~ on media engagement, by Margaret Weigel

Age Advisories Branch Out

2010-12-31T06:29:00.000-08:00

Specifically, with respect to Nintendo's new 3DS gaming system. What, is it too violent? Feature sexy urban strumpets? Advocate puppy drowning?

No. Well, maybe; puppies and strumpets aren't called out. But the advisory Nintendo issued is related to the 3D form of the game, and not its content:

The handheld gaming system displays games in 3D without the need for special glasses. Games can be played in regular 2D — an option that should be used for young children whose eyes are still developing, according to an advisory posted on Nintendo's Japanese-language website.

A Google translation of the advisory suggests adults protect young players by setting a code to block the 3D function, a view that "has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes."

Also, this:

In April, television manufacturer Samsung Electronics Canada issued a warning to children and pregnant women to be careful if they start to feel dizzy when watching its 3D television.

Nintendo thoughtful equips its handheld system with a 2D option, beneficial not only for the under-6 crowd but for those with lazy eye or no patience with 3D machinations. Older players engaging with all three dimensions are instructed to take a break every half an hour or so. I can just see it now... a tween sets an egg timer and allows himself 30 rip roaring minutes of 3D immersive gameplay. Mmmmm.

To be fair, the handhelds may be less immersive than the larger screen versions, which the company will be touting at the upcoming E3 trade show. I can see it now... dizzy pregnant gamers grasping for handrails before falling... the ensuing lawsuits and murder charges...

Happy new year, everyone!

Edward Boches gives me a headache

2010-12-21T15:14:00.000-08:00

... but he's annoyed me enough that I'm blogging about it, so that's something.

For those uncool enough to know already, Edward Boches is the Creative Director of Mullen, a large ad agency in Boston. He is probably a nice guy, but what I suspect explains why he is the head of Creative at Mullen and I'm not is a combination of anatomy, timing, background, and dumb luck. I'm not sure how else to explain some of the rubbish he shares on Twitter.

Today's dump was the following:

The 30 percent rule: innovation calls for 20-somethings: Always make sure that 30 percent of the people involved... http://bit.ly/g0UCm4 about 2 hours ago via twitterfeed

Where do I start? How about ageism. Depending on who you hire, they could just as easily be as conservative and small-minded as the average person on the street. My research with changes in high school students over time suggests that they are in fact less intellectually daring than earlier generations.(As I say this, I'm holding my nose from the stink of generalizing about an entire generation. But if we're talking cohorts, let's talk.) Today's students tend to operate with a close eye on praticality, the bottom line, and pleasing the Boss Man. So if Boches is in the market for a fresh cluster of toadies, by all means, why stop at 30% twenty somethings? Why not all?

Another factor is the gruesome reality that employers such as Mullen can easily pay these twentysomethings a factor or two less than more experienced personnel. What happens when Toadie #3 turns 30? Will he want a raise? Will he advance? Or will he be chucked to the curb to decompose along with the rest of the aged?

How about that 'freshness of perspective'? That's a great idea -- sorta -- hiring your own in-house group of naives. But why do they have to be in their twenties? Why not hire someone new to advertising who's forty? Sixty? Fifteen? Again, the refresh rate here is rather brutal to anyone looking to build an actual career.

Finally (I'm running out of my head of steam), the best team is predicated by what you're selling. I don't really expect twentysomethings to relate to the Geritol set. And let's not forget, I predict a serious run on designer adult diapers as the baby boomers continue to grey out. Does that audience respond to the "ask/tell" mentality of their grandchildren? Did they 'get' the Old Spice Man (being old and all)?

All to say that Ed Boches just reconfirms that advertising is no longer a thoughtful, creative enterprise but one in which the decision makers perpetually seek to clone themselves with younger versions, and to come up with the hippest, trendiest gimmick at any given moment. Sigh.

Wikileaks and Privacy

2010-12-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

Wilileaks' disclosure of hundreds of documents related to US diplomacy is rightfully generating a lot of discussion. Was this an attack on US government policies? Was this a necessary act to promote greater transparency and accountability in government?

Most everyone has an opinion on Wikileaks, so here's mine. It's a bit like the actions of the pro-gay group in the 1980s/1990s that would forcibly 'out' closeted gay celebrities (Richard Chamberlain comes to mind). In a sense, American foreign policy has been similarly outed without its consent by an organization that supports greater transparency.

Whether you think that outing is a constructive practice or not -- and there are good arguments on both sides -- this episode begs the larger question of privacy. This looms large over the Internet, with today's youth espousing 'authenticity and transparency' but while still engaging in the same time-honored roleplaying practices of their parents. The declaration of transparency, in fact, seems to be part of the game today.

Who isn't for honesty, right? But there are gradations of honesty: the "that shirt you had on yesterday was really great" variation versus the "today's shirt is really hideous" one. No individual or organization is wholly transparent -- whose who claim they are can be identified as dishonest very quickly. : ) And I can't say that I approve of Wikileaks outing US government tactics.

Perhaps this incident will lead to greater governmental disclosure and openness in its dealings. Or maybe it will spur low-tech approaches to information exchange. In this insightful piece by Umberto Eco, he observes technology moving, "crab-like", in a backwards motion. As for the future of diplomacy:

I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe.

The unbearable lightness of Groupon promo copy

2010-12-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Groupon. Though not the only, or even the best, example of promoting consumer discounts through collective buying, Groupon remains a Big Kid on the Block.

But am I the only one who skims through the opening gambit every day? Some examples of some recent cringeworthy copy:

Multitasking makes both activities more enjoyable, as demonstrated by the popularity of eating in the shower and bird watching while regretting a chosen career path.

Despite outnumbering the enemy by large serving portions, General Custard's cupcake army proved no match against the rogue sweet teeth and difficult terrain of Candy Mountain.

Much like Ted Williams and Barbaro, yogurt is full of so much greatness that it must be frozen so it can be shared with future generations.

Who, exactly, is the audience for these saucy nonsequiteurs? They seem to try to tread a fine line between ironic and playful. For me, it's like the person at the party who's doing a crazy little dance to get your attention, and then when he's got it and you look closer, it turns out that he's a pretty normal guy. Or ad pitch, as the case may be. Why the initial jumping? Why the playful language that immediately is discarded?

Maybe pitch writing duties are divvied up per sentence. John, you write the body of the pitch. Sarah, you make sure all the information is correct. And the first sentence will be handled by Nweobaseroiu.

I'm baaaaaaaack!

2010-11-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

I'm in the midst of experimenting switching this blog over to Wordpress; there is so much you can do with a WP blog, all manners of fun add-ons and widgets and hoozees.

I'd been twittering more than blogging while I worked on the site. I admit it's been slow going, in part because I've been so busy. But in the meantime while I find the time to work on the WP site, I'm going to resume blogging here. So stick around, in a virtual kind of way, to hear more.

Singing builds solidarity within a group

2010-07-15T08:58:00.001-07:00

...or so says the results of a recent research experiment from cognitive thought leaders Sebastian Kirshner and Michael Tomasello:

Writing in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Kirschner and Tomasello report that playing music as a group influenced behavior in both of the subsequent scenarios. [Kindergarten] children who had sang and marched together were more likely to help one another pick up marbles. They were also more likely to choose the cooperative solution to the task...The researchers conclude that engaging in the “shared goal of vocalizing and moving together in time” strengthened the children’s “sense of acting together as a unit.” Their results support the hypothesis that music originally evolved as a way of fostering group cohesion, by “generating an intuitive feeling of community and bonding among the performers.”

It's not terrifically surprising that girls were generally more cooperative than boys, relatively speaking.

One wonders if this sense of cooperation and cohesion through song is effective with older individuals, as well. Casually speaking, one thinks of rock concerts, campfire sing alongs, church hymns and propaganda party chants as evidence in the affirmative. Perhaps Congress should start each session with a heartful tune, or several.

In terms of online marketing, how can one mimic the effects of group song online?

Games and creativity

2010-07-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent post by games guru Raph Koster about the recent Newsweek article on the declining creativity scores of American youth, and how this might be tied up with gameplaying. Here's Newsweek's take

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

It's no surprise that the mainstream media could not pass up another chance to dump on games. What is surprising is that Koster agrees, to an extent.

The article salutes problem-solving skills, persistence and the like which, as Koster points out, are skills cultivated by gameplay:

...The rest of the article (and the rest of the research in the field) seems to suggest that handing students problems and obliging them to think about possible solutions, is a much better way to go than rote memorization. And that is what the best games do.

But Koster also brings up the very concept of a designed, and by association, controlled game. Even multiple paths for success are paths designed by the game designers/puppetmasters:

Many games these days “come with the answers” — there’s only one way to solve the puzzles they present — a “through line” that was created by the designers. Could games like this, as opposed to ones that provide truly emergent answers, be an issue in terms of creative development?

That there is a presumed solution is incompatible with real-live problem-solving, where some riddles cannot be cracked, or the answers take years to determine. Are all of life's problems reducible to games, i.e. crack the genome!, or produce better solar panels! And who determines the problems in the first place? Who decides how this new knowledge will be implemented?

Finns declare access to broadband a basic right

2010-07-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

... says BBC News:

From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection...

Speaking to the BBC, Finland's communication minister Suvi Linden explained the thinking behind the legislation: "We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment.

"Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access," she said.

Hear, hear.
Although it bears mentioning that 96% of Finnish households are already wired.

Still, it's nice that the final 4% will get a boost up. The internet has become far more than the sum of its funny cats and gambling sites. You can accomplish a wide variety of social and civic functions online, from renewing your library books to checking in with the unemployment office to finding health information. It was always this way, of course, but now even more so as governments and organizations realize the long-term cost savings an online presence can provide them. (Not all, but many). Between direct deposit and online banking, I hardly step foot in a bank anymore. I renewed my motorcycle registration online. I think in both instances everyone was happier in the end.

And public wireless in the US, purported to be a public/private partnership of sorts, has ground to a virtual halt during the recession. The 2009 Broadband Bill has, as this article says, something to disappoint everyone. Sigh.

Changes...

2010-07-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

First, the bad news:

Popular online video service Hulu on Tuesday will announce the launch of an ad-supported subscription service that will offer top broadcast shows in high definition to be viewed from a plethora of devices, including Internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes and game consoles, as well as portable devices such as Apple's iPad and iPhone.

An ad-supported subscription service? Isn't that redundant?

Though Hulu is keeping its free download site, it won't have all the bells and whistles of the new subscription site.

This will be interesting to watch, as it looks like it will exacerbate tensions between teens (and others) who want to watch media anywhere, anytime, and teens (and others) who are loathe to pay for even an $1 iTune song. Perhaps this model changes once the teens ages up and gets a job, but the latter may not be happening anytime soon. Then again, who thought that a 13 year old could afford an iPhone?

Now, for more positive changes... over the coming month or so, I'll be transitioning this site to tie in more directly my new consulting venture. If you or anyone else you know is needs some creative thinking around digital media and how to encourage others to engage more fully with it -- ok, social media -- send them my way.

I want to believe

2010-06-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

... in the transformative effects of cognitive surplus, as laid out by Clay Shirky in his new book "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age" Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing is fully on board:

Shirky is very good on the connection between trivial entertainments and serious business, from writing web-servers to changing government. Lolcats aren't particularly virtuous examples of generosity and sharing, but they are a kind of gateway drug between zero participation and some participation. The difference between "zero" and "some" being the greatest one there is, it is possible and even likely that lolcatters will go on, some day, to do something of more note together. These sections are a warm and compelling rebuttal to people who argue that the net is a fad or a toxic waste heap, and his systematic argument is so well-reasoned that it might as well be a road-map for winning frustrating arguments about the net.

The rest of the review heaps praise on Mr. Shirky's newest work as showing us a way out of the forest.

I also read this much longer, detailed review by Evgeny Morozov in the Boston Review. Warning: this is not a warm and fuzzy way to start your day:

Shirky, of course, would never talk about viewers’ interests: that is not populist-speak. Populists prefer to make normative claims about the need to break up the traditional media without specifying how we should nurture responsible citizenship and promote good public policy in their absence. This just happens, apparently.

But the Internet will not automatically preserve—never mind improve—the health of democratic politics. Yes, a wired future might look good for democracy if some of the social functions currently performed by traditional media are taken up by new Internet projects. But that outcome needs to be demonstrated—perhaps constructively aimed at—rather than assumed. For populists such as Shirky, the need for considered political commitment does not even merit discussion. The triathlon must go on, even if the athletes become brainwashed and bigoted.

Dammit! I thought the internet was going to save us!!

I'll split the difference. Shirky's correct when he waxes on about the possible transformative power of the internet, the shift towards participation and creativity, the ability to network and organize. Morozov rightly asks what we're getting so jazzed about -- lolcats as the path to salvation? o hai, reallyz? -- and points out that any theory about networked media today still operates within a broader framework of power structures, discrimination, allegiances, etc.

Or, no matter where you surf, there you are.

The Context is the Thing

2010-06-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

WaPo classical music critic Anne Midgette brings up an overlooked point in performing arts criticism: does watching a truncated clip of a performance ultimately help or hurt the production?http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/06/video_killed_the_opera_product.html

he short video of the Achim Freyer staging that I posted at the end of the review gives you a kind of Cliff’s Notes version of what went on. It doesn’t, however, communicate any of the things I most liked about the production, which had to do with the use of physical space and the pacing -- things that had to do with the experience of being present, physically, in the room -- and I’m not sure the snapshots it affords are an adequate representation of its strengths.

Is watching clips of longer-length productions like reading an exerpt of a book, or listening to half a song? It might be worse, in fact, in that the spatial dimensions of the performance will be lost -- how an actor moves around a stage set, for instance, the resonance of the room, and the audience's reactions.

Pop stars of yesteryear... and today

2010-06-16T04:35:00.000-07:00

The Boston Globe found this story interesting, and so did I:

As consumers buy fewer and fewer CDs, an interesting phenomenon is occurring — artists who appeal to older listeners are showing up surprisingly high on the charts.

The reason: Adults are largely the ones buying CDs these days. Younger people tend to download in general and focus on singles.

“We’re appealing to the last buying vestiges of the public, because adults don’t steal, because we don’t know how to,’’ said legendary producer and songwriter David Foster, who produced Buble’s latest album. Older consumers, he said, are “still married to the concept of ‘put the CD in the car, put the CD in the library.’ We’re still in that zone, and that’s why this is still working.’’

Some of the hot acts burning up the Billboard charts these days are Michael Buble, Sarah McLaughlin, Sade, and Susan Boyle.

What gives? Less CD sales overall, and the demographic that tends to buy CDs are older. The Rolling Stones' recent reissue of "Exile on Main Street" ranked #2 on the list with 76K units sold. Ten years ago, that might've placed the album in the lower part of the top twenty; it took sales of at least 100,000 to crack the Top Ten. The older population appears to be in the habit of buying CDs, and also has a life equipped for CD listening, such as CD players in cars. They also tend to give CDs as gifts.

Which begs the mechanics of gift giving -- would you rather give someone a physical CD or a gift card to iTunes where the giftee can choose what they'd like to listen to, albeit with a smidgen of work involved? And on a broader sense, paying attention to the CD charts today feels very outdated, and not reflective of general listening habits. But what can you do, when digital music floats around the intertubez and BitTorrentz uncharted, and unpaid for?

Time for a new way to chart what we're listening to. Any ideas?

Virtual Street Corners: ChatRoulette +

2010-06-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

This article in today's Boston Globe discusses a project where folks on the street in two different locations -- Brookline's Coolidge Corner and Boston's Dudley Square -- can live chat via video and audio:

Everette Linton Jr., a photographer who had been playing chess in Dudley Square, did a double take Wednesday as he passed the screen. He stopped, excitedly grabbed the microphone, and yelled into it: “Anybody out there?’’

A man selling newspapers in Coolidge Corner wandered into his view. “I’m working,’’ the man said. “You got to wait for somebody to come by.’’

The project is the brainchild of artist and activist James Ewing as a way for these two neighborhoods with shared histories but generations of cultural isolation to connect.

“We were the first black family on the street,’’ he said. “My mother just had her 50th reunion. She graduated from the [Jeremiah E.] Burke [High School]. She was one of only three black kids who were there. In fact, the reunion was in Brookline. Now, I don’t think there’s one white kid in that school.’’

In a way, this project is not unlike ChatRoulette: you're on your end of the monitor, and you have no idea who will wander by. Conversations are likely conducted by strangers, there's no commitment to engage, and there's no penalty for walking away.

But it's unlike ChatRoulette in some important ways:
* it's conducted in two public settings, which will (virtually) eliminate the chance you'll come across a masturbater;
* depending on the location, people on the street are usually there to conduct business, meet friends or are just passing through en route to another engagement. In short, they're generally not hanging around looking for trouble.
* Virtual Street Corners links two neighborhoods with a shared history and enough exoticism to draw people in. It's not linking, say, Roxbury with Middleborough, though I suppose if you dig deep enough you can find links between any two locations.
* Virtual Street Corners will feature "regular programming", local news presented by correspondents in both locations. Ewing hopes that this will help cut down on the more shallow, chatty conversations, like the correspondent above who discussed his mother's experience growing up in Roxbury.

All that being said, it's probably good that the project is set to run for only two weeks. School's still in session, curtailing gaggles of teens dominating the chat. And it should take awhile before the curious and/or the destructive get ahold of the technology.

Distractions and technology

2010-06-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

Nothing new here, really. Having devices that ping and chime and ring and buzz when a new bit of information is arriving is pretty distracting. The NYT is on the story:

Neil Erickson of Akron, Ohio, blames his lack of focus on his cellphone. “It’s distracting, but you never know if something is going to be important,” he said in a follow-up interview. Mr. Erickson, who is 28 and studying computer engineering, added, “I suppose I could cut down on checking e-mail and phone use, but I probably won’t.”

It is really technology's fault, though, that (according to the article) 40% of us check our work email while on vacation?** Frankly, that number seems low to me. Thinking further about what constitutes distraction, if you're focusing on work on vacation, does that mean that you're drinking a Corona on the beach, or you're holed up in your Wifi-d cabana? There's a difference, too, between surfing for fun or playing games vs. doing work.

In the case of the latter context, I don't think most of us would choose to be on call 24/7 unless we felt we had to. Unfortunately, given the decimation of the social safety nets, of secure jobs and of real wages, most of us have to sell our souls (or a good chunk of them) to The Guy With the Wallet.

** disclosure: I'm on vacation right now. Is this work? Do I enjoy it? Do I sometimes start reading an article to cite and get pulled down the rabbit hole and come to half an hour later knowing everything and more about Gary Coleman's life and how Garnett rates the Celtics' chances in Game 4? You betcha.

Game? Play?

2010-06-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite game thinkers, Raph Koster, has an interesting post on a recent talk by Sebastian Deterding on what UX designers can learn from game designers. The blog comments were just as interesting as the post:

Tracking, measuring, rating… these are compelling things, and thus they get incorporated into a great many compelling games, making the confusion understandable (not that, ahem, I really need to tell anyone here that). I definitely share the frustration at dressing things up like a game that aren’t, and do see the danger in that potentially co-opting certain areas of intellectual ground. It’s an error with a certain logic to it, though, and knowing that might help in countering it (hopefully).

and...

My To-Do list is a game. I have a list of things. To defeat said list of things, I have to achieve the tasks. By achieving them, I get the reward of a to-do list with nothing on it, and a “Done” list that grows ever larger. This is little different to my WoW quest log, except the loot is worse :)

All which hints at the core question of what motivates us to get out of bed or off the couch in the mornings? Are we filled with the desire to win the loot (literal or virtual), or filled with fear of losing said loot?

I'm very interested in learning more about the motivation to gameplay, versus just outright play, overall. I suspect it breaks down with respect to gender, age, and how much of that non-virtual loot we need...

Motivation and Cognitive Surplus, Part ii

2010-06-02T08:24:00.001-07:00

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

And in June, [Clay] Shirky is publishing Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, which mines adjacent territory. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action...And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

This Drives me Nuts, Part II: what are these "powerful forms of online political action"? I suppose the most popular bit is Twitter, the instant, if often nonsensical and contradictory, reports from on the ground. But what I see more of is the emergence of the meme that People are Useful, i.e. socializing as networking, friends as encompassing a broad degree of relatedness from your best friend to the guy you met once at a conference that you don't quite know well enough to add to your LinkedIn contacts.

Perhaps more pervasive is this notion that we're supposed to learning all the time, and leisure time as pure leisure no longer exists for anyone who is not a sloth. Besides, who says I don't engage with the TV? Why, I was screaming at the Celtics when the Lakers whupped them good just the other day.

More precisely, what does Shirky mean by engagement in this context? Sending an asynchronous text message is still like sending a letter, albeit attached to a jet rocket. The recipient can answer at her leisure, or not answer at all. Engaging in a affinity group forum online is essentially the same. Even if you are live chatting, you can get disconnected abruptly, or just hang up with few repercussions.

And who's to say that all this engagement is more than discussing the results of American Idol? It's unpopular but important to point out that more talk doesn't necessary equal more wisdom. In fact, it very often doesn't.

Motivation and Cognitive Surplus, Part i

2010-06-02T07:31:00.000-07:00

I really don't mean to pick a fight with anyone; but this drives me nuts:

In December, [Daniel] Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.

This drives me nuts, Part I: doesn't it make more sense to say that both methods motivate us? Sometimes we have the leisure to pursue stuff we're interested in, and sometimes we need to be poked and prodded to get stuff done.

And let me tell you: as a manager for the last five years, I've found that this notion of motivating workers to do their best is not so simple. A case in point: I had a highly educated assistant who felt the job was beneath her. Surely it was, and so I gave her ample opportunities to pursue interesting work that better suited her educational qualifications. What she chose to do instead was to spend all of her time job hunting. Another employee interpreted my largesse as a signal that she should go for my job. Another spent all of her time doing the stuff she liked, and none of the stuff that actually needed to get done. These women were all under 37 years old -- not old codgers by any measure.

I digress. But has Daniel Pink ever managed anyone? Do you have the leisure to do only interesting things? (If so, can you tell me how you've made billpaying interesting? Perhaps that'll be the next step from Blippy; the online billpaying game! Earn VISA points while you battle demon creditors and check your 401k!)

But the meme of doing only what interests you is an old and seductive one. Even the obscenely beautiful and wealthy have to do things they don't like to do -- finance overseas wars, liposuction, etc. I can't help thinking of the old adage that "You're still a kid until you have a kid", i.e. until you've assumed some responsibility and put yourself and your ego-centered interests on the back burner. Are we turning into a nation of perpetual adolescents? grump grump.

And finally, who has time to pursue what they're interested in? It's interesting to me that this pursuit is presented in a work context. Because increasingly, our lives have no leisure time. This is the Great White Hope -- or Great White Whale, that somehow our interest in 19th century pottery or gardening techniques can somehow get incorporated into a monetized framework. We take less vacation and fill our waking hours with media, so unless media is what we're interested in, it's hard to say what else we have time to pursue.

Flarf, with a heaping side of irony

2010-05-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Flarf is a style of experimental poetry which usually relies on computer-generated inspirations, and which has been around since the turn of this century:

The flarf method typically involves using word combinations turned up in Google searches, and poems are often shared via email. When one poet penned a piece after Googling "peace" + "kitty," another responded with a poem after searching "pizza" + "kitty." A 2006 reading of it has been viewed more than 6,700 times on YouTube. It starts like this: "Kitty goes Postal/Wants Pizza..."

I'm old enough to remember the Mac's old poetry generator; you'd input a few keywords ("heart", "hypnotize", "leave", etc.), and it would spit out some hackneyed verse. Today, there are many online options for streamlining the poetry process. The Poem Generator allows you to select either "city" words or "sea" words; the Love Poetry Generator prompts you to input a fruit, a bird, a musical instrument, a flower, etc.

But Flarf is a bit different, in that you are not simply inputting words into an algorhythm or database; rather, the poet uses computer results as a jumping off point for creativity. As the article describes the evolution of Flarf, the poets began to discover that random Google searches often threw out odd juxtapositions and intriguing collages that revealed—at least to them—new poetic possibilities. The poems were so bad, they were good. A terrible beauty was born.

"I found the word flarf online on a police blotter where some stoner had described marijuana as flarfy," says Mr. Sullivan, who appropriated the term for the new poetic style.

A bit like visual collage, one of the works of art that the computer excels at:

"Flarf is a hip, digital reaction to the kind of boring, genteel poetry" popular with everyday readers, says Marjorie Perloff, a poetry critic and professor emeritus of English at Stanford University. "You used to find it only in alternative spaces, but it has now moved into the art mainstream."

Not only does it toss the prim poetry of the past overboard, the computer is the inspiration for creative work, the platform on which it's composed, and the primary way it's shared. The computer is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.

Why, Blippy, why???

2010-05-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

... that is the question.

I was joking to a friend the other day about the decline in online privacy (I use the work 'joking' loosely), and said, "Can you imagine if all your purchases were online? Now there're no secrets!!"

Sounds like the work of some nasty, fascist-leaning conglomerate. But Blippy is such a cute-sounding name. The tagline on the site cracks me up (again, in an unfunny way): "Blippy is a fun way to see and discuss what everyone is buying." As opposed to, say, rifling through your friend's credit card receipts or perhaps simply asking them.

But no fascist conspiracy here; you sign up to have your purchases broadcast for all to see:

Your friends have shared 6 new purchases on Blippy!
See them all: http://blippy.com/login?s=d

huyhong spent $7.09 at In N Out Burger (6 comments) http://blippy.com/t/iz45?s=d
cte got 1 album from iTunes for $7.99 (4 comments) http://blippy.com/t/iwiz?s=d
ijustine got 1 tv show from iTunes for $1.99 (1 comment) http://blippy.com/t/j02m?s=d
leolaporte spent $31.49 at Amazon (1 like) http://blippy.com/t/ivnr?s=d
pud got 1 app from iTunes http://blippy.com/t/iyws?s=d
saarsaar rented 9 movies at Netflix http://blippy.com/t/iyw2?s=

To be honest, I don't know any of these people. You can be notified of the mundane buying habits of anyone who's available. This particular haul, I have to say, isn't very interesting: iTunes, In N Out burger, Amazon, Netflix. The discussion around the In N Out Burger went something like this:

X doesn't let me go to In N Out Burger, but it is sooooo good!

Why not?

Looks yummy!

No animal fries?

There are multiple lessons to be derived from this:

* nothing is considered too private to share with friends, and strangers, online.
* Most people's shopping habits are really boring.
* Most people also appear to have too much free time on their hands. Shirkey is all about the 'cognitive surplus' digital media will afford us and our big brains. But seriously, what are the odds we'll just fill up that free time inventing new ways to ingest beer, nap, watch porn and surf online?

"Hiding in plain site"

2010-05-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

Ironic that one of the best Twitter feeds around, IMHO, is that of Alain de Botton. That's Botton like "baton" and not like "button"; yes, he's not American and yes, he's a roving philosopher of sorts. His book Status Anxiety made some very interesting, and necessary, arguments about social class, self-image, and the like. His follow-up, The Architecture of Happiness, demonstrates that even in a world where our hearts and minds are increasingly cloud-sourced online, our physical surroundings matter, and that they can-- and should -- be a point of joy.

Now you can enjoy nugget-sized bits of de Botton's brilliance on Twitter. To wit, from today:

Businesses head blithely off the cliff when no one at the top is sufficiently scared - scared enough to think properly.

Ashamed and bemused by our own fragility, we consistently underestimate how anxious everyone else is.

Perhaps more relevant for this blog are these two nutritious tidbits:

In modernity, our only way of imagining what strangers are like becomes the media. Amazement when s/he turns out not to be murderer.

and

Our impulse to be social is enhanced by the option to avoid others.

They're all bits of koan which land softly in the Twitterverse, to be savored and pondered at leisure. Which is frustrating, because de Botton tends to Twitter in spurts; seven tweets in the last seven hours, gah.

I'm particularly intrigued by that last tweet of his I posted here: our impulse to be social is enhanced by the option to avoid others. Which essentially describes social networking functionality. You can disconnect/ignore/flame whenever you feel like it. No need to find one of those beautiful outposts Alain describes the The Architecture of Happiness to hide out in. We are all hiding in plain site.

Life as a Game, Part II

2010-05-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

... in which our intrepid heroine is trying to find the schedule listing for 30 Rock on her computer and is sucked into NBC's Fan It site:

Q: What is Fan It?
A: Fan It is NBC.com's affinity program where members are awarded points for participation and interaction. Members can choose to redeem these points for a variety of rewards and/or experiences....

Q: How do I earn points?
A: There are two different ways to earn points: events and challenges. Events are the activities you do on the site and on the social networks you've linked to every day, such as leaving comments, watching videos, playing games, posting links or updating your status. Challenges require you to perform specific events within a specific amount of time and are typically worth more points...

Q: What can I do with the points that I've earned?
A: You can use your points to determine your rank on the leaderboard(s) and you can redeem points for a variety of different rewards. (links to leaderboard page and rewards page)

A tip of the hat to games whiz Raph Koster, on whose blog I learned about this development.

Fan It appears to be a clever way to engage TV fangroups, and to encourage fans to watch the shows, as you can elect to answer challenges related to specific programs. You can also accrue points by posting information about the challenge or the shows (not entirely clear) on social networking hubs like Twitter and Facebook.

What do you win? It appears they're selling prestige ("your spot on the leaderboard") and awards in the forms of links to (hopefully exclusive) videos.

I revise my original assessment: this is very, VERY clever. They're enlisting fans to circulate information and to watch the shows more diligently, and the awards they distribute is existing content or comes at minimal cost to them. One suggestion, though: offer an award that's a limited livechat with a show's stars. Also low-cost, and perhaps more appealing than status on a closed network and watching more TV.

I want to live in virtual world

2010-05-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

... but barring that, I'll settle for having pervasive and persistent gaming opportunities linked to media content across platforms. Actually, I don't want that, but I'm trying to understand those who do.

I'm not sure why this even counts as news anymore:

Pity the hoary television ad, billboard and trailer. As studio marketers try harder to use technology to advertise movies, ambitious Web games that interlock with social networking sites are an increasing focus. With Day X Exists, Sony hopes to mimic the viral success of Facebook games like Mafia Wars, which is played by tens of millions of people.

The goal is to reverse the consumer-advertiser relationship. Traditional marketing pushes a message over and over. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership.

People, it's called 'transmedia marketing'. Actually, it's called a lot of things, and has a lot of variations. It seemed to be all the rage before the recession. Let's look back to "I love Bees," an early Think of the extended "LOST experience" treasure hunt game, the Dr. Pepper promotion which inavertantly led to hordes of clue-seekers converging on a historical graveyard in Boston.

There are a few marketing concepts at work here, which have their own kinks:

* users appreciate agency, and those who elect to play will be more receptive to... something. Hopefully the whole movie transmedia franchise, cuz these games aren't cheap to produce.

* females are big casual game users, and games like this are designed to be played and then fade away as new products move front and center. I think it totally depends on the kind of game you're talking about, and the kind of female player you're looking to attract.

"Studios have been using simple Web games to sell their wares for a decade — press the space bar and a character kicks something. More ambitious alternate-reality games, a genre that blends online and offline clues and relies on players collaborating to solve puzzles, have also been successful in reaching what studios call “alpha fans” (the boys in the basement)."

I guess the bigger question is, who is attracted to transmedia participation? It takes a lot of time and commitment and energy, and I for one am far too lazy about my tv consumption to work that hard at it.

The Gift Economy

2010-05-17T12:10:00.001-07:00

We're glutted with free stuff online; images, songs, articles, videos, etc. Rob Walker of the NYT has an interesting musing on the value of these materials:

For the consumer...it’s a bonanza. Even the most hardened skeptic of the self-expression free-for-all has to admit that plenty of nonprofessional creators, ignoring the wants and needs of the market, have produced priceless gifts for the rest of us to enjoy. On the other hand, even the most ardent enthusiast of giveaway culture has to admit that a lot of what’s on offer is not only free but worthless. That is to say, with so many gifts out there, some $0 things seem more valuable than others.

I've been getting gifts I don't want for years: those lumpy slippers that Auntie Edna knitted for me, the bright green plastic rosary beads, Nick Gilder's first album. The free offerings online are so much better, and I can pick and choose which gifts to accept.

Then I wonder about the gift which is Facebook. Sure I get to hang out with the weirdest mashup of high school friends, work colleagues from the last twenty years, and fellow music enthusiasts for free. It's fun. But I'm increasingly wary of what I am ostensibly paying for this gift in terms of my privacy and, in some ways, my brainpower.

The price for either opting out or moving myself and my 300+ friends to another site seems impossibly high. I think that in general, we digital participants need to look more carefully at the institutionalization of new media, and the point where bureaucracy and stagnation trump moving forward, and moving on.

Is Photography Dead?

2010-05-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

OK, not photography per se, but photography as an art? We are deluged with images left and right, on the street, in the elevator, on our banana stickers... everywhere.

Check out what the smart folks had to say about this topic at a recent SFMOMA talk:

Curator and New Yorker contributor Vince Aletti had the best - at least, the most direct - answer in his written statement. "What is over is the narrow view of photography - the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational - not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract ..."

Aletti anticipated several other contributors' remarks, such as Joel Snyder's and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's, when he wrote "photography isn't merely a window on the world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares, obsessions and the purest abstraction."

What I took out of these notes is that Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which I literally read six times in grad school, just WILL NOT DIE:

Trevor Paglen, an artist who teaches geography at UC Berkeley, took a detached view from a very different angle. " 'Photography' for me," he wrote, "denotes a wide range of imaging practices ... dialectically enmeshed with the construction of practical reality. ... This includes everything from 'art' photography to iPhone snapshots, from MRI scans to the infrared eyes of CIA predator drones, and from surveillance cameras attached to facial-recognition software to minoritarian documentary practices from Rodney King to Abu Ghraib."

"We can't divorce imaging technologies from uses of power," Paglen said during the Thursday evening session, echoing his written reference to Paul Virilio's coinage of the term "sight machine" for the coalescence of imaging devices and their data that digital technology has permitted.

Or, to rip off Benjamin, the more copies you make, the more your image is a tool of social control.

See, Ma. I did learn something in grad school!

Culture today is such a yawn...

2010-05-11T11:28:00.001-07:00

... or so says this critic from The Age:

Don't get me wrong, I'm a child of appropriation, sampling, collage and pastiche. It doesn't bother me that artists such as Sam Leach and thousands of others are out there appropriating a range of different contexts to make works... However, I am concerned about originality. Artists that appeal to me aspire to do that, and I find myself agreeing with those who argue that we've institutionalised lazy adaptation and elevated them to the highest echelons of our cultural priorities and hierarchies.

So if I'm reading this in the spirit in which it was intended, culture has essentially swallowed its own tail in the endless cycle of 'remixing'.

I wonder about that, too. The copyright issues around remixing is a profound symbol around all of remixing, anyway. Is the work original? Who's to say? Jaron Lanier has plenty to say about this. He strongly vetoes a culture of collaborative production, recycling, etc.

Though might it be true, too, that a). there's plenty of bad remixes in the world, just like there are plenty of bad oil paintings, poetry, and the like? and b). we are so tone deaf to all media now -- there's just too much of it -- that any mediated work of art has an uphill battle?

Teens: twitter is 'uncool'.

2010-05-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

What-Ever. Talk to the hand:

But when I asked [teens] whether they kept abreast of things via Twitter, they all looked at me like I was crazy. Rajiv Rao, who's 17, said "I don't know one high schooler that uses Twitter." His friend, Arya Zarifi, also 17, added: "It's something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something."

And yet Ashton Kutcher allegedly has over a million Twitter followers? and they aren't teens?

Apparently not. A study by Ezsther Hargittai and other leading internet use researchers confirms that sorry, Twitter, teens just aren't that into you. Dr. Hargittai suggests that this is related to teens' typical elevated focus on their immediate friends and family, and are less engaged with the broader world at large.

This is interesting in that a). ChatRoulette, where you dial up an anonymous digital friend, is hot hot hot and b). Formspring.me is the 'twenty questions' game, except for a broad public and shared with the world.

And yet are more aware of global issues today than in the past. Huh.

eXaudios wants to know how you're feeling

2010-05-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

When I read that a company is offering software to decode the emotional content of telephone conversations, I thought with a chuckle, "Yeah, because when I'm yelling at tech support, they don't know that I'm upset."

Turns out I was right:

An Israeli company called eXaudios has developed a computer program, known as Magnify, that decodes the human voice to identify a person's emotional state. Some companies in the United States already use the system in their call centers..."When agents talk with customers over the phone, they usually focus on content and not intonation, unless the customer is screaming," said Yoram Levanon, President and CEO of eXaudios, which recently won a $1 million prize at the Demo 2010 conference. "If a customer is screaming, you don't need the software. But if we can identify the other emotions of a customer, we can save customers and companies money."

Hoorah! So much for the human capacity to interpret emotions through one's tone of voice, volume, words used, etc. Let's just interpret emoticons instead.

The next thing you know, they'll be claiming to diagnose my physical state as well...Whaaa---?!

eXaudios is even testing the software's use in diagnosing medical conditions like autism, schizophrenia, heart disease and even prostate cancer.

Movies the size of your thumb!

2010-05-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Or, more realistically, your iPhone; maybe size doesn't matter after all:

As Hollywood shrinks its films and television shows for the small screens of cellphones, its assumptions about mobile viewing are being upended by surprisingly patient consumers.

“We all thought they’d be watching video clips in the checkout line or between classes,” said Vivi Zigler, the president for digital entertainment at NBC Universal, summing up the industry’s conventional wisdom. But owners of iPhones and other smartphones are actually watching long episodes and sometimes complete films, so a growing number of media companies are vying for people’s mobile attention spans.

So far, mobile viewing revenues are far less than those of TV, movies, and videogames. Most content is streamed for free from sites like Hulu.com. But that looks to be short-lived. Look for more subscriber services such as Flo TV or Bitbop, which charge a monthly flat fee of @$10/month, in the future.

What amazes me, though, is that people have time to watch a full-length episode of "The Office" while on the go (hopefully not while driving). How does this work? Do that many people take long bus rides? Have to wait at the doctor's office for half an hour or more? Just plunk down on a public bench to watch some TV?

2010-05-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

An interesting story from NPR this weekend about how we define generations is increasingly based on media, and not on shared experiences.

Prof. ROSEN: Well, one of the interesting things about the teenage generation, the iGeneration...

SIMON: Mm-hmm.

Prof. ROSEN: ...they have learned technology basically from birth. They want to be able to text on mom or dad's phone as soon as they can grab the phone. Whereas the generation just above them, their older brothers and sisters in the Net generation, they certainly came to technology at some point but not as young and not as overwhelmingly prevalent in their lives.

SIMON: And what difference does this make though? Or what differences does it make? Because you lay out a quite a few.

Prof. ROSEN: Well, first of all, the little I in iGeneration stands for both things like the iPod or the iPhone or the Wii, but it also really stands for individualized. And this generation has gotten very used to having things their way. They want all their technology individualized and they want it all available all the time.

And did I not say exactly the same thing over two years ago, when I collaborated with Penelope Trunk on a "What Generation Are You?" test that measured your generational membership in terms of the media you consumed? Yes I did.

Having said that, I think the notion of a generation is often not very useful. I'm technically a Baby Boomer, but at the very end. So why do I have more in common with someone born in, say, 1951 than someone born in 1965?

The internet cannot save us

2010-04-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

... or so say the fancy folks over at Foreign Policy magazine:

Two decades in, the Internet has neither brought down dictators nor eliminated borders. It has certainly not ushered in a post-political age of rational and data-driven policymaking. It has sped up and amplified many existing forces atwork in the world, often making politics more combustible and unpredictable. Increasingly, the Internet looks like a hypercharged version of the real world, with all of its promise and perils, while the cyber utopia that the early Web enthusiasts predicted seems ever more illusory.

I'm no hard-nosed cynic, but in many of the academic circles I've run in, I'm the Debbie Downer of the group. People seem to forget that the internet itself is neutral -- information, networks, etc. -- and that these networks and this information has generally been accessible in the past for those who were interested in pursuing them.

On grey days like today, I sometimes think of this digital life we subscribe to as helping out a self-sustaining entity -- like the machines in the Terminator movies, or how academia cranks out academics in order to make more academics. The youth we looked at in our studies seem to engage with the internet for its own sake. All the calendar management and information gathering and networking is in service to.... what? A higher purpose? More happiness? Or participating in a grinding of the machine's gears?

At the base of it all, the internet is still driven by people -- people with egos, agendas, hopes, fears, mortgage payments, broken hearts, silly hobbies.

iPhone symphony app

2010-04-27T06:32:00.001-07:00

Is it me, or is it true that when someone wants to get attention throws in a reference to the iPhone to make sure their press release moves up in the Google search ranking? This article brings out my inner cynic:

"This year's shortlist is arguably the boldest and most exciting yet," said chair of the PRSF, Sally Taylor.

"Just as the Turner Prize makes people talk about art, we hope that this year's New Music Award will stimulate debate,"

Got my attention.

If I was being less cynical, I might regard the PRS for Music Foundation (PRSF) Prize a way to both raise awareness of new attempts to combine technology and musical production, and a way to emphasize creativity in musical tools -- other finalists include "a portable structure resembling a fairground organ" which can recycle ambient sounds, a way to generate "automatic" musical instruments, and a way to use beatboxing to approximate the sounds of authentic African instruments -- versus musical products.

I guess the real question here is how well these tools can be used to make marvelous music. Given the iPhone's audio limitations, I am less sanguine about that app. Though I would love to get my hands on a portable ambient sound recycler.

The World in your Backyard

2010-04-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

... or perhaps I should say the whole universe?

To make up for the decline in visits, many museums are taking their lessons to the classroom, through traveling programs, videoconferencing or computer-based lessons that use their collections as a teaching tool.

“Even if they can’t come to the museum, we can bring the excitement of science to the school,” said Ms. Slivensky, one of seven traveling educators at the Boston museum.

While I understand the reason for this trend, and it's to be commended -- kids love novelty and a glow in the dark classroom sounds great -- let's not forget about teaching kids how to be out and about in the world, to travel, and to discover delights which are not pre-screened or pre-tested. I remember trudging to the top of the Bunker Hill monument in third grade, whacking my head on the low ceilings of the USS Constitution in the fourth grade, and feeling extremely socially awkward during the lunch portion of our fifth grade field trip to Strawbery Banke.

These small humiliations have stayed with me all these years. I don't remember much else from these experiences. Hmmm. Perhaps an inflatable planetarium might've actually taught me a thing or two...

this blog brought to you by...

2010-04-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

... the random blips of an invisible scribe. I've never even tried to find advertisers for this site, but I've heard that I'm supposed to be "monetizing" it or something.

But the relentless seepage of advertising into our lives is something to be aware, and cautious of. This recent article in the NYT reviews the book “The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture” (Counterpoint, $26). Perhaps the most compelling argument they proffer is how many of us not only consume the advertising, we live it -- speaking in tongues with the Starbucks barista, reworking advertising in personal homages, transforming it into a symbol (Mentos, Rick Astley):

YouTube, founded in 2005, follows in the tradition of exchanging something of value for audience attention. The authors say it is revolutionizing marketing by enabling “democratized ad messaging.” Rather than being the passive recipients of sales pitches from advertisers accompanied by entertainment or information, consumers can now create and disseminate their own entertainment and information in the form of videos.

Yesterday, I was working on my computer at home, and at one point I had to delete over a dozen pop-up ads from Netflix, some debt collection agency, and some weight loss pitches from my desktop. Is there no relief from the advertising onslaught? I can only walk in the woods so much...

Thank you, Wrap News

2010-04-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

... for encapsulating all the reasons why 3D TV is a nonstarter. To briefly summarize: prohibitive costs, prohibitive sizes, and multitasking humans aren't down with wearing special glasses.

Though one would think that if you dropped @ $2,500 for a 50"+ screen, $150 a pop for glasses, and god knows how much for 3D media, all you'd want to do is stare at that behemoth night and day.

2010-04-16T16:23:00.000-07:00

And in today's candidate in the "Questionable Interpretations of Scientific Findings" division, we have the claim that the brain's ability to focus on two goals at the same time is the same thing as successfully multitasking:

For the study, 32 right-handed subjects were asked to match letters while their brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Subjects were motivated by a monetary reward they would receive based on how many letters they matched without error. During this baseline test, both hemispheres of the brain's medial frontal cortex (which is involved in motivation) appeared active. However, when the researchers introduced a second task, where the subjects had to match like uppercase letters in addition to matching like lowercase letters with separately accruing reward tallies, Koechlin and his coauthor Sylvain Charron (of the same institution) found that the subjects' brains divided the two reward-based goals between the two sides of the region.

So if I'm interpreting this correctly, two tasks were distributed between the brain's two hemispheres. Booyah!

But both tasks involved language, and both tasks were very similar to each other... and performed in a single sitting. Give the shared circumstances of the lab setting, the computer platform, etc., it almost seems like one simple task became one complex task. I would like to see the experiment conducted with the subject organizing letters while trying to talk on the phone with, say, a realtor**.

The new work does not, however, show that the brain can actually execute two distinct tasks, such as letter matching, at precisely the same time, Paul Dux a psychology lecturer at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, noted in an email to ScientificAmerican.com. The data reveal that though separate goals might be running concurrently in the brain, "there are still large dual-task costs" when people have to switch between two tasks making for "non-efficient multitasking," cautioned Dux...

Thank god for the letters section, I always say.

I'd like to point out a broader issue, which is who benefits if we can effectively multitask. The multitasker perhaps. But more likely the taskmaster. Just a thought.

** nothing against realtors. They're one of the few professional classes I know who still rely heavily on the phone.

Hoarders Help

2010-04-10T18:03:00.001-07:00

I enjoy watching the show "Hoarders: Buried Alive" on TLC, but I'm not sure why. There's the voyeur's perspective, of course. What we're looking at isn't appealing or attractive, it's pretty repellant -- food on the floor, flies, dead animals and lots of dirt along with stacks of stuff, and cheap stuff at that, still in their Target bags. So is it a horror reaction? Or an aghast reaction, wondering how the hell anyone could live like this, and think for the most part it's fine.

Then there's the broader question of the origins of our disgust. Is it simply the sanitary and safety issues? (more than one household lacked running water; another house was filled with loaded guns under the piles of stuff). Is it the awe-inspiring depth of cognitive dissonance as the subjects claim that their homes might be "a little messy"? Is it the cheapness and chaos? The rampant consumerism of it all?

Help me crack the nut that is "Hoarders: Buried Alive" !

p.s. I went to the TLC site to fetch the link for the show, and there's a quiz you can take to assess whether you might be a hoarder, or merely an indiscriminate collector, with a teaser which starts "Do you have a doll collection that's getting out of control?"

Today's Story of the Week

2010-04-07T08:47:00.001-07:00

The Library of America -- not to be confused with the Library of Congress or the Library at Alexandria -- describes its mission as "publishing and keeping in print authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing." What constitutes 'significant' writing is anyone's guess, but I suspect LOA is of the "100 Greatest Books" ilk. Z z z zzzzzzzzzzz....

But kudos to them for their "Tell Me A Story" program, a once-a-week sharing of some of these greatest literary hits. Their website is run by a simple (and free) Blogger program (as is this one), and they allow interested folks who can't be bothered with a rss feed to sign up for weekly emails. This week's offering is a fun little story called "Baiting the Umpire" by George Jean Nathan (1882–1958). I'd never heard the name before, but now I have -- a certified strike from the Library of America!

What a clever and easy and affordable way for nonprofits to further their mission.

YouTube Triumphant

2010-04-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

Would you like to know how YouTube became the de facto site for online video?

Then read the Wired article with caution.

The first listed reason is its content: "Reason #1: it elevates the absurd". Using that logic, you might be wondering how it came to pass that the surrealists didn't last longer than they did. Or do we crave the absurd during certain cultural moments? Or maybe we are just collectively bored.

Reason #2 has to do with smart strategy re: online advertising. #3 is how YouTube played nice with the big media producers by yanking copyrighted content. #4 is about how YouTube tapped into a new creative class -- well, a new producer class; let's leave judgments about creativity out of this conversation, which has been so civil up until now. #5 is its willingness to reinvent itself.

This is all fine and good, but it doesn't say much about how all the other video sites who tried to do these things failed. My reason #6: brand recognition and market domination. Once a site has enough content, it seems to reach a tipping point where it becomes the place for content to see and be seen.

Get your (mediated) groove on

2010-03-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

I think the whole world should be wrapped in motion-sensing enhancements. I think this is the reality that Bjork and her song and dance numbers in Dancer in the Dark portend...

DENVER (Billboard) – Music games are about to come full circle, with the next stage of the struggling genre coming from the familiar category of dance music, driven by new motion-capture controllers expected to hit the market this fall.

Because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we were born to bust a move.

I was a bit too old for Dance Dance Revolution, but who could object to its groovy wholesomeness? Now get ready for The Return of The Hits That Didn't Translate Well into Guitar Hero:

Current Wii hit "Just Dance" is an early indicator that dance games based on motion controls have great potential. Taking advantage of the Wii's motion-based controllers -- as well as tracks like MC Hammer's "You Can't Touch This" -- "Just Dance" has defied negative reviews to sell more than 850,000 units in the United States since its debut in November, according to NPD Group. In February it was the fourth-best-selling game stateside and the third-ranked game in the United Kingdom.

The optional plug-in module features Lady Gaga and Beyonce poisoning an entire family while grinding out the grooves. (just kidding).

... and the ugliest building in Boston is...

2010-03-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

... Cith Hall! What a magnificent surprise (not).

Of City Hall, one e-mails, “It’s scary, right out of ‘1984,’ intimidating and grim.’’ Another disses it as “a hideous and disastrously non-functional abomination of a building.’’ And another calls it “a landmark which is infamous, not famous.’’ Well, I did ask for passion.

Poor, unloved City Hall. Part of the bad idea that was 1960s urban renewal, as entire neighborhoods like the West End and Scollay Square were bulldozed and sanitized. Is City Hall truly awful? How can we measure its awfulness? Perhaps it's just woefully out of sync, like your grandmother shopping at Forever 21.

Not everyone agrees about City Hall, though. “Bet most of the bozos cite City Hall, one of the city’s best buildings,’’ writes one fan. I, too, am a fan of this powerful, ugly-and-wonderful building, and I look forward to the day when it gets the loving and inventive spruce up it needs and deserves.

A Short History of the Beep

2010-03-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

I heart this post on the origins and impact of the humble mechanical beep:

“The beep is a purely human-made, electrical sound,” Jonathan Sterne, a professor of communication studies at McGill University, told me by e-mail. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals....If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.

If you hear a beep, you are near a piece of man's handiwork.

Virginia Heffernen, the author of the piece, says that the concept of 'beep' started in 1929, as car horns and machine rumbles were joined by the humble beep as a signifier which politely asks one to pay some attention.

Interestingly, one of the most important technological innovations of recent memory, the internet, is relatively beep-free:

On the other hand, as Sterne pointed out, the Web is “largely a silent medium.” We prefer to enjoy our visual and textual experience online in silence. Other than a few chimes and classy sound effects that communicate “everything is working” — the best being Brian Eno’s beautiful late-lamented Microsoft start-up sound — a personal computer should produce only the white noise of its fan. Sound design for computers could become like sound design for cars, Benjamin Tausig, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University, wrote to me. “The ideal is not necessarily silence, but warmth, smooth operation and possibly even luxury.”

So does that beeping signal that something is not only clamoring for attention, but that it's declasse? An interesting thought for product designers.

Gotta Dance...!

2010-03-19T09:28:00.001-07:00

Remember that weird dancing baby motif on "Ally McBeal"? Well, it turns out that her hallucination was true to the facts:

Babies are pre-programmed to dance and to enjoy it, research by the University of York has shown.

The study of 120 children aged between five months and two years found that babies spontaneously started moving to music and rhythmic beats.

Scientists also found that the better the children were at moving in time with the music, the more they smiled.

This study suggests that we are hardwired to bust a move, and that it pleases us (if not our dance partners).

But why? The article goes on to state "It is not known why humans have developed this predisposition."

Might there be a connection between music, exertion and pleasure? (Is this why it can be great to listen to music at work?) When does this propensity for rug-cutting, and movement in general, start to wane?

And, appropos to this blog, if we introduce kids early on to the pleasures and perils of digital life, will this, too, decline? I'd love to see a longitudinal study, because perhaps it's already declined. Or perhaps the infants studied lack the tactile skills to manipulate electronics yet. But just wait. Test them again in three years...

No news or local, but plenty of TV...

2010-03-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

This article, entitled, "Local TV news doesn't share the public interest", may not shock anyone, but it's instructive to the extent it shows how TV newscasters are forgoing the public interest to cultivate an aging, internet-phobic viewership:

From what a USC Norman Lear Center study has concluded -- Los Angeles television news stations manage just 22 seconds of local government coverage for every half hour on the air...

Wow, 22 whopping seconds. It takes me longer to put on my seatbelt.

Not to pick on LA, but apparently they fare the worst. The average local TV newscast devotes slightly more time... but under ten minutes:

In each 30-minute segment, more than eight minutes go to advertising. An additional 7 1/2 minutes focus on stories outside Southern California. Sports, weather and teasers (touting the dreck scheduled later that hour, day or week) take up a total of nearly six minutes.

The eight remaining minutes might amount to something worthwhile. But they get frittered away too -- mostly with soft features and, especially, coverage of the latest murder or string of burglaries.

Try to recall an evening newscast that didn't include an animal in a predicament or at least one story gift-wrapped in yellow police tape. A regular diet of this stuff might reasonably have you cowering in your house. Never mind that statistics (so meddlesome, those numbers that provide context) show crime in fairly sharp decline in recent years.

The takeaway is that national news and puff stories (pets, kids) hog the stage on local newscasts. Local papers aren't much better. Local news bloggers are just filling a void, then. One wonders what would happen if these professional news outlets reasserted themselves into this space.

ChatRoulette spins me round like record right round...

2010-03-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Over at the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning blog, danah boyd posted a piece about ChatRoulete, which I just mentioned in my last post. I found myself pontificating about this hot new phenomenon, and thought I'd share my wicked insightful comments with you, the reader(s). This post makes a lot more sense after you read the initial piece by danah.

Hi, danah. I understand that ChatRoulette is not the devil incarnate, but I don't think it's quite an accessible public, either. When you cite your positive experiences from over a dozen years ago, a few things come to mind:

* the web as a public resource was still very much in its infancy, and there wasn't, for better or for worse, the same range of online participants. Academics, radicals, and scientists, mostly.

* Similarly, who's primarily on ChatRoulette? Are there statistics on participation? My ad hoc assessment is that it's skewered towards youth and boys. Do you think your thoughtful transgender friend would play CR with the hopes of lucking into someone s/he could dialogue with on a meaningful level? Or might s/he be a participant in a more formal community?

* I don't think CR participants are looking for those types of conversations. How might the immediate, easy-in, easy-out affordances and (might I suggest) expectations of ChatRoulette map to the meaningful conversations you found? There are more efficient ways of finding those people to talk to online.

* The smut is unfortunate, but no less so than offline, where strangers hump you on the subway and expose themselves to you in the park. In a way, perhaps it's positive "de-sensitivity training" for young girls who will most likely encounter some of this later on, and should learn how to laugh and point. : )

* CR is the idea of dialing up strangers for entertainment -- you claim for elucidation, but I'm not buying. It's the digital equivalent of a prank phone call, except with costumes and multimedia. That one might be able to extract more meaning out of it than that is about as likely as using the internet randomizer and hoping to happen upon a webpage that's aligned at all to your interests.

* So really, it's thrillseeking teens. Nothing new there.

testing!

2010-03-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

I just learned that Blogger lets you update your posts via email. And here I've been tying everything out through the Blogger interface like a sucker!!

So here's a test. I wonder how it handles links...well, if you're wondering, you can always visit my <a href = "http://www.margaretweigel.com" target = "new> home page</a> and tell me about it.

Board games, friends and connection

2010-03-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Hartford Courant recently featured a story about the return of classic board games. It's just as you might think -- board games are returning because there's nostalgia, they are cheap, they are somewhat novel -- but what I caught my eye was the subtle framing of social networking and media as bad, bad things. Consider these following snippets:

They are part of a trend fueled by the economy and lifestyle changes...to turn to classic board games as an inexpensive and engaging way to get people together face-to-face

For five us to go to the movies for a couple of hours would cost about $60, and we don't even talk to each other

Those who play insist that board games never really went away, but they acknowledge the comeback in popularity and categorize play as "classically social" in a world consumed with faceless social networking.
"Nowadays people are so into their computers and social networking, they never go out and connect anymore," says Cheryl Livsey, during a Scrabble game at Real Art Ways. "This gives you a chance to exercise some social skills and interact face-to-face."

Not that I'm knocking face to face interaction; far from it. I talk to some of my best friends face to face. But I'm mystified by the assertion of "faceless social networking" practices, and how that isn't "connecting". Given the choice, would you rather chat with your dear friends online, or hang out with a bunch of strangers playing Connect Four? Which is safer? Which situation has more potential for meaningful connections? Just sayin'.

I never thought I'd say this, but if you want to chat with random strangers, you may as well take a spin with ChatRoulette. Admittedly, the chances of your ConnectFour partner flashing his pecker for you is probably lower; however, you can ditch the ChatRoulette buddy far more easily, and he won't follow you home.

Digital, personalized learning plans

2010-03-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

It's not just a dream, for some kids, it's a reality:

...But this year, all 428 sixth graders at Linwood Middle School in North Brunswick, N.J., are charting their own academic path with personalized student learning plans — electronic portfolios containing information about their learning styles, interests, skills, career goals and extracurricular activities.

These new learning plans will follow each sixth grader through high school, and are intended to help the students assess their own strengths and weaknesses as well as provide their parents and teachers with a more complete profile beyond grades and test scores.

I love it that teachers, parents and students are all working together to identity a student's interest and capacity, and then move forward with a plan. The students take an online quiz called Matchmaker, which help to identify possible professions for them. It's also acknowledged that over time, the plans will likely change.

It sounds like a responsible plan. I can't wait to hear how it progresses.

Off to SRA!

2010-03-11T07:29:00.001-08:00

... that is, the Society for Research on Adolescence biannual meeting in Philadelphia, PA, this weekend. Looking forward to seeing some great work. I'm presenting on "The Shifting Nature of Autonomy: Adolescence, Social Cognition and Digital Media", informed by findings from the Developing Minds and Digital Media project. Looks to be fun. If there's interest, I'll post my fabu slides afterwards.

more on violence and media

2010-03-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

Hooray!!

I spied the headline "Anti-social music brings out the biff, says scientist" and thought well, at least he's not going to link it to visual imagery and the whole video game discourse.

Color me wrong.

Dr Wayne Warburton says consistent exposure to violent music videos may help hard-wire the brain with aggression-related concepts and thought patterns.

"Across three decades, research has converged to suggest that exposure to music with violent themes increases the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, along with aggressive and hostile thoughts and negative emotions such as anger, unfriendliness and fear," he said yesterday.

I really wish that there were more specifics here. It's too easy to just make a correlation between violent youth and violent media. But where's the causation? The classic rebuttal to this argument is that youth who are predisposed towards violence are attracted to violent media, not that violent media makes youth violent. Also, it would be helpful to have some data on socioeconomic status, gender, and age.

In short, can we have a more nuanced conversation about this topic? Or are we going to continue to hash out the same yes/no arguments that have been directing the discussion?

2010-03-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

This is so cool! Say what you will about your smartphone, but does it also function as a canteen?:

Researchers say a cache of ostrich eggshells engraved with geometric designs demonstrates the existence of a symbolic communication system around 60,000 years ago among African hunter-gatherers.

The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns, according to a team led by archaeologist Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux 1 in Talence, France.

It's unclear from the article if the markings were intended to be decorative or symbols with meaning (or both).

And here's a heartwarming expression of geek flow:

Even more exciting, according to archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe, is the presence of drinking spouts in the South African eggshells. Water containers opened a new world of travel across arid regions for ancient people, he notes.

"The ability to carry and store water is a breakthrough technological advance, and here we have excellent evidence for it very early," Marean says. "Wow!"

Driving and Digital Distraction

2010-03-03T14:20:00.000-08:00

When you hear the worlds "driving and digital distraction", you probably think of texting or talking on a phone behind the wheel (or driving a subway car, for that matter). (Any type of car will do, it seems.) That's an individual behavior that legislators are trying very hard to discourage. Individual drivers, with their phones.

But what if your environment is the digital distraction?

This article in the NY Times yesterday sheds some light on a growing phenomenon: the digital billboard:

These high-tech billboards marry the glow of Times Square with the immediacy of the Internet. Images change every six to eight seconds, so advertisers can flash timely messages — like the latest headlines, coffee deals at dawn, a cheeseburger at lunchtime or even the song playing on a radio station at that moment.

Other critics call the digital billboard "TV on a stick".

Digital billboards currently constitute @ 15% of all billboards currently, and it's not clear how many of these are situated next to roads, vs. in front of Caesar's Palace. But it appears that this is a growth industry, as a digital billboard can occupy the same space as an analog one, but cost more to rent. The messages can be varied, and they're harder to ignore, so more bang for your buck. So you turn your phone off when you get in the car, but the billboards start flashing.

I hope that the next time I'm on the highway, though, I'm not driving next to this new innovation -- the mobile billboard. I get dizzy just thinking about it. : (

What have I been up to , part I

2010-03-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

That's a very good question, thanks to whomever asked. :)

I've been running the Developing Minds and Digital Media project at Harvard's Graduate School of Education... interviewing forty teachers, analyzing and writing up the results. W00t!

Here's one of my latest publications; I'll be rolling these out in the next couple weeks.

Weigel, Margaret and Celka Straughn (2009). "Multiple Worlds: Adolescents, Digital Media and Habits of Mind." GoodWork Publications, Project Zero Publications, Cambridge, MA. PDF.

--> This is the final paper from Phase I of the project. It summarizes all the work, though it doesn't get into the fine grain detail some of the other papers do.

No Excuses; No Apologies

2010-03-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

Some people can write blog posts like breathing. Perhaps they have Blackberries (I don't) or lots of free time. Wait -- do people with Blackberries have free time? That seems counterintuitive.

But in any case, I've enjoyed my loooong break from writing, and hope there are still some diehard readers out there. I've made a resolution to start up again; if not daily, then as often as I can.

Starting very soon. Hopefully later today.

Free Stuff!*

2009-05-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-23T13:25:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

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"!

2009-03-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

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.

If you build it, they will strum

2009-03-25T12:10:00.001-07:00

I often moan about the ahistorical nature of the web, with its limited archival capacity and rush to adopt new technologies. But then there are stories like this:

Using data from various sources, including images in artwork, fragments from excavations and written descriptions, researchers of the Ancient Instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application, or ASTRA, project succeeded in developing a 3D mechanical computer model of the [epigonion].

Wow, ancient instruments! (Apparently, the instrument is a lot like a harp.) Hear what our ancestors heard! OK, those of us with ancestors in medieval Europe at least.

In the near future, the researchers hope to perform a concert on instruments that have not been heard for more than 2,000 years.

It's charming to think that through compiling bits of information from a variety of sources, the good folks at ASTRA can recreate objects without any blueprint. I do wonder why they've focused their energies on the epigonion; surely there are lots of forgotten instruments. Though perhaps they're starting out small and building up:

Vicinanza and colleagues ...resurrected the monochord, an instrument played by Pythagoras... Meaning "one string," the monochord had a single string fixed at both ends and stretched over a sound box.

This is Your Brain on New Digital Media, part XXX

2009-03-24T09:58:00.001-07:00

This brief piece from NPR contributor Peter Sagel muses about what might be lost when everything is accessible via phones and the internet:

I'm raising children now...and I see them drawn to the flickering, dimly lit holes leading from our house to the other worlds — the TVs and movies and computer games — and I can understand the almost overwhelming urge to crawl through. But I also wonder if, like me, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they'll have nothing real to let go of.

A sweet elegy to things past, to be sure. But might it be that exposure to a range of different environments, whether they're online or on TV, might actually help to flesh out one's imagination? To have a range of "wooded forests" to draw upon when needed vs. the sole patch of trees near your house? That having been said, offering young people a circumscribed set of shared 'stock' images to draw from suggests certain built-in limitations. Imagine if there were only, say, three or four fables from our childhood to draw upon versus the myriad of folk tales, fables, etc. we enjoy. Cinderella can only explain so much.

The Long Tail of Waiting for Profitability

2009-03-19T07:18:00.000-07:00

A new article speaks to both the confusion and promise around online distribution, with an eye towards profits:

SnagFilms...users can download widgets for any one of more than 550 documentaries available on the site, and watch the film -- which has about 90 seconds of advertising interspersed through it -- for free. SnagFilms shares the revenue, half and half, with the filmmaker. But the films need to be seen hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times before filmmakers can see substantive income from advertising revenue.

And at this point, the viewership is just not there. What gets me is that it seems to be a split business model:

On the other hand, the site allows filmmakers to earn full revenue from any DVD sales, which are promoted along with the free download.

Should a fan either go online a thousand times to watch a favorite film, or buy the DVD? It seems to make more sense to promote one option over the other, and maximize on that particular revenue stream, esp. when dealing with a modest audience size.

Though the Long Tail of market outliers is a great idea, by its very size it seems destined to stay unprofitable for most participants. Except for that lucky lottery winner or the creator with 1,000 true fans that just may justify continued participation.

Our bizzy, bizzy brains

2009-03-18T10:25:00.001-07:00

This article on NPR is on doodling's relation to the bored brain:

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says...the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

But why is this nugget in a blog about media engagement? Well, I could justify it in all sorts of ways, but try this on for size:

So when the brain lacks sufficient stimulation, it essentially goes on the prowl and scavenges for something to think about. Typically what happens in this situation is that the brain ends up manufacturing its own material.

Or, it could doodle.
Or, it could daydream, or problem-solve.
Or, it could play with a pocket-sized video game.
Or, it could text a pal, I'M BORED.

In a recent talk, Sherry Turkle said something along the lines of "Loneliness is failed solitude... we develop an attachment to technology when we're "bored" or have time when nothing's happening." Is it that we are hardwired to hate boredom? What did we do with our bored feelings before digital media came along and made everything so interesting?

Margaret's blog post, now with extra McDonald's references!

2009-03-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Back in 2001, I said that the future of advertising was product placement. Alas, there were no witnesses to my brilliant observation, so you'll have to take my word for it. But since then, product placement has been seen as a sure fire cure for the revenue blues. Declining ad dollars from Detroit carmakers in particular have put the economic pinch on broadcasters. In a particularly funny/cruel twist, the Las Vegas morning news show featured
fake, not real cups of McDonald's ice coffee on the news anchor desk. To taunt anyone with a simulacrum of caffeine at 7am is beyond cruel.

The CW of product placement as a cash cow is challenged, however, by this story about the continuation of a UK ban on product placement on the BBC channels:

There is a lack of evidence of economic benefits, along with very serious concerns about blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial.

I'm puzzled by this seeming contradiction: does product placement generate revenue or doesn't it?

Could it be that product placement has a high opportunity cost? The BBC representative was very protective of the BBC brand. Could it be that media properties free of product placement are Porsches compared to the McDonald's infused Yugo programs?

How Tweet it is...

2009-03-09T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yea. I think I was the last one in the world to hear about the new Skittles promotion on Twitter. For low-cost brand recognition, it's brilliant: an app on the skittles.com home page lists all Twitter posts which mention the word "skittles".

And now, I get Twitter (more than I ever have):

* the search function is absolutely critical. Search on anything -- your favorite color, your cat's name. Fun!

* this one word searchability is brilliant for marketers like Skittles.

* by publicizing the Twitter feed on their homepage, folks are bending over backwards to write about Skittles, or just throw in the word in their tweets.

* suddenly, tweeting about Skittles has become a game. Sure, a game with no point or rules, but a game nonetheless.

* Or perhaps it's better to call it a viral meme? Or, as Jenkins suggest, 'spreadable media'?

* Folks are also posting negative tweets about Skittles, i.e. "aren't Skittles carcinogens?" But it doesn't matter. It's all part of the game.

* Traditional marketers are saying that all this content-free twittering will not accomplish much. But how can anyone recommend with a straight face that anyone should be having 'a conversation about Skittles'?

Twitter as marketing juggernaut... to be continued...

Coraline -- a mild dissent

2009-02-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

I just returned from seeing the movie "Coraline", which has been hailed far and wide as a cool, creep children's fable for the new century. I even saw it in a cheap-ass theatre which didn't have any 3D glasses, so I missed those effects, and I liked it well enough.

A few things struck me, though, and I'm not sure that other critics have so pointedly mentioned this. (caution, spoilers ahead). One, at the point our plucky heroine gets a clue and returns to the dark parallel world of button-eyed delights to rescue her parents and the souls of three trapped children. And suddenly, we're watching the narrative of a video game. Coraline suits up with a bag full of tools such as garden shears, as well as a magical ring of sorts given to her by the crazy divas downstairs, and returns to negotiate the terms of 'a game' with the evil Parallel Mom.

And then it becomes even more like a video game. Coraline is tasked with finding three orbs which hold the souls of the lost children. "Give me a clue", she asks Parallel Mom, which she does. The garden shears come in handy in battling overly aggressive lilies; looking through 'the ring' allows the viewer to see the orbs in sharp relief. Coraline deftly collects them all with the help of a great cat. Did I mention there was a time limit? Each success leads to the world around her unraveling a little bit more. Freeing her real parents seemed more like an afterthought. The game element was, to me, a bit of a drag.

Two, she throws the wise cat at the crazed, evil mother in order to make her escape. That's the thanks he gets for saving her butt several times over earlier.

Three, I found it funny that in this supposedly interactive world we live in, where a child's self-actualization comes from creating, Coraline's dream is to passively suck down cupcakes and baked chicken, and to take in fabulous entertainments.

Four, what kind of man writes a story about a crazed mother whose heartfelt desire is to love a child? And my companion at the movies took one look at that squishy tunnel to the otherworld and said, "Vagina." Female issues, anyone? A victim of inappropriate (s)mothering? And was it me, or did the evil version of Mom look a bit like Joan Crawford?

Thank goodness no one reads this blog. But can I make a call for more female mainstream reviewers already? and writers?

2009-02-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

One of the big deals in digital literacy is the notion of 'visual literacy'. Our study at Harvard's GoodWork project confirm what has become conventional knowledge: students are more visual learners than the previous generation. Visual literacy is generally treated as though it's a relatively recent phenomena, but stuff like this makes me wonder if we hadn't be sliding towards a more visual world all along. This quote is taken from the obit of Ben Blank, cited as an innovator of TV news graphics:

Another early image, for a story on segregation, was the silhouette of a house, half black and half white. To illustrate the buildup in the Vietnam War before American involvement, he drew a map and then had it set afire on camera to show the intensity of the fighting...when the launch of the first Sputnik satellite took Americans by surprise, in 1957, Mr. Blank created what is believed to be the first electronic animation by repeating camera shots of a rotating golf ball, which represented Sputnik, on the end of some coat-hanger wire; the wire was attached to a small rotating globe. For added effect he glued glittering stars to the black background.

But if we're going to start getting all historical, I may as well tout my master's thesis (warning: PDF) which focuses on the increased visuality of information in public spaces in Manhattan in the early part of last century.

And if we're really going to go there, let's talk about textuality and literacy as being a relatively recent historical phenomena. Really, my digital comrades. Must we always be so ahistorical?

The End of Schools As We Know Them.

2009-02-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

Cuz showing up is a drag:

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

That actually makes a lot of sense, in terms of learning. You can listen to a recording multiple times and revisit the more difficult parts, like the way you can flip back and study a passage in a book. But then things get less clear-cut:

Students who downloaded the podcast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test - substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).

But that difference vanished among students who watched the podcast but did not take notes.Students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes had an average score of 77, McKinney says.

It's not clear -- did the students in class take notes? I presume so.

The lesson apparently to be learned is that the more types of study aids the better, esp. when it comes to learning for retention and assessment. And that digital media are not de facto brain wreckers. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

Benjamin, revisited

2009-02-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

Given that so much of our production now is produced on computers and printed out on cheap laser paper, the antiquities market is heading for a short circuit:

Although a panel of auctioneers and booksellers suggested that digital archives would end up being valued at levels close to their paper equivalents, conference delegate Gordon Bell, from Microsoft Research, suggested that prices should actually fall to almost nothing. "Isn't it about scarcity? Once it's been copied and distributed the value is gone, it's just a piece of memory."

"The nature of digital information is that it's near-infinitely copyable," agreed Peter Hirtle, who works on technology strategy at Cornell University Library. To turn it into something of value, "you're having to deny the nature of the medium", he argued.

Good point. Is the old "supply and demand" paradigm irreparably broken? Or is value now increasingly conferred through association, i.e. George Washington slept here? That's nothing new, really.

Then again, who wants an old hard drive that J.R. Rowlings once saved data to hanging around the house?

I bet someone does.

Cut and Paste Orchestra

2009-02-18T06:49:00.001-08:00

Be afraid. Be very afraid:

Today, online voting begins to select the members of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which (as The Washington Post announced in December) will perform at Carnegie Hall on April 15 under Michael Tilson Thomas -- an ensemble selected entirely from video auditions posted on YouTube, culled by judges in leading symphony orchestras around the world and chosen in part by votes from YouTube viewers. This means you.

Because, natch, you can judge a musician by an audition tape, and because a symphony's chemistry as a group together is overrated.

This speaks a bit to the work I've been doing on information versus wisdom and knowledge. Turns out the web is great at conveying information, but the sum of its parts remains elusive. It's a bit like closing your eyes and randomly selecting a pair of pants and shirt to wear; the fact that they're in your dresser counts for something, but how to assemble an outfit?

In short, what suffers in a web-dominant culture is art, which involves a complex stew of emotions, historical understanding, technical adeptness, and time.

Wither Wikipedia?

2009-01-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

My goodness:

Until now, Wikipedia has allowed anybody to make instant changes to almost all of its 2.7m entries, with only a handful of entries protected from being altered.

But under proposals put forward by the website's co-founder Jimmy Wales, many future changes to the site would need to be approved by a group of editors before going live.

The standard argument against Wikipedia is that it's not accurate: the standard Wiki booster argues that not only is it perfectly fine that way it is, but that it's more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So it seems strange that now Wales is proposing to up the accuracy quotient.

Of course, the thing about Wikipedia is that while it may be accurate at some point, it is really not at others:

On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, the site reported the deaths of West Virginia's Robert Byrd - the longest-serving senator in American history - and Ted Kennedy, who has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and collapsed during the inaugural lunch.

How reliable is a 'pedia that is driven by misinformation and rumor? I know, an extremely uncool thing to say, and the mistake was fixed. But how many others aren't?

This move also seems antithetical to the spirit of Wikipedia which, when you look at it, is more a social ideal than anything. That people working harmoniously together, building and sharing knowledge, is a cornerstone of the collaborative intelligence and social media movements. And we will gently police each other, smooth over mistakes, harbor no grudges, hard feelings, biases, etc...

I want what they're having.

Critique as My Point of View

2009-01-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

This article from a site called The Daily Gorilla mourns the decline of more experienced reviews as internet reviews take their place:

The online blog and review culture of saying whatever is “cute, smart or attention-grabbing” gives less chance for context and leaves no room for reasoned discussion, Moon says. The problem is that few people have an extensive knowledge or understanding of what went into the work. As critics more and more simply report their visceral feelings, actually knowing something about music has become seemingly unnecessary.

Yes, this is probably the case, although not necessarily the case. Most people still put more credence in a newspaper review versus a blog post, though they may be reading the newspaper review online for free. This screws up the paper's revenue stream -- less eyeballs means less ad income -- but it's not going to stop anytime soon. As information circulates freely online, newspapers desperately need a new approach for income. What that might be escapes me; the first to think of a viable model wins a sack of cash.

I was also interested in reviewer Moon's take on the content of reviews; the professional has a historical understanding of the craft in question and is able to separate out his personal opinions from his critique. For instance, my 'professional' take on the movie Appaloosa might focus more on the unexpectedly heartwarming relationship between the two male leads, and how this is a departure from traditional western roles. My blog interpretation might harp on how annoying Renee Zellweger is trying to play a femme fatale who apparently squints all the time. All that New Mexico sun, I suppose .

The distinction is definitely not a hard and fast rule -- many blog reviews can be insightful and many print reviews can be dreadful. But this dichotomy speaks to two different approaches to reviews, and the decline of the insightful review in favor of the more easily accessible, shallow and emotive review.

The future of novels

2009-01-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

I'm going to bypass all the stuff around literacy rates, because they confuse more than they clarify. I'm also not going to dignify the arguments that the novel is swirling around the cultural drain.

No, I'm going to focus on business models for publishing. Time has a great article about the changing business model of the book, as typified by the success story of one Lisa Genova. An aspiring novelist she did "everything right" within the traditional publishing framework: networked with agents, sent out lots of queries, etc. Nothing. But then, she paid a company $450 to publish the book herself. That was 2007. We rejoin our story in progress:

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

So what's the moral of this story? That book editors are morons? (Maybe). That Lisa was lucky? (For sure, but only partly). Or perhaps that this was a success story where a persistant author gets her work out and starts growing an audience over time. A savvy publisher notices, and gives the author a book deal (smiles all around).

Who are the losers? Lisa G. wasted time, effort and likely some money, but that half a million dollar advance will help take the edge off. Simon and Schuster gets a young, proven author added to the roster. It seems to me, looking down this road, that the only losers here are the unnetworked -- ironically, many of which are book readers who disparage the web -- who won't have a say in the future of publishing.

Free at last, somewhat, in Europe at least

2008-12-31T07:17:00.001-08:00

As of January first, Popeye the Sailor enters the public domain in Britain. Argagagaga!

Mind you, Popeye does not have the earning power that the ubiquitous mouse does, but it's still more than you and me -- @ one billion British pounds in 2008. As of Thursday -- in the UK? -- you can riff of Elzie Segar's original 1933 drawings. But the US copyright won't expire until 2024, which I also wouldn't bet on given the predilection of copyright holders to want to hold onto the rights until, well, forever. The Wikipedia page on copyright features a handy chart which lays out, in graphic detail, how copyright terms have increasingly been extended.

Yesterday I happened upon a broadcast from Benjamin Barber on Alternative Radio. Barber spoke of capitalism as being too concerned about short-term gain versus long-term profits, and gave the example of Detroit's auto industry focusing most of their energies on gas guzzling behemoths versus hybrids because at the time, people were buying gas guzzling behemoths. Now, Toyota is poised to become the #1 auto firm in the world because they strategized long term and took the new hybrid engine -- which had been built in Detroit and then PUT ASIDE -- and make hybrid cars a reality.

One could suggest the same logic for the media conglomerates -- perhaps if you stop holding on so tightly to aging intellectual property and allow folks to muck around with the content, someone might conjure the Next Big Thing that makes one billion pounds look like yesterday's leftovers. But alas, I don't think uNBC or Hearst read this blog. : (

When good memes go bad

2008-12-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

Should you be delighted or horrified at the mainstream media's attempt to 'get hep' and climb onto the Rick Rolling bandwagon during the Thanksgiving Day Macy's Parade? For those decidedly unhep readers, RickRolling is a gag where a website will unwittingly lead one to this 1987 Rick Astley video of the song "Never Gonna Give You Up", or one like it.

Yeah, I know. It's almost as funny as the "all your base are belong to us" slogan showing up everywhere in 2001. But it's not supposed to be funny; it's supposed to be ironic, for one, and also a status marker. If you don't know what Rickrolling is, square, beat it.

That is what disturbs me so much about the Macy's day stunt. That the parade was Rickroll'd says a couple of things. One, that even dorks at NBC know about the phenomenon, possibly from their much hipper children. Two, they interrupted A PARADE and had Rick Astley lip-sync right there on the spot. Won't someone please think of the children!?!! And three, they treated Astley like he earned his newfound celebrity status the old fangled way, through people liking his music and buying it, instead of being an object of mockery online, the punchline of a joke.

Yeah, I know. Bow down to the power of transformative irony. Meaning = dead. Whassssuppp?!

Libraries, still?

2008-12-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

Really, who goes to the library anymore when everything is online?

Actually, I go to the library. I confess. I enjoy browsing the new fiction books, and being able to take one home risk-free to try. I admit I very much like the theory of libraries, where anyone can consume all sorta of media for free. Though I'm less in thrall of the original mission of the library, which was to keep the rabble reading "the good stuff" versus that crud you could buy on the street -- serialized pulp magazines, bad porn, political tracts, etc.

But besides iconoclasts like myself, why go? The Christian Science Monitor suggests a couple of reasons:

seniors love the library. It's a warm place to hang out all day.

with the downturn in the economy, more people are interested in using its resources.

most libraries have the structual capacity to host readings, films, and the like. In fact, the library may be the most stable entertainment outlet in many cities and towns.

And then people go and close down the few libraries which remain. For shame.

Whither Privacy

2008-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

Did you know that every time you log on, you're leaving a 'digital footprint' behind? All those embarrassing party pictures of you clutching that red Solo plastic cup, all those digital rants, all those... well, some things are better left unshared. But it seems we can't resist online, and it's going to come back and haunt you:

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence toolscould create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

The article starts with a story of how MIT undergrads are paid to use special cellphones where their every keystroke and phone call is monitored. Could it be that our very notions of privacy are changing? In a recent article, the fiction author Jonathan Letham suggested that privacy is no longer monitoring what you share with the world, but trying to monitor who manages to reach you the Person. Let those embarrassing pictures circulate: what matters is whether or not someone gives you a hard time about them. Perhaps this is the right attitude for a digital age where we can't possibly manage all the information out there about us.

Mimi Ito on "On Point", WBUR.org

2008-11-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

I'm currently listening to Tom Ashbrooke's "On Point" radio program on WBUR.org as he discusses the results of the Digital Kids study with Mimi Ito. He's also chatting with youth, too, which is great.

Mimi said something quite articulate about her study, calling it a picture of what kids are doing. And that's exactly what it is. But it doesn't talk about who is engaged online, what they're learning and, perhaps most importantly, what is lost. In our interviews with educators in the Developing Minds and Digital Media project, there is an underlying concern that kids are missing out on a lot. Nature, for one. The world around them, for another. One can argue that kids have never much been interested in what's going on around them, but that just doesn't wash; the impulse for learning has only been awakened via digital access?

And another: serendipity. And another: reflection.

Just call me an old fart. Go ahead. I won't hear you, because my hearing aid fell into my Metamucil.

Hanging out, messing around, geeking out -- DigiKids research paper

2008-11-25T07:42:00.001-08:00

In case you managed to miss the media blitz -- The New York Times, the Washington Post, even the O'Reilly Factor -- Mimi Ito's group in California just released their seminal paper, "Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project."

It's beautifully written, and well-researched. However, I find myself hungry for context. Statements such as "Kids are mashing up content" make me want to ask, How _many_ kids? How old are they? What are they mashing up? Do they share it with friends? The project outlines two "genres of participation" -- friend-driven online engagement and interest-driven online engagement. That in and of itself is a valuable framing, but I find myself what constitutes a 'friend', as it seems from this document that it's anyone you have contact with. Is it the geek in class who tries to impress the cute girl by being extra competent? The report skirts around this issue by praising dabblers for capitalizing on their new technical skills, and mention the broad types of engagements, but misses the age-old conundrum of the geek and the pretty girl.

"We have also avoided categorizing practice on the basis of technology or parameters defined by media, such as media type or measures of frequency or media saturation." And given that their stated goal was to map out the parameters of participation, they have done an admirable job. Now it will fall to the rest of us to see how populated and nuanced each of these categories are.

I'm back!

2008-11-05T10:56:00.000-08:00

... but who know for how long?

Congratulations to President-elect Obama, his family and supporters. I accompanied a New Orleans-style marching band tooting their way from Davis Square to Teele Ssquare in Somerville, waving to curious residents peering at us. When the news struck, I was half in the bag at a restaurant in Somerville with about forty other Democrats.

But enough about me. Reports are coming in about how, a scant four years after the supposedly 'permanent Republican majority' had been instituted, this stunning change in affairs could've happened. Some cite the youth vote, the weakness of the economy, the utter cluenessness of the other candidate. Others claim that it was merely an uptick in registered Dems. In any case, the election was inescapable. Even if you are eight years old and a big fan of Nickelodeon.

On Hiatus

2008-06-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

Both of my regular readers may have noticed that I haven't written for awhile. This is the regretful fallout of a very busy life, both online and offline. I anticipate taking the summer off and returning in the fall, but who knows? I hope both of you beg for my return. : )

This summer, I will be:

* helping the Medford Square Market usher in its second year;

* assisting with local efforts to ensure that the proposed Green Line light rail extension is extended as far as it can possibly go. If you're interested in this, too, I urge you to sign the online petition;

* renovating the kitchen;

* trying to get some plants to grow in the backyard;

* going to the beach;

* barbequing with friends;

* watching So You Think You Can Dance, all one hundred thousand hours of it;

* brushing the cat;

* flossing as much as I can bear.

So in short, my offline life has overtaken my online life. And that's the question I'll leave you both with this summer -- who has the time and inclination to spend time online? How is this decision made? In some recent readings I've done, attempts are made to balance out the competing theories of sociality online, of the "rich get richer" (i.e. popular kids) or the "social compensation" (shyer people).

Chances are, they're both online, and that the internet magnifies each behavior. But we'll leave that discussion until after August. I know -- summer homework. Makes you want to just go and floss.

Until later.

A thought on the benefits of fandom

2008-05-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was listening to "Planet Mikey", a sports call in show on WEEI-AM here in Boston, and I was struck at how caller after caller could critique Julio Lugo's performance the night before (awful), Papelbom's pitching (surprisingly awful), and Youkelis' home runs (unexpected). The callers were able to cite batting strategies, on-base statistics, batting averages, you name it. Pretty impressive.

And yet... after generations of sports fandom, what has it gotten us? A more numerical literate populace? (no). An improved ability to construct a coherent argument? (not for many of the callers). A community of like-minded souls who bond together outside of baseball for more civic-minded enterprises? (we're lucky if they vote).

My point being, fans have been around for a very long time, and number in the millions. Why do we think that now, with the application of digital media, this new breed of fan will be able to make that cognitive leap from enjoying an entertaining pastime to gaining cognitive skills that can be applied across domains? Just wondering.

Who's running online life?

2008-05-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me the other day that there's an unresolvable tension embedded in online culture: that is, that the leaders online -- the developers, the coders, the engineers -- are not known for their social skills offline so much. Yes, it's a stereotype, but for a reason. Coding is accomplished through a computer interface, requires mastery of reams of arcade symbols and logic systems; for those of us whose tastes lean more on the literate side of things, anything written in syntax makes our collective eyes glaze over.

Everyone discusses who goes online and what they do online, but who's building the fundamental architecture of the place? Who can master the code and rule online life? Not the poets, that's for sure. All that fun stuff -- Flickr, Facebook, Webkinz, etc. -- has been built by someone (or someone(s), a team of coders). It can all be leveled by a sharp hacker. In the offline world, virtually anyone can stroll through a garden. To master doing it in Second Life is a colossal pain in the ass. So why invest the time learning? Who has the capacities to learn this high-level coding?

We talk about participatory culture, but it's akin to being able to dial the telephone... what I'm asking is, who's building the telephone? Who decided the buttons should go where? One school of thought will counter that user feedback influences the construction of these interfaces, and that's probably true to the extent that developers want to broaden participation.

But at the end of the day, there is someone at Blogger.com who built this portal and I dutifully type in the box they've given me and use one of their generic templates. There are rules online, and I'm a mere putsch.

All this intelligence

2008-05-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

... and what's the point? Two separate postings online have gotten me thinking...

The first, from the New York Times, discusses recent article which suggests that smarter animals die earlier and get confounded by certain tasks versus their less bright brethren. For those of us who have spent our lives going to school, working on academic projects, writing all those goddamn papers, etc., you have to wonder if we're going to keel over sooner rather than later. Or will we be confounded by something simple that all the other non-academics figured out long ago, like "never bet on the Cubs" or "stay away from pleats"?

This is balanced by a recent BoingBoing posting on media theorist Clay Shirkey, who provocatively asks if the future will involve a cognitive surplus, given all the free time we're going to have freed from drudgery?

Not that these two posts are directly contradictory. It's just the opposite: we're either going to be done in by our own intelligence, or burn it out in frustration because there's nothing to do. Note to self: learn how to repair iPhones...

Wikipedia: the Book

2008-04-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Am I missing something? link>:

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, will be appearing in German stores in September in an unusual format: as a book.

German publishing giant Bertelsmann AG said Wednesday it planned to publish a one-volume reference book containing the best of the Germany version of the popular online encyclopedia.

The 993-page book will contain approximately 50,000 definitions and 1,000 illustrations and will be priced at about 20 euros ($32.18 Cdn), according to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the group behind the ncyclopedia.

It's encyclopedia as photography: take a snapshot of a moment in time, and hope for the best.

p.s. it occurs to me that this may be nothing more than a savvy PR move, or an art installation. It's so hard to tell them apart these days.

Google Generation a Myth

2008-04-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

I love it when I come across articles that tear down the whole notion of the "digital native":

The report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, found users "power-browsing" or skimming material, using "horizontal" (shallow) research. Most spent only a few minutes looking at academic journal articles and few returned to them. "It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense," said the report authors.

But this behaviour was not restricted to "screenagers". "From undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, flicking behaviour in digital libraries. Factors specific to the individual, personality and background are much more significant than generation."

Let this be a lesson to those who like to think that today's youth are essentially aliens endowed with a natural facility for navigating digital information. Hurumph!

Being a media studies person and a lover of history, you learn that over time, modalities change, but human capacities rarely do. What makes the case of digital media engagement tricky is that while on the one hand it uses the same raw materials for communication we've used since the printing press -- pictures and words -- on the other hand, it promises new ways of interacting with them. In groups, rarely alone, information at your fingertips, yet often physically isolated and spiritually shallow.

I am your Grandmother

2008-04-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

At least I feel like I could be...

In theory, at least. In fact, I don't have children and have sometimes wondered about missing out on the joys of, say, baby's first steps. But that doesn't matter now. I can enjoy those private moments in a child's life online, without the crying and the burping and the $5 in the birthday card.*

In theory, I can enjoy moments like these with all the networked children of the world. I'm not sure if this makes me a stout-hearted humanitarian, or a weird voyeur. I think the same goes for whomever posted "Standup"'s video online. Is a moment intimate if it's filmed and shared with an anonymous audience?

*yes, I'm a cheap virtual grandma.

What does participation mean?

2008-04-11T16:48:00.001-07:00

While I'm a great fan of participatory culture -- defined as web 2.0, bottom-up connection, etc. -- I've started wondering how this practice is going to ultimately affect the distribution of power. I'm not talking about "Heroes"-type power, but the kind that can effect substantive structural changes in how business is conducted and government is run.

A friend recently told me that ethics were the quaint province of the middle to lower classes, and given the behavior of men (yes, mostly men) in power, it really does make one wonder if there's something to the idea that power corrupts. Absolutely. Or maybe power is more attainable by the corrupt -- the classic chicken/egg dialectic.

In any case, while I see participatory culture having the potential to afford great opportunities for learning, networking and creativity to everyone, I also see the following:

* those with more money and opportunity have more gadgets and more free time to play with them
* those with more money can buy the leisure time to participate in cultural pursuits

But even the lucky who aren't working eighteen hour days at several low paying jobs aren't off the hook, as corporations are more than happy to:

* make what was once (or should've been) paying work a 'game' and entice those free timers to do their work for free
* encourage fan-driven culture in order to exploit it for feedback
* appropriate ideas and talent without paying the creator a penny

So I ask those fans of participatory culture: how does the practice translate into a shifting of the corporate paradigm? Or is it its snuggle bunny? Because in any pursuit in this capitalist system, follow the money.

Discuss.

Digital life spans

2008-04-07T07:49:00.001-07:00

Check out this story on Boston.com about the ephemerality of digital media:

Digital files, like any other media, decay over time. A typical low-cost hard drive lasts five years. While CD's and DVD's haven't been around long enough to know whether they will in fact last a century, some studies indicate they may last only 20 years.

"Who knows how long they're going to last - how much time before the information on a zip disk just goes into heaven, cyberspace heaven," said Paladino, who recently was shipping out a box of Betamax tapes of the television show "Adam Smith's Money World," to be converted into a more usable format.

A confession: I still have a shopping bag full of eight track cassettes in my basement. For my birthday one year, a friend bought me a vintage eight track player that I rigged up to my (also very antiquated) stereo system. But after years of enjoying CD fidelity, the screeches and pop of the typical eight track were like fingers down a chalkboard. I still have them all if anyone's interested, including the Broadway soundtracks for Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Decaying media is nothing new; as they mention in the article, paper turns to dust, tablets break, scrolls are misplaced during a Mongol raid. What might in fact be new is the extent to which we rely on these objects to extend our human capacities. Why should schoolchildren remember dates, learn how to multiply, etc. when Google can do it for you for free, online, 24/7? The thinking is that these appliances free up our time to think Big Thoughts. Though I'm not sure how readily these Big Thoughts will come without having gone through the boot camp of multiplication tables, spelling drills and the really boring stuff that surrounds good communication.

The Royalty Question, Part I

2008-03-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

THere's a thoughtful article in today's New York Times about the value of free contributors to the whole web 2.0 schema. This piece was written by Billy Bragg, a veteran songwriter/performer, but it could easily apply to other sites other than music sharing ones:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

What’s at stake here is more than just the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it.

As a former musician, I've wondered from the get go how newcomers are supposed to earn any kind of compensation from this new market paradigm. This is a hot topic these days, so I'll do a few posts (promise!) on this in the coming days...

If You Charge Them, They Will Come?

2008-03-05T07:27:00.001-08:00

A recent article in Wired about the need to liberalize digital movie sharing and distribution contained this nugget:

The lessons from the music fiasco are clear: Trying to limit the inherent advantages of digital files is a losing strategy. The way to stop piracy is to make everything available — easily, legally, and at a fair price.

Writer Frank Rose thinks that the way to stop online piracy is to make everything easily available at a fair price. I'm smiling somewhat condescendingly at that charming notion, because an early trend in the GoodPlay research results I've seen so far (and mind you, the research is in the early stages), the youth ages 15-25 frankly don't want to pay for anything digital. I heard statements such as "Those dollar [purchases on iTunes] really add up" and "I don't have that kind of money". Given the choice between "fairly priced" offerings and "free" offerings... hmmm... hmmmm....

What really is at stake are not issues of distribution or accessibility (though that's a factor), but of ethical behavior and what we are currently learning to expect from the internet -- instant gratification, video on demand, no waiting. Which is a whole 'nuther kettle of cognition but I wanted to bring it up.

Kids and Music downloading

2008-02-29T12:09:00.001-08:00

Hello?! Paging the Chicago Tribune! 2004 wants its article on kids downloading music back:

SAN FRANCISCO - Going to the mall to buy music might no longer be a rite of passage for adolescents.

Nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38 percent of teens shunned such purchases, according to a report released Tuesday. Two years ago, teenagers accounted for 15 percent of CD sales. In 2007, the figure was 10 percent.

Did you know that it was no longer a common rite of passage to go to the mall to buy CDs? Yeah, I knew, too. But you know that irks CD companies more than kids not buying CDs? Kids not paying unreasonable prices for digital downloads:

What concerns the music industry is illegal Internet file-sharing on Web sites where people pick up a digital song or album that others have uploaded. They can also do what is known as peer-to-peer file sharing, when people download music while temporarily opening up their computers to others to pick up music. The music industry says people who obtain music free online are breaking the law.

I'm not trying to condone or encourage law-breaking, but clearly there's a huge disconnect between traditional definitions of property and ownership versus digital copies. There are no more 'per unit' sales to count; digital copies are infinite, easy to produce and last awhile. Can we please move beyond this argument and work on another commercial paradigm?

And if I knew what that might look like, I'd be a very smart, lucky young lady.

p.s. happy birthday to me! THis is my 100th blog post.

Media and participation, part I

2008-02-26T07:15:00.000-08:00

You know, as I get older and I get fitted for my first pair of bifocals (true!), I wonder about stuff like this, where Mom watches video on an iPod while sitting in a theatre. OK, maybe it's beyond the mere size thing (thought size is indeed important). It's about people being able to engage in a shared experience, mediated or otherwise.

This started becoming a long, rambling post, so let's just say for now that for the past two years, at every meeting there are folks typing away on iChat, surfing the web, or otherwise not actually engaging with what goes on in the room. I get the arguments that people learn in their own ways, and our laptops are becoming critical extensions of our thinking facilities, and that sometimes lectures and meetings are unbelievably boring *not the ones I run, though. of course* You visit someone in their office and half the time s/he continues to type away at whatever else they were doing. Is this still considered rude, or has the practice of engaging with your coworker gone the way of Betamax?

Maybe I *am* really the person who wear bifocals. And you durn kids -- get off my lawn!!

Soulja Boy Cool like WSJ

2008-02-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've finally decided that, in addition to posting my thesis and recent intellectual work online, I'm going to upload a video instructing you how to dance to it. Hey, it worked for Soulja Boy and the macarena, right?

OK, maybe I'm a grump. Maybe there's a difference between cultural and intellectual properties. But the WSJ article certainly lends one to believe that anything can be a hit when there's a good beat behind it.

Part of what bothers me is that a). this story is in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, and b). the emerging participatory culture basically is becoming fodder for corporations. Think of the money they can save by laying off their talent scouts! And I have nothing against artists making money, none at all.

But what is unsettling is how this all mirrors the process that Thomas Frank laid out in his book The Conquest of Cool. In Frank's case, he profiles the cooptation of the 1960's hippie, anti-corporate lifestyle by -- yep -- the corporations. We are totally free to create and to dance to our theses and get jiggy with it. But we have always been this free. The stakes are a bit higher now with digital media, in that it is a social process and a public process like never before, and YouTube features all sorts of teens singing with their friends, a once-private ritual, for an anonymous audience with time on their hands. And they're walking ads for Pepsi.

And for the few talent scouts who remain, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

The Vexing Kindle

2008-01-30T07:34:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has an interesting article on the Kindle, the newest electronic e-reader to hit the market. You may have heard about the Kindle by now: it's small, it's white, it has been screen resolution. Here it is, in all its tiny glory:

Hope is high for the Kindle's future. For starters, critics are suggesting that Amazon.com might do for the digital book reading digerati what Apple's iTunes did for mp3 music: provide a comprehensive library of downloadable properties available at an affordable price. But wait, there's more!:

Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: books and other content can be loaded wirelessly, from just about anywhere in the United States, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.

That's right. Say you're hankering to compare the literary version of, say, Atonement, with its screen adaptation. The Kindle will allow the user to rapidly download books across a high-speed network. No more tedious reserve lists at the local library! No more tracking down an actual bookstore and buying a paper copy!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure that consumers purchase novels on impulse, or struggle with the ability to quickly secure a book to read. Unlike, say, blogs or magazine articles, the mainstays of the web, books require some time to read, and it's not like your business competitor has read Atonement before, thereby gaining some strategic advantage over you.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that while I don't agree with Steve Jobs' derision towards reading -- "“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” -- I do agree that people who in fact do still read books are not the technological pioneers who will buy the Kindle, or subscribe to the now now now mentality that drives much of digital commerce.

Inside or out

2008-01-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

So here I am at work, sitting in front of a computer screen and plugged into my iPod. I suspect I'm not alone in my technological tethers. Last night, Frontline broadcast a pretty good special on Growing up Online. You can watch the entire show online for free; how's that for 'on demand'? I'm lovin' it.

In general, the program was quite thoughtful, delving into various elements of internet addiction, identity play, parent vs. child rifts and the like. The father of "Autumn Edows", a former misfit teen who transformed herself into a glamorous and popular internet sensation, perhaps said it best: the Internet has everything, all the good and all the bad.

In some ways, the show seemed like a pu pu platter of media concerns, and was hard pressed to do justice to any of them. Also, I totally enjoyed the Edows story, but in another sense, it seemed exploitative of female identity exploration and sexuality. Don't we get enough of girls posing, wanting to model, etc?

One issue left unspoken was the loss in outside play as teens increasingly plug in. A recent article in the Boston Globe titled "Sheltered Lives" takes a somewhat nostalgic, woozy view of how kids used to play. Back in my day, she says with a hurumph, we played huge games that spanned across multiple yards. Interestingly, there was a playground around the corner, but it was dominated by the kids from the 'other' streets that we thought were weird and plus, our yards had trees, bushes, garages and lots of props.

But I know I was lucky -- yards, safety, lots of kids to hang with. Many neighborhoods were never as fortunate. And horror stories (of kidnappings and attacks, of economic failure) have kept kids to a strict schedule. I'm less concerned about what kids are learning -- I think it's comparable if not better than past educations -- but how they're learning, and what is gained or lost in this exchange.

The Writer's Strike and the Future

2008-01-19T04:42:00.000-08:00

The Hollywood writer's strike just seems to keep dragging on and on. In the blogosphere and beyond, most folks support the writers, who are looking to receive fair compensation for their work as it crosses over from TV and film to online downloads, promotions and the like. And the owners, perhaps realizing how much this could cost them down the road, are none too pleased. As a result, your TV set may have already imploded from the colossal content vacuum with the tremendous sucking power. The New American Gladiators? It was funny and corny the first time around; now it smacks of a pro-wrestling audition. I hope they still have the 'Atlasphere', the human-sized wire cage that contestants crashed into each other. Something, in fact, like this:

But I digress.

It strikes me as ironic that in an era where more people are looking at content online and TV watching is declining overall that the strike is being driven by the older, most established and (dying) medium of TV. I think in the future web content will increasingly drive TV material. Given our love of the immersive, big-screen, larger-than-life mediated experience, going online is still too small, and too much work, to attract a certain (high) percentage of viewers/creators. But that being said, the fundamental natures of TV and the internet suggest a time where noncorporate, noncommercial creativity online will drive TV content for the world's couch potatoes, the tired, the sick, and the otherwise unable to manufacture their own fun for whatever reason.

Back in the day, you didn't have many options to kick back and enjoy a good yarn. No, you learned to play an instrument, or you read the Bible, or you didn't relax at all because you were so busy on the farm. Come to think of it, maybe that's why reading became so popular in the first place... it was early TV. : )

The Life of a Museum

2008-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

I deal a lot with digital culture on this blog, but there's also room for engaging with more traditional media forms, such as the museum. Museums themselves are trying to climb aboard that participatory culture bandwagon like everyone else, with interactive exhibits, visitor-curated shows, and iPods created by laypeople to explain what you're seeing, and why it actually matters.

Perhaps that's what is dooming the Guy Lombardo Museum in London, Ontario. Or not.

This closing fascinates me on a couple of levels. One, the traditional mission of a museum is to preserve and archive significant cultural achievements. Does this mean that we no longer be concerned about remembering Lombardo's longstanding New Year's Eve gig with the Royal Canadians (the band)? Perhaps because the poor fellah's fallen out of fashion is exactly why he should deserve his own museum. Local heritage advocates said they're ready to fight the recommendation to close the museum:

The closure would be a "slap in the face to Lombardo's legacy," said Barry Wells, an advocate for heritage preservation.
The recommendation to close has not received public input or scrutiny, he told CBC News.

Given that the museum hosted all of four hundred visitors in 2007, I'm not sure how much impact galvanizing all the fervent Lombardo fans will have on this decision. One suspects that many of Lombardo's fans are on the elderly side, and are not inclined towards cultural activism, but I'm happy to be proven wrong on this score. I must agree with the commentator who opined that the museum could do with more publicity: I've driven through London, a decent-sized burg in lower Ontario, a number of times and had I known about this museum, I might've persuaded the driver to pull over.

The flip side of all this is that who decided that Guy Lombardo's achievements merited a museum in the first place? Was this an ill advised tribute, a schlocky marketing ploy by London's elders to persuade rubes like me traveling along the 403 to take a Lombardo break? Was the museum ever successful? And, if a museum's mission is to preserve the significant despite changes in fashion, should it matter?

Ding dong, DRM is Dead! (for now)

2008-01-11T06:43:00.000-08:00

A news blurb online at Wired magazine yesterday announced that Sony's proprietary DRM technology for music would be discontinued. DRM, or digital rights management, was a rather draconian scheme by companies to compel users to purchase and use specific devices in order to play music, movies, etc.

It turns out that DRM has a long and storied history dating all the way back to digital dark ages of 1996. The basic arguments are that a). owners would like to profit from the sales and distribution of their titles, but b). other groups decried the technological locking systems as anti-competitive and, frankly, naive, given the extent that hackers could devise workarounds. My personal favorite hack was marking a specific portion of a copyright-protected CD dics with black magic marker or gaffer tape, thereby wrecking years of carefully crafted DMR code. Can you say, "Ha, Ha!"?

And yesterday Sony, the last remaining big media corp still trying to outwit the general public armed with markers and tape, is giving up the ghost and partnering with Amazon to distribute its media holdings:

We are excited to be working with Amazon as they continue to build new markets for digital music," said Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business and US sales unit. "We are constantly exploring new ways of making our music available to consumers in the physical space, over the internet and through mobile phones, and this initiative is the newest element of our ongoing campaign to bring our music to fans wherever they happen to be."

Glad they finally came around. Though I would put good money on future attempts to cram the digital genie back into its bottle using DRM.