help but feel it’s important. But where it will come from next?

The answers are, I think, too long - and too complex - for even very clever individuals to answer. The common will be found in the collective, in, to deliberately take up a Web phrase, the wisdom of crowds. Earth Hour is only one example of this, and a tiny one at that too: when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, 30 million is only a spark - but perhaps it will be one that will lead to a larger flame. I think the internet will have something to do with it. I, despite my curmudgeonly ramblings, still believe this thing I spend so much time connected to will bear fruit that, to the current world, will seem gloriously utopian. I also think it’s possible that it is only catastrophe that now has the capacity to bring people together on the macro level. I guess I don’t know. All I’m really saying at the end of this is, in 2008, it’s hard to find what you and your neighbour have in common, as what we used to call culture has fragmented into innumerable pieces that cannot be put back together.

But tonight, as we sat in the pale yellow flicker of candelight, a simple idea pushed its way through the murky, postmodern mass. I think it would be regressive and dangerous to talk of a common humanity, of some universal core that we all share. We’ve heard those phrases before and we’ve seen how they went wrong. Still, something was there. Something besides the glow flickered. I suppose I don’t really have a name for it. But, if you’re reading this, then I will take on faith that you too have some sense of what I am gesturing towards. And that right there - that ineffable, nameless thing that we both point to - is, one hopes, a place to start.

Clearly then, I am obsessed with Muxtape. But sometimes obsessions are good things - or, perhaps more accurately, recognising obsessions as such is a good thing. The recognition reveals something, it peels back the layers to get at the desire at its root. So, I am obviously returning to think about Muxtape. But why? Well, I am curious about two things: 1) First, why did Muxtape explode so quickly? 2) And secondly, why did Muxtape seem to fill a void, as if people had just been waiting for it before they knew it was something they wanted? So, some thoughts.

1) Let’s skip the usual “breakneck speed of information on the internet” bit to explain Muxtape’s ‘meteoric rise’ (that’s a totally fresh phrase right?). More interesting is the potentially circular, enclosed logic of Muxtape’s instant popularity: tech/web types spend an awful lot of time in front of their computers, and are, perhaps tautologically, more likely to use the Web as a social tool. So, an application comes along that lets you: a) express who you are; b) do so using the the contemporary cultural marker for the the overlap of culture and technology, digital music; c) share and compare, boast and roast (yes, that second one is totally my phrase). It spreads and is instantly popular among people (like me) who spend their time sitting in front of computers, listening to music and using those two things to connect with other people and mark out their position within contemporary culture. Positive spin: we are the bleeding-edge, on the cusp of the lightning-quick exchange of units of culture as we blur and destroy lines of separation in both physical space and consciousness, engaging with culture on a profound level. Negative spin: geek-hipster circle jerk.

2) In the transition between analogue and digital, what happens when the change is not about media but a cultural artefact? This, to me, is worth thinking about. A given object in culture (like the mixtape) gains importance because of its exchange value - when I give you a mixtape, I hand over a piece of my identity, marked out by certain cultural signifiers that individually have a value that works in relation to the broader social context; you receive it as such, giving it value for those same reasons. So, in the digitization of the mixtape - and here I mean digitization of the form (the online mixtape) and not the content (the music) - what happens to the ‘value of the exchange’? Is it reduced? Or morphed in some fashion? Is sending someone a link to your Muxtape the same as handing them an object? What does this have to with the fetish of the cultural object? And how is the system of exchange disturbed/changed/ruptured by the change in - well? - spatial relations, aesthetics, speed that come with digitization?

3) How are we to think of a piece of technology simply ‘making sense’? Or, as I said, why did Muxtape seem to fill a need that it itself created? There would be two views on this: the positive one would be that new media technologies reveal new forms of connection and expression that work in symbiotic relation to the cultural shifts that they themselves engender. New media changes how people relate to art, each other and themselves. As those avenues of connection and culture change, new forms and modes of expression and interaction arise. Thus, to deliberately be a bit circular, Muxtape works because it is part of the systemic, social changes that create a need for things like Muxtape. The negative spin would be the Adorno/Jameson take - that this is a system that fragments culture and turns cultural expression into a mode of distraction and sublimation. For once though, I think I buy the positive spin here.

Yesterday, new mixtape app “Muxtape” spread through the tech set like wildfire. The site is brilliant in its simplicity and, like Dropbox and Instapaper before it, Muxtape works because it does one thing in an uncluttered, intuitive fashion. To my mind, this is how web applications should work: take a cultural form like the mixtape, with all its (flirtatious?) connotations, and translate it to the web in a way that just ‘makes sense’. The mixtape especially seems to work well because of its twofold nature: on the one hand, it is a sort of gift that you give to someone you like; and on the other, it is a creative thing says something about its maker. And aren’t creating and sharing what this whole Web 2.0 schtick is supposed to be about? This, I imagine, was the reason Muxtape exploded the way it did.

Of course, many were quick to point out that putting up music online to stream for free is rife with legal issues, and more than a few bloggers and twitterers suggested that Muxtape, as great as it is, will be taken down before it has a chance to take off or ‘monetize’. This seems like a reasonable, if unfortunate, prediction. With a culture currently obsessed with the enforcement of intellectual property laws, it seems unlikely that Muxtape will be able to continue without some major changes and/or licensing deals. Either way, the transparent nature of Muxtape - that it is an agnostic tool - seems to be both its blessing and its curse.

This question - of how copyright either enables or restricts cultural expression - is both ubiquitous and tricky. After all, in some sense ‘copyright versus culture’ is a false dichotomy: the ideas that underpin copyright law - ownership, private property, accreditation and individualism - are cultural linchpins as much as they are legal ones. But Muxtape’s intuitiveness, the simple fact that it ‘just works’ in both a technical and a cultural sense, renders the question in a somewhat different light. Though the disjunct between content providers and users is clear to anyone who has ever heard of DRM, to what extent does Muxtape highlight the contradictory, even antagonistic relationship between intellectual property laws and what people actually want to do with media and art?

Yes of course, people need to make money and anti-DRM, anti-IP-law arguments often focus on this economic aspect - that in order to re-grow the music biz and recapture customers, companies need to start opening up. But what if, rather than only hampering growth, the current approach to media is one that stifles both the expression of culture and its capacity to affect the current political-economic model? Using Muxtape, one immediately gets a sense of how it might disseminate - of blog badges that read “Listen to my Muxtape” or the creativity that will ensue from a sort of playlist mashup (like Rex’s mix of Madonna, M.I.A. and Scarlett Johansson) - and the way in which it will become a mode of cultural expression. And to me, creativity lies in refashioning existing art and media to produce something new and yet not-new, its significance stemming from its ability to simultaneously speak to both the past and the future. Muxtape and other mixtapes apps seem to do this on the level of both technology and culture, the analogue tape now scattering through cyberspace. That the fervour for copyright may crush yet another new cultural mode, a new way of relating to one another - even if it is microscopic and, taken in isolation, insignificant -  seems far sadder than the legal and economic hand-wringing.

Oh btw, my Muxtape is over there on the right hand side of the page.

Alternate Title: Why Sony have made Baudrillard the Go-To Philosopher for the ‘Net.

There are moments on the Web in which the speed at which information disseminates raises some very interesting questions about truth and power. Case in point… A couple of days ago, Sony announced that they were about to release new firmware for the Playstation 3 that would include some new features. This is a pretty regular occurrence and PC World, as they do, reported on the news. However, Peter Cohen, the writer of the article, made a mistake: he claimed that a particular feature - the ability to copy from a Blu-Ray disc to a portable device - was included in this update when it was in fact not. It was an easy error to make - Sony had mentioned something about copying media to a Playstation Portable and they themselves have said that the ability to make little portable copies of movies was a feature that was coming sometime in the future - so it’s not as if Cohen committed a cardinal sin. It was poor fact-checking and unfortunately it happens. (The article has since been updated and no trace of the original mistake remains).

What was fascinating though was the way in which this filtered and spread very quickly through the web. At its end point, when mainstream CNET blog Crave posted about the new firmware, they stated the following: “despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the update did not include the ability to copy portable versions of Blu-ray movies to the PSP”. There is, I think, a palpable sense of disappointment in both this and many other posts and comments. It isn’t at all new that a rumour flew around the web at breakneck speed; this happens all the time. What did strike me though was the way in which the dissemination of the rumour, the way in which was reproduced a thousand times, added to the weight behind it such that, when it was proved false, it was as if Sony were at fault for not including the feature.

When I first read the story on PC World, I knew it was a misunderstanding. When it had shown up twenty times in my RSS feeds, I started to wonder if they hadn’t gotten the inside scoop. The point - besides the now obvious fact that Baudrillard is the philosopher for the Web - is that the linear movement of a rumour sets up a situation in which falsity comes ‘before’ truth. Here, many are disappointed that something that was never promised did not materialise. What has happened is that the pace of the movement of information produces an expectation that, once not met, is read as an example of failure. While this has existed in the past in the form of rumour-mongering, the situation seems to be made exponentially worse by the pace of the ‘net, specifically in two ways: first, a mistake such as Cohen’s needs to only exist for a moment for it to spread like wildfire; and secondly, that this same speed may in part be a cause for the sort of poor fact-checking that was at the root of this minor misunderstanding. It’s a very specific, localised example, but it does make one wonder about how the multiplication and reproduction of a ‘fact’ can add weight to its ’sense of truth’ even when it is totally false. And while it makes little difference whether Sony included this feature or not, it is very hard not to think of ‘Swiftboating‘ or other political uses for this ’speed’.