Archives for the 'Media' Category
In Defense of Internet Lingo (Careful Fanboys, This Meme is Snarky)
Everyone has something to add to Oxford University Corpus’s list of the top “irritating phrases,” (for the upcoming book, Damp Squid.) The Telegraph article now has 2400 comments, some of which are a back and forth of what is and is not a misused phrase, eg, “To the person who ‘corrected’ the incorrect phrase ’spitting image’ to ’spirit and image’, your correction is incorrect. The original form of the phrase is ’spit and image’, commonly reduced in casual speech to ’spit ‘n’ image’, in the same way that ‘rock and roll’ becomes ‘rock ‘n’ roll’.”
Wired’s blog has another hundred or so comments, and many of them unsurprisingly sneer at common web lingo. Do these people really want to constrict the English language so that it never grows and words only mean what they have always meant? Or is it just a mild prejudice against the kind of people who talk like that?
Perhaps the greatest article on the subject was on Gawker a few years ago, rightly zinging the blogger-insider language that distinguishes it as not-real journalism:
I’m looking at you, [example of complaint].
Has been known to cause actual outbreaks of hives. As if the thing/person “looked” at would react with a surprised and bashful “Who, me?”. Puts the writer in the unflattering role (for all concerned) of pedantic schoolteacher addressing unruly children.Um, [condescension]?
As a verbal tic in conversation, “um” is perfectly acceptable and often auditorially invisible. Written in prose, it signals a level of smarmy superiority that would get you rightly punched in the face if you dared behave like that in person.[Argument], wait for it, [rhetorical flourish].
Where did this come from? Stage direction cues in the theater? No matter, it’s a ridiculous tease and artificial tension builder that’s never worth the wait.
Generally I’m annoyed by people who say “random!” when they don’t actually mean random or say it after a silly (not funny) joke. It’s not their usage of the word that bugs me, so much as the kind of people who tend to say it — a signal they might be part of a certain gum smacking subspecies. Hatred of business-ese also seems better directed at the overwhelming personalities of mid-management social media hacks who want to sell you something “bleeding edge,” part of the “brand called you” once they “touch base with you.” It has nothing to do really with the cliches themselves, misused or not.
Maybe I’ve insulated my world away from those kinds of people, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read the phrase “jumped the shark” used without the utterer knowingly referencing the annoyance the phrase inflicts. Likewise, “thinking outside the box,” always seems to be said with a knowing arched eyebrow.
There are three words web writers often can’t stand but I’d like to see them preserved as they so subtly acknowledge particular facets of online behavior: snark, fanboy, and meme.
I can’t improve on this response by Caesar on Wired about snark: “You can’t get replace ’snark’ with ’sarcasm.’ Everyone knows that sarcasm doesn’t come across over the internet, but it’s easy to tell when someone’s being snarky.” And a fanboy isn’t a fan. It is so much more, explaining a childlike blind devotion that is also a very isolating experience, one ususally can only share with others on online forums. Red Sox fans aren’t fanboys, especially in Boston, because you can meet and bond with anyone who shares your passion by entering the nearest Irish bar on game night.
I long tried to avoid using the word “meme” knowing how many people out there love to say Richard Dawkins wasn’t talking about dancing cat pictures. But, whatever. There’s no other word describing the way an idea on the internet spreads, um, “virally.” The term has been around since the early days of blogging. While it, like “blog,” is a hated word, it’s here to stay.
More interesting comments from the Wired thread:
I don’t know where to begin. Most people who think they have mastered English aren’t even close. In fact, there is no mastery of language, except in the understanding that it will never be static. Most phrases that annoy people are simply those that originate in a different region or culture (generation, dialect, etc.) and are misunderstood. Spelling and syntax errors aside (mostly), the flexibility of English is what makes it a great language, and I thumb my nose (I’m sure I just made a few people squirm) at those language Nazis who think their version is the correct one. If you want to sound intelligent, stick to the rules. However, there are great benefits to learning the lingo of another dialect or generation. And at the end of the day you’ll find you’ve communicated in a new way with someone who isn’t *you* (with all due respect). How about that.
Posted by: robogobo | Nov 7, 2008 10:36:23 AMMy god you people have a long stick up your collective asses. Do you hate every colloquialism? Is everything you say a completely unique combination of words? Are you never, ever redundant for emphasis, clarity, or just for entertainment? It’s tight asses like you who keep us from having an official genderless singular possessive pronoun equivalent of “his/her”, namely “their”- and so we’re stuck with one of the most awkward and yet “correct” phrases ever.
I swear all you English majors need to get laid more often.
Posted by: robogobo | Nov 7, 2008 11:24:06 AM“the”
I keep hearing that word all the time. I don’t care how useful it is; I’m tired of hearing it. If you’re not creative enough to express yourself without using old words, then you don’t deserve to express yourself.
…seriously though, cliches are pretty much the same as words. Why should I make up a new metaphor/symbol/sentence when a well known one already exists? I can use it without effort and my listener can understand it without effort.
The example of “snarky” was very ironic. In a piece that’s basically just complaining about people using old words, the author complained about people using a new word when the old word was “good enough.” Well, the expressions and sayings I already know are good enough for me.
The “begging the question” complaint is silly too. I have never once heard that phrase used “correctly,” and “circular argument” makes a lot more sense anyway. If everybody in the world forgot the original meaning of “begging the question,” nothing of value would have been lost.
I don’t care what any arbitrary “rules” (there are no actual rules… only conventions) say. The purpose of language is to express your idea in a way that others can understand. If you don’t do this, then you fail at language…. no matter how perfect your grammar/usage is or how unique your metaphors are.
Posted by: james | Nov 7, 2008 11:29:47 AM
A lot of comments make the infuriating assumption that typos evidence a writer’s sub-Grade 3 grammar skills. Look, the greater likelihood is someone accidently typed “their” instead of “they’re” because people often type homonyms accidently when they are typing fast. (For some reason I always seem to write celebrate as “selebrate,” even though I can’t remember not knowing how to spell the word. I guess my fingers are aligned in a weird way with the aural part of my brain.)
What we see as errors might be our own arrogance. One comment fumes over “centers around,” but while a bunch of centers wheeling around sure is stupid, one might also visualize this as finding a center point near or “around’ someplace.
Reading this, I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s op-ed, “Everything You Heard Is Wrong,” defending Sarah Palin and GWB’s pronunciation of “nucular”:
no, “nucular” is not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”
Nucular, FTW!
Art by Mark Bradford
Previously:
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism
On NRO’s the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson’s answer to the question “Why Do We Like Palin?” pretty much nails exactly why Sarah Palin is the most polarizing candidate we’ve seen in the election so far (Yes, more so than HRC.)
Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.
So along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.
Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.
If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.
So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.
Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.
Well I know why I’m criticizing her, and that is because I’m a libertarian and I remember the election of 2000. Her “reforming” political views and “down-to-earth” “symbolism” only remind me of George W. Bush in his first run for president. Naturally, it wasn’t the huntin’ and fishin’ that won over independents/libertarians, but his platform on limited government, free trade, and non-interventionist foreign policy. When you think about it, Bush in 2000 sounded a lot more like Ron Paul than John McCain today. From a libertarian’s perspective now, the worst thing Democrats can do is raise taxes. But I can’t even conceive of the worst possible Republican actions because the party has consistently gone beyond my most cynical expectations.
Foreign policy is the president’s direct responsibility, the economy is mostly out of his hands (Not that they’re unrelated: a hugely expensive war doesn’t help things.) Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Do you really believe that Sarah Palin understands the distinctions between Shia and Sunni, has an opinion about the future of Pakistan, has a view of how to exploit rifts within Tehran’s leadership, knows about the tricky task of securing loose nuclear weapons? Does anyone even know if she has ever expressed a view on these matters?”
I don’t fear Palin is the female Quayle but potentially the female GWB: a weak leader nevertheless capable of getting elected for the likability factor, falling under the influence of the people surrounding her while moving up the ranks. Remember, Bush had “executive experience” as a governor of Texas before the presidency. And they share a speechwriter.
From the Washington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis “suggest Palin would be able to handle foreign policy matters by leaning heavily on McCain’s staff.” You aren’t electing a person, you’re electing a party.
While much is made about her lack of “experience” canceling out Obama’s, now the Palin pick finally makes sense: this election is about “elitism.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.”
Class in our country isn’t well examined or understood, mostly as the division has much to do with race relations. And that makes Obama’s “elite” status so bizarre given his race and upbringing.
To the GOP, “elite” has nothing to do with money or race. It has to do with “values.” “Elite” is any social liberal. Which is why the left badly needs to reframe this debate and claim its side of the culture war as reasoned, principled, logical, honorable, any word other than something suggesting the result of a college education.
It all comes back to Karl Rove’s remark, “Even if you never met him, you know this guy… He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
As Jon Stewart put it, “Doesn’t elite mean good?…This job you’re applying for — if you get it, and it goes well, they might carve your head in a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than what the fuck are you doing?”
(BTW, if I had Photoshop on this computer I’d impose Palin and McCain’s faces on Grant Wood’s painting. And oh, maybe mash-up Cindy McCain and Marie-Antoinette.)
Update 9/4/08: More Sarah Palin 2008 = George W. Bush 2000 articles now. Sarah Palin’s real soul mate in Salon and George W. Palin in Huffington Post
Previously:
Boris Johnson isn’t London’s New Bicycle
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Related links:
- It’s an Election, Not a Revolution, Tyler Cowen in NYT
- Book: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard
- Don’t LOL. Palin Pick Is About Taking On Washington — Not About Gender, Joe Trippi
- Liberty Island, The American Prospect
- President Camacho Speech from Idiocracy
- The View on Palin from an Alaskan Anti-Real ID Activist and Democrat, Reason
Handmade Looking Writing
Reviewing “Lesser Panda,” by Sarah Morris at White Cube in London, The Guardian’s Adrian Searle recently wrote “Technically, Morris’s paintings are so accomplished there is nowhere for them to go. They are what they are and do what they do, resolutely declaring themselves as both product and spectacle.”
But…
Next to a Sarah Morris painting I feel sweaty, awkward, street-soiled and gangling. There’s not a bleed of paint, an errant hair or a fly trapped anywhere in the paint. If Morris’s horizontals or verticals ever appear off-whack, it is because the world is wrong. Euclid would run screaming from the room.To witness such perfection in a handmade object is wearying. Even Mondrian was allowed blips. Barnett Newman was positively sloppy. Morris’s unremitting dazzle is somehow soulless and inhuman, which I guess is the intention. However much the colour sings and the Olympic quoits jump and shuffle about, the general effect is alienating.
Reading that, I was reminded of an interview with Margaret Kilgallen, where she said she tries her best to make her lines even, but she doesn’t mind some asymmetry or crookedness as it is the sign of a human touch.
Will the Kilgallen way ever be the prevailing attitude toward online writing: the idea that a typo here or there is just the sign of a human being behind the text?
Were an artist to seek “perfection” in every painting, the end result would likely be fewer paintings. Some artists are better at it: a tighter grip, keener eye, or a number of other reasons can enable more precision. While it is true there is some laziness to letting a line get crooked, I don’t know of any art critic holding it against an artist unless it’s obvious.
Published writers aren’t allowed mistakes. To many, any kind of error proves absence of authority. Previously, we discussed the unlikelihood of conversational artificial life any time soon. The English language just has too many words, each nuanced with a number of scarcely interpretable resonances. But someday we’ll be talking to robots and they’ll be writing our press releases. And when they do, will it seem cool to let go a misspelling or a grammatical error here or there? You know…just to keep the reader on his toes.
The amount of email we all struggle with means if you aren’t born with a copyediting sixth sense, you probably made several errors today. The l33t-speak “teh” once seemed to signal “I’m too busy to backspace.” (Don’t we often feel that way? I’ve got something like 50 emails weighing on my shoulders and I’d love it if half the future recipients wouldn’t be offended if I type the message out as fast as I think it.)
Also, we make tradeoffs with our time. Time is allocated depending on the priority of the recipient. A document I turn in to my employer is edited line by line several times. But with emails to friends, I don’t just skip spell check — sometimes I don’t read it over before pressing send (which usually leads to clarifications in the Re:s, but anyway!) My blog is somewhere in the middle. Fretting over the spelling and grammar eats into the short time I have to write the posts. And writing out my ideas is the point of this blog. That being said, it’s the first page result googling my name, and on the off chance someone important is checking it out, I don’t want to appear hasty or incompetent.
That’s what spelling and grammar is all about: appearances. There are people out there who, no matter what you accomplish in life, will view you as at a third grade intellect if your tenses don’t match.
Tech Dirt recently wrote:
There’s a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It’s the infamous “Grammar Nazi.” There are nice Grammar Nazis — and we appreciate those — and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.
He also explains a nice Grammar Nazi (”usually emails us privately”) and the obnoxious kind (”always, always, always posts their comments publicly.”) By the way, if a writer does happen to write “you’re” instead of “your”: yes, he probably does know the difference, dearest helpful readers. Those of us without the sixth sense sometimes type homophones when we are working fast.
What is particularly vexing about the correctors is the implication that someone who makes typos doesn’t deserve to write. This is the belief of elementary school English teachers, at least when I was growing up. Points were docked for misplaced commas or misspellings, so the person with the highest grade didn’t necessarily write the greatest essay.
The best editors aren’t the best writers. I like the first draft quality of Philip K. Dick’s books. Maybe Gertrude Stein wasn’t as self-aware as people thought, when it came to her run-on sentences. I hate to think the reason modern literature is such a wasteland these days is because the genius novelist we’ve been waiting for was turned away by a Random House editor, “Ah, he can’t spell.”
Art by Sarah Morris.
Previously:
Saying Yes and Hearing No
Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.” - George Saunders (via.)
The other night, I attended “No More Bush Tour” at PA’s Lounge, a bunch of bands celebrating the last days of the shrub, including Bobb Trimble, whose obscure early-80s psychedelic records were rereleased on Secretly Canadian last year, the hypnotic Fahey-like guitar sounds of Jack Rose and several others. Between the acts there were literary readings, most memorably Damon Krukowski, (of Damon and Naomi, the best two-thirds of Galaxie 500.)
Krukowski and Yang run Exact Change, publishing experimental classics like Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring. It’s an impressive catalogue of books (beautifully designed by Yang.)
They focus on Surrealism, Dada, and Pataphysics, and all of the books are at least 50 years old. Nevertheless, Yang and Krukowski receive a fair share of requests to publish new work over the years. Many of the queries are strange. Very strange. One writer says he will “expose Marquis de Sade as the rank amateur he is” with his forthcoming novel including such horrors as “AIDS in preschools,” and other gruesome situations. Another was an extremely bizarre and lengthly erotic work — with numbered paragraphs — about a “brand new spiritual organ.”
I was reminded of the room in the Museum of Jurassic Technology with letters to Mount Wilson Observatory from amateur astronomers. (”Hydrogen, was created by Electricity between Nitrogen and Oxygen and the three forms the Trinity of Life Even as Electricity, Nitrogen and Etholeum form the trinity of all planetary existance. Electricity the (passtime p) thru Nitrogen the passtime Entrance ( ) Hydrogen between Nitrogen and Oxygen and these ( ) forms the air and the water with the surface of the earth.and that of the water between which is the trinity of the worlds existance. By the gathering of the water below and above to form the firmament which in the beginning God called Heaven, and wherein we live.”) And of the colorful stories of friends of mine who looked over the slush piles at their respective publications
Once I was a judge for a film script competition and it was a frustrating experience because, while everything I read was silly, I felt morally obligated to read closely in case I should glaze over the one line that might reveal a seemingly horrible script as a Hal Hartley-style farce.
A letter to Krukowski pronounces “we’re all insane unless something’s going wrong.” A crazy person zen koan that is kind of endearing, and an example of how the Diane Arbus question never went away.
One might look at the variations of “outsider art” and the mixed emotions of exploitation, sympathy, and curiosity of its spectators. And outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, and the documentaries about them that never quite articulated whether their (in Erickson’s case, new-found) success was based on talent or novelty.
Very often, I turn to Paul West’s “Mem, Mem, Mem,” published in The American Scholar (and Harper’s) last autumn, as an example of sifting a golden kernel out of what might otherwise seem like nonsense. In it, West, once a first rate literature scholar, describes his condition of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia the only way he can now: in aphasiac language.
You disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses.
The book, The Shadow Factory, was released last April.
The other question this raises is whether we accept “crazy” experimental things from people so long as they appear upstanding. A recent Washington Post article on Jeff Koons says the most surprising thing about Koons is how polite and sane he appears. I find that least surprising. As Mikita Brottman said, “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” Naturally, the normal articulate ones are those most likely to receive grants and succeed in other ways.
Then there’s JG Ballard, whose novel Crash famously received the verdict “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” from a publisher. That it was ever published must have something to do with Ballard’s record of several conventional(-ish) novels prior and that’s he’s Cambridge educated, undeniably intelligent, and presentable.
Were JG Ballard completely inarticulate about his ideas, and were that his only work, would Crash have the same power? Do we look at the man behind the curtain because we are too timid to align our sympathies with the work of a person who might genuinely be mad?
When it comes to experimental literature (or film, art, etc,) I find myself less capable of explaining what it is I like or dislike about it. And I am reluctant to suggest many of these titles to others simply because I can’t determine whether it’s the work that’s so moving or the result of projecting my own values and ideas on vague atmospheric paragraphs.
This is all a very long way to go about mentioning Mattathias Schwartz’s riveting New York Times magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us.
There’s not much I can build on what was already written (so very well!) by Schwartz, and commented on just about everywhere else. But it’s applicable here, because you find the strangest comments on the most MSM websites: CNN, New York Times. Conviction that their words are worthy of being printed in the grey lady. Finally the crazies have a platform. And so long as it’s left unmoderated, if there is a Cassandra among them, we might find her.
Automatic drawings by Unica Zurn
Previously:
Why Read at All?
Unica Zurn and Rachel Feinstein Currin: Fantasies Embodied
Related links:
- Damon and Naomi
- Damon Krukowski interviewed in The Modern World
- Naomi Yang interviewed in Dust Bureau
- Unica Zurn on Myspace
- “Under-Appreciated Existing Legal Remedies for Trolling, Defamation and Other “Malwebolent” Invasions of Privacy,” TLF
- The Chimeras of Unica Zurn, artnet
- Who cares about Ann Quin? Lee Rourke
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
Please Don’t Leave a Facebook Comment on My Birthday
I’m trying hard here to word this in the right way, without sounding exasperated or too demanding, because it’s not the worst thing in the word — but it is unfortunate there is no Emily Post for our generation, spelling out why and how we might best celebrate birthdays. The “happy birthday” comments on my social network pages get a fraction of my attention, as it took a fraction of the attention of the 
person who wrote it. Perhaps it wouldn’t trouble me if it didn’t seem a substitute for presence or substantial communication.
First there is the question of why it matters anyway. Aren’t we a little too old for birthdays? It’s true, some are indifferent to the annual “special day” but most of us just out of habit are not. It’s the one day of the year to receive special attention without doing anything to earn it: our personal New Year in order to reassess the paths we’ve taken and expect to take.
Plus, we grow up demanding this attention. It’s the best day in a child’s life, and one she waits for all month. For children, going to someone’s birthday is almost as fun as having your own. Becuase there will be cake and an inflatable castle in the backyard, or, at the very least, a slip-n-slide.
In college, replace “drinks” with “cake.” You ask the seniors to “buy” for you and get drunk in the dorms. But sometime, once school is done, a birthday is too much of a hassle to celebrate. For the birthday person, it’s a little awkward to send an email out: “Hi friends, please pay tribute to me at this sushi restaurant. By the way, I’m not one of those people that expects gifts but it would be nice to see you all.” For the invitees, well, sometimes they feel they have other priorities.
A text message, “Can’t make it tonight sick/busy/tired,” is an everyday disappointment, but on one’s birthday, it’s difficult not to take it personally. I thought I was the only one who got upset about this, until I went out with my friend, at the club he was DJing the night of his birthday. There was only the lightest shower just before he started playing, but he received text message after text message, “I’d go out, but it’s too rainy.”
Friends of mine, five years or more older, who actually have the sort of responsibilities one would assume might cut into their social time, never seem to do this, but with friends five years younger — forget it. Were there a Getting Things Done-style book for keeping up with friends, well articulated methods how not to alienate ourselves from the people we like best, no one would read it anyway. A shame, as I find so much of my email consists of messages back and forth from friends on why one or the other can’t meet up on this or that day. We all over-extend ourselves, because we can. But what it seems to bring about is what, T. S. Elliot called the “sty of contentment.”
And so you get the Facebook and Myspace comments instead. Both applications allow for no one to forget your birthday. But, here’s the thing, it requires nothing of a person to type and post two words and an exclamation point on a page. This is all part of the problem of time and attention, and also of priorities. I don’t know anyone too busy to watch The Wire or Man Men, but somehow we get too busy to meet up with friends.
Images by Laurie Simmons. The first a still from The Music of Regret
William Gibson Completely Deleted from BoingBoing Archives
Valleywag just reported Boing Boing deleted every mention of William Gibson on the site. A list he wrote of “Top 10 Science Fiction Memes of 2006″ is now offline. They no longer link to his books. A few days later the podcast interview they did with Gibson was offline too. Only a “via” link to a site that’s not his own remains.
Ok, it wasn’t William Gibson. It was Violet Blue who was unceremoniously purged. But whatever it was she did that so grossly offended Boing Boing, it is entirely possible that Gibson, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Johnson or any other male Boing Boing favorite could say or do the same thing. Violet Blue is a published author too (who is only going to gain prominence now that Kate Lee is representing her.) If you believe Boing Boing would ever so thoroughly scrub their archives of any of these men, please leave a comment here. I am always welcome to dissenting viewpoints.
This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging.
If Tim Noah got on David Plotz’s bad side, and the Chatterbox column vanished, the whole web would know about it within the hour. Pitchfork cleared Nick Sylvester’s reviews from their site after it was discovered he fabricated parts of a Village Voice cover story, a move most would say was unnecessary, but in the end it was Pitchfork’s call. (CORRECTION 7/2/08: They didn’t. The reviews are still there. Here’s one.) You’ll still see Jayson Blair as a byline in the New York Times archive. They only pulled the stories containing lies. “The Jayson Blair stories are going to (stay) in the archives,” Craig Whitney, standards editor for the New York Times told OJR. “We can’t pretend he was never here.” (He also discusses constant requests from divorced couples to nuke their wedding announcements.)
But no one is calling Violet Blue a dishonest journalist. She’s pulled from the Boing Boing site for some reason anyone several miles or more from Ritual will never know, (and doesn’t care to know either.)
And in one way what Boing Boing is doing is a lot worse than MSM pulling the plug on someone. It’s a snag in the blog quilt at large. Say I linked to a Violet Blue Boing Boing post using the old blog cliche “read the whole thing.” That post is worthless now, as is any external commentary on the content that Boing Boing deleted.
As Rebecca Blood wrote in her outline of weblog ethics:
Changing or deleting entries destroys the integrity of the network. The Web is designed to be connected; indeed, the weblog permalink is an invitation for others to link. Anyone who comments on or cites a document on the Web relies on that document (or entry) to remain unchanged. A prominent addendum is the preferred way to correct any information anywhere on the Web. If an addendum is impractical, as in the case of an essay that contains numerous inaccuracies, changes must be noted with the date and a brief description of the nature of the change…
The network of shared knowledge we are building will never be more than a novelty unless we protect its integrity by creating permanent records of our publications. The network benefits when even entries that are rendered irrelevant by changing circumstance are left as a historical record. As an example: A weblogger complains about inaccuracies in an online article; the writer corrects those inaccuracies (and notes them!); the weblogger’s entry is therefore meaningless — or is it? Deleting the entry somehow asserts that the whole incident simply didn’t happen — but it did. The record is more accurate and history is better served if the weblogger notes beneath the original entry that the writer has made the corrections and the article is now, to the weblogger’s knowledge, accurate.
History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.
This is a discussion we need to be having. Already blog archives are rarely looked over by the authors or major readers of a site. But they are found by people googling something specific.
Evidently, this isn’t the first time Boing Boing has removed a post because of a perceived microfeud. In February this year, Rex Sorgatz wrote, “BoingBoing linked to me yesterday. For 10 minutes. Then someone apparently told them that I’m the guy who hates on BoingBoing. Post deleted.”
From the post in question:
One of these days I’m going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I’ve already got a few ledes written: “BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man’s Fark,” “BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links,” “BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991….” And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang — they’re swell people. And I bet I’m the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING — the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it’s also the third-most-popular).
Those are the words of a disgruntled fan, not a hater. There’s nothing there that wouldn’t get published in a print magazine Letters to the Editor section. Seems like Boing Boing should listen to Will Leitch’s parting words: “Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended.”
Like Jim Harper at Tech Liberation Front, I get annoyed when people use “Big Brother” to describe non-coercive private actions. BoingBoing, as a private entity, is entirely free to censor their own material. They get a lot of flack for their overly eager moderating policy, but for the most part it seems to keep the trolls at bay. (Although, here’s an example of a heavy hand.)
But, Boing Boing hates corporate censorship too. They made a huge fuss when SmartFilter blocked their site for its “nudity.” And rightfully so. The story even ran in the NYT. The most interesting point coming out of the Valleywag story, was a comment from one of Cory Doctorow’s former students:
I find this extremely disappointing given that Cory Doctorow was a visiting Fulbright professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication in the Public Diplomacy program. Needless to say, there is a great deal of irony in Cory assuming such a “public”, democratic position, and yet for BoingBoing to censor voices like they seem to be doing.
I took Cory’s graduate seminar, which was a life-altering experience, but he clearly is stuck in larger “networks”, I guess.
Another blogger writes she’s angry “because I know that — because Boing Boing taught me — that we’re supposed to call out sites that do shit like that. So that’s what I’m doing.” Unfortunately, it’s unlikely any other bloggers will. This is a big fish in a small enabling pond situation. Most bloggers will ignore the story because they want to keep in Boingboing’s favor. Big media will ignore it, because they think it’s insignificant Mission District coffee shop gossip. Banning Violet Blue doesn’t exactly merit a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose.
However, this unfortunate incident is now noted on the Boing Boing Wikipedia page (”Sex blogger Violet Blue has, in the past, been regularly mentioned in Boing Boing, including a being the subject of a Boing Boing Boing interview. On the 23rd of June 2008, Blue posted on Tiny Nibbles that all posts making mention of her had been deleted from Boing Boing, without explanation. Boing Boing has refused to comment at this time.”) In the meantime you can hear the podcast on The Internet Archive.
So what might really be behind Boing Boing’s people purges? Fear of the inevitable. In cycling the person racing ahead of everyone else has to work the hardest. The person behind has an aereodynamic advantage from the drift, meanwhile the rider ahead has to work as much as 35% harder. That’s a great metaphor for everything — especially in technology. The leader is always the one who sweats the most. Because everyone can see where he is heading, but he can’t turn around to look at what’s coming from behind. There’s going to be a website that will do what Boing Boing does now, but better. Whomever develops it, is likely watching this event closely and vowing never to make this kind of mistake.
Images from “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia,” by David King
Update: 6/30/08 Finally the media is commenting on this. The LA Times blog has a pretty long piece on what happened:
No one, including Blue herself, has any idea what’s behind the scrubbing. BoingBoing has been conspicuously silent; despite considerable confusion in the blogopshere, the site has not posted about the issue or said they planned to. Blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer Xeni Jardin did not respond to an e-mail from me, and several other bloggers and writers reported non-answers too…
It’s bizarre that BoingBoing has failed to take any steps to clarify the situation.
For one thing, post-snuffing is usually “a serious no-no,” said Eve Batey, Blue’s friend and Chronicle editor. “That’s just against the rules of the blog world.”
But there’s also the fact that BoingBoing has often presented itself as a stalwart of cultural openness. Doctorow himself is a well-known copyfighter — a crusader against restrictive intellectual property laws. He has removed a post at least once before — when writer Ursula K. Le Guin asked that an excerpt of her book be taken down — but he immediately wrote a long, apologetic explanation of the incident.
I really hope Wired News and others continue to cover this story.
Update 7/1/08: If you are reading this for the first time, understand you’re a little bit late to the conversation. I wrote this post on Saturday. I first read about the deleted posts on Valleywag last Wednesday. I wrote this post because no one was talking about the issue, I would have been happy enough staying out of it, had other blogs and news sources commented on the Valleywag post. Since Monday, mainstream media picked up the story and today Boing Boing finally made an announcement, admitting the posts were deleted an entire year ago.
In the comments, Suzie Q writes:
Here’s the best theory I’ve come up with - and DO feel free to send this around the blogosphere, since hitting on the wrong answer will get the real answer just as surely as hitting on the real answer will get no response - it all comes down to this article on friend-of-boingboing Amanda Congdon:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/04/05/violetblue.DTL
This is a pretty blatant slam on Congdon for dishonesty regarding her corporate sponsorships, and may in fact have been related to Congdon leaving ABC ( I believe I heard a rumor about them getting upset when they found out about the side vlogging).
Essentially, Violet Blue possibly got Amanda Congdon fired, or at least that’s what it looks like. I would imagine that very likely, VB found out about this in a Boing Boing-related way. It could even be that VB didn’t get her fired, but betrayed their trust in revealing the info about her.
Which is why they’re not saying what the reason is. Because it’s actually the only thing that would make them look more hypocritical… because it’s anti-transparency.
But note that the only hint we get in their note of explanation is that VB’s posts were removed about a year ago - and this was the only really noteworthy thing she did around that time; at least, publicly.
Of course no one really knows what is going on here, but maybe this is worthy of a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose after all.
Another update: “violet blue boing boing” is #31 on Google Trends today. “Violet Blue” is #12.
Update 3: Here’s the post about Rex that was deleted.
Update 4: LA Times Web Scout this afternoon:
In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an “erroneous” claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had “unpublished some posts relating to her”). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.
Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet.
It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet’s boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two. So maybe 72 is slightly high.
In any case, let’s say that more than just “some” posts were removed. And let’s also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing’s Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.
In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue’s number of 100. I should have said at least 70.
I apologize for the imprecision.
Update 7/2/08: Zenarchery articulates why this is a great breach of ethics far better than I did.
Also, I’m no longer allowing comments to this post
Microcelebrity and Frienemies
If you used AOL in the early 90s, you likely remember Courtney Love going nuts on the music message boards. She’d stop in every few months and leave a whirlwind of mostly incoherent posts — sometimes something about Mary Lou Lord and oral sex and Kurt and a van after a show and how it is all NOT TRUE, sometimes just her daily gripes (”I am thinking heavily of trying Prozac…. I would appreciate info from intense, passionate, sexual (hetero, generally) and esp. CREATIVE females regarding this drug__I’m NOT clinically depressed__I’m not even manic-depressive, just super neurotic and paranoid….”) — whatever it was, she always sounded defensive. From an article written around that time:
“It’s like a masturbatory videogame all about me!” Courtney Love brags over the phone, only halfself-mockingly. Love first stormed onto America Online in the spring of ‘94, not long after her husband took a shotgun to his head and changed her life forever. Her first mission: to intercept her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who had been on the service promoting a very unauthorized Kurt Cobain biography he was writing. In an online battle in full view of AOL’s thenthree million users, “hunnypi 28″ accused “BioDad” of exploiting the tragedy. BioDad eventually vanished back into anonymity. Love decided to stick around.
“For a while I was really addicted to it,” she says now. “It was like my only friend. I just couldn’t deal with humans__I was dealing with these cyberbeings, and having these inane conversations, banal conversations, crazy conversations, dealing-with-grief conversations with people from fucking God-knows-where who looked like God-knows-what.”
But she wasn’t treated with adoration at all. Love was entangled in major drawn out online feuds, at a time when everyone hid behind anonymous “handles.” Part of it was to accuse her of killing Kurt, partly a reaction to her paranoid writing style, but I think most of the people coming at her, just wanted to get her attention.
Online, Courtney Love was a pinata, but most of these people were just random suburban teenagers who would inevitably act obsequiously given a backstage pass to meet her. Because they were — kinda — her fans. She still blogs, but has, as far as I know, kept out of online discussions.
There is one case when the rage toward a public figure is genuine: when it is not really the public figure, but someone posing as him. Look at Richard Dawkins on Twitter. Some hater registered the account and used the opportunity to eventually tell his fans how Dawkins is wrong. Following that, he got a number of flaming replies.
Now, anyone who paid attention from the beginning would have noticed it couldn’t possibly be Dawkins. But no one on the internet bothers investing the time to even read a sentence from somebody seemingly important, unless it directly matters to them. You just add “Richard Dawkins” to your Twitter feed cause you know he’s smart and you’d like to read his stuff one day and maybe that passive-contact will make you smarter by osmosis.
AOL users never doubted Courtney Love’s posts were fake. It had to be her. The way she wrote was so uniquely strange. It was a nervous breakdown reduced to online text. It was great!
I was reminded of Courtney Love, reading Keith Gessen’s blog. Not in terms of content, but the reactions he’s received. He made some comment about “Taking back the internet,” and a blog appeared using that name:
Last week, when Gawker linked to this blog, I took some solace in the fact that I suddenly had a slew of tumblr followers. My followers, I thought, would follow me to the ends of the earth.
But now I’ve clicked on some of your tumblrs, and it turns out you all hate me.
Will I ever forget the moment I discovered “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” in my followers? “Ah!” I thought. “A fan site.”
It was not a fan site.
So, without further ado, I’ve decided to take the initiative and buy up all the potential tumblrs my less than enthusiastic followers might be inclined to one day occupy. These are:
keithgessensucks.tumblr.com
keithgessensucksballs.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’sear.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnames.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnamesinthegawker
commentssection.tumblr.com
ididn’tevenstickmyballsinkeithgessen’searbecausei’veneverhe
ardofhimandhesucks.tumblr.comI think that about covers it. Now what you gonna do?
See that’s kind of funny. Maybe he’s not conceited, like everyone thought. And he’s writing it on a Tumblr — the least pretentious blog software one could use. But the criticism kept coming, playful jabs at his alleged inflated sense of entitlement (here and here and here.)
It’s a perpetuation of previous aggression and the capacity to get attention from someone who is in the public eye. Criticism is always easier to write than praise. But the haters don’t really hate him. At least, not the way I hate Chris Matthews or Londoners hate Boris Johnson. They may resent his success. They might find something about him annoying. But the premise of the annoyance — that Gessen takes himself too seriously — was proven wrong as soon as he set up a Tumblr. Now he’s having a party, inviting the very people behind the mocking websites.
Attention is attention whether its praise or venom. As Rex Sorgatz writes in his New York magazine article on how to attain microcelebrity:
If there is a Latin phrase for “reply to everything,” it should be crocheted on your pillows and tacked above your door. Anytime your name is used, you are required to e-mail, comment, or firebomb the person invoking it. When in doubt, remember these three maxims: There is no such thing as being above the fray, every battle is worth fighting, and all disputes are good press.
Tao Lin gets it. He offered free copies of his books to “shit talkers,” anyone who can produce evidence “that you don’t like me (a link to something you typed on the internet or a description of what you said to someone about me).”
McLuhen didn’t predict a medium that keeps you busy every minute of the day — even when you are doing nothing. There is always another thing to “Read Later” or email or blog or cut+paste, or skim rather than read. Time and attention are spread too thin. People are too busy to decide whether they like something or not, the Internet makes everything a joke.
What was the last thing on the Internet you concentrated on for longer than a minute? What got a strong reaction from you? Besides this photo of Ryan Gosling and this video from a My Bloody Valentine concert, just about everything I see online is encoded in my mind as a murky grey shade. And it isn’t often retrieved after I close my laptop for the day. I have no idea what I looked at thirty minutes ago. I could take or leave it, but I can’t tear myself away from looking, when I’m in the middle of it.
And that gets to an idea I have, which is going to be an upcoming post: why everything on the internet goes back to sex. Porn is the one thing that consistently holds one’s attention online (And if you can’t concentrate on that, man, maybe you really should consider visiting those Chinese rehab clinics.)
Another good point from Sorgatz’s piece:
Where traditional fame was steeped in class envy on the part of the audience and alienation on the part of the celebrity, microfame closes the gap between devotee and celebrity. It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity. And you can just as easily begin to cultivate your own set of admirers. Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.
This is important because for most creative types, microcelebrity is all you can dream to achieve. Sorgatz points out Tila Tequila only sold 13,000 copies of her album. But that’s the average for a Pitchfork-approved musician. An author under contract with a major publishing house might sell twice as many books. Microfame is inevitable for most authors and musicians, regardless of their web participation. And money plays a part in this. Someone can be extremely well known and just never manage to profit from it. When you hear about an author earning six figure advance for a novel, it might seem like they’ve entered a tax bracket above your own. But not really. If that book took two or three years to write (as it very well should have!) the advance isn’t as impressive.
How can you pretend to have any power over your fanbase when they earn twice as much as you did, working as administrative assistants? If you want to be a public figure in these times, you can’t play boss.
Images of male celebrities crying by Sam Taylor-Wood, courtesy of Arab Aquarius.
Previously:
- The President Isn’t Your Boss
- We Live in Public
- Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
- More tagged “web history“
The President Isn’t Your Boss
[Despite] his doubts about the “intelligence” he had been provided, despite the fact that he spent days “trimming the garbage” from Vice President Cheney’s “evidence” of Iraq’s weapons programs and its ties to Al Qaeda, Powell went ahead and shilled for the liars anyway. Why did he not threaten to expose the whole thing publicly? Because, as he has said, to do so would have betrayed the ethic of the loyal soldier he believed himself to be.
What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses. Powell’s excuse—that he did not want to betray the ethic of the loyal soldier—was precisely the one used by the defendants at Nuremberg, and if you say that the analogy is a reckless one, that Colin Powell is no Rudolf Hess but a generally decent man—an A student, a team player, a loyal employee, a good soldier—I’ll agree, and say only this: God save us from men and women like him, for they will do almost anything in the name of “loyalty.” Something to consider, perhaps, as the nation contemplates electing to the presidency John McCain, a member of our warrior class for whom loyalty constitutes the highest possible virtue.
That’s Mark Slouka in an outstanding essay in this month’s Harper’s, “Democracy and deference.” You can read the whole thing online.
At a White House reception a couple of years ago, President George Bush asked Senator-elect Jim Webb how things were going for his son, a Marine serving in Iraq. “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb replied. “I didn’t ask you that,” the president shot back. “I asked you how your boy was doing.”
Webb, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, had not only risked his own life in the service of his country but now had a child in harm’s way, serving in an ill-conceived and criminally mismanaged war sold to the nation under false pretenses by the man standing in front of him. One might expect this second man to be nice. To show a modicum of respect. Should he fall short of this, one could at least take comfort in the certainty that the American people would hold him accountable for his rudeness and presumption.
Which is precisely what many of them did—they held Jim Webb accountable. “I’m surprised and offended by Jim Webb,” declared Stephen Hess, a professor at George Washington University, in a New York Times article entitled “A Breach of Manners Sets a Tough Town Atwitter.” … Letitia Baldrige, the “doyenne of Washington manners,” termed the whole thing “a sad exchange.” Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, made the point that “even discussions of war and life and death did not justify suspending the rules,” then declined to comment on l’affaire Webb-Bush, saying, “It would be rude of me to declare an individual rude.”
But it was left to Kate Zernike, the author of the Times article, to place the cherry atop this shameful confection in the form of a seemingly offhand parenthetical: “(On criticizing the president in his own house, Ms. Baldrige quotes the French: ça ne se fait pas—‘it is not done.’)”
To which one might reply, in the parlance of my native town: Why the fuck not? Répétez après moi: It ain’t the man’s house. We’re letting him borrow it for a time. And he should behave accordingly—that is, as one cognizant of the honor bestowed upon him—or risk being evicted by the people in favor of a more suitable tenant.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The outrage over the Webb-Bush exchange was not really about decorum. It was about daring to stand up to the boss. Rudeness? Stop. This is America. We’re rude to one another more or less continually. We make mincemeat of one another on television, fiberoptically flame one another to a crisp, blog ourselves bloody. No, rudeness, as deplorable as it is, is not the point here, particularly as Webb, judged by any reasonable standard, wasn’t rude at all.
Our president?
Slouka blames America’s “boss culture.” On every office TV program there’s a humorless boss, who “will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.”
Gene Healy’s new book The Cult of the Presidency examines imperial presidency as something that goes against our Constitution. And Jerry Brito, writing about Barack Obama made an interesting point: we don’t have a head of state. While the UK has a Queen to serve as the face of the nation, and the Prime Minister to do the dirty work, our President serves both roles. “I think one reason why some of us who are ideologically opposed to Barak Obama are nevertheless drawn to him is because we’d like to see him in the role of head of state,” he writes.
Slouka concurs. During the Prime Minister’s Questions, every Prime Minister sweats under pressure, answering tough questions from the audience. And think about it, 10 Downing Street is just a row house, not some massive estate. Souka explains, “My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants, because they have both, clearly labeled.”
An audience member — Maria Hutchings, a homemaker –once demanded Prime Minister Blair apologize for going to war. She responded to his answer with “That’s rubbish, Tony.” Slouka writes, “Now recall that steel tycoon who, upon accidentally addressing the president as ‘Mr. Truman’ rather than ‘Mr. President,’ was never able to forgive himself for the breach of etiquette. Which one is the citizen, and which the subject?”
Previously: Boris Johnson Isn’t London’s New Bicycle
We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
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