Someday Twins Will Rule the World
Since 1980, the number of twins has climbed 75%. I wonder how this is changing elementary school friendship dynamics. Are twins more or less likely to be bullied? Are there non-twin on twin rivalries? My favorite band at the moment — School of Seven Bells — is fronted by twins. By 2030 or so, will they be icons for some future hipster twin subculture? Could a twin ever get elected president?
Right now there is some hrmphing at mothers of twins, as it indicates later age at the birth of the child or using IVF or both. On Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style last year, a mother of twins received a makeover. She was quite horrible and deserving of all the hate from Television Without Pity. But then some comments started mocking her because she had twins. Like it’s something pathetic about her femininity if she needed … help. I hope I don’t need to point out how disgusting and wrong that is. After all, so did Angelina Jolie (probably.) Anyway, I was just thinking about all that as today John Mullan in The Guardian lists the best twins in literature (via.) And then some chilling news in The Telegraph about a village in Brazil where, attributed to Josef Mengele’s experiments, “as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed” (via.)
Cell Phone Cameras Forever
It seems like everyone had the same thought I had watching President Obama’s speech at the Inaugural Youth Ball last night. Cell phone cameras!!! Whether or not it’s appropriate, (I see nothing wrong with wanting to document “history”) I found myself wondering if any technology might replace the camera now that it is more essential today than television — and constantly with us. I just can’t imagine a world without cameras, no sci-fi scenario where they are replaced with something else now that they are cheap and omnipresent.
We like to remember people and events as static images, framed in our minds. And we want to remember images from precisely the vantage point where we stood at that place that night. Even knowing a million other people captured the same thing and we can search for it on Flickr, on Tweetpic, on anything really — it’s not the same if we didn’t snap it.
What was distressing was no one put the cameras down. It wasn’t a sneaky thing…take one snapshot and it’s back in the bag. No, most of the people there seemed to be observing it all through their viewfinder, which is, oh my god, the most cliched of cliches in modern life.
But what kind of things don’t we photograph? You don’t take a photo of the bride when the priest is about to pronounce you married. You probably didn’t take a photo (you forgot to, didn’t think of it) during nearly all of your happiest memories. Why would you want to interrupt a blissful moment? Distancing yourself from the action taking place and denying yourself the opportunity to experience it with your full attention?
Image from VentureBeat via Ekstasis, who points out cameras are what lighters used to be. Clayton Cubbitt quotes A Clockwork Orange, “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
It made me think of an Aldous Huxley essay:
The saddest sight I ever saw was in a Montmartre boite at about 5 o’clock of an autumn morning. At a table in the corner of a hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adverturously seeing life for themselves. In front of them, on the table, stood the regulation bottle of champagne; but for preference - perhaps on principle - they were sipping lemonade. The jazz band played on monotonously; the tired drummer nodded on his drums; the saxaphonist yawned into his saxaphone. In couples, in staggering groups, the guests departed. But grimly, indominably, in spite of their fatigue, in spite of the boredom which so clearly expressed itself on their charming and ingenous faces, the three young girls sat on. They were still there when I left at sunrise. What stories I reflected, they would tell when they got home again! And how envious they would make their untravelled friends. “Paris is just wonderful…”
Cameras remind us to feel something, when perhaps we aren’t as much as we would like to be.
The Annotation Impulse: Graffiti and Social Media
Some of the bathrooms at MIT have chalkboards in them. It plays into the fantasy of being an MIT student: the head-in-the-clouds genius who will come up with the answer to a seemingly unsolvable theorem while standing over a urinal. He just must jot it down! But it also combats more permanent bathroom graffiti. Given a place to scribble something scandelous, knowing it can easily be erased, people who wouldn’t otherwise write things on walls might leave something behind for the next person to ponder.
In Oklahoma City, residents still mourn the 1991 passing of the “graffiti bridge.” Since 1930 it was where rival schools would make threats, students painted murals, and a whole lot of memories were made like the time on kid spilled a bucket of paint on a brand new BMW (The rubble is now repurposed as jewelry by a local artist.)
Some people think of books as holy things that should never been handled too roughly or written in, but I read everything with a highlighter between my thumb and index finger and a pen or pencil between my index and middle finger. Highlighting is a mnemonic device — I slow down and concentrate on the text when the fluorescent ink covers it. The pen is for writing my own commentary.
One of the best things about used books is the opportunity to pick a stranger’s brain. Not just the author — the previous reader. I’ve found so many odd, wonderful scribblings in previously owned books: first drafts of what eventually may be love letters and other funny or sad or interesting things. Sometime the annotation is enlightening. Sometimes it’s annoying. Whomever owned my copy of Understanding Media before me is an idiot and I cross out everything of his when I start a new page because it annoys and distracts me. But that’s part of the annotation impulse too.
Says Dovegreyreader:
Nothing sacred about my books, they are living and working extensions of my mind which as I get older is feeling slightly more full to overflowing, marginalia becometh a necessity not a sin.
Words that sum up the book as I’m reading, often a family tree if it feels complex, page numbers and gems of lines from the author, sometimes a message that the book will have hit me with suddenly and like a sledge-hammer, often a flash of blinding truth gone in an instant unless
I write it down.Don’t anyone suggest a notebook or post-it notes because those are never around when you need them whereas I have furnished the entire house with pencils.
After the publishing apocalypse, when we are all reading almost exclusively digital ink, we will share our scribbled pithy commentary, line by line, with whomever cares to read it (You can see a glimpse of this future on The Golden Notebook Project.)
Book marginalia is like graffiti without the property law infringement. The impulse is the same. It’s the same thing that drives kids to collect signatures on their cast when they break a bone, or later, get tattoos. And that is the same impulse that fuels the social web.
I know a lot of people who dream about painting their bedroom or office walls with chalkboard paint. Then there are those cafes where you can text something to appear on a screen on the wall. The bigger the cafe the more scandalous the messages get: “Dark haired girl in blue sweater cut me in line.” Before that there were places with paper walls and tables covered entirely with people’s scribbling. There are a bunch of them in Chicago. I was sad to see the emo verses I left on a wall in silver sharpie at a Gold Coast pizzeria as a teenager weren’t there ten years later. But that’s the nature of those things.
Karla Diaz in Journal of Aesthetics and Protest writes about those kind of places in an article about graffiti and texting: “public texting allows the once private text messages to be displayed on the sides of public buildings, on screens in coffee shops or on huge digital displays. People speak of this digital writing as an exciting possibility for language to exist in a visual, public space. However, one has to wonder how is this different from reading Graffiti on a wall somewhere?” So the big screen Twitter feeds at the tech conferences are kind of like graffiti.
“[Looking] at what I call the Older Graffiti artists’ original method of art practice which fosters collaboration and is guided by it street context, one can see how Graffiti culture has influenced text messaging,” Diaz continues, pointing out how younger, digital native graffiti artists think about their tagging as how it might look on a laptop or cellphone screen.
The major problem graffiti presented as an art form — its mortality — was overcome with the rise of blogs and digital curation. Looking beyond Diaz’ points about text messaging. How about Photoshop? What does seeing a website like LOLGraves make people think of architecture and space? Or what about the Internet as a hive mind? And then there is the joy you can get in doing something completely anonymous. The pleasure of a secret life. And don’t forget the way the Internet blurs the line between amateur and professional.
And on the Internet we can say whatever we want wherever we want. It completely open, for good and for bad. Some of us take that sense of entitlement with us to the street. People are writing “THE DOG DIES” on Marley and Me ads in Los Angeles. Just as they would to annoy others on a message board. Maybe it’s wrong, but what about last summer’s AT&T Billboard improvement in San Francisco?
My favorite blog post this year was Anti-advertising Agency’s call to “Demand a Read/Write City”
Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal - a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want - as long as it’s not too political.
But this is public space. You’re free to say whatever you want in public space, but freedom of speech does not extend to the visual environment. The visual environment is pay to play. Public visual space has become commercial space.
The visual environment is read only.
Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression.
Read/write is how democracy works.
There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen.
Read only culture creates apathy.
We need more places like the MIT bathrooms or the Oklahoma City graffiti bridge. In a better world, anywhere could be our chalkboard paint office.
Images: Geoffrey Raymond’s “Annotated Paintings” (some for sale on his website.)
Previously:
Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Micro-soliloquy, Conversation, and Correspondance
Funny video from Idiots of Ants (via.) Online “conversation” isn’t so much an exchange of ideas as it is an aggregate of micro-soliloquies. Says my friend @kilmer in under 140 characters: “Wondering if usage of an inherently self centered technology like twitter could be evidence of borderline personality disorder”
I’ve always wanted to turn my Twitter feed into a Beckett-inspired existentialist play. A mix of personal minutiae and social marketing gibberish:
- Delicious bibimbap in Kendall Sq before 5pm flight
- three important rules in content: coordinate, specialize, and know your audience http://is.gd/12u2
- drinks at 7B
- Cheapest place for car repairs in Arlington?
Says Bruce Schneier:
Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed.This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations — with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet — are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.
We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we’re being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.
Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. Someone in George W. Bush’s administration learned this, and millions of e-mails went mysteriously and conveniently missing.
Ephemeral conversation is dying.
Here’s a very good post about Twitter’s role in the Mumbai attack from the Berkman Center Digital Natives blog points out that Twitter isn’t good with breaking news because it isn’t designed for breaking news.
What is the point of Twitter anyway? Its a productivity tool and an email shortcut at its most essential. If I’m in NYC for the weekend, a tweet saves me from contacting several people individually. It developed as people bond over events from the historic (presidential debates) to the mundane (Top Chef). You can keep in touch easily — passively — with your favorite people who live far away.
Then there is a question of who to follow. At first I only knew about six people on the service. Two years later, I’m worried a tweet from @diablocody will bear out: “Why aren’t more moms on Twitter? It would seem to appeal to their checking-up obsession.” This means a lot more self-censoring.
Unlike Ideas on Ideas, I don’t think Twitter will die, but it will have to splinter out somehow. And it looks this is on the way in the form of Twitter Groups.
Image by Amy Cutler
Matching Books and Readers: Publishers Need Better Websites
Darkness moves by Wendy Heldmann
To continue on some of the points brought up in last week’s post on the Future of Entertainment 3: why are publishers’ websites so difficult to navigate? There is plenty of “content” — author interviews and videos, RSS feeds by subject — but nothing to match a reader with a book depending on her taste.
A bookstore (a good bookstore) is fun to browse because of the care employees take in displaying titles they believe buyers will appreciate. Many small bookstores have wonderful websites, because they are suited to a particular audience. However, publishers do very little to curate their inventory.
Even Amazon is difficult to navigate. Although their recommendation agent has had access to my buying habits for nearly ten years, it still doesn’t know me very well and is like some guy at a bar, “Hey, I know you! Jessica? Ugh, Jen? Samantha?” (Yes, I bought a Graham Greene book last year. I’m not impressed it believes I would also like all twenty of Graham Greene’s other novels.)
Good interactive websites do not require the most expensive UX designers. It takes creativity– silly gimmicks and fun. What about an eHarmony parody that asks MBTI-type questions and answers with several suggested books for your “type”?
These websites forget the goal of the visitor: which is to find a book that speaks to him or her. Publishers need to think about readers as individuals.
As it happens this reader is a freelance book critic. I write about a half dozen reviews a years, and would double that if it were easier to learn about new releases. To pitch a review for a magazine, I like to know about a book a few months before it is released so the review will be timely. But I rarely receive any kind of notices from publishers. The effort to find books relevant to my interest is often too time-consuming. In contrast, I get lots of screener offers from documentary/indie film distributors even though I rarely write about film.
I’m a little surprised my name isn’t in some kind of Excel spreadsheet with the publications I write for and the types of books I typically review (popular science, technology, art, often female-penned, etc.) It seems a pretty simple task to delegate to an intern.
Plus, I have a blog and reach a certain type of audience with taste in books similar to mine. If I mention a book on my blog I sell at least a couple copies of it (which I know because of our Amazon affiliation. For the record, I receive no information about buyers via our website besides the books they purchase.) It’s not a ton, but I’m one blogger in a sea of a million other blogs.
Obviously, there are bigger concerns right now in the book world. But, as publishers are thinking about the bottom line, efficient use of advertising and marketing budgets has got to include “spreadable media.”
Literary Novels and Fan Culture: Some Thoughts Following The Future of Entertainment 3
Over the weekend I attended The Future of Entertainment 3, a conference organized by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. The two day event featured back to back roundtables focusing on issues related to social media, audience participation, and “spreadable media,” a term CMS director Henry Jenkins coined as a more appropriate way to describe content than “viral.” (Viral connotes an inexplicable element the “infected” have no control over. It suggests you can “design the perfect virus and give it to the right first carriers.”)
From a post on Jenkins’ blog last year:
Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.
Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
While I was at the conference, Richard Nash publisher of Soft Skull responded to my article on the iPhone and the novel:
I’ve found in Joanne a fellow believer in the increased salience of the novel, more or less as we understand it now, long into the future…
[We] wish to take as given not only that the mobile internet could provide the means to read novels (various devices), the means to talk about and share them (various social media tools), and instead [merely] think about how it becomes part of the texture of the novel, like the letter and the phone call have.
And we notably don’t assume that the novel becomes a video game. Why should it? They video game already exists—it doesn’t need the novel.
This got me thinking about whether several attributes of “spreadable media” are inapplicable to most literary fiction. (Please note none of these points are meant as arguments for the superiority of literary fiction over other kind of fiction or entertainment.) Also some of these points are true of any type of media but especially true in this case.
- Size — selling 50,000 copies of a first novel is good run. Long Tail or not, 50,000 pageviews or tickets sold wouldn’t qualify as a major audience.
- Time - Reading a book is an investment of one’s time. And we read books at different stages. Someone who read Sleep Has His House seven years ago might have trouble conversing with someone finishing it now. There’s no broadcast or event unifying the audience.
- Solitude - Reading is a solitary experience. The reader’s imagination is as integral to the construction of the journey as is the writer’s words. We may share our books and love the same books, but with a good book, there is always the sense the journey was a private one.
Of these barriers, the solitary, private nature of a great book seems the significant. This isn’t true of genre novels, which are plot-driven, more visual, and for these reasons easier to discuss on message boards and blogs. Then again, running is also a solitary activity, as Kyle Ford from Ning pointed out during a panel on social media. Still, Nike rather ingeniously designed a game and social marketing plan in Nike+. A small wireless pedometer in your sneaker logs miles and tracks your progress. You can compare your run with your friends. The sneaker company even planned a half-marathon in a dozen cities around the world. Says the website: “Nike+ has become the world’s largest running community, who collectively, have run nearly 100 MILLION miles. Yes, 100 million miles. That’s nearly 4,000 trips around the world. Or roughly 5.28 billion running shoes lined up end to end. Or just a whole lot of miles logged by the dedicated runners of the Nike+ community.” (Update 12/1/08: See The Golden Notebook Project as a successful collaboration in reading. More in the comments.)
But size and time are the bigger problems. As Joe Marchese of Social Vibe pointed out, Dr. Horrible happened because it was Joss Whedon’s project. The excitement for True Blood and Barack Obama didn’t happen from social media, it carried over to social media. Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer (a television series that incorporates an incredibly innovative fan community) said during her presentation that in spite of Tivo and Hulu, the audience will generally make a point to watch a show as it airs on tv. So they won’t have to deal with spoilers. So they can talk about it immediately with other fans.
People did wait outside all night for the last Harry Potter book. But could they do the same for the debut novel from an unknown author?
Fan Communities for Literary Fiction (by Author, by Publisher, by Readers)
There are existing online fan(-ish) communities for novelists. Some are managed by the authors themselves. Tao Lin has an online army. My friend Scott Heim has written three of the most widely acclaimed novels in twenty years, and he communicates with fans over Myspace. Keith Gessen has a Tumblr. Naturally, this blurs the line between fan and friend. And maybe this has to happen for an author to find success. It is taking cues from the sci-fi community, where due to conventions and meetups there never was the sense of the writer as someone walled away, inaccessible to readers. John Scalzi had an interesting post about this a few months ago.
Another shift, I see is in mainstream readers thinking about publishing houses as they do record labels. That the catalog was curated. That there is some reason this book was published on this particular imprint and if you like one book they printed, you’ll like another. Right now, readers don’t really have brand loyalty with publishing houses. But a publisher can aggregate support for a multitude of books at once by emphasizing their shared origin.
A smart publisher is going to figure out a way to encourage fan communities. And I bet it’s going to be a small press with an existing reputation for excellence — Small Beer, Dalkey Archive, Soft Skull, Akashic Books, Melville House, etc. A minor example exists in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency with user submissions for humor content. But that started several years ago. A new model, should work as Moses from The Ghost Whisper, explained. She thinks about the website and series as a “loop” — the audience goes from once back to the other. The show encourages the website. The website encourages the show.
Existing online communities (Goodreads, LibraryThing) find common ground in the act of reading itself. This isn’t always the best way to way to find like-minds and share passions. (See Jessa Crispin’s article on a bookstore event we attended a few years ago, as how one constant reader might not have much in common with another.) It does however make room for wider applications — maybe a mobile service that helps you find book clubs. Recommendation agents can be expanded upon.
Collaboration in Creation:
A major problem with novels is they take a long time to write and you probably won’t get paid when you finish. If you are paid, it’s probably not very much.
At the conference, there was some discussion of sellaband.com, raising recording budgets for musicians through micro-payment. Could this ever assist a writer? Maybe? Doubtful? It’s nice to think about. There is the Concord Free Press, a nonprofit which exists on donations of services (writers, designers, printers.) Books are also given away for free.
Collaboration in creating an actual work of literary fiction is tricker to discuss. It just hasn’t happened yet. (Well, it did and the product was a failure.) It is pretty obvious why it’s easier to collaborate on Wikipedia than on a novel. We might jointly write something resembling Burrough-style “cut-ups” or something experimental — and it could be very good — but it won’t be the sort of emotionally committed personal writing that we come to expect from a great literary novel. Yochai Benkler pointed out in his presentation, the “storyline in a novel is different from documentary,” which is why collaborative platforms just aren’t being built for the former. Were a project in a motion, it would inevitably take the tongue-in-cheek sense of “this will be crap but let’s just try” that NaNoWriMo admits to.
First You Need a Good Book
Ballardian is a great example of organic literary online community. It’s very well-written, frequently updated, and widely read. It as much explores the writing of J. G. Ballard as it does his obsessions and themes in a contemporary context. There is a forum and much activity in the comments. Simon Sellars, who runs the website independent of the author and publisher, even hosted a contest for cellphone-shot home movies inspired by Ballard’s novels.
This might have something to do with Ballard’s unique appeal to artists and musicians. His books are plot-driven with familiar imagery easy to sample and remix. But it also offers promise for other authors. Publishers need to try to find authors who inspire and engage. Maybe one day a similar site will exist for Junot Díaz or Tatyana Tolstoya. First you need to find quality and foster it.
We can’t move on to the conversation of fan communities and social media when the product itself isn’t delivering. In store displays are more effective than price cuts. So why is prime Barnes and Noble real estate wasted on hastily written, unsatisfying novels, which in turn end up in the remainder bin? Like the bad debts that created the financial collapse, publishing houses have for too long traded on unremarkable books.
It’s worth noting J. G. Ballard, still isn’t published in the United States. A known author, a known genius of an author with a wide online fan community is cut off from his contemporary audience here. Likewise, where were the major publishers when Thomas M. Disch needed them? This is an author of immeasurable talent, who should have seen success before he killed himself earlier this year. He’s precisely the sort of author who inspires passionate and loyal fan communities.
A basketball scout wouldn’t restrict his search to Park Slope. So why do publishers only really print authors who live there? Here’s another idea: outsource the slush pile SETI and Wikipedia-style. I’d love to take a look at it.
Random House or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are now both in tremendous financial difficulty — freezing pensions and suspending new acquisitions. This isn’t just the greatest blah blah blah since the Great Depression. It’s a problematic business model. It isn’t comparable and shouldn’t be compared to what is happening with newspapers, where advertising has changed and online content is a substitute for print. Web content isn’t a substitute for a novel. I find the more time I spend online, the more I crave the quiet escape of a novel. But to work as a technology respite, a novel first must be exceptionally well-written.
I’m reminded of Neal Steaphanson’s comment at a recent reading. I believe the question was was — as remembered by Diana Kimball — what is the point of writing if the world is full of unread books? He said the life of a writer is now like a monk’s experience. In a world of “creatives” with sky-high income, we’re the ones who live simply and act simply.
The novel won’t ever die. The more I think about it, the more I agree that fan culture/spreadable media is essential to literature, and will succeed in spite of constraints on time and size. The first step is a great book.
Creating A Culture of Thrift
There is a very interesting discussion on several conservative websites about creating a culture of thrift. From Rod Dreher:
The cultural pressure against thrift and sensible spending, and self-control, is overwhelming. I literally cannot imagine how we reverse this. I know how we in our family reverse it, or at least combat it: we teach ourselves to say no, and we practice the habit of saying no. We’re not nearly as good at it as we need to be, but we’re a lot better at it than we were. We don’t let TV run our family’s life, either, which helps.
But we still get caught up in it. And I wonder: where does the countercultural message come from? Where do people hear any message, ever, to counter the constant drumbeat from TV and media, which is: “You won’t be happy until you buy this thing or have that experience”? Who is telling people it’s a lie? The churches? Please. If the churches did tell them, would they hang around to listen?
I’ve got an idea: start by focusing on the most pernicious kind of luxury — the status symbol.
After all, some unnecessary consumer goods at least add to our enjoyment of life. My iPod is a daily pleasure as I ride the metro. Desert at a restaurant is a tasty treat. The enjoyment I derive from these items — while it can never be compared to the pleasure derived from friends, family, faith, professional achievement or other more important goods — at least don’t come at anyone’s expense. We’ve all got different tastes in life. If you’re favorite thing is fashion — if you love its aesthetics — I don’t begrudge you that new pair of high heels. But I find that same pricey pair of shoes objectionable if the primary motive for the purchase is signalling to others that you can afford them.
Friedersdorf and Dreher continue with some discussion of wedding rings, to which I can only add, I adore everything Rebecca Mead has to say in “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding,” (my review for the Washington Times is here.)
As for diminishing the power of status symbols, I think trends are already pointing that way. A lasting success of the green movement is a conception of plastic bags as disgusting. Even if you privately don’t care about the environment, you’ll feel ashamed seen in public carrying them. The inevitable looks of scorn from bystanders prevent one from acting on any impulse to litter.
One benefit to extract from the current worldwide calamity is that this generation will learn to live within their means. The dirtiest word this year is “junket.” Whether or not you can comfortably afford luxury, it is now regarded with cynicism. Celebrities are wearing the same dress twice. Canceling holiday celebrations is simply good PR strategy. The mood is status goods and status events are tacky.
This might mean a divorce from brand-as-identity as described by Rob Walker in the wonderful book Buying In. If there is no incremental gain in quality with regards to price, the product is going to fail. That’s why Apple is doing ok, but high-end hotels are slashing their prices. What is the different between a $300 hotel and a $200 hotel?
What remains to be seen is whether we can ever return to the days when we bought for quality rather than quantity. Still in Europe, you’ll see middle-income families buy Mercedes rather than say, KIA, because they’ll drive the car to the ground. The status of the brands has to do with the quality not how much your neighbors envy you. They are also more likely to buy tailor finer quality clothes or take their shoes to the cobbler when the heel wears down.
But America buys the disposable. From Ikea to Forever 21. Buying for trends rather than durability. Items are sold with implicit expiration dates. You see it at its most obscene in technology, the term is “planned obsolescence” — gadgets built to break eventually.
The trend before recession — as the recession is perversely a “trend” as much as it is a reality — was green-anything. A newly cost-conscious society, which is also an environmentally-concerned society might be the right formula for a revival in “forever” products.
Back to wedding rings — an example of the best copywriting in the history of advertising is “A diamond is forever.” Might we soon see a spin on Frances Gerety’s famous phrase in everyday goods? Attempts to heirloom-ify everything from coffee makers to swivel chairs? This is the only pen I need. I wear these shoes every day to work. I’m passing this stemware down to my grandchilden. That sort of thing.
It might be the spin a flailing luxury brand like Burberry needs to stay competitive. Louis Vuitton might start emphasizing their history of service. How if you buy anything of theirs and it breaks they will fix it — for free — in the store. That’s a service lower-cost goods can’t afford to do. Buying only one expensive bag that lasts a lifetime is a much cheaper than constantly buying, rotating, and throwing purses away.
Photography by Jean Luc Mylayne
Previously:
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
Social Consequences of a Poor Economy
Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Second Life Dumpster (2008) by eteam at the Sculpture Center. (via Sixteen Miles of String)
Does anyone actually use Second Life who isn’t an artist or grad student writing a thesis on it? Anyway, eteam, New York-based German artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger have a Rhizome Commission-winning project, Second Life Dumpster. An installation, as part of their work, is now on view at Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, in the exhibit “Degrees of Remove: Landscape and Affect.” (Here’s a review on Inhabitat.)
Previously, the artists purchased a 10-acre piece of land in rural Nevada for under $500 on eBay. The International Airport Montello “operates like a perpetuum mobile,
an impossible machine, which is perpetually in motion and sometimes on strike.” In other words, residents of Montello (population 67) playact, with a convenience store temporarily selling IAM gifts and bars masquerading as airport bars. The town organizes a culture about the nonexistent airport. More from the website. Moderegger said he wanted to “create something emerging temporarily—that is what a town is. There is nothing here, but in a way there is everything here.” (Video.)
For Second Life Dumpster (located here on SL) eteam wrote a script to collect items from Second Life users would otherwise trash, which shows the decay. (This month there are a lot of Obama and Palin posters.) Here is their activity log. Part of the project includes real life rebuilding of decaying Second Life objects. From their statement:
- Is there a need for avatars to get rid of their trash in some other way, then just clicking the delete button?
- What kind of waste will be disposed (objects, viruses, messages, behaviors, avatars, cache, histories, programs, etc.),
and how will this effect the appearance and “inner life” of our land and the dumpster?- Will the disposal site be a heap that builds up and grows bigger, or will it transform into compost, where “matter” decomposes and turns into new material?
Will we have to program “worms” to initiate this process? And, what will we do with the new substances?- In which way will we (or Second Life management) be able to control the potential directions of growth?
- Will we be able to create an aesthetically filthy area that sticks out from its artificially clean surroundings?
- What kind of reactions will the dumpster provoke in avatars that own land adjacent to our land?
- How will we be able to get rid of the land and the trash on it after the duration of one year?
“When we heard about Second Life for the first time, we imagined it to be a kind of utopia, where people would create things that are impossible to even think of in the Real World. But, even after SL replaced our first life for a while, we could not permeate the top layer. There is no shovel around to dig that ground, no way to go beyond the surface. Maybe that’s why we are currently investigating the possibilities of our SL land as a public dumpster — to fill the place with some kind of history by leaving traces, to introduce the decay script,” eteam said in a recent interview with Rhizome’s Marisa Olsen:
There is often an element of field work or research, which can involve performance, followed by videos, and installations. Does your take on virtuality apply to your take on documentation?
We are constantly trying to figure out this problem: If virtuality is the inherent ability or potential of something to come into existence, how do we picture this potential, how do we document it, what do we call it and how do we protect it from turning into a reality that will be fenced-in by its practicalities?
Until we worked in Second Life, we called physical access to a site “facing reality”. When we went out West and visited our property, we had to wear boots, hats, sun lotion and drink water. Despite the fact that we tried to stay as abstract as possible, we still had to deal with facts, listen to people, and stay around long enough to find out if a certain reality was present at the site, one that was waiting to be identified so it could temporarily emerge with a name, like “International Airport Montello,” for example. Now we are asking ourselves: Was this a reality, because it was based on two abandoned landing strips behind the town of Montello and therefore connected to the land? Did this reality temporarily manifest itself, because it had been innate to the air around this place anyway, or were we lucky, because we proposed our concept to a group of people who believed that “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve!,” as Dr. Ron, our airport manager, said.
And, how do we compare this experience to working on a piece of land in Second Life? A real invention versus an invented reality? Take this conversation we had recently with someone who visited the dumpster:
[12:50] eteam: mmhh, I am just trying to figure out what this whole world is about
[12:50] Rolando Ember: i noticed
[12:50] eteam: and on what level it operates. I get stuck a lot and in the end it’s just a relief that I can clean up this dump in order to make space for new stuff. How do you spend most of your time?
[12:52] Rolando Ember: either at my military base or exploring. I don’t take this seriously at all. How about you?
[12:53] eteam: I sort through trash and attach the decay script to objects
[12:54] Rolando Ember: is this all you do on here?
[12:54] eteam: what?
[12:54] Rolando Ember: tend to the dumpster
[12:54] eteam: yes, mostly. sometimes I go to freebie places and get some more trash
[12:55] Rolando Ember: what’s the fascination with trash?
[12:55] eteam: that it does not look like trash. that it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out. that’s why I asked you earlier how you decide what’s trash and what not. I can not get over that…
[12:56] Rolando Ember: why can you not get over it? It’s really not that deep.
“it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out.” That describes everything on the Internet. Design trends change but nothing fades or rips apart. There’s no reason to ever delete anything online. Even Treehugger says the environmental benefit from trimming your gmail account is negligible.
Think of a box of old photographs. There’s usually one mistake per roll — someone’s head is cropped out or yellow spots ruined another. At 30 or 40 years old, it seems wrong to throw out those photos now. But we think nothing of deleting digital images that come out poorly, as it doesn’t cost anything more to take several extra frames per shot.
Similarly, there is no reason to junk personal email except for peace of mind. All past billets doux courriel is in an eight-year old email account I only use for social network logins. I so infrequently need to check it, I sometimes wonder if Yahoo hasn’t just deleted the account by now. And if they did, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
The funny thing about romantic internet correspondence is at some point, one person or the other will say how much he or she wishes the text were instead on paper. It’s sort of like the inevitability of talking about 9/11 on a first date. But only in special circumstances will anyone send a letter by mail and it wouldn’t be the same. It would be formal, maybe less romantic. Writing email accesses different emotions than pen and paper. No drafts. No rewriting, as the delete key is intrinsic to the process (more on this here.)
If you’ve ever been a college student instant messaging someone who is just down the hall, you know just how easily secrets spill out with technology to mediate. We don’t record our conversations over drinks. That would be creepy. We shouldn’t. But we tend automatically save all of our instant message chat files. Is it worth it to hold on to these memories?
There’s a company called BigString that sends email as html, which they claim the average user can’t detect. This means you can edit or delete a message after it’s sent. It’s been around a couple of years, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone actually use it. So few circumstances would call for it.
What I like about eteam’s project is this idea of rather than throwing something out entirely, you’re handing discarded items to someone else. Handing over the responsibility of thinking about them. In practice, this is abused. Rather than activating the decay script, some avatars are simply leaving their trash on the SL lot, (in case, they get dumper’s remorse?)
A smart start-up might create a kind of time capsule for all of our “oh, do I really want to get rid of this?” e-clutter. Those images where you are smiling but your friend isn’t. There is some guy in the background. Five years later, he’s a famous actor. Don’t you wish you never deleted that picture?
Wrap up all of those personal emails from someone right now too painful to remember. Shove it in someone else’s storage with the promise it won’t be deleted and can be accessed whenever forever. It could be a physical place, a library of our unwanted digital things. He or she could save all of these things on disks. Maybe even activate some kind of “decay” like the eteam’s SL project: turn the letter into pdfs, yellow the paper year by year, and within five years the text might bleed into itself a little, in ten years, it’s even less legible.
Much is said about the need for curators in the digital world. Why, for example, link blogs will never go away, they’ll just grow more specialized. Much is also made about the search for permanence in a world of ephemera. Quite naturally, things go missing and they break and we can never wear or play with them again. The natural process of losing and forgetting is missing here.
Gmail has that wonderful grey area between save and delete — “archive.” What are needed are more diverse tools which help us deal with abundance in similar ways. Methods to keep things completely out of sight while never running the risk of losing that which we might want to see later… eventually.
Images by eteam from their website and Second Life log.
Previously:
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital
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
Where Are the Renaissance Women?
Checking Google Reader this morning I found Virgina Postrel linking to two posts on the lack of women writing “big ideas” books (26th Story and Galleycat.) Meanwhile, C-Monster and Art Fag City both linked to Personism who noticed “The IDEA Conference” didn’t book female speakers. What’s going on here? Are there no modern day Renaissance women?
HarperStudio editor Julia Cheiffetz’s original point of discussion was the omission of women in Macolm Gladwell’s new book on “high-achievers”:
The omission of women in Outliers says more about the nature of “big think” books than it does about Mr.Gladwell. Since the publication of The Tipping Point we’ve seen a proliferation of books that present a single, shrink-wrapped idea as a means of understanding the world at large: books like The World is Flat, The Black Swan, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail. Now some of these books (the ones written by behavioral economists) tend toward the gee-whiz-isn’t-that-interesting set like Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics, and The Undercover Economist. But the point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men.
It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup. But until we get in the ring and start claiming our own big ideas in book form, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if current discourse leaves us on the sidelines.
Gladwell’s editor, by the way, responds, a “big part of the book’s argument investigates the arbitrary, often sexist ways women have been summarily excluded and denied opportunity and success.”
From a comment in a related post by Alison Flood in the Guardian:
Part of it is innate to women - simplistically speaking - i am sure we have all seen this but men are just naturally more confident - in my family and my peers where my girlfriends have brothers - the boys were encouraged to speak out at parties and anything they said was considered witty and insightful… there was a definite double standard - i would get grades far better than my brother but when he came home with no D’s or F’s he was congratulated and yet I never got D’s or F’s?!
I think men naturally think what they do is probably a good idea and they tend to get more support and then they go ahead with it.
Whereas I meet loads of smart women but they dont realize it or they think fair enough - i am rather academic but hardly groundbreaking and they dont go forward with the idea.
Indeed. Women aren’t encouraged to fake it ’til you make it. Instead we study and study so that no one will mistake confidence for bluffing (Unless, of course, the woman is Sarah Palin.)
For whatever reason, the perception of a female intellectual is usually that she is linear in her reasoning and interests. She doesn’t think about “the intersects” of this subject with that, but instead specializes in a single field. There are countless great woman-penned history books, and many women write biographies, but the bestseller trend right now is nonfiction that attempts to explain the world in a big, blustery way and women just aren’t authoring them.
Postrel, author of the very good big idea book The Future and Its Enemies, writes “Maybe because women don’t buy our books?” I would be interested in seeing the numbers, because I find it hard to believe readership of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point isn’t equal between genders — if not more women reading. (If fewer women read Postrel’s books it’s probably an outlier. She’s associated with libertarian politics, which has a notorious gender imbalance.)
Ron Hogan names Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein, off the top of his head, while admitting to find, “Cheiffetz’s distinction between ’storytellers; and ‘big thinkers,’ and the suggestion that these two types of writing might play out along gender lines at least as far as what sells, intriguing.”
There are a good number of women speakers at TED and PopTech. And women tend to make up half of the annual MacArthur Fellows. But too few women writers are making creative connections and sweeping observations like Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler, and others. I’m struggling now to think of more examples than I can count on my hands. Without Susan Sontag, it’s hard. The novelist Helen DeWitt, is continually described as “brilliant” and “brainy,” and makes those kind of digressions that are especially difficult in fiction. There’s Laura Kipnis, but because she writes about feminism it’s pretty much only women who know she exists. Sherry Turkle and Rebecca Solnit write those kinds of books, (although neither recently.) Solnit, by the way, wrote a wonderful essay last spring that could be related to all of this.
I wonder if it might be that women instead write books of essays without a unifying theme. Contemporary essays, as explained in this um, essay –by the woman writer– Cristina Nehring, are less intellectually daring than in the past. “The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.”
No doubt there is existing cultural hesitation in identifying women as big idea thinkers. Just look at the many examples of publishing houses advertising science fiction written by women as literary fiction. Which is why I find it hard to imagine publishers ever selling a “big ideas” book written by a woman as just that. Mary Roach might have been encouraged to write Stiff with a long arch (If The Selfish Gene can be considered a big ideas book, than one can arise from any subject.) Even Klein and Faludi are considered specialists in activist-left politics and gender studies, rather than digression-heavy sprawling thinkers. Likewise, I can’t imagine The Boston Globe ever green-lighting a woman who wants to write a blog called Brainiac or the NYT “Ideas”. Or Wired with a columnist Ms. Know-It-All. Look at how Marilyn vos Savant has for so long been ghetto-ized in Parade magazine, with a column amounting to not much more than a Sudoku of word problems.
I don’t doubt that a big publishing house would buy Gödel, Escher, Bach were it written by a woman, but I do doubt they would accept a pitch of that scope from an untested young female writer. Which is a shame, because I would read it and so would you.
Art by Jansson Stegner
Previously:
Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Related links:
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit
- Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The American Way of Death by Jessica Milford
- On Photography by Susan Sontag
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, ABCNews
- “Brilliant Women” in the National Portrait Gallery
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