Free Stuff!*

Douglas McLennan, of the excellent ArtsJournal daily web digest of outstanding cultural writing, has a new blog called diacritical. In its inaugural post, he waxes on the business model of giving away stuff. Supported by successful giver-awayers such as Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin, McLennan suggests that obscurity is worse than death, and that a free model is cool because on the web it doesn't cost anything to produce. The model that McLennan is leaning towards can be summarized as "give away free stuff to raise your profile, so when you actually sell stuff/apply for a grant, you'll be known and get money then."

I have mixed feelings about this. It seems like a good strategy on the surface, but neither Doctorow nor Godin have been exactly obscure for awhile now. There seems to be this pervasive philosophy online that if you offer something for free, they will come. But if that were true across the boards, every blog writer would be a SUPERSTAR. Lifestyle writer Penelope Trunk puts it well in her post Reality Check: You Are Not Going to Make Money From Your Blog. Ouch.

What about the wisdom of the markets, if a product is good they will come, yadda yadda? I can't seem to refer to this post on cumulative advantage theory, and how decisions are based on more than perceived 'quality' and price, but popularity. So, all you aspiring creative sorts, give stuff away, but don't quit your day job quite yet.

* yes, incredibly, I give away free access to my blog. :)

Workplace 2.0

On his blog "Dog Days", Delouge Smith makes an interesting proposal:

I'm wondering how Boal's ideas for the spectator becoming part of the creative process can be applied to the institutions where most Americans spend their time and have their community. I'm thinking of corporate work environments...The vulnerability we live with in middle and lower income society is generally less vicious and violent than when our ancestors were creating the middle class, but it's still real. Boal worked to give vulnerable people a mechanism for using their voice. It seems to me working people meet this criteria.

I'm down with that. Any of us who still have jobs have to keep our noses clean and our mouths mostly zipped and pray that we don't get the evil eye.

But this is the problem. It's the problem in the workplace, and in schools, and in any other institution which still adheres to a hierarchical system of checks and balances. I agree that an artist-in-residence would be a very interesting process. But then, who is able to handle the truth? Who really wants to hear it? And how much of our current situation is based on office politics?

There's a disturbing story on GQ about Donald Rumsfeld and his creepy, messianic, Christian-flavoered daily updates to GWB during the early days of the Iraq War. Nut job, or simply a man giving his boss what he wanted/"managing up"?

The New Tyranny has Just Friended You

I LOVE THIS ARTICLE! (and yes, I'm shouting). I want to share the love with you, now. The author, James Harkin, has written a comprehensive review of the complexities of cybernetics -- a cringe-inducing word, to be sure, but why? Because the web allows us ever closer to Norbert Wiener's dream of a continuous feedback loop between man, machine and information:

By laying a vast electronic information loop between all of us, we ...put millions of ordinary people back in touch with each other as online peers, thus stretching everything perfectly flat and leaderless – and leaving bureaucracies and hierarchies, without any means of controlling information, to collapse of their own volition.

Yay, no more hierarchy! Yippee! Storm the gates!

But wait...can we revisit Obama's recent online 'town hall', with its pungent stink of the funky weed? "Lost in the bowels of the White House’s website and unsure of how to make their presence felt, most of the nearly four million voters had simply chosen to “buzz up” the questions of the dope-smokers who had arrived just before them", says Harkin.

This references an a study on cumulative advantage theory I flagged earlier. Basically, it's a lemming effect of site visitors voting for something already deemed as popular. In the town hall case, a pot legalization special interest group NORML got its members to pump up the numbers on the pot questions. "Are the workings of an online auction site an appropriate model for a mature democracy?" asks Harkin. "Just like any other medium, the net has biases which pull our behaviour in peculiar ways. At its worst, making decisions on the net tends towards a self-reinforcing populism, which binds everyone together in an electronic chain gang."

Likely not, but too many hopeful eyes are raised in adoration of the seemingly public process of internet information loops. And if you rub your eyes and look at it more closely, one can see the outlines of a potentially NOT flat (a la Friedman), oppressive regime. And here we are back again at Tocqueville's nineteenth century tyranny of the majority tract.

the ides of spring

Back post-vacation, and I'm not finding that much has happened mediawise in the interim. : ( But Jane Remer has posted an interesting blog entry on the lack of evidence between arts education and impact:

Even the wonderfully simple 'habits of mind' (which are not exclusive to the arts at all) that my serious colleagues Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner recently identified in their on-going arts research at Project Zero are now being paraded on stage by arts enthusiasts as "proof" of the omnipotential power of the arts to ....well, you fill in the blanks*.

Interesting, yes, and a bit sad for this art lover who sees creative production moving in two equally dispiriting directions: mimickry or commercially inspired production for the masses, and more thoughtful, original art for an elite few. While I see the value in mashups, fan fiction, cosplay and the overall creative universe of fandom, it seems that in such setups, there is a corporate puppetmaster in the background already adhering to particular memes around established mainstream narratives.

Remer concludes her post by calling for art teachers to infuse arts education with meaning, transcending the perceptions that art is mere play. Really, a wonderful post. I highly recommend you check it out.



* In the interest of full disclosure, Winner and Hetland are colleagues of mine at Project Zero, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Architecture yokes us ever closer

I love this. Wired has a visual history of office organization, ending with a design for the 'networked' workplace. "Since the dawn of the white-collar age, office designs have cycled through competing demands: openness versus privacy, interaction versus autonomy." The burgeoning, networked, collaborative, collective intelligence flavor of the contemporary workplace features four-person pods, the edges defined by curved walls.

I dunno. Some people work better alone. Where will those people sit in this new arrangement? Or is collective intelligence the newest repressive regime? I say this as a person who shares her office with a p/t person, and I sit closest to the window. And it's glorious.

Another Volley in the War On Games

Shoot'em up vide games may be good for eyesight, shouts the provocative headline:

Tests before and after showed that the contrast perception of both groups improved. But the action-game group showed 43 per cent improvement on average, compared with just 11 per cent in the other group. The effect persisted for months, even when people didn't play games at all.

I think that's cool, but I have a few questions /comments about the study:

• The study group numbered a robust ... thirteen participants. Lucky thirteen.


• Participants either played "some type of action video game" like Unreal Tournament, or played "a more sedate game" like the Sims. What did they actually play?


• And speaking of good protocol, did they cross-test with, say, an action movie?


• Any monitor variations? Resolution variations? Just sayin'.


• Any unintended consequences?


• The study focused on amblyopia sufferers, or "lazy eye", which affects 3% of the population.

I'm all for an open dialogue on video games, but shoddy-ass research like this should be treated with a high dose of skepticism. Or maybe it's just shoddy reporting, it's hard to tell. New Scientist, I'm watching you...

Hi, I'm "Miley" "Cyrus"!

During the election season, "Fake Sarah Palin's" observations provided laughs and an ironic look at a sudden American superstar. When a furor erupted over Palin's shopping spree, FSP wrote "I know who planted fancy clothes in my closet now, ppl. CINDY YOU ARE GOIN' DOWN, PALIN STYLE". And during the actual election, after Pennsylvania's electoral votes were announced for Obama, there was this: "I was going to name my next kid Pennsylvania but screw you guys5:45 PM Nov 4th, 2008 from mobile web".

But you knew it was fake. It was quite clear that this was not the real Sarah Palin. But what of Twitterers who postfaux celebrity Twitter feeds? This article is about the twitterer 'cwalken'. His profile features a picture of the actor Christopher Walken, and his tweets speak of celebrity and drip of Walken's trademark irony. Other posters twitter under fictional personas, with Don Draper, Betty Draper and Peggy Olson of the AMC hit seriesMad Men sharing their thoughts online.

Why the inclination to twitter under a celebrity name? Is it because the 140 character limit invovles its own kind of stilted syntax, making it difficult to distinguish the real from the faux? Is this not so different from assuming the persona of a fictional character?

But there is a real Christopher Walken. I can also imagine that the writers of Mad Men may not be too thrilled should the Twitter manifestations start behaving out of character, participatory culture be damned.