Media activists and forward thinker Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, raps on “imaginary cosmopolitanism,” “wisdom of the flock,” and “human curators.” He shows that despite the global nature of networks, most of us still remain within cultural bubbles and there remains little crossover between users of different cultural environments. The solution? We need more DJing.
21
Jul 10
B(P)-movie mystery
America’s Blog posted a series of images demonstrating how BP photoshopped its command center for its Website. Apparently there is a trickster in their midsts, but the photoshopped image (posted above) actually is from the set of the wonderful TV series, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not to make light of the seriousness of the Gulf oil spill, but is this not a plot line from the old TV show? Where are the robot comedian deconstructionists when we need them?
Update: here are some more hilarious photoshopped versions.
16
Jul 10
Buzz kill: ambient music not a dangerous drug
As Wired.com points out (Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High), there is a new hysteria about a craze called “i-dosing.” As the story goes, teens are encouraged to put on headphones and to listen to ambient tracks on the Internet that induce feelings of pleasure and ecstasy. God help them! As the Wired article points out, the phenomena is getting the attention of some concerned folks who worry that this is simply a gateway to some other drug, like marijuana or LSD. Never mind that this is much safer than a much more pressing addiction: our insatiable appetite for war and petroleum.
Indeed, their fears are likely confirmed by the graphic on the signature i-dose track (posted above), “Gates of Hades” (you have to let it run a little to see it). If anything I find the electronic pulse on this track annoying. I much prefer a Tibetan bowl, Balinese gongs, chanting ohm or my favorite: a live Sonic Youth feedback jam. But hey, who can fault teens for wanting to transcend the hellish nightmare we call school and American consumerism.
The fear of teens evading the control of the capitalist/Church mind trap are normal in America. During a time when corporations have hijacked democracy and are poisoning the planet, there’s never a better moment to whip up hysteria about how race music/rock/rave/Internet are abducting our children.
Incidentally, the article’s comments are hilarious. My favorite comment from Zombowski who put it this way: “I can’t figure out how to get the music into the needle. Do I shoot it up with an old record player?”
15
Jul 10
I’m lovin’ it
A good culture jam always brings me a smile! In case you can’t read the label on the right, it says L’oreal Insect Repellent.
06
Jul 10
Heart swarming
Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.
I love both the aesthetic and paradigmatic approach of this video as a potential solution for the environmental crisis. Though I’m encouraged by the proposed solutions at the end of the video, I’m not sure if they will necessarily pan out as stated, mainly because I think it will emerge in ways that we can’t imagine quite yet (a la Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World). I also don’t agree with its “war on climate change” rhetoric. Nonetheless, the form of the video (it’s a collaboration between 24 artists) and its central concept of the swarm and its re-presentation of the ’60s as a rhizomatic prototype (and its critique of the co-optation of ’60s culture) shows us that we already have lots to build on.
You can learn more about the creators, Coalition of the Willing, here.
05
Jul 10
Conflict (mineral) resolution
In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
03
Jul 10
Feeling grumpy about media monopoly (and the World Cup)
OK, so I’m a little pissed about the World Cup.
I don’t subscribe to satellite or private service in Italy, and only have access to public TV, for which I pay a 100 Euro annual tax. RAI (pubic TV) is only broadcasting one World Cup game a day, which means I have missed many matches, including last night’s crucial game between Ghana and Uruguay. The Net in Italy is now thoroughly filtered so I cannot access live streams from the BBC or ESPN. This is all because the big media monopolies have agreed to gate off large chunks of media, essentially privatizing a global event that arguable belongs in the planetary public sphere.
Incidentally, who pays to train the national teams competing in the World Cup? We do! This is like corporations patenting inventions from public universities.
Burlusconi and Murdoch are big jerks!
25
Jun 10
From Deepwater Horizon to Event Horizon on Planet BP
Many of you might be feeling powerless about the situation in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t want to descend into disaster porn to report how scary things look at the moment. But they do. And I, for one, have been feeling a lot of despair, angst and anger. However necessary these emotions are, I also feel the need to be proactive. Given that one of the primary problems of the situation is a lack of transparent communication, I thought it would be excellent if we could put our brain trust together to create a response that can can empower citizens to understand the discourse and spin surrounding what is happening, and also to guide our thoughts towards a systemic reflection on what we can learn from this horrible tragedy.
As such, I’m now referring to the Deepwater Horizon as the Event Horizon, because for me it reveals the broken condition of our world system’s operating paradigm and offers us a point of visualization that our future selves could look back upon and say: that was the moment we went into recovery and ended our addiction to oil.
Here is some background information that informs my thinking:
Continue reading →
23
Jun 10
Making a difference: knowing you are on the right path
I’m a fan of David Korten, who has an uncanny ability to model economic worldviews very clearly. He has updated Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, which includes the following sign-posts of difference making behaviors.
To bring down the institutions of Empire, we must begin to build the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up.
So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.
1. Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?
2. Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?
3. Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?
4. Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?
5. Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?
23
Jun 10
Drugged out butterfly hates bad publicity
The Lunesta ad parody that has survived fair use on YouTube (not the one I posted)
Apparently that cute little Lunesta butterfly flapping around in a corporate induced stupor is a rather pissy drug shill. I posted the Lunesta ad on my YouTube channel because I used it for teaching purposes in my courses. Accompanying the video I posted the following comment: “Corporation is a butterfly, replaces nature.”
To my chagrin YouTube users made lots of positive comments about the commercial, one stating that it was her four-year-old daughter’s favorite ad and thanked me for posting it. In fact, this has been a common trend: I post an ad for the purposes of criticism, and the commentators end up loving it. Go figure.
Anyhow, Sepracor, the maker or Lunesta, decided that an open media system is more than it can take. Too bad for them, because ultimately I made the one mistake of culture jamming: through my efforts to critique corporate brands, I end up giving them even more attention than they deserve, and hence more “mind share.”
Hey Sepracor, didn’t you learn anything from PT Barnum, who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?
This, too me, is what I have been fearing about the future of the Web, and particular for those of us who teach media literacy. So far there has been a “hands off” approach from advertisers when it come to us using their work as part of our teaching materials. Either the Fair Use provision has kept them away, or we’re too few to care about. But you know the saying, you have free speech as long as no one listens to you.
Or put differently, does a copyright violation happen when a deconstruction takes place in the forest?
For what it’s worth, this is what the take down notice said (click here to see the rest):
Continue reading →
17
Jun 10
World Cup and the anthropological object at play
Two different visions for the World Cup
Living in Italy it’s hard to ignore the World Cup. Everyday at the local market people want to know my opinion about the England-USA match-up on June 6. That’s fine by me. I’ve got the bug too.
What I find fascinating is how a single ball can so inspire the collective imagination, which is brilliantly captured in the above Nike ad (the first embedded video). Taking a page from Lost, the ad flashes sideways into alternate realities based on the results of the play. Aesthetically the ad captures the global zeitgeist of the World Cup’s fever dream.
Speaking of balls…
Using the soccer ball as a point of discussion, a section of Piere Levy’s Becoming Virtual explores the “anthropological object,” which highlights the possibility for using the World Cup’s gameplay as a visualization for a larger project: global ecology.
Building on French philosopher Michel Serres‘ work on “quasi-objects,” Levy draws on the image of a soccer match to concretize how collective intelligence can emerge around the movement of an “anthropological object,” the otherwise unspectacular soccer ball. There are different levels of engagement: the stadium and its spectators, who cannot directly act on the ball, but most certainly can charge the energetic field of the gamespace (as the general debate about the vuvuzelas testifies). On the field, there are the players, of course, who directly engage the ball. Then there are those of us with our nervous systems extending into the gamespace via the cameras that capture the action and transmit it through cyberspace, satellite and broadcast.
With the scene set we can see that though the ball is itself an artifact in its own right, once it goes into play it becomes a point of relations, propelling collective intelligence into action. No single player can pick up the ball and puncture it or run away with it. The ball becomes a tool for which we can think with and respond to in relation to other people. In play it is collectively conceived, a fulcrum for a billion people to relate to and with each other.
Now, imagine if that kind of collective action revolved around the most important ball of all: Earth.
Certainly the commercial, creative and civic energies that go into the World Cup are not currently directed towards our blue ball in space. Yet, as Levy wholeheartedly wants to do with this particular thought exercise, we can humanize/eco-ize the virtuality experiment that we as a global society are engaged in. He suggests that cyberspace can be such an object to think with, one that offers the pedagogical potential for engaging us in building intelligent communities. Obviously at this current moment the BPs of the world are firmly entrenched in the political, military and financial matrix of global power, but they are not poised for the necessary intelligent response to what the ecosphere, and humanity, is calling for. The Greenpeace ad (the second embedded video) is a step in this direction.
Of course, unlike a soccer ball, we don’t need to kick Earth around any more. In Levy’s words:
“Technology virtualizes action and organic functions. Yet the tool, the artifact, are not merely efficient things. Technological objects are passed from hand to hand, body to body, like a baton in a relay. They create shared uses, become vectors of knowledge, messengers of collective memory, catalysts of cooperation.” (p.165)
16
Jun 10
Not too challenging: freedom is slavery and other ironies
Is Challenger the official car of the Tea Party? Here Dodge is desperately pandering to the extreme right, an indicator that American corporations have no scruples when it comes to salvaging its business model. Indeed, this is a zeitgeist ad for the American political landscape: a failed ideology can only salvage itself through the appeal of fascist aesthetics.
Indeed, muscle cars are like tea Partiers on steroids, trouncing the landscape as they chase off the foreign occupiers with a false sense of self-confidence. Sorry to say this folks, but the Brits have you by the balls right now. BP will gladly fuel your Challenger for you at a special discounted rate of specially repurposed Golf oil.
George Orwell, Walter Benjamin and George Washington are somewhere shaking their heads right now while chasing quaaludes with a stiff brandy.
So much for freedom.
12
Jun 10
Education wants to be free
The Mitochondrial Vertigo blog is one of the few places I’ve found that is focusing attention on the scary takedown of a.aaaarg.org. In case you missed out, a.aaaarg.org was a grassroots file sharing site for academics (formal and informal), so blokes like myself could post PDFs of important chapters for our students to read (and to share with others) without going through the hassle of copyright clearance, which is increasingly a huge DRM finger up the arse. Not surprisingly, it’s megatextbook publisher McMillian/McGraw-Hill–the Monsanto of academics–who took a page from the music industry to shut down this Temporary Autonomous Zone of exchange. Ironically, every bit of technology and science that enables Macmillan/McGraw-Hill to be a scholastic monopoly was probably developed in open learning environments. No doubt Macmillan/McGraw-Hill would like to run the educational Web like its own plantation, despite the free and open access labor at the foundation of its distribution platform.
(Hear Clay Shirky rhapsodize on the Internet’s “cognitive surplus,” the kind of thing that a.aaaarg.org provided for free thinking folks like us.)
Anyhow, there is a larger drama at play, which is about the war of e-readers and who has the right to read what and under what conditions. As Mitochondrial Vertigo argues, we should pay attention to the battle between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, both of which I find to be rather scary devices when it come to books and copyright. This is part of a bigger war over the future of the Net, which every concerned citizen should get caught up on by reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (you can download the book for free here).
Here’s a choice quote from Mitochondrial Vertigo:
“The minds of the future lie within the Kindle v iPad wars, the habits of our thinking, our cups of coffee, and our licking of the page turning. The nice thing about technology, it always does MORE, it lets not only the cat, but its fleas and its dreams out of the bag. As Macmillan attacks file sharing in order to secure as much leverage as it can in its battle with Kindle and Amazon, the frayed hem edge of our complexity is showing. We must also reflect upon the fact that ‘We demand more content, faster (cheaper)!’ is what is behind many of our complaints when file-sharing is restricted, a demand worth inspecting.”
On this last point (demanding more faster and cheaper), it may be the case we want all our information/entertainment to be free and that has depended on a trade-off to allow ad creep into the vestibules of our lives. The alternative, DRM, makes pimping my eyeballs the better deal. Selling out screenspace to advertising is most certainly a Faustian pact, and it’s naive to assume that everything should be free just because we want it to be that way. On the other hand, as an old school punk, I feel like a barter economy keeps our culture honest. I’m never going to make money on my books anyways. What’s important is performance–what Radiohead and other rock bands have finally figured out as they watched their corporate overlords sue fans to recoup discretionary cocaine funds.
The money thing will have to be worked out, one way or another. Meanwhile, as long as I can show up and teach, and at the end of the day go home to eat a fresh meal and sleep in a warm bed, I’m happy. But for that we need public education–another seemingly lost cause these days. Quite honestly, my own profession is collapsing like all others, and it’s hard for me to foresee who will pay for education when growing food will increasingly become a priority. As a brown thumb, I wonder if being an intellectual will be relevant in the future. I can only hope.
09
Jun 10
CNN’s lesson in branding history
CNN’s recent re-branding effort, “Go Beyond Borders,” presents a bit of a conundrum for me. On the one hand this is a brilliant marketing campaign that is also educational and interactive. On the other hand, it really bleeds the line between marketing, history and interpassivity–designing carefully controlled parameters of interactive media that are “free” in aesthetic only.
Here CNN re-brands itself as “borderless,” yet it’s not just any border. It carefully chooses an event whose symbolism as the triumph of capitalism cannot be ignored. At a time when capitalist ideology should be challenged by media, CNN intrenches itself as the premiere network of capitalist dogma, incorporating the various signs and trademarks of the system’s triumphs– the fall of communism, art, marketing and networked technology–to bundle them into their own nifty little neoliberal package.
Is this something to be concerned about? Commercialism has penetrated every aspect of public life. I know I’m old school when I argue for a clear line between the public good and corporate interests, whereas others would say, what’s the big deal? Maybe it shows that corporations are responsive to the public good. Yet, as is the case with BP, it’s one thing to brand yourself and side with a particular outlook, it’s another thing to practice it. Given a choice between CNN and Fox, I would certainly prefer CNN, but I would hardly call the network virtuous. It certainly remains a primary propaganda arm of global capital. This is not a conspiracy, just business. After all, which “side” do you think Time Warner Inc. is on? Wall Street’s or yours?
I suppose the world is more nuanced than my cartoon, punk rock version of it, yet it’s still hard for me stomach this marketing ploy couched as a history lesson.
04
Jun 10
BP games Google and chemical disbursements for the mind
(Check out Greenpeace’s re-brand BP page)
An interesting item from the Huff Post: BP is greenwashing Google searches through paid ad placements. I haven’t commented yet on the spill because this catastrophe is so huge, I can’t seem to contain it. A quick thought, though, related to this post’s lead: I think it’s interesting (and predictable) that BP’s history of greenwashing would translate as actual clean-up strategy. The use of chemical oil disbursements, for example, eliminates the visual scourge of oil slicks while poisoning the ocean bottom and doing little to stop the underwater oil plumes. Is this not a perfect metaphor for the psychic effects of greenwashing?
Finally, more fodder for the doublethink department: I’m increasingly concerned that the Right is using this spill to attack environmentalists, using their PR witchcraft to power an unconscionable noise machine. As always I hope that people will see through this, especially when oil starts raining down on rich coastal communities during hurricane season. Golf courses and McMansions offer no shelter from evil.
It reminds me of a scene in Three Kings when the Iraqi soldier pours oil down George Clooney’s throat while berating him: “You want oil? Here’s you’re oil!” (I’m paraphrasing here.) This will surely be a test of the addict’s denial mechanism. Will this be the bottoming out in which a life-changing turn-around commences for the addict? Will we enter into collective OA (Oil Anonymous)? Will this be our Chernobyl cum Berlin Wall moment?
As they say, denial ain’t a river in Egypt. It’s a big, fat ink blot on the region whose circular depression was created by an ancient meteor believed to have caused our last global extinction. Its legacy is the fuel that drives our entire economic system: decomposed dinosaur.
04
Jun 10
Empathic media
Call it TED meets Story of Stuff.
The above clip contradicts a bit my previous missive about the Net. Indeed, this clip represents all that is good about the Internet: it combines sharable oral communication with visual storytelling and the intellectual rigor of print. In this most excellent visualization of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s adds to its excellent series of Web-illustrated talks (follow this link to see other like-minded illustrated talks). Yummy.
30
May 10
Slow blogging and Net agnosticism
Although I remain enthusiastic about the Internet, I’m also increasingly a Net agnostic.
What is happening is that I’m finding my natural Net rhythm, which is like settling into the orbit of Pluto instead of Mercury. From afar I’m seeing more and more spinning at the Internet’s center, and finding myself as if I’m in a centrifuge spun out to the edge. This partially explains the recent slower pace at Mediacology. For the moment I’ve lost the drive and enthusiasm I had when I first started blogging five years ago. Back then I was excited and energetic to post everyday, and was pretty prolific in the beginning. I also had dreams of blog fame and a second income. Having let go of these delusions (and hence the simplified design of my current layout), I’m feeling more comfortable letting things come when they are ready, and resting when I need to.
Continue reading →
16
May 10
Streetwise
“There is a kind of attentiveness that can be cultivated and deeply relished, and a whole secret life of the street that it brings to light. It gives to the human-made world almost the same kind of delight that the lover of the natural world (and I am also one of those) might take in lizard eggs, bird colonies, feathers, droppings, rocks, and lichens. It does not oppose the wild and the made worlds but conjoins them, finds their overlap and resonance, sees the wild in the made, pays to the rust stains on an old corrugated iron wall the same receptivity it gives to dewdrops delicately strung in a spider’s web. It includes but goes beyond spotting and classifying.”
From Susan Murphy’s “The secret life of the street,” Winter 2006
16
May 10
Biospheric simulations of the simulacra
On the heels of her recent book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, Jane Poynter raps about her Biosphere 2 experience at TEDX. Note that the book’s title is “human experiment,” a far cry from the ecological experiment Biosphere was sold as (rather than give a detailed description, watch a few minutes of the video to get a sense of what happened). Regardless of what you think of the proejct and its rather strange history, I feel the story is quite interesting and the talk offers plenty of lessons for us in terms of thinking about our place in the world.
As a side note, back in my journalism days I was asked to write a hit piece on the project because of its roots in an unusual art/hippie/cult/commune near Santa Fe called Synergia Ranch. I never wrote the article, but if you want a really good deconstruction that reads like sci-fi, I recommend the chapter on Biosphere 2 in Timoothy Luke’s Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Taking a page from Baudrillard, here’s my favorite Biosphere 2 quote from Luke’s book:
“Biosphere 2 is a unique ecoengeneering project that reduces natural life-forms to their biotic/biophysical operability in order to reintegrate them in new synthetic ecosystems that can, in turn, develop only in the artificial spaces of this biospheric laboratory. Here, “Nature” is not Nature, but rather something that has been digitally sampled, botanically colorized, zoologically compressed, and ecologically scanned into a biospheric simulation of itself that could not and would not exist without the engineering needed to stage this odd ecological experiment.” (p. 102)
PS: Here is a post regarding recent photos of Biosphere 2 (the images have been taken off the site, but I pasted below one from Boing Boing to give you a taste of the photos):
04
Jul 10
Postironic stress disorder
One of my earliest posts on this blog was about Tila Tequila, whose initial claim to fame was being the most “friended” member of MySpace. My initial shock was her insistence that success was due to her punk rock DIY approach to celebrity. Anyone who knows anything about punk (that is, from direct experience), celebrity and punk are like BP oil swirling in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless, of course, you are geniuses like the Sex Pistols (and Malcolm McLarin), who exploited the media as a kind of guerrilla warfare. Now that John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) self-parodies on reality TV shows (I still love the guy– you’ve got to see Filth and and the Fury for some insights into his character), it seems like the media has won the war.
Enter Lady Gaga. As Nancy Bauer writes in her NYTime philosophy blog post, Lady Power,
“Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, ‘Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.’ Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.”
Continue reading →