Media Permaculture
Want a company Web site for nothing? Ad agency Modernista has come to the realization that hosting Web sites is unnecessary when you can distribute your content across the Web. Why not? Host your images at flickr, network with Facebook, put your company information on Wikipedia and make Google your home page. Conceptual, geeky, or just plain viral? You be the judge.
Sticker image from Cafe Press
Firefox is moving beyond “open source” to declared itself “organic software.” Makes sense to me. I’ve always used the analogy that DIY media is like organic gardening when compared to industrial mass media, which is akin to industrial farming. Maybe the main thing that makes open source “organic” is the self-organizing aspects of it that are part of nature’s normal emergent systems.
You can read an interview with Paul Kim, Mozilla VP, who explains what they mean:
Mozilla Firefox Goes ‘Organic’ : TreeHugger:
Paul Kim, Mozilla VP: I think for people in the open source movement, the term ‘organic’ is a lot clearer and immediately graspable. I think in the broader culture, and again I’m speaking of the US, the word ‘free’ gets filtered through a consumer lens. So yes, it’s a terminology issue for end users - trying to communicate clearly what practitioners already grok.
As software companies go, we’re a little unusual. We use the term ‘organic software’ to sum up the various ways we’re different from the other guys:
Our most well-known product, Firefox, is created by an international movement of thousands, only a small percentage of whom are actual employees.
We’re motivated by our mission of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web rather than business concerns like profits or the price of our stock (guess what: we don’t even have stock).
And as a non-profit, public benefit organization, we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives. We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.
Technorati Tags: organic software, firefox, open source
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
One of Greenpeace’s most important campaigns is to push electronics companies to go green. Here is the latest report.
Samsung and Toshiba new leaders in greener electronics ranking | Greenpeace USA:
The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child laborers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.
The Guide ranks top market leaders of the mobile phone, computer, TV and games console markets according to their policies and practices on toxic chemicals and takeback. Samsung and Toshiba share top spot with 7.7/10 closely followed by Nokia, Sony, Dell and Lenovo all on 7.3. Apple continues its steady rise due to new products like the MacBook Air with less toxic chemicals helping boost Apple to 6.7.
Technorati Tags: Greenpeace
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
I’ve been very interested in understanding the amount of power we consume with our televisions. Well, the Sierra Club offers this little quiz to test your knowledge. I found it quite enlightening and learned something new (spoiler alert): even though TVs are becoming more energy efficient, they are also getting bigger and include more add-ons (such as media players, stereos, etc.), so the net effect is actually a wash.
Technorati Tags: Sierra Club
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
These days I go to author Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation to get a grip on the economy. Not surprisingly today he scribes a grim report (snippet below). The thrust of his program is that we have to end the suburban mentality, which leads him to criticize environmentalists for trying to play the cars-can-be-saved-as-a-way-of-life card (as in perpetuating the car fantasy through the promotion of alternative fuels and hybrids). Want a picture of future car travel when gas is ten dollars a gallon? Go to Latin America and see how people get around. (I know, I know. This picture exaggerates to make a point, it’s not meant to depict them as “primitive,” but instead ingenious.)
Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteUltimately, in my view, the issue of what happens next will be settled not by the fantasies of the algae-biodiesel geeks or the wishful thinking of the sustainable futures organizers, but by the natural, self-organizing properties of a society responding ‘emergently’ to new circumstances. One of the implications of destiny-as-emergence is the probability that we will try any damn fool thing besides the right things to keep the old game going for a while — even in the face of obvious failure.
* * *
Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve engineered a $30-billion dollar Saint Paddy’s day present for the JP Morgan bank by handing them the corpse of Bear Stearns. The object of the game is to prevent the “assets” of Bear Stearns from going to the auction block, on which they would be discovered to be nearly worthless, which would instantly render all similar assets held by the other big banks to be similarly worthless, and would result in a universal margin call that would pretty much unwind the hallucinated “wealth” acquired the past ten years.
Graphic via textually.org
I’ve noticed an increasing pop culture awareness that we are addicted to our networked technology gadgets– a no, duh kinda revelation– but I was quite surprised (well, not really, it was inevitable) to see it pathologized with a new term, “Disconnection Anxiety.” I think the term sums up our entire planetary situation, actually, and it began long before the Internet. You could say that a system predicated on objectifying nature and reifying existence produces the ultimate disconnect anxiety, and that’s why you see so many drug ads on TV these days. Social Distress Disorder, Disconnect Anxiety… these are just other names for alienation, or the pain we feel from becoming aliens on our own planet.
I just hope a good dose of mindfulness is in the offing instead of a handful of pills.
textually.org: 68% of Americans feel “disconnect anxiety”:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteAccording to a recent study from Solutions Research Group, 27% of Americans feel “acute” anxiety when disconnected from the Internet or their mobiles; 68% feel some level of anxiety.
“This goes for both mobile and computer connections. More than 80% of those surveyed reported that their mobiles are always with them and always on. Nearly 40% report logging on to the Internet via their computers while in bed and more than 60% admitted to using their Blackberry’s in the washroom.
American’s are logging on for safety, work and social life and for navigation according to the report. Many users report that they feel safer when connected via mobile or computer and many say they need constant connections because of a hectic work or social life.
Bad News at the Pump: The Dangerous Implications of $100-Plus Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet:
Three factors, in particular, are responsible for the current surge: intensifying competition for oil between the older industrial powers and rising economic dynamos like China and India; the inability of the global energy industry to expand supplies to keep pace with growing demand; and intensifying instability in the major oil-producing areas.
File this one under FIY. Though tangential to the topic of media per se, the energy crisis is closely tied to media in a structural way. Indirectly, media are funded by petrodollars because the majority of advertising is for cars, thus the industry that builds and depends on a cheap oil economy uses commercial media as a propaganda machine for the dreams that automobiles would deliver us. Anyhow, I thought the article above was a good, simplified perspective on where the oil economy is taking us.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
OK, so please don’t kill me for this cheap date, but I saw the above clip at Huffington Post and instantly fell in love. I’m torn because part of me thinks this is really a future SNL skit inserted as covert marketing, the other part of me wants to believe that this is the last piece of authentic home brew media we’ll see ever again. I love this because with so many out-of-the-box media production kits out there, rarely do you get to see something with real fingerprints on it.
Now, bring on the imitators and the haters and see what happens.
This video puts paranoia and acid into a whole new context. Thanks Jessica!(You can see a longer version here)
Produced by Anybody
I’ve never been a rabid fan of Nine Inch Nails, but have been periodically intrigued by Trent Reznor’s music and output. His latest project, Ghosts I-IV, however, turned me into a true fan. Taking Radiohead’s cue, Reznor stuck a big digitized middle finger into the face of the recording industry by releasing this incredible 36 instrumental track album on his own. You have the option of downloading it for free, paying $5 or buying limited release boutique items. I paid the five bucks and I have to say it is the best music value I have ever gotten for coffee and bagel money. It’s also available on Amazon.
As a listening experience the record is like an open ended film soundtrack, as series of sketches, fragments, and movements. You hear riffs and bits from across NIN’s musical spectrum, but the album is mostly atmospheric and less didactic or scary like a lot of NIN’s music. There’s a little Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Tom Waits and clips from yet-to-be made films. This has to be one of the best iPod bubble albums in existence. I mean it.
Now you can upload your own video to the “Ghost Film Festival,” a really cool way to generate user feedback for the album (check out Reznor’s statement about it in the above video clip).
From the NYT:
Mr. Reznor also afforded fans freedom in another way. The band decided to offer the music with a Creative Commons license, a new type of intellectual-property copyright. It allows creators to reserve certain rights and, in effect, authorize various unpaid uses of their products. In this instance the band is allowing virtually any noncommercial use of its music. The band is also testing a tiered pricing system that could add a new wrinkle to the conventional wisdom on how to attract fans in the music business, in which a slump in sales has prompted Wal-Mart and other retailers to pressure record companies to cut their wholesale prices.
As some of you may know, I have been a regular contributor at Reality Sandwich. This week we’re starting an online reading group for the book, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, which I’ll be facilitating. I hope you will participate. Below is the intro text for the group posted on the site. To find out how to participate follow this Reality Sandwich link.
Reality Sandwich | Multitude Reading Group:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteDecentralized networks, smart mobs, collective intelligence, open source software, biopolitics, the emergent social Web and the integration of love percolate the New Edge, yet how do we use all these sexy, geeky, quasi-spiritual concepts to deconstruct the global empire of control and build a movement in response?
Welcome to the first Reality Sandwich reading group, featuring Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. As the subtitle suggests, the book grapples with two of the most pressing issues of our age. It can be argued that all other causes that we care about – health, environment, media, etc. – pivot on the dual problem of a militarized system trying to maintain global control while it pushes against the unfinished work of democracy. We’re led to believe that “democracy” is codified, set in stone in the guise of the world empire envisioned by the Neocons, yet the reality is that democracy is a work in process. We are constantly shaping it, evolving it, but often in unconscious ways. The goal of Multitude is to make more conscious the nuts and bolts of this process, and to demonstrate how it is evolving along with the emergent paradigm of network theory, immaterial production and knowledge work.
Just because someone on YouTube said this is the first McDonald’s ad, doesn’t make it so. Regardless. This is creepy!
Some Iraqi War vets staged mock raids in Chicago based on patrols they performed in Iraq. It’s in interesting guerrilla theater tactic to get people to switch mental gears. Frankly, it scared the crap out of me.
PS As I was thinking about the action depicted in the video, it occurred to me that post-9-11 doing guerrilla theater is so much more dangerous. Essentially the security industry is outsourcing to uneducated people to detect out-of-the-ordinary events that defy patterns of “normal” behavior. Additionally, there is a rattled and scared citizenry who are so nervous that even a chap reciting the lyrics of a Clash song becomes a threat. People are grasping so tightly to the shreds of reality that bind them to the old world that disturbances and disruptions can send them over the edge. For this reason I think the video scared me. I was worried about the “performers” being misconstrued and misinterpreted because at this point terrorism has been reduced to spectacle and theater, and under those conditions, the security apparatus can decide that performance of any kind is now suspicious activity, in the same way that England is starting to criminalize photography. Is it possible that in the near future, if the current trajectory continues, that any art outside the establish commodities market will be construed as subversive?
Slate takes a look at amateur UFO footage on YouTube. So much for photographic and video evidence. I hope the same standards are applied to government arguments for going to war.
BTW, I feel like it’s necessary to say that I think there is a false dichotomy in our culture between the rational and kooky, with the belief in UFOs as being the borderland between the two. The term UFO should be taken literally: unidentified flying object. Would it shock you and discredit everything I say and write about if I told you that I saw an UFO in Mexico? Or that a strange light in the sky once spoke to me in a Brooklyn accent?
But, what of a belief in aliens? I think it’s so ethnocentric to think we are the sole inhabitants of this universe. Even so, I won’t deny that there is a crazy strand that obsesses about aliens instead of dealing with the reality that is front of them (in some cases, that is the reality in front of them). And in all fairness to Dennis Kucinich, who was ridiculed for saying he believed in UFOs, he was not treated as fairly as the other presidential candidates (perhaps it’s because of his call for impeachment of Dick Cheney?). Shouldn’t all so-called Christian politicians be treated with the same kind of skepticism? After all, given the UFO litmus test, isn’t mass organized religion and its belief in immaculate conception and miracles equally as absurd? Just a thought.
Technorati Tags: UFO
Remember this controversial OJ cover, darkened for effect?
Well, now Hillary apparently brings us this. Follow the link below for more detail.
Questions Raised Whether Hillary Ad Darkened Obama - America’s Election HQ:
A controversial new Hillary Clinton attack ad caused an Internet stir Tuesday among critics who claim it deliberately darkens Barack Obama’s skin color.
Technorati Tags: election, Obama
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Enrique Chagoya, “Road Map”
As regular readers know, I’m a strong advocate of mapping as a form of media education because it is the clearest example of how visuals can represent perceptions about reality and space. Thus, I was very pleased by the article below, because it links to a variety of interesting resources now available to DIY global information mappers.
In These Times: We Can Now Map Everything — from Illness to Endangered Species:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteGoogle Earth is the crown prince of the search engine’s mapping realm. The downloadable, interactive globe combines the thrill of a first-time flyer — Look, Mom, the people look like ants! — with a near-superhuman sense of control and mobility. With a click you can stand the Earth on its head and shake change out of its pockets. Selecting Google Earth icons can lead you to offbeat video clips to the all-important location of the nearest Starbucks. As the Google Sightseeing blog puts it: “Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?”
The program comes with its own built-in “layers” that pinpoint the locations of parks, landmarks and boundaries. Through its Google Earth Outreach initiative, the company has supported efforts by nonprofits to use the program for advocacy and activism. Early adopters have included the Global Heritage Fund (mapping endangered historical sites), the Jane Goodall Institute (mapping endangered primates) and Fair Trade Certified (mapping sites that protect endangered coffee growers).
Mediacology
(click here to buy from Amazon.com)
Find out more about the book here.
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, written by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. Occasionally he shoots from the lip, bloviates, misspells and can be tangential.
Flip: The best (and cheapest)
DIY media device available:
Or with Paypal below:
New feature! Make a recurring donation of $1 a month:
Now available, Antonio's health and media literacy CDROM curriculum for youth of color, Merchants of Culture. This valuable resource contains dozens of video and print examples of how advertisers market harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco to various niche audiences, including Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, GLBT and Women. This is an excellent primer for introducing the subject of cultural marketing to high school and middle school students. This is also a great product for health professionals and councilors working in the area of prevention.
