Aram Squalls

RIP: A Remix Manifesto -- tonight at UnionDocs

Whatever you think you're doing tonight, cancel those plans. Because Brett Gaylor's massively acclaimed documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto will be screening at UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if that weren't incentive enough, you can hear me and Fred Benenson from Creative Commons talk about the social significance of remix at a panel immediately following. Serious fun. Begins at 7:30pm.

The wisdom of the anti-crowds

One of the main problems with the whole wisdom-of-the-crowds thing, as any skeptic or nonconformist knows, is that crowds can actually be pretty stupid. Not only are large groups of people acting in concert susceptible to all manner of delusion and misdirection for organizational and structural reasons (ever play a game of "telephone"?), but there's a snowball effect, where we tend to believe that if everyone else has validated an idea, it must require less scrutiny on our own parts.

Politics aside, no recent cultural trend has better exemplified this than The Secret, the asinine "self-help" book and video that's become a social phenomenon in recent years. Its central tenet appears to be (according to the proselytizers I've had to fend off; I admit to not having read it or seen it) that all you need to do to get what you want out of life is to think about it really hard, and it will just manifest. Ergo, by the law of modus tollens, if your life is shit, it's because you just haven't focused hard enough on getting good things. Sent to the ovens by Nazis? Too bad, nebbish! Laid off by your boss? Don't blame AIG, blame yourself! Laid out flat for months with a neurological disorder? Think yourself healthy! Etc.

Needless to say, this bit of severely counterproductive flimflam has been selling like hotcakes for the last few years; the book is currently ranked #62 on Amazon, and 5-star ratings beat out 1-star ratings by a factor of over 2:1.

Thank goodness, then, that hilarious stealth critics like Ari Brouillette are using a wisdom-of-the-crowd apparatus -- the Amazon user review -- to subvert the system's logic, writing gloriously absurdist reviews for everything from The Secret to a water bucket. He's been at this for years, as have countless other members of wise anti-crowds, injecting skepticism, silliness and critique into a system structurally built to ignore or sideline dissent.

And kudos to the 6,624 of 6,775 people who found Brouillette's review of The Secret "helpful" -- I proudly count myself among them.

Here's a snippet of Brouillette's tongue-deep-in-cheek water bucket review:

At first glance the Dover Parkerburg 610 is clearly a step above the competition, the smooth galvanized exterior is indicative of the more modern electrocoat process which produces much less surface bubbling and insures a uniform surface. Jagged Edges? Not on this baby! Also of note are the two horizontal ripples which are placed 6 inches from the base. A simple structural analysis and crush test showed the slight corragative additions to be more than simple decorations, they actually produce an increase in tensile strength of 35.8% when compared to smooth walled galvanized buckets of the same carrying capacity.

The dark side of D.I.Y. (and sustainability)

As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.

However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?

We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"

There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:

• Fifty years ago, you'd go to a department store and purchase a bookshelf. Today, you go to IKEA, bring home a box of compressed wood chips, and spend hours at home with an allen wrench.
• Marketers are increasingly relying upon consumers to share the cost of advocating products and identifying markets. MySpace and Facebook can certainly be seen as vehicles for this trend, although it also applies in the mass media, such as the recent peer-produced Superbowl Doritos commercial.
• Fifty years ago, both local and national news events were reported and published by a corps of professional journalists. Today, an increasing percentage of the news and (especially) opinion we read comes from the peer-produced blogosphere.

The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:

• Peer-production is killing traditional industry, (e.g. the much-maligned influence of blogging on the newspaper business).
• Big businesses are crassly appropriating the peer-production ethic to lower their costs and boost their margins, in the guise of consumer-friendliness.
• Everybody benefits from increased efficiency, with lower overall production costs being passed down to the consumer.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:

• In the case of newspapers, for instance, I would argue that Craigslist is far more devastating an influence than the blogosphere. Local and classified advertising have always subsidized print news journalism, and the Web is simply a much better platform for localized marketing and commece. If anything, the blogosphere provides much-needed credibility and readership for the newspapers' online editions.
• Far from maximizing their margins, many industries are now in the red, and we are witnessing the fastest growth of unemployment in American history, and one of the fastest rates of atrophied production on record.
• Consumers have hardly reaped economic rewards from taking on the burden of production. I did a little checking with the bureau of labor and statistics, and it turns out that the cost of furniture has escalated 300% (accounting for inflation) since the mid-1950s:

So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.

One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.

To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.

One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong...

The teen social networks gospel (according to danah)

My friend danah boyd, who recently received her doctorate from Berkeley's Information School, just made her dissertation available online. I haven't read it yet, but I've spent a lot of time reading her past work, and sharing panels with her at conferences, so I'm confident it's a doozy. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this will very likely emerge as the definitive academic work on social networks from the Web 2.0 era. I can't think of anyone else (except maybe her mentor, Mimi Ito) who's done so much solid ethnographic work on teens and online community.

I have a feeling I'll be assigning sections of this in many classes to come...

Here's the details:

"Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics"

http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

Griefers: The Anti-Situationists?

For my masters course in digital media yesterday, I assigned Julian Dibbell's excellent, if flawed, Wired article on griefers, as well as a few critiques of the article.

As often happens with grad classes, I felt that my students had an excellent understanding of the subject matter, but not much historical contextualization.

I thought it would be interesting to discuss the griefer methodology, namely interrupting the normal flow of behaviors and protocols in online social environments, as a descendant of Guy Debord and the Situationists. (Similarly, my friends and colleagues Doug Thomas and Biella Coleman have both chronicled the Yippie origins of the hacker movement).

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that griefers are really anti-situationists. What do I mean by this? Dubord and company were revolutionaries, attempting to forge a "new culture, independent of the political and union organizations which currently exist," through their theatrical disruptions. By contrast, griefers are (mostly) a bunch of white, male, middle-class, middle-Americans who use racist avatars (such as the "Patriotic Nigras") to disrupt furries, fantasists, and other "deviants" and dreamers from enacting their alternative lifestyles online.

In other words, griefers use the methods of the Situationists, and the tools of hackers, to enact a reactionary political agenda that is anathema to the Situationist movement, and to most hacker cultures. In a way, they are almost agents-provocateur, giving a bad name to the online environments and communities which threaten their "real world" hegemonic power.

In a way, then, the Situationist claim that we should treasure "the value of the game, of life freely constructed" is opposite in both literal meaning and political valence to the griefer battle cry that "the Internet is serious business."

Just a thought, at the moment, but hopefully when I get a little time, I can work this up into a more formal journal article.

Memetic hybridization -- or, Hitler gets Rick Rolled

I love it when two or more Internet memes get together and have a bizarre little baby. I noticed this back in maybe 2000, with the launch of amiallyourbaseornot.com (no longer active; a mash-up of "Am I Hot or Not?" and AYBABTU).

With the acceleration of configurable culture overall, of course it's difficult to keep track of all the new memes, let alone their wonderful little hybrids. But I find this one particularly interesting -- the oft-re-subbed Hitler's bunker scene from "Downfall" and perhaps the most frivolous Internet trend of 2008 - Rick Rolling. (A few weeks ago, I posted an awesome remix of Barack Obama being Rick Rolled).

Anyway, here's the runty little offspring -- almost too cluttered with in-jokes to live, poor thing!

Chinese mash-up culture: Egao

My student Lin Zhang just hipped me to "egao," the Chinese equivalent of U.S. mash-up culture, and Japanese kuso culture. It's such a new phenomenon (last 2 years) that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page yet -- a search for "egao" redirects to the "kuso" page.

According to a paper Lin wrote,

[I]n a country where truth is often suppressed or bent to serve the absolute power, by way of playing the “court jester”, egao practitioners have circumvented official censorship to speak out truth disguised in the form of parody. A review of the more than one hundred egao videos that I downloaded from the internet shows that egao practitioners have concerned themselves with a spectrum of social issues in China, ranging from the rights of migrant workers, press freedom, official corruption and backdoorism, public transportation deficiency, rampant consumerism to global capitalism, nationalistic concerns, education policies, employment issues, to name but a few.

Of course, the Chinese government is trying its best to nip this configurable cultural movement in the bud. This year, it issued its Regulations on Administration of Internet-based Audio-Video Program Services, which censors and licenses audio/video web sites, with the aim of:

advocating appropriate use of the Internet, creating a civilized and healthy network environment, spreading healthy and beneficial audio-video programs, rejecting and preventing from spreading decadent and degenerated ideologies and cultures and operating under the guidance of the State Council’s radio, film and television authorities.

Below is the video that launched the movement: The Bloody Case That Started with a Steamed Bun (2006). I wish I understood the language, because, according to Lin's description, it sounds pretty damn funny!

Black + Otaku = New hybrid subculture?

In the year since we got back to NYC, Dunia and I have noticed a new trend on the streets: black American teens dressed up like Otaku, replete with straightened hair, Hello Kitty knapsacks, and cute gadgets. I guess this was inevitable, but it's interesting to see it finally manifest -- especially after all the science fiction on the subject (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, etc.)

I've coined an appropriately un-PC term for this phenomenon: "Brotaku." Although, to be fair, Google tells me there are already 117 web pages with this term (most of them appear to be usernames).

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to snap a pic of any of these kids yet, but I'll update the post when we do.

I guess this is kind of a reciprocal movement to the whole Ganguro thing (see below):

lolz vs. lulz: regionalism in emergent online culture

Instead of grading papers, I've been procrastinating some more at my favorite time-suck site, Google Trends.

As usual, a little casual searching turned up something interesting: "global village" rhetoric aside, there seems to be some regionalism in the growth of emerging online subcultures. Specifically, I searched for variant spellings related to the "lulz" phenomenon.

Turns out that the more popular "lulz" spelling variant holds exclusive dominance in the Midwest, Southeast and Northwest states such as Michigan, Washington and Georgia. The "lolz" variant has more traction in the Northeast and rural/suburban California, gaining parity with "lulz" in New York City (w00t!). Strangely, urban California is just as lulz-centric as the Midwest and Southeast.

Not sure what this means. Broadly, of course, spelling variants are kind of a marker for information flows; people who game, chat and email with each other, and who read and watch and play the same mass media, are more likely to adopt similar spelling habits for an emerging lexicon.

It might be interesting to correlate these trends with other, macrosocial trends (voting habits? eating habits?)

Got a Miss Piggy mask and a frog fetish? Reply to this Craigslist ad post haste.

I really don't know what to say about this, other than:

1. I think that the rise of the "furries" subculture has something to do with configurability and our desire to extend the pleasure and freedom of online avatar-building into the physical (and sexual) realm.

2. Back in my college days, I had a whole riff about how we were the "Muppet generation" because the show sowed the seeds of postmodern critique via children's entertainment.

3. Disney now owns Henson, and they can't be happy about this. I can't believe it's been up without a takedown notice for two whole days (Passover weekend must take a lot of lawyers off the bench).

4. Eeeeeewwwww

Here's a sample, in case the ad is down by the time you read this:

"Some time ago, I found an original full head rubber Miss Piggy mask, circa 1977, complete with a full head of long blond hair. I am looking for a tall, sexy BBW, preferably over 300 pounds, to wear this mask to bed. She should also be open to playing with plastic wrap and liquid latex."