Tag: Media Theory

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Temporary Eponymous Zone: SXSW 2012

SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone again. The outdoor shows that would have been a drenched disaster went on without weather-induced incident.

I started off my own, soggy SXSW Interactive with a quiet breakfast with Howard Rheingold. He was here to talk about his new book, Net Smart (MIT Press, 2012), and it was his first time at SXSW since he was the keynote speaker for Interactive ten years ago. His book Smart Mobs (Basic Books, 2002) was just out then. Lots has changed around the conference since, but the ideas in that book were prescient (as proven by its echoes in Amber Case’s SXSWi keynote this year). Net Smart will definitely send out the same temporal ripples. Other than books, Howard and I talked about everything from the weather and breakfast to life and careers. It was so nice to sit down with one of my mentors for a face-to-face interaction after over ten years of virtual ones.

Next on the list of rain-limited events was a trip to Red 7 to see my friends Jake Flores, Ryan Cownie, Seth Cockfield, Brook Van Poppelen, Lucas Molandes, Nick Mullen, Blake Midgette, Kath Barbadoro, and others put on some free funny. Now, a show like this is a fairly typical night for me here in Austin, but this line-up is like three really good versions of those nights all put together. We had to go through a wormhole to find the back door to Red 7, and once inside we found our friends in the dark, damp, abandoned-warehouse feel of Red 7’s backside (there was some other event hogging up the inside space). Assorted badges followed us in, but most quickly left. The venue was perfect for the material in play though: dirty, dark, wet, hilarious. For those outside the community, the Austin stand-up comedy scene is one of its best kept secrets. It boasts not only open mics nearly every night of the week, but damn funny line-ups on a regular. Jake’s show was no exception. Against all the SXSW rules, we left early to catch Ume at Stubb’s.

Ume played on the big, outdoor stage at Stubb’s, which left us happily skanking in the mud. Eric Larson was out of town, but Mark Turk filled in nicely on bass, even after only two rehearsals. He and Rachel held down the rhythm and rumble while Lauren brought the flash. Fresh off of a Left Coast tour with Cursive, Lauren kept up her supernova energy (this was also only the second of no less than eleven shows Ume played during SXSW). The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve ended with a new song that sounds like Lauren is singing for Kyuss. The track is thick, heavy and huge. According the Eric, the working title is “Black Stone.” I’m anxious to play it very loud on my headphones. We saw them again on Tuesday at Bat Bar with Eric happily reinstalled. Even with sound issues, they never disappoint.

Ume's Lauren Larson rocking Stubb's. (photo by Lily Brewer)

Monday found me getting my Music badge, which I’d tried to get the previous Friday, but was denied. Credentialed up, I met Alex Burns for lunch. Alex and I have worked in tandem on at least two versions of 21C Magazine as well as several years together on the Disinformation website. Alex is another great mind with whom I’ve been in touch and exchanged ideas for over a decade and finally met IRL at SXSW. People say it every year, but it cannot be overstated: The sidebar conversations that an event like SXSW affords are very often its true value.

Dave Allen, Hank Shocklee, and I hamming it up in the green room. (photo by David Ewald)

While meeting in the green room preparing for our panel “What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology?,” Hank Shocklee stopped by to say hello. As one of the sonic architects behind the sound of Public Enemy, Hank has had a profound influence on the way music sounds in the twenty-first century, as well as my appreciation thereof. It felt more than appropriate to run into him before we took the stage. Dave Allen (North), David Ewald (Uncorked Studios), Jesse von Doom (CASH Music), and I had done a version of this talk in San Francisco last September at SF MusicTech Summit. At SXSW Music, we were joined by Anthony Batt (BUZZnet, Katalyst, etc.) and novelist and music critic Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm, On Celestial Music, and many others). This gathering of minds represented every aspect of the issues we were addressing: From artists to fans and from technologists to journalists, we used everyone’s expertise and experience to express our opinions about the direction music is headed as an industry, a cultural practice, and as a commercial enterprise. Ours is a discussion that will continue as long as people love making and hearing music and other people try to capitalize on that love.

Speaking of music technology, the Vinylrecorder T-560 was on display at the trade show. This device allows one to cut a vinyl record from recordings on a computer. It’s like burning a CD, except it offers the “warmth” of vinyl playback. As many times as events at festivals like this prompt me to question what year they think it is (e.g., Bruce Springsteen? Counting Crows? Billy Corgan? We’re only doomed to repeat history if our elders keep force-feeding it to us.), I have to admit that the idea of pressing my own records looked like the kind of useless fun I often enjoy most. Home recording fun notwithstanding, the back-to-the-future approach of the Vinylrecorder is a great metaphor for many of the attitudes represented in music technology: “How do we use what we have now to get back to the way things were?” they seem to be asking.

This is part of the reason we gathered to talk about these issues. There’s no going back. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry, but you still have to be good at what you do. The internet has made fame much easier and fortune nearly impossible. You have to learn the technology. It’s easier now than ever to get heard, yet harder to stand out. Events like SXSW emphasize just how noisy and cluttered the current music milieu is. How do you cut through it all? If you want engagement, be engaging. Show us something. Doug Stanhope has a joke about how you never see ads for drugs. “If you have a good product,” he says, “people will find it. You don’t need to advertise.” No one owes you a living just because you make music (or Doug as a comedian, or me as a writer, etc.), but if you do something people want, they will find you. Rain or shine.

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Many, many thanks to Dave Allen, David Ewald, Anthony Batt, Jesse von Doom, and Rick Moody for the great discussions both on and off the stage; to Hank Shocklee for the chat; to Rebecca Gates for coming by; to Howard Rheingold and Alex Burns for sharing meals and beers; to Andy Flynn for hooking it all up; to Ume for rocking everything as usual; to Tarryn Lambert and friends for the lively debate; to Brooke Pankey for braving the city streets on a bicycle with us; to Luke and Abby Brewer for walking nine miles even though we couldn’t get their young selves into a show; and special, special thanks to Lily for enduring the whole week with me.

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Fresh Prints: Digitization and Its Discontents

When John Naisbitt was researching his best-selling book Megatrends (1982), he had a file system of shoe boxes. The shoe boxes were labeled according to major trends he had spotted in local newspapers from across the country and filled with the actual clips from those papers. Not only is this method of research rendered obsolete by the all-encompassing web, in light of the web’s ubiquity (especially to the so-called “digital natives” who’ve grown up with the web), it sounds downright silly.

A fraction of Kevin Kelly's library.

Kevin Kelly has a lot of books, and like me, he works with them, adds to them, uses them. But he’s ready to leap into a future without them in their current form. Calling us “People of the Screen” (not his most original idea), he writes on his website,

I work with books. I wrestle with them, play with them, mark them, write in them, dog-ear them, talk to them. I use them. But my books on paper, as gorgeous as they look, are usually bimbos. I can’t search them, clip them, cut and paste their best parts, share their highlights, or my marginalia, link them to my other books, or continue our conversation for very long. That’s why I am moving to digital books as fast as I can.

I have to admit to finding this somewhat troubling. Not so much the move to digital books, which I’ve been toying with myself, but the enthusiasm with which Kelly touts the move. I maintain that the move to digital makes sense for other media–music and movies, where the media themselves require no more than speakers and a screen, respectively–but that books are an example of good design. Compact discs and DVDs are not an examples of good design. A cassette tape or a video tape is not an example of good design. For music, the iPod is an example of good design, one that is far better than any previous music device. There’s no carrying anything else along (e.g., CDs or cassettes). There’s no flipping of the tape, or rewinding or fast-forwarding to find that perfect track. The music just flows, like words on a page.

We’ve discussed these transitions at length in terms of organizing principles, but what we’re really talking about here, especially in the case of the printed word, is delivery systems. The book, as cumbersome and intractable as Kelly’s attitude sees it, is an example of good design. Books are built to last, their batteries don’t run down, most of them are extremely portable in small numbers, and they exist just fine without screens. This last point is one I’ve been thinking on a lot lately. As much as I do not lament the past inconveniences of flipping over of a record or rewinding a cassette tape, I am more and more aware of how the computer has devoured all of our media activities, and part of my anxiety against the leap to bits is the fervor with which we’re putting everything on a screen. I’ve been looking for things that don’t require screens: riding bicycles, skateboarding, walking, face-to-face conversations, and so on. Reading books is still among these activities, but the screen’s threat to that activity troubles me. This cartoon from Reddit user Gordondel illustrates the point:

And this one (source unknown), speaks to the very speed of our increasingly digitized culture, in contrast to the analog methodology of John Naisbitt above:

Again, I do not lament the change in music, especially where discovery is concerned. It’s the best it has ever been for a music fan like myself, and for years I’ve wanted the ability to search my bookshelves with the same ease that I search for music, both new and on my hard drives. I have also discussed this shift on this site ad nauseam, as well as invited my music friends to discuss it here. When it comes to what I do — that is, synthesizing the ideas of others into (hopefully) new insights, like a DJ mixing records (I like to think, in my grander moments) — there is no question that digitizing makes sense. Though, as Alex Burns noted in a recent email to me, citing ebooks has yet to be formalized (i.e., there are no page numbers), tools like DevonThink and Steven Johnson‘s Findings work wonders for locating quotations, citations, and connecting tasty morsels among digitized texts. Limited by the selection of books that exist in the digital future Kelly is cheerleading, our libraries just aren’t there yet. The printed word still carries its own inherent DRM by dint of resisting digitization in a way that other media do not. Where we easily rip(ped) our CDs and DVDs to hard drives and co-located clouds, no one is rushing through their bookshelves with the same fervor. This changes the power structure of the format shift.

To that point, earlier today, Jay Babcock posted a link to an interview with journalist and Free Ride (Doubleday, 2011) author Robert Levine by Ben Watt, DJ, label head, and musician/songwriter with Everything but the Girl. In light of the SOPA/PIPA crisis, their discussion is germane and deserves a wide readership. Digital vs analog discussions inevitably turn to the internet, and furthering the distiction between music and text above, Levine states,

I have a contract with Random House: They gave me an advance that represents a risk to them, since many books don’t sell very well, and they take most of the revenue on each sale to compensate them for that risk. If you pirate my book, I don’t lose all that much money directly, but it definitely affects my ability to get another deal and ultimately — because working on something for two years costs money — write another book. Random House is my partner. Like all partners, authors and publishers have differences of opinion — the former want higher royalties and the latter don’t. But commercial-scale piracy hurts both. As to whether authors and musicians should have publishers or labels, that’s a separate issue.

It’s always more complex than we think. Digitization often undermines our ideas of intellectual property (It should be noted that large-file sharing site MegaUpload was shutdown while I wrote this piece). Levine continues, “the fact that barriers to entry have come down is what’s great about the Internet, and the fact that piracy is rampant is what’s wrong with the Internet, and I think we need to separate them.” The question then becomes: How do we move forward in one way without moving backward in another?

That aside, after debating the all-or-nothing, digital divide of books, I purchased my latest e-reader because I wanted the option of ebooks. Let’s face it, a lot of books are cheaper in digital form. I had to debate the divide remembering that some of my favorite movies are yet to be available on DVD, but once we all decide that we’d rather have ebooks than book-books (what I call “The Tyranny of Adoption”), the latter will go the way of the CD, DVD, and LP.

Recently I was contemplating my next ‘zine project, an archaic practice the physicality of which I still find rewarding in both process and product (much like shopping in brick-and-mortar record and book stores), and I was thinking of making it available for e-readers as well. One of the first things that occurred to me was the lack of a two-page spread in that format. In ‘zines, magazines, and books, the fold between signatures, between pages, provides a landscape view of two pages at once. This expanse of visual real estate is not extant on an e-ink or tablet screen. Much like the one-sidedness of the MP3, the ebook is all fronts.

Let me stop here and attempt to gather the threads unraveled above:

  • Digitization is not inherently a bad thing.
  • Some media thrive in strictly digital format. Others need more nuanced modes of delivery.
  • (That is, some things do not need to be on screens.)
  • Wanting searchable book content does not mean not wanting books.
  • We decide what works for us.
  • No matter what, we still need to reconcile intellectual property with digitization (IP with IP).

New devices and media formats, whether we’re designing them or adopting them, curate our culture. We have to think cumulatively about these changes and decide what we want. Book culture has served us well, and we might be ready to let go of it in its current form (reactions to yesterday’s Wikipedia blackout in protest of SOPA certainly do not support literary culture as we know it). Let’s just be mindful of the culture we’re creating.

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One for Fun: While I was writing this piece, Jason Kottke posted the video below of John Scalzi’s thirteen-year-old daughter Athena seeing an LP record for the first time [runtime: 1:41]. One cannot help imagining the same fate for books:

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Acknowledgements: To be fair to Kevin Kelly, his original post was about digital publishing, and I agree with his points and enthusiasm for that. Given my ebook anxiety, I couldn’t help but take his massive analog library as an opportunity to discuss the readers’ side of the issue. Thanks are due to Dr. Martha Lauzen, who told me the John Naisbitt story during my master’s degree days studying with her at San Diego State University. Gratitude is also due to Alex Burns, Jay Babcock, Steven Johnson, Jason Kottke, Dave Allen, David Ewald, and Lily Brewer for sharing links, lively discussion, and correspondence.

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Sharing Music: Kick Out the Spam…

I spent my undergraduate years working at record stores. Not surprisingly, the lulls behind the counter were largely spent talking about and sharing music. We’d all bring in our small CD cases, each stocked with a dozen or so discs for the shift. There was a lot of judging and clowning, but even more sharing and putting each other on to new sounds.

When I first got an iPod in 2003, I thought the practice would continue. Around the time that I procured my refurbished player, my friend Chang came out to San Diego on tour with dälek. Before a show one day, he was hanging out with some of his old college friends, one of whom had a new boyfriend. Chang snagged the dude’s iPod from her, and was judging her new beau on the merits of his mp3s. Maybe this happens more often than I’m aware, but this case is the rarity in my experience. Ironically, our listening experiences tend to be as insular as the devices that facilitate them.

When the Walkman first came out, it was intended for sharing. The first models released had two headphone jacks. I distinctly remember the first one I listened to having dual jacks. When the initial numbers came back, and they found that no one was sharing the devices, Sony retooled their tack. In the ads, Weheliye (2005) writes that “couples riding tandem bicycles and sharing one Walkman were replaced by images of isolated figures ensnared in their private world of sound” (p. 135). And so it has gone, each of us to his or her own.

There is research on the matter though. Termed “playlistism,” the studies aim to highlight the links between music and identity using the practice of sharing playlists. Assuming that we compile playlists to represent our identities, the sharing of them should show how we present ourselves through music. Citing Brown, Sellen, & Geelhoed (2001), Valcheva (2009) found that sharing via peer-to-peer networks “confounded the traditional way of possessing and sharing music, and thus instigating a shift, on one hand, towards a citizen/leech styled community where music sharing interaction tends to be anonymized.” We don’t use P2P spaces to share in a traditional sense. In contrast, “[P]laylistism is underpinned by the practice of capturing and contributing one’s ‘music personality’ in the form of playlists that are either published online or shared through portable devices.” As one article put it, “We are what we like.”

Now that we listen more from the cloud and less as a crowd, the streaming services have adopted a stance of “social integration.” Similar to what Four Square does with your location when you check in to a place (automatically sending it to your social networks), Spotify does with the song you’re listening to. While Spotify doesn’t require that you share your listening, it does require you to have a Facebook account. Some online publications have adopted the practice as well, letting all of your friends know what you’ve been reading online. The trend is troubling. Social integration is the opposite of sharing. Sharing implies intention, and if your playlists are being broadcast without your curation, well, then they’re just spam in the streams of those who follow or friend you. It’s analogous to signing your friends up to newsletters they might not want or adding their numbers to telemarketers call-lists. There is nothing social about it.

I believe sharing music is a powerful practice. I wouldn’t know about most of the bands I listen to or have ever listened to if it weren’t for the friends who shared them with me. Sharing via automation does not make things social. Real sharing requires attention and intention. No algorithm can replicate that.

References:

Brown, B., Sellen, A. & Geelhoed, E. (2001). Music sharing as a computer supported collaborative application. Proceedings of ECSCW 2001, Bonn, Germany: Kluwer academics publisher.

Gelitz, Christiane (2011, March/April) You Are What You Like. Scientific American Mind.

Valcheva, Mariya (2009). Playlistism: a means of identity expression and self‐representation. A report on a conducted scientific research within “The Mediatized Stories” project at the University of Oslo.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2005). Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bring the Noise: Systems, Sound, and Silence

In our most tranquil dreams, “peace” is almost always accompanied by “quiet.” Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer (2010) points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they did so, like tea leaves before the addition of hot water” (p. 21). Reading silently was subversive.

We often speak of noise referring to the opposite of information. In the canonical model of communication conceived in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, which I’ve been trying to break away from, noise is anything in the system that disrupts the signal or the message being sent.

If you’ve ever tried to talk on a cellphone in a parking garage, find a non-country station on the radio in a fly-over state, or follow up on a trending topic on Twitter, then you know what this kind of noise looks like. Thanks to Shannon and Weaver (and their followers; e.g., Freidrich Kittler, among many others), it’s remained a mainstay of communication theory since, privileging machines over humans (see Parikka, 2011). Well before it was a theoretical metonymy, noise was characterized as “destruction, distortion, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages” (Attali, 1985, p. 27). More literally, Attali conceives noise as pain, power, error, murder, trauma, and youth (among other things) untempered by language. Noise is wild beyond words.

The two definitions of noise discussed above — one referring to unwanted sounds and the other to the opposite of information — are mixed and mangled in Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Zone Books, 2011), a book that rebelliously claims to have been written to be read aloud. Yet, he writes, “No mere artefacts of an outmoded oral culture, such oratorical, jurisprudence, pedagogical, managerial, and liturgical acts reflect how people live today, at heart, environed by talk shows, books on tape, televised preaching, cell phones, public address systems, elevator music, and traveling albums on CD, MP3, and iPod” (p. 43). We live not immersed in noise, but saturated by it. As Aden Evens put it, “To hear is to hear difference,” and noise is indecipherable sameness. But, one person’s music is another’s noise — and vice versa (Voegelin, 2010), and age and nostalgia can eventually turn one into the other. In spite of its considerable heft (over 900 pages), Making Noise does not see noise as music’s opposite, nor does it set out for a history of sound, stating that “‘unwanted sound’ resonates across fields. subject everywhere and everywhen to debate, contest, reversal, repetition: to history” (p. 23).

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
— John Cage

The digital file might be infinitely repeatable, but that doesn’t make it infinite. Chirps in the channel, the remainders of incomplete communiqué surround our signals like so much decimal dust, data exhaust. In Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (University of Minnesota, 2011), Peter Krapp finds these anomalies the sites of inspiration and innovation. My friend Dave Allen is fond of saying, “There’s nothing new in digital.” To that end, Krapp traces the etymology of the error in machine languages from analog anomalies in general, and the extremes of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (RCA, 1975) and Brian Eno‘s Discreet Music (EG, 1975) in particular, up through our current binary blips and bleeps, clicks and clacks — including Christian Marclay‘s multiple artistic forays and Cory Arcangel’s digital synesthesia. This book is about both forms of noise as well, paying due attention to the distortion of digital communication.

There is a place between voice and presence where information flows. — Rumi

Another one of my all-time favorite books on sound is David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (Serpent’s Tail, 2001). In his latest, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (Continuum Books, 2010), he reinstates the human as an inhabitant on the planet of sound. He does this by analyzing the act of listening more than studying sound itself. His history of listening is largely comprised of fictional accounts, of myths and make-believe. Sound is a spectre. Our hearing is a haunting. From sounds of nature to psyops (though Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” is “torture-lite” in any context), the medium is the mortal. File Sinister Resonance next to Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House, 2010) and Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare (MIT Press, 2010).

And how can we expect anyone to listen if we are using the same old voice? — Refused, “New Noise”

Life is loud, death is silent. Raise hell to heaven. Make a joyous noise unto all of the above.

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My thinking on this topic has greatly benefited from discussions with, and lectures and writings by my friend and colleague Josh Gunn.

References and Further Resonance:

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Evens, A. (2005). Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Goodman, S. (2010). Sonic Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hegarty, P. (2008). Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum Books.

Keizer, G. (2010). The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise. Philadelphia, PA: Public Affairs.

Krapp, P. (2011). Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Parikka, J. (2011). Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance. In E. Huhtamo & J. Parikka (Eds.), Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Refused. (1998). “New Noise” [performed by Refused]. On The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts (Sound recording). Örebro, Sweden: Burning Heart Records.

Schwartz, H. (2011). Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books.

Shannon, C.E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tompkins, D. (2010). How to Wreck a Nice Beach. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Toop, D. (2010). Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York: Continuum Books.

Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum Books.

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remixthebook: Guest Post and Tweeting

In 1997, I wrote a piece about turntablism for Born Magazine called “Band of the Hand.” Years later, I wrote a related piece for Milemarker‘s now defunct Media Reader magazine, called “war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music.” I’ve been revisiting, remixing, and revising these previous thesis pieces ever since. I eventually combined the two and posted them here, but I’ve also written other things that spin off from their shared trajectories.

This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted a piece on the remixthebook site. remixthebook and its attendant activities situate the mash-up as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. With that in mind, I tried to go back to the writings above and update them using pieces of relevant things I’ve written since. If you will, my post is a metamix of thoughts and things I’ve written about remix in the past decade and a half or so, pieces which also represent material from my other book-in-progress, Hip-hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture. It’s a sample-heavy essay that aims to illustrate the point.

Here are a few excerpts:

Culture as meaning-making requires participation. In addition to the communication processes of encoding and decoding, we now participate in recoding culture. Using allusions in our conversation, writing, and other practices engages us in culture creation as well as consumption. The sampling and remixing practices of Hip-hop exemplify this idea more explicitly than any other activity. Chambers wrote, “In readily accessed electronic archives, in the magnetic memory banks of records, films, tapes and videos, different cultures can be revisited, re-vived, re-cycled, re-presented” (p. 193). Current culture is a mix of media and speech, alluded to, appropriated from, and mixed with archival artifacts and acts.

…

We use numerous allusions to pop culture texts in everyday discourse, what Roth-Gordon calls “conversational sampling.” Allusions, even as direct samples or quotations, create new meanings. Each form is a variation of the one that came before. Lidchi wrote, “Viewing objects as palimpsests of meaning allows one to incorporate a rich and complex social history into the contemporary analysis of the object.” It is through use that we come to know them. Technology is not likely to slow its expanse into every aspect of our lives and culture, and with it, the reconfiguration of cultural artifacts is also not likely to stem. Allusions – in the many forms discussed above and many more yet to come – are going to become a larger and larger part of our cultural vocabulary. Seeing them as such is the first step in understanding where we are headed.

…

Rasmussen wrote, “there is no ‘correct’ way to categorise [sic] the increasing diversity of communication modes inscribed by the media technologies. Categories depend on the nature of the cultural phenomena one wants to investigate.” Quotation, appropriation, reference, and remix comprise twenty first century culture. From our technology and media to our clothes and conversations, ours is now a culture of allusion. As Schwartz so poetically put it: “Whatever artists do, they are held in the loose but loving embrace of artists past.” Would that it were so.

The whole post is here.

Many thanks to Mark America and Kerry Doran for the opportunity and to everyone else for joining in on the fun. Here’s the trailer for the project [runtime: 1:21]:

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David Preston’s Literature & Composition Class Talk

On November 2nd, I was invited to talk to Dr. David Preston’s Literature and Composition class via Blackboard Collaborate and Howard Rheingold‘s Rheingold University. Here’s a screen capture of that talk [Warning: It’s long. Runtime: 1:02:21]. Topics include a few of my projects, the web, advent horizons, collaborative learning, technology in the classroom and in the lives of the youth.

Many thanks to Ted Newcomb and Howard Rheingold for hooking this up, to David Preston and his students for their time, attention, and participation, and to Linda Burns for saving the video. This was a great opportunity and a humbling and inspiring experience.

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Follow for Now is Now Available at BookPeople

Yep, nearly five years after its release, Follow for Now is now available at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. As you can see in the photo below, it’s in the General Science section, and I am quite proud.

It’s also in Cyberculture & History, and right now, in the New Arrivals.

So, if you’re in Austin and don’t have a copy, stop by and get yours.

Many thanks to Michael McCarthy and everyone at BookPeople for their support. And to you for yours.

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Touching Screens: Digital Natives and Their Digits

Since I attempted to brand and explicate the Advent Horizon idea, the following clip has been circulating online. “The new generation is growing up with more digital than print media,” deigns The Huffington Post. “They play with their parents’ smartphones, tablets, laptops. We guess It’s only natural that they examine items that don’t respond to touch — and then move on to the things that do.” Danny Hillis once said that technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet. I think this baby would disagree with that statement wholesale [runtime: 1:26]:

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Though I find the sentiment that Steve Jobs “coded a part of her OS” a bit much, this clip reminds me of a story  by Jaron Lanier from the January, 1998 issue of Wired about children being smarter and expecting more from technology. Lanier wrote, “My favorite anecdote concerns a three-year-old girl who complained that the TV was broken because all she could do was change channels.” Clay Shirky tells a similar story in Cognitive Surplus (Penguin, 2010). His version involves a four-year-old girl digging in the cables behind a TV, “looking for the mouse.”

Without mutual engagement and accountability across generations, new identities can be both erratically inventive and historically ineffective. — Etienne Wenger

These are all early examples of a new Advent Horizon being crossed. The touchscreen, the latest ubiquitous haptic device, is here to stay. To those who are growing up with it, everything else seems “broken” — much like a TV “that only changes channels” to a native computer user. We become what we behold.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?
— Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The screen is already the most seductive of technologies. Think about how much time you spend staring at one screen or another. Iain Chambers (1994) writes, “In the uncanny property of the computer to present a ‘world picture’ we confront the boundary set by the screen, the tinted glass that lies between the apparently concrete world and the simulated one of ethereal lights” (p. 64). We want to get in there so bad. Think of the persistent dream of entering the screen and the machine: Neuromancer, TRON, Snow Crash, Lawnmower Man, Videodrome, and even Inception, among many, many others. It has a mythology all its own.

To its end, we’ve gone from wearing the goggles and gloves of most virtual reality systems to using our bodies as input devices via the sensors of Wii and Kinect, bringing the machine into the room. Where our machines’ portability used to be determined by the size of the technology available, the size of our devices are now dictated by the size of our appendages. We can make cellphones and laptops smaller, but then we wouldn’t be able to hold them or press their buttons individually, a limitation that the touchscreen is admittedly working around gracefully. Still, we have to design at human scale. These are the thresholds of our being with our technology.

The Machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine. – Aviv Bergman

The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of people we want. – Robert Sommer

We have to think carefully and cumulatively about what we design. Technology curates culture. Technology is a part of our nature. How will we control it? The same way we do our lawns or our weight: Sometimes we will; sometimes we won’t, but we have to remember that we’re not designing machines. We’re designing ourselves.

References:

Chambers. I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge.

Christopher, R. (2007). Brenda Laurel: Utopain Entrepreneur. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. New York: Harcourt.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin.

Sommer, R. (2007). Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Bristol, England, UK: Bosko Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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And I say peace to Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011).

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Not Great Men: The Human Microphone Effect

The passing of Steve Jobs has sent millions of people into reflection and reverie, and begs questions of the possibilities of repeating his vision and success. “Will there ever be another Steve Jobs?” asks one publication. While another contrarily claims that he “was not god,” still others iconize him, call him a tech-messiah, and lament his passing with something just short of worship. As agnostic as I’ve been computer-wise, I’ve always been a fan of the man, but does the death of Steve Jobs mark the end of a human era, the end of the singular genius, the lone visionary, the thought leader? In some ways, I am compelled to answer affirmatively, but to give Jobs all the credit is to do him and others like him a disservice. As Bonnie Stewart put it, “I fully agree that Steve Jobs left us a legacy. But it is not to be him.” We are the reason he was the last of his kind.

The connectivity of the web has all but killed the archetype of the singular visionary leader. Online, we connect to share with each other, not to listen to a single voice. It’s not necessarily the death of the grand narrative and the birth of postmodernism, it’s more the onset of postMODEMism. Ever since we started modulating and demodulating our ideas, information, and identities, our heroes have been in harm’s way. The web is more about processes and projects than products. The web is inherently a collaborative space. Authorship does not equal ownership. We’re in this together.

In spite of recent reports, the creative class is very real, and, as Scott Smith pointed out, is the larger part of the masses currently occupying Wall Street. The creative class is still here, but like the creative genius, no one owes us a living. We have to make our own way, and we will.

Unlike others, I don’t think the Big Idea is dead either. I think our collaborative, networked thinking makes it more difficult to see the collaborative origins of the singular innovation. If ideas are networks, then big ideas are big networks. Even Jobs brought to market what were previously existing, networked ideas: “He saw what technologies were on the verge of being possible — and what technologies consumers were ready to accept,” Josh Bernoff wrote when Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO in August. “There could have been no iPhone without the habits created by iPods and Blackberry, no Mac without Apple and IBM PCs embraced by those who came before… Apple doesn’t make flash memory, microprocessors, touchscreens, or, for the most part, websites. It just puts them all together.” Toward the end of this 1996 interview with Steve Jobs on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser [runtime: 4:32], Jobs talks about the sheer openness of the internet and how no one single company can ever contain it [the internet bit starts around 3:15]. “We’re going to see innovation contain it,” he says.

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No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home

It’s not made by great men

The past lives on in your front room
The poor still weak the rich still rule
History lives in the books at home
The books at home

It’s not made by great men
— Gang of Four, “Not Great Men”

It’s downright eerie watching these ideas collide in realtime on the choppy live-feed of Slavoj Žižek addressing the protestors of Occupy Wall Street today, as they respond in unison: “You don’t need a genius to be your leader.” This call-and-response is called “The Human Microphone” and is used due to restrictions on amplified sound in the public space of New York City. In an ironic mix of collaborative leadership, collective allegiance, communication technology, and lacks thereof, The Human Microphone is the perfect metaphor for the death of the hero. There is no “one for all” anymore. History’s not made by great men. As Bonnie Stewart concludes, “So maybe in this new world order, we should stop touting those who are ‘crazy enough to be geniuses’, — which is a romantic notion, even if it is sometimes true, like with Jobs — and reward those who are best able to share and innovate in teams.”

The good news for all is that collaboration makes each of us bigger. Find the folks that empower you to do more, to be more, and avoid the ones who don’t. As the Hopi once put it, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

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Here’s a clip of an odd yet amazing cover of Gang of Four’s “Not Great Men” by an appropriately all-female Japanese percussion group [runtime: 4:09]:

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Many thanks to my friend Dave Allen for sharing links and the Japanese Gang of Four cover clip, to Mike Schandorf for sharing the Žižek live-feed, and to my friend and collaborating champion Heather Gold for sharing the Steve Jobs clip. Onward together.

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Drawing Lines in Time: The Advent Horizon

Significant advances in technology are disruptive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. They are the initial conditions from which our media is born. As Jean Cocteau once put it, “The public does not like dangerous profundities; it prefers surfaces” (1972, p. 316). Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our world and with each other. Not unlike learning new words, every new advance is a new addition to our media lexicon. Our media vocabulary includes those technologies with which we feel facile or familiar. Cocteau continues, “As a matter of fact, the public likes to ‘recognize’ the familiar. It hates to be disturbed. It is shocked by surprises” (p. 315), and no one states the matter more clearly than Barry Brummett:

Every new technology is feared, is compared unfavorably to the one before, and is misunderstood, especially in the early years of its inception. We simply have fewer anxieties about computers, for instance, now than we did during their introduction into the global market and culture (p. 172).

One of the ideas in my talk “Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive,” as well as in my book-in-progress The Medium Picture is the line we draw at the edge of our comfort zone with new technologies. It’s a line we draw as individuals as well as a society at large. I call it the Advent Horizon. I was pushed to explain it further by David Burn:

@davidburn Two key phrases from #Geekend presentations this week: Advent Horizon and Interchange Zero c/o @RoyChristopher and @sethpriebatsch#brainy

We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing (see Wolf, 2007), to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable — differently on an individual and collective level — in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.

Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales, or the way we teach computer animation. The former is an analog totem from a previous era, the latter is analog scaffolding for the digital world (what Bob Greenberg calls “analog drudgery“). Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time.

I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida last summer. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration (with pencils and paper), flipbook-style animation (with paper and lightboxes), and 3D modeling (real-world 3D, sculpture with clay and other materials) before they ever sit down at a computer. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new: These are evidence that an Advent Horizon has been crossed.

Each generation is born during a certain technological era, between these lines we draw. We are imprinted by the media technology with which we grow up. For instance, there has always been a television in my world. When I was born, it was there. In contrast, my parents remember when the first TV arrived in their house. William Gibson tells the story.

The only memory I have of a world prior to media is of standing in a peanut field on a farm in Tennessee, looking down the hill at a black, 1950s, sort of, late ’40s panel truck, driving along the road.

One of the next earliest memories is of my father bringing home this wooden, box-like thing, with a cloth grille on the front, and a little round, circular television screen, which, I believe, we had for some time prior to there actually being any broadcast to receive.

And then there was a test pattern. I think the test pattern preceded any actual broadcast for several weeks, and the test pattern itself was only available briefly, at scheduled times. And people… neighbors, would come, and they would look at this static, non-moving pattern on the screen that… promised something.

And then television came.

As Alan Kay once said, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born” (quoted in Kelly, 2010, p. 235). I have never known a world without television, and my students have never known — or don’t remember — a world without computers, the web, or cellular phones. Perhaps they will cross a line of comfort when implants become the norm for their children, but the world before wireless connectivity means nothing to them.

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Here’s the relevant clip from my talk in Boston, thanks to David Burn [runtime: 1:37]:

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By the way, the “L” and “B” story at the beginning of this clip was a secret message to my girlfriend, who became my fiancé on this trip to Boston. Here’s to connecting our dots, Lily Brewer.

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Many thanks to Sloane Kelley, Jake and Miriam Hodesh, and the rest of my Geekend family, as well as David Burn for the push on this idea.

References:

Brummett, Barry. (2008). A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press.

Cocteau, Jean. (1972). Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau. Margaret Crosland (Ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Kelly, Kevin. (2010). What Technology Wants. New York: Penguin.

Neale, Mark. (director). William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories [Motion picture]. London: Docurama.

Wolf, Maryanne. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper.