Borat and Truthiness

I know, I'm well behind the Borat juggernaut here. So let's consider this a historical re-examination of Sasha Baron-Cohen's often hilarious and disturbing movie that follows the sweet, racist and sexist journalist from Khazakstan as his "documentary" turns into the pursuit of American bombshell Pamela Sue Anderson.

The NPR show "Fresh Air" rebroadcast an interview with Baron-Cohen yesterday. I don't know about you, but something about Borat didn't sit well with me. Sure, I laughed. It was very funny. But as for reflecting the American psyche, I'm not so sure. My first reaction was that Borat the character, and not the American people, was the character who emerged looking more like a jerk than anything. Get a load of those uptight people who get upset when Borat brings a sack of shit to the dinner table, and hires a black prostitute to show up! Frankly, if I was from Khazakstan, I'd be more than a little insulted.

In yesterday's interview with Sasha-Cohen, he recounted a skit where Borat visited an Arizona redneck bar and regaled them with that traditional Khazak ditty "Throw the Jew Down the Well." That bar patrons sang along with the refrain was supposed to demonstrate what cheery anti-Semites they were. And admittedly some probably were.

But I was waiting for Terry Gross -- or anyone! -- to ask this question: can't the audience play along, too? Why is it that Sasha-Cohen as Borat gets the privilege of pretending, and no one else does? If you don't directly address Borat's Jew-bating, Sasha-Cohen implies, you're part of the problem. But maybe the bar patrons, besides being drunk, were just humoring this crazy foreigner and his outlandish behavior. There are also unwritten codes of behavior in America which discourage us from sticking our necks out too far, for better or for worse.

But to consider Borat a reflection of America is not fair, or accurate, to any meaningful extent. At this point, we start to devolve into well-tread terrority of the culture wars, of redneck vs. urbanite, liberal vs. conservative, Christian vs. Jew, etc.

Rise of the Amateurs

Panic and euphoria abound when addressing the new participatory culture we swim in -- cellphones, iPods, YouTube, EtcCetera. Clever Newsweek columist Steven Levy gets to have it both ways. In his article "The Invasion of the Web Amateurs", he ostensibly is reviewing a book by Andrew Keen. Andrew Keen is not a fan of the new Web 2.0 model of "upload everything":

March 26, 2007 issue - Andrew Keen is not surprised at the latest twist in the ongoing saga of Wikipedia. In his view, the entire Internet movement involving "collective intelligence," "citizen journalism" and "the wisdom of crowds" is a cultural meltdown, an instance of barbarians at civilization's gates. He considers Wikipedia, the popular Internet-based encyclopedia written and vetted by anyone who cares to contribute, as no more reliable than the output of a million monkeys banging away at their typewriters, and says as much in his upcoming poison-pen letter to Web 2.0, "The Cult of the Amateur" (due from Currency/Doubleday in June).

Well, to be fair, the metaphor of a million monkeys on typewriters can be read two ways: Yes,it may take wading through a million dreadful monkey-produced manuscripts in order to find the next Ulysses, but then, they'll be the next Ulysses, which would be cool. Keen, as one might suspect, is not so keen on Wikipedia, with its half-truths and outright lies, either, never mind creative pursuits.

Levy then outs himself as pro-amateur:

Just as the printing press was disruptive in its time, the ubiquity of the Net and the cheap tools that give voice to anyone—whether talented or not—has kicked off a period of creative ferment. The optimists among us believe that the cream will rise to the top; Keen speaks for the pessimists who believe that the bloviators will drive out the investigative journalists, craigslist will shoot down the newspapers and an army of half-witted YouTubers may block the ascent of the next Alfred Hitchcock.

The thing is, both men are right. The overwhelming amount of information now available cries out for some kind of gatekeeper so all of us don't have to wade through all that monkey dung. Do you have the time for that? I don't. I watch YouTube clips that are forwarded to me, and that's about it. However, what's the harm in having odes of silly, poorly produced movies with hammy acting online? I won't watch them (well, probably not), but maybe the producer's friends will. Didn't we want to get kids off drugs and all that? Give them a camera and let them have some fun. Levy mentions that the 'cream of the crop will rise to the top.' I think a lot depends on what you define as 'cream'. Mine is different than my mothers, which is different from a 17 year old boys. Let's look at the crossover success of American Idols, and tell me about the wisdom of crowds with speed dial again...

Neither men, however, distinguish between fact and fiction. Goofball YouTube creations don't pretend to be anything but; Wikipedia is supposed to be a resource of knowledge. What's the point of promoting an unreliable source of knowledge? God knows there's enough of that online, anyway. Is Wikipedia really a performance piece? Cuz it's a lousy encyclopedia.

On Multitasking, again (and again)

A recent article in the New York Times cites a mountain of evidence cautioning against multitasking. In case you're wondering where they stand on the topic, these pictures that accompanied the article illustrate it succinctly: multitasking in the big city is going to get you hit by a car:

In an earlier blog post, I cite Microsoft's 'Multitasking Summit', where the practice is increasingly seen as a hindrance, not an aid, to productivity. Now the neuroscientists are lining up with the computer scientists:

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

I was hanging out with a friend today as he played the piano, sightreading from sheet music. And it occured to me: he was in fact doing two tasks at once, reading two lines of musical scoring. How long has this type of multitasking been going on?!

Admittedly, Rick hasn't been playing piano in traffic lately, and if the discussions are about public safety, there's little to object to. But to claim that doing two things at once is detrimental is missing the nuances of multitasking. A person can't multitask if the tasks are unfamiliar to them; more focus is required. As for sightreading sheet music, my friend said that the more he practices, the more he recognizes certain note patterns and signals, and the more quickly he can react to them.

How are 'tasks' being defined? Is 'playing piano' a single task? Is driving? Juggling? And which is more dangerous, a multitasker on a bike in Times Square, or a novice trying to cross Broadway? Rather than focus on the number of tasks, perhaps researchers should examine the sense of mastery growing around certain ones, and makes people confident enough to drive, dial, and slurp coffee simultaneouly. If the problem is that we *think* we have mastered a given task when we actually have not... overconfidence is neither caused by technology nor cured by it. Except when that ominous 'sad Mac' icon, with Xs for eyes, appears one day on your screen.

Art in Isolation

I was talking to an artist friend of mine the other day who was railing about the whole notion of juxtaposition. When he displays his custom glasswork in a gallery, it is a serious point of consideration to the curator what piece(s) are nearby. One can see not wanting a red piece next to a green piece next to another red piece lest the whole affair shimmer like a outseason Yuletide display.

When you visit a museum or gallery, there is the notion of sequentiality, of positioning, of composing a narrative through thoughtfully placed pieces. Most museums divide their holdings into different sections, delineated by period ("Romantic"; "Modern"), and take care to make sure larger pieces don't overwhelm smaller, subtler ones. One question is why don't they arrange displays according to color, shape, etc., like they do in retail.

Another question is what happens to the constructed narrative when a museum's holdings is scanned into a searchable database which allows the viewer to find a certain piece and view in in isolation from its carefully-selected neighbors. Are works meant to be viewed in isolation, like my friend thinks they ought to, free from the corrupting influences of similar pieces? Does it make sense for them to mingle with works by other artists at all? Or is it idealistic to imagine any work of art presented free from some kind of context, even if it is a petite, collapsible HTML frame online? Can art ever exist in a vacuum, and should it?

The Book: Early Multimedia

I love reading books. And magazine articles, websites, the back of the toothpaste tube and, frankly, anything that's not moving away from me at a fast clip. That I read ingredient lists and that small type explaining who the film's caterer is probably more of a testament to a need for near-constant stimulation; that is, if one can consider the production notes in the New Yorker stimulating.

But do I read the whole book, the whole magazine article? Not on your life. Hey, I'm really busy reading all sorts of ephemera! And as it turns out, the habit of grazing media consumption is not a new one. Even the venerable old book has readers who don't respect its charms. A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed lays to waste the notion that book reading is a wholly different practice than less hallowed forms of reading:

An all too predictable moralism surrounds the reading of books. There is a prescribed way of reading: one page at a time, starting from the front of the book to the back, paying close attention to every single page in order, no skipping around. But the reality is that most of us graze — read a bit, put the book down, start up again. We may pay more attention to one part than another, skim boring parts, and even (heaven forfend) leap over long, dull tracts. Some very strange people even admit to reading the end of a book before the beginning, which is sort of like eating dessert before dinner.

These are fighting words, coming from an academy insider; I look forward to the next edition of the letters page. The author, Lennard J. Davis, economically lays to waste lingering myths about the sanctity of the book. Let's face it, how often do we read an entire book? No, an entire book? I recently read Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses, a classic much improved in my eyes as I sped through some pretty boring exposition there in the middle. Other books are picked up and put down after the second chapter. Hey, I gave them a fighting chance. Still others I read a long time ago (Mary Stewart's fantasy line) and don't remember a thing about them, not even their titles. And just as you can skim over books, you can find well-turned prose online.

There is certainly something to be said for the artistry of well-turned prose. And I'll gladly read it -- I recently devoured The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon, captivating in both style and substance. That kind of outstanding writing is also available exclusively online, on writer's websites and in personal journals. So let's look at books for what they are -- printed texts that users engage with in a variety of ways, from reading only the chapter summaries (a grad school trick) to ingesting the whole blessed thing to walking away after the first boring exposition.

The Quick Six Year Portrait

An article in today's New York Times focuses on digital self portraits, a term that doesn't reflect the dynamism of the practice in question. The article profiles Noah Kalina, a photographer who snapped a picture of himself every day for six years, and then strung the images together sequentially, tacked on a piano track and then posted the production to YouTube. Six years of Mr. Kalina flips past; backgrounds shift, hairstyles morph from longer to short to unkept again, but his wide brown eyes stay fixated, unblinking, on you the viewer.

Kalina was not the pioneer of the "moving snapshot", however. That honor goes to Ahree Lee; her film "me", constructed out of hundreds of shot taken between 2001 and 2004, made an immediate impact when it was initially launched August 8, 2006 on AtomFilms (me.atomfilms.com) and on YouTube, where it has recorded over 3 million hits. Lee's film is more artfully constructed than Kalina's -- her background remains consistant, and she reports that she took great pains to align the eyes as she constructed her composite. Her film forces the viewer to look at the woman, while in Kaline's version the eye wanders to take in the background information as well.

Some celebrate this new mode of expression; others dismiss it as a parlor trick a way to salvage images that, on their own, aren't particularly interesting or well-composed:

Richard Benson, a photographer, printer and professor of photography at Yale University since 1979, called them “a complete waste of time.”

“They are people who don’t know what they are doing and who celebrate themselves,” Mr. Benson said. “I find it completely boring.”

Others find the work compelling and a creative expression of new modes of visual production.

But [some] say such views may reflect generational insecurity, prompted by the old-guard notion that good work that isn’t laborious isn’t worth much. Mr. Kalina’s “everyday” is a dramatic challenge to those conventions...because it breaks barriers, has helped to establish a new form of portraiture and sets a new standard of audience interest.

Videos Games as Cultural Artifact

An article in the March 12th edition of the New York Times calls attention to the work of Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University. Dr. Lowood's claim to fame is that he started archiving video games way back in 1998. At last week's Game Developers Conference in SF, he announced that colleagues from Stanford University, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois would be compiling a canon of definitive video games:

“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”

Whatever your relationship with digital media -- games, websites, even early cellphones and cameras -- it is important for us as a culture to preserve them, and be able to draw a line from there to here, to plot the evolution of genres and platforms as a reflection of our culture, and of ourselves. I am a proud history geek, and enjoy browsing the dark, scary depths of the Internet Archive. Thrill to the days of yesteryear's websites, when the background color defaulted to the saddest grey of them all, hex #333333! Recoil in horror at the overuse of the dreaded blink tag! Marvel at how, in the days before CSS, designers inserted objects in tables to approximate some semblance of layout!

But I digress. Wondering which games made the cut as canon-worthy by the Stanford consortium?

Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

The Wired City

The LA Times today had a feature on Mayor Villaraigosa's plans to wire the metropolis for WiFi access. LA joins other cities such as Houston, SF, Boston, Tampa, FL and Philadelphia in announcing ambitious plans for univeral access available everywhere within city borders. The utopian vision is that

In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.

In the not-so-sunny scenario, there are some problematic storm clouds on the horizon:

* All these people plugged into into some external media appliance as they do whatever people do in the city are less likely, not more likely, to engage with their environment. Just take a look at how the Walkman and cellphones, relatively low attention devices, impact relations by blocking out incidental contact with strangers. Which, admittedly, is part of their appeal, but they don't extend the public sphere rather than hijack it.

* Access, part one. In the article, the author Christopher Hawthorne points out that a partnership between LA and wireless carriers is sure to benefit the wireless carriers more than the citizens of the city. That's yet to be determined, but be sure that the corporations will get their share, and then some.

* Access, part two. How many city residents own portable devices, and where do they primarily live? Cellphones are the clear winner for devices, though clumsy to use for internet access. Given the limited access capabilities of the more ubiquitous personal devices, what will this universal WiFi be used for? Looking for a local restaurant? Quick IMs back and forth?

* Hawthorne warns of the emergence of a two-tiered WiFi system:

But free wireless service doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't afford a laptop [or a phone - mw]. And the structure of the plans that have been taking shape in other cities suggests that ours may not match the populism of the press-conference talking points. The service in Houston may cost as much as $21.95 per month (with possible discounts for low-income residents). San Francisco may offer parallel services, a subscription plan from EarthLink and a slower, free alternative from Google loaded with targeted advertising.

* Will local businesses be able to throw off the shackles of their current internet provider and capitalize on universal access? Would they want to? And should businesses benefit from what is positioned as a public utility, or pay extra for the amount of bandwidth they'd surely gobble up?

That sounds quite a bit like the digital equivalent of a highway system split between private toll roads and sluggish public freeways. And it raises the question of how precisely to measure civic progress as nearly every corner of city life undergoes commercialization. If you put a drinking fountain on every corner but allow a private company to charge for each sip, even if it's only a few pennies, can you really make a case that you're improving access to clean water?

In that sense, what rings most hollow is the claim from the mayor and his allies that universal wireless is designed primarily to help the city's electronic have-nots.

So while wiring America's cities is inevitable, this is a good time to reflect on how these systems will operate, who will benefit and who will pay.

Extreme Panic, CT edition

An Associated Press story this morning headlined "Bill would require social networks to verify users' age." You know the story --

The bill came a day after a man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for using MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old Connecticut girl. It was one of the first federal sex cases involving the popular site.

The Connecticut Attorney General claimed that

"The technology is available. The solution is financially feasible, practically doable," he said. "If we can put a man on the moon, we can check ages of people on these websites."

OK, adults arranging sexual encounters with 11 year old girls is illegal, and predatory. Blech. It would probably make sense if online age verification actually verified something. But putting a man on the moon was a piece of cake versus the overwhelming privacy and data issues around verifying a user's age. NASA did not have to gain access to millions of Americans' social security number. Let's thank our lucky stars that the troubling notion of a national ID card seems to have fallen by the wayside.

But the only thing that an age check would do is eliminate the illegal part of the equation, while leaving the predatory intact. There are individuals with some serious issues who are 46, 36, 26, and even 16 years old; a troubled teen (a too-polite euphemism) murdered a random classmate in the school bathroom. (The perpetrator was a big fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower comic books, so prepare yourself for another around of the negative media effects debate.)

When I was a young thing, it was all about not taking candy from strangers or telling someone on the phone that we were home alone. Thank goodness some wise AG did not put restrictions on my telelphone use and candy consumption.

The Future of Media Professionals

I am so sorry. I somehow allowed World Book Day, which was celebrated March 3, to pass by unnoticed. Not everyone was so forgetful, though: the Guardian UK commemorated the day with an op-ed piece by Stephen Page, president of the Publishers Association, on the continuing relevance of editors in the increasingly digital, producer to consumer pipeline "long tail" model which is the dream made possible by new media. Today, MediaShift's Mark Glaser has a similar piece where he ponders the fate of the professional photographer in an era of Flickr:

Journalism instructor Mark Hamilton says that photojournalists overestimate their ability to shoot breaking news, but that they do have a place in an evolving photojournalism field.

“Photojournalists do something a lot of us can’t — immerse themselves in lives and issues and bring back images that are not only true and touching but, in the best cases, iconic,” he wrote. “Maybe if the citizens are willing to shoot the easy stuff, our photogs can be freed up to do the difficult, essential storytelling.”

Both the Guardian and MediaShift articles share the fundamental idea that media professionals will still exist in the future because they will excel at discrimination, that being the good kind of discrimination -- the work of assessing the astounding amount of information available to the average consumer, and selecting the best. From the Guardian:

There is much in The Long Tail that is exciting for publishers and writers. But there are aspects to the argument that I don't buy, particularly the transforming nature of the age of abundance. Already people are time-poor, and our battle as publishers is to identify the best writers and then win them a readership. This is tireless work made harder by the rising monoculture...It seems clear that the age of abundance has already given way to the age of attention, in which the two key attributes of successful publishing businesses will be expertise in how to catch people's attention online and developing brand identities that reassure consumers that the information, culture or entertainment they are buying comes from a reliable source.

This kind of work is detailed and difficult, and will require a committed investment of time and resources across the range of titles published, plus a strong and authentic brand that will at times be identified beyond the writer.

There also seems to be agreement from the supporters of a bottom-up system to not expect too much from the glut of material currently being produced by amateur auteurs. MIT's Henry Jenkins, who sees the emergence of a participatory culture in all quarters, explains his enthusiasm for student production in a blog post entitled "In Defense of Crud":

We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don't do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create.

I agree with Jenkins on the value of the process versus the product, but does that mean that there should be no distinctions between this amateur practice and the work of professionals? It's as though every pottery shop is crammed full of these lopsided pots when one might just want to buy something half decent.

Photo of the Year

I wanted to share with everyone this year's astonishing Photo of the Year selected by World Press Photo:


The caption that ran with this photo on Getty Images read, "Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood Aug. 15, 2006, in southern Beirut, Lebanon." The image was initially condemned as a loathesome case of "war tourism" -- four babes in a red convertible thrilling to the horror and destruction of a neighborhood torn apart by violence. The red convertible is outstanding, a shock of color in an otherwise banal palette. The women are attractive, and are being chauffered about by a young man.

Or so it seems. Credit goes to NPR's "Day by Day" program for its outstanding interview with Spencer Platt, the image's photographer. Platt, a veteran war photographer, shared the real story behind the images with listeners. The women were actually former residents of that particular block. They'd borrowed a friend's car to drive back to their old haunting grounds. The clothes the women are wearing, far from being chic, were also borrowed from friends.

So while an image can be worth a thousand words, an image taken out of context is in effect mute. It is telling, too, that the judgments passed on this photo speak more of the viewers than it does of the image.

Ad Rant: Stacy's(tm) Pita Chips

In the March 5th print edition of The New Yorker, there is a full-page ad for Stacy's Pita Chips, along with a small eight-page booklet of cartoons. One, not too many snack food companies spring for full-page ads in The New Yorker, the Bible for Americans educated in the Upper Middle Class style. I flipped through some back issues, and nary an ad for Tostitos or even Smart Food was to be seen. How far the bourgeoise has fallen. What's next, pairing video games with the opera? Hurumph.

Two, I was annoyed with the attendent booklet, which features unfunny cartoons in the New Yorker style, except while New Yorker cartoons can be regularly obtuse and often unfunny, many of them, more than one out of eight, say, are actually pretty funny. How do these tickle your funny bone? A man on a therapy couch is told by his therapist "Relax -- your recurring dreams of Stacy's® Pita Chips are completely normal." Or how about this gut-buster? An older woman offers a cracker to her parrot, who retorts, "Polly wants Stacy's® Parmesan Garlic & Herb Pita Chip." I know what you're thinking: A ha ha ha ha!

I'm not sure which is more annoying, the constant use of the ® symbol, a jolting reminder that this is corporate shilling, or the horrid unfunniness of the cartoons, which beg to be taken ironically if only to make any sense out of their existence.

Three, the full-page ad itself was a straightforward shot of a living room couch and bookcase, with Stacy® on the couch holding a bag of chips. Only thing is, everything was photographic except for Stacy® herself. This sent me into an epistemological spiral -- which is more real, the (real) bag of chips, or the illustrated woman who allegedly created them?

Being a glutton for punishment or an irrepressible optimist, I clicked on the web site. It's a very flashy Flash number, with bags of bouncing chips. It's designed to resemble a day planner, with side tabs on 'recipe tips', 'talk to us', etc. I don't know about you, but nothing says 'good times' like a day planner. Defaulting to the glutton for punishment position, I clicked on the recipe generator, selected 'acorn squash' as an ingredient,and got the following recipe:

Jazzed Up Acorn Squash

Ingredients:

* 1 acorn squash
* 2 apples, cored and sliced
* 1/2 cup cranberries
* 1 tablespoon butter
* 2 tablespoons brown sugar
* 1 tablespoon walnuts, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
* drizzle of maple syrup
*

Instructions:

Slice acorn squash in half and remove seeds. Microwave squash for 10-15 minutes on high power and let cool. Scoop squash into a large microwave-safe bowl, add apples and cranberries. Top with pieces of butter. Sprinkle with brown sugar, walnuts, salt, nuts and cinnamon. Cover with plastic wrap, then poke a few holes thru the top for ventilation. Cook in the microwave for 71/2 minutes on high power. Remove, uncover, and stir. Return to the microwave, and cook for another 7 1/2 minutes on high power until tender. Serve hot with a dollop of maple syrup. Serve with Stacy's® Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips to scoop. Also try: Simply Naked™ or Multigrain Pita Chips.

See any ingredient absent from the ingredient list? This is how the game is played. Pretty much any recipe can be served with pita chips.

I know that there are companies that are doing a much better job integrating hip media representations into their advertising. For all its efforts, Stacy's® is still treating new media much like the old, as a top-down distribution system that panders to the audience and shuts out authentic fandom.