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By the time you read this, it will be old news. The Kony 2012 meme has probably already exploded and splattered across the various portals, screens and networks of your sphere. Today everywhere I looked, there it was: my favorite blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall, speakers of my office mate’s computer, and the hallway of the university where I work.

With its vast, instantaneous spread and quick linking without thought, this obviously made me curious, not just to learn more about the issue, but also to think about this as a phenomenon and lesson in the power of social media.

Admittedly the whole thing made me feel suspicious. But rather than indulge my critical tendencies, I thought it would be good to acknowledge that the people behind this project (Invisible Children) probably mean well and are doing what they think is the best solution to solve a terrible problem. So what follows are my initial thoughts about its positives, and then some reflections on those elements that make me guarded.

What it does right:

Demonstrating collective action around an idea, using a clear message, slogan and image. A successful campaign that has drawn attention to an area that usually is considered peripheral. Generating debate and dialog about best practices and methods. Showing the organic and open character of the internet in which an idea can be promoted and contested. Clever and persuasive use of cinema for the greater good. Connects global problem with local reality. Effective harnessing of empathy. Nice slogan: “Where you live shouldn’t determine whether your live.” Makes the political personal. Good use of social marketing by telling a story rather than just showing facts. Powerful design and packaging strategy.

Things that make me wary:

Presents a neoliberal/neocon vision of political activism, reducing it to brand politics not unlike focusing on the arrest and elimination of Osama Bin Laden as a means for solving a much bigger, systemic crisis. Pseudo-empowerment based on flattery of the activist. Politically safe action that reinforces existing power relations. Not very Afro-centric. Promoting the role of the US as global police force. Threatens to be meme of the week, and little more. Too self-referential, self-congratulatory, and ego-driven. Orientalist in that dark Africa is once again a means for the purification of a white man’s soul. A little too emotionally manipulative, bordering on the group pressure tactics of religious cults. Potential abuse of slick design and packaging strategy to mask larger complexities.

This story is unfolding rapidly. To get more context, check out Visible Children and The Guardian.

In a time when information abundance and zero transaction costs should translate as lower prices, eMusic defies the laws of Internet gravity to increase prices so as to appease the monopoly tactics of major labels. This is rather disappointing. I’ve been an eMusic subscriber for more than five years. I have moved from $19.00 for 90 tracks a month to a miserly 50 tracks for the same price. But in order to satisfy Sony, Warner and Universal, they have restructured to a monthly pricing plan that has basically increased the average track cost from .40¢ to .49¢ for older music, and then charges 69¢, 79¢, and 89¢ for major label fair. Meanwhile, as a result of the new system, eMusic lost the Beggers Group, which includes one of my favorite labels, Matador. The net result? In exchange for Kiss, we lose Spoon. Pretty dumb considering that eMusic was a boutique service that specialized in indy music.

Unfortunately, this goes in the opposite direction of where we should be heading. Internet competition did drive down the cost of many CDs, but not from the majors. The majors continue to gouge customers with exorbitant retail pricing, which has driven customers to piracy. There is no reason a CD should be more than $6. So when we get to the plus $15 range, who should bother? Smart artists are hip to the emergent culture of their customers and have gone to appeal directly to their fans to allow them to volunteer their price (i.e. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, to name a few big acts). (Here is an interesting pricing analysis from the view of an artist on eMusic, and this take on the company’s economics.)

It may be that in the background eMusic is feeling the heat from streaming services for mobile devices. Since I’m not a “smart” phone user, I don’t know how this works exactly, but I believe that the paradigm is for people to pay a monthly fee for access to the streaming cloud. I’m still old school enough that I prefer to own my tracks and have them on my hard drive. I’ve been burned by Net services when they go out of business. When I pay for something I also like the illusion of a tangible object. Moreover, I liked eMusic because it was not what the major’s offered. What is to keep me there now?

Throwing fans under the bus for growth is yet another example of capitalism’s dumb rationality, in particular the logic of media companies that are no longer satisfied with stability and slow growth. It used to be if a newspaper netted 5% growth during the year, that was dandy. The steroid economy will no longer tolerate such incremental stats, and must zoom along at 20-30% every year. That puts a big demand on people, resources and especially the Earth. This kind of insanity really has to stop. Why eMusic caved into this logic is unclear. But inhabiting Manhattan’s economic reality bubble may have something to do with it. I’ve certainly had enough of it. Such behavior definitely makes me appreciate piracy much more.

The majors are a dying dinosaur. Rather than show vision and leadership, those guiding the eMusic ship have gone way off course. They have headed the Siren’s call, and may end up sinking the operation. Judging from the multiple complaints on their Facebook page and rants from Indy music Websites, I can’t imagine what calculous eMusic is using. Maybe they are guessing that raising prices will cover the loss of loyal customers. But in an era of affective economics, the incalculable value of loyalty, trust and goodwill is something very hard to come by. Sorry eMusic, it was fun while it lasted.

I just jammed through two fast reads that simplify big debates about the the world of media and where we’re going. The Unidentified is a Young Adult novel that depicts a dystopic vision of education and Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking is a pragmatic but optimistic manifesto for the power of social media to further progressive activism. Both offer strikingly different Web 2.0 scenarios.

Like its YA counterpart Feed, The Unidentified is not a hifalutin text about digital media’s impact on youth culture. Rather, Feed and The Unidentified are novels written for young readers that offer literate, critical takes on the downside of corporatized social media. Feed, in case you haven’t read it, is about a future world with a dead ocean and kids who are wired from birth into an augmented reality that is always trying to sell them something (via the “feed”). Their speech and vocabulary have been reduced to a kind of text-messaging slang. It’s pretty depressing and not too far from some of the ideas in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (a must see). I only mention Feed in passing because it bookends well with The Unidentified, which is more up to date with current media fads.

In The Unidentified, school has been entirely privatized and branded by a hybrid of technology, gaming, fashion and security companies. School is now The Game, and takes place in a repurposed shopping mall. Kids graze experiences, all branded of course. The administrators have cleverly appropriated many of the cool cultural practices many of us libertines celebrate, such as crafting, remixing, gaming and so on. Surveillance is everywhere and welcomed by the students because it enables them to be seen and observed by cool hunters. The goal of The Game is to get branded. Yes, a sickening reality, but also a logical consequence of our current neoliberal push to privatize education. This is a cautionary tale not only for adolescents but for us adults who are designing future education strategies that are potentially complicit with the corporate agenda. In particular, as we move into models of open education we have to be vigilant and ethical in how these tools and environments are shaped and informed.

The Unidentified grapples with rebellion, identity, anti-marketing and co-optation. Given that many young people today don’t think critically about these issues (I’m basing this on my observation of lots of the undergrad students I work with), I think the book is provocative, albeit a bit cliched in terms of rehashing the typical Hollywood high school narrative of geeks and freaks versus the snob clicks. The characters are also stereotypically suburban American (i.e. not too culturally diverse), but they are cartoony in order for younger readers to think more critically about their media habits. It’s a call for an ethical response to the consumptive habits we take for granted.

Share This! is a different kind of book. It is a feel-good, optimistically toned manifesto for sharing and utilizing social network tools. Deanna Zandt, who writes and edits for Alternet, is also cautious and critical of the utopian assumptions we have about the Net. Through a careful application of stats, we get an interesting picture of Net usage and demographics that will likely surprise you. This is not an academic book, so for those steeped in theory it might seem a little pedantic. However, sometimes it takes simplification to ground and remind us of the central ideas behind Net activism and social Web tools. It draws on a best-of list of contemporary Net theory (i.e. Shirky, boyd, Rheingold and the like) and also business thinking about new media (which also can be useful).

As an old school netizin, I can’t say that I learned anything particularly new, however the book does distill strategies for using the Web that are obvious once you see them laid out, but are somewhat hidden in the muck of day-to-day practice. I would recommend this book to a newbie because it will provide a coherent and contemporary framework that is practical for promoting any worthy cause. As Zandt reminds us, authenticity rules the net and our authentic presence is required. Likewise, the central characters of The Unidentified are searching for authenticity as well, but get caught up in faux-interactivity that gives the illusion of democracy and choice. I suppose I have a position somewhere between the two books, my pendulum shifting day to day from celebration to despair.

I read both books with my students in mind. I’ve been throwing a lot of theory their way the past few years and was looking for some alternative resources that they will actually read. If time permits, I would assign The Unidentified because it offers an entertaining entry into some very critical territory. I would also use Share This! in a situation in which I was assigning students an activist project. I don’t consider either book particularly rigorous in terms of academic norms, but on the other hand, what is normal doesn’t seem to work anymore, so I’m open to trying something different. We’ll see what happens.

Collapsus Introduction from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

As a follow-up to my previous post, “book as environment”, this little video demonstrates another platform that expands the ecology of a given text. This is the kind of true hybridity that postmodernists theorized about but is now materialized through a blend of networks, access to cheaper animation tools and a growing aesthetic practice that embraces transmedia storytelling (among other things).

You can visit calapsus.com for an immersive experience.

I just came across this excellent mind map of the “all things open and free” from Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. Truly amazing.

Via collectivate.net.

In the digital media class I teach we have been talking about the “consumer sublime,” which is the idea that people seek increasingly more stimulating media to “awe” their senses in the same way we once encountered the sublime within nature. The clearest example is comparing the experience of going into the Grand Canyon versus watching an IMAX movie on the canyon’s edge (yes, it’s possible). This pattern goes along with the theory of the “creeping cycle of desensitization” which argues that every time media technique hits a threshold and becomes normalized, new media come along to amp up sexuality, violence, editing, sound and overall sensory experience. For instance, go to the IMAX home page and it instantly promises that you will “hear more, see more.” For another example, compare early James Bond trailers with recent ones, or old Bat Man with the new one.

Why does this matter for the environment? Because in our addiction for speed and thrills, we seek to supplant nature’s innate experience of awe with one generated by a computer; in the process of hyper-stiumulation we actually numb ourselves to the subtle voices of the extended natural world. But there is a fuzzy boundary between technology and nature (ultimately a false dichotomy, anyway), which might explain why naturalist Wade Davis of National Geographic would star in the IMAX film, “Grand Canyon: River at Risk.” On the one hand it seems absurd to watch this film inside a dark theater on the edge of the Grand Canyon when you could simply hike down and have the experience yourself. On the other, not everyone can travel there (the film can be seen in other theaters) and it does create an intimate experience that technology enables (such as telescopes or microscopes enhancing the invisible). This contradiction is similar to that which Walter Benjamin grapples with in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He argues on the one hand art loses its “aura” when reproduced, but on the other, it becomes democratized because it becomes available to everyone (unless, of course, if it’s being mediated by fascist propaganda or corporate media).

Any new medium both enhances and eliminates some sensory experience– no doubt certain aspect of nature become accessible to us through film and TV, while others are inadvertently cut off. BBC’s Planet Earth series, for example, takes us places we can never go, or allows us to see animals we’ll never know intimately. Or Winged Migration can show us birds’ “umwelt” (selfworld) in a way that we may never know (unless we become a shaman, that is). This is an over simplification of a much larger argument, but suffice to say, the natural sublime can be present in some kinds of media.

With that said, I now want to take a closer look at Comcast’s “Dream Big” ad campaign (the first is posted here, to see the others you can click on the YouTube playlist I created with examples). Like the IMAX Website, it promises more and better of everything (the jingle chimes,”Speeding forward, future hopping, always dreaming never stopping…”). The ad presents a veritable Christmas morning of sensory delight in which we can live out our fantasy of perpetual childhood. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with being childish, but as ecopsychologist Paul Shepard points out in Nature and Madness, our culture is traumatized because we are wired for rites of passage involving communication with nature, without which our “ontogenesis”–growth pattern– is corrupted. In other words, because of our increasingly deeper disconnection with the natural world, we never fully grow up and mature the way that our biology intends. Look around, and you will see the disastrous consequences of this kind highly addictive personality disorder. Rather than have a healthy, nurturing relationship with our natural world “parent,” we run around the globe like five-year-olds with M-16s gulping as much oil as possible, even if we choke on it. I use the royal “we” of course. Most of us, I presume, would not choose this mode of life if given a choice or were properly aware of our options. Yet, here we are.

Even more sad is the Prozac calm of the ad talent’s tone. There is nothing arbitrary about this because historically “advanced” capitalist societies have cultivated a certain emotionless gaze. Think Ray-Bans and aviator cool. This began with the “Fordization of the face,” industrialization’s efforts to smooth the temperament and emotion of workers so they wouldn’t rebel against mind-numbing work. The modern equivalent is advertising’s droll voiced 20-something narrator who bemoans the cubicle life, but surrenders to it, nonetheless. The logic is that the System is more successful when few care what its managers design or do with the world, as long as it is entertaining and fun on the weekend. But then again, that might be the very reason why the System is currently falling apart. Confuse, divide, conquer and rule the emotions of people, and they will no longer find any gratification from a system that is supposed to “nurture” them. This creates a perfect opportunity for nature to reassert herself into the center of our attention, because in the end we know deep down inside the Candyland reality of this Comcast ad is only an unfulfilled desire to bond with the Mother. In fact, it’s available to you if you go outside and look. I recently had my own Candyland experience with a patch of grass. In it was a wonderworld of tiny spring flowers, varieties of grass, buzzing bees, succulents galore and mounds of emerald moss. I imagined myself tiny running amok in this little forest and found it wondrous and full of awe.

Finally, I want to remark on the inevitable harvesting of Generation BoingBoing culture. If you have followed BoingBoing over the years (it remains one of my favorite sites), you’ll notice that its writers have become tastemakers, a role I don’t think they sought or care much about unless it has to do with promoting positive net values such as open source and sharing. But aesthetically they have certain obsessions that inevitably become pop culture “cool,” which is evident in the Comcast ad. Comcast is “remediating” (or recycling from other media) a number of BoingBoing motifs. First is the fetishizing of coy, flirty ukulele DIY songstresses recorded on Webcams in bedrooms by young, attractive females. Another is the flattened eboy art style of pixelated cities hybridized with the Sims-like virtual world playground of video games. It’s a consumer cornucopia of vintage vinyl and cassettes, Japanese monsters, 1970s toys, Sesame St. animations, Linux penguins, and so on. True enough, the Comcast world is full of “wonderful things,” which in and of itself is not bad, but put into the context of how the global culture is trending, we may do well to hit the pause button for a minute and wonder where in the hell we are, and assess how we really got here.

Unfortunately, to criticize something like this is to be labeled a “Luddite” against “progress.” But I’m far from it. I don’t bemoan the many great positive changes that are happening as a result of convergence and new media (such as participatory media, collective intelligence, and transmedia storytelling). Nor do I think that Comcast is brainwashing us into a specific reality frame. But what it does do is reinforce dominant cultural themes and mentalities that need to be called out. Failure to do so would mean a failure to intervene and read against the grain of paradigmatic thinking that normally goes unchecked. Frankly, if I wake up some morning in Comcast’s world, I’d say we’re pretty screwed.

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives – NYTimes.com:

Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.

With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.

“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”

And will mobile mapping handicap brain development?

“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.

For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?

“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”

The New York Times – Video Library – Magazine Playlist

Click the above link to see what I consider to be one of the coolest presentations ever using simple desktop tools (the content doesn’t much interest me). The potential for this kind of vlogging is incredibly appealing because it allows for addressing the audience via webcame while showing videos and documents. Brilliant!

This video is from the same feature story, the New York Times Magazine’s special issue on screens. It’s a video of kids gaming, which reminds me of Godfrey Reggio’s “Evidence (shown below), but with slightly different results. How would you compare the two?