Qualms About Mountain Lion

Like millions of other people, I've become a Mac user and fan over the course of the last 5 years. From about 2007 - 2011, it seemed like Windows couldn't touch a thing Apple was doing with its operating system (I'll try to stay away from phones and tablets for the moment). Leopard seemed to be almost perfect when it was announced, and Snow Leopard built on that core functionality. Whoever was designing these systems seemed to know how to build a program that got things done without a bunch of fancy crap that complicated the experience. But starting with OS X Lion last summer, the focus has seemed more on redirecting consumer spending back towards Apple than on improving the user experience.

Lion launched in the summer of 2011 with new features like Mission Control, the Mac App Store, Launchpad and inverted scrolling. All of them mimic or borrow from iOS software that was designed to function effectively with limited controls, small screens and direct hand gestures. And none of them really have a place in a desktop operating system. Writing for Gizmodo last summer, Jesus Diaz put it better than I can: "The OS X team has produced an incongruent user interface pastiche that won't satisfy the consumers seeking simplicity nor the professional users in search of OCD control." In the same editorial, Diaz's contends that Apple had gone askew by "attempting to appeal to everyone." With the announcement of Mountain Lion yesterday, I'm thinking that Apple isn't trying to appeal to anyone, but to create the type of simplified, restricted environment on Macs that already exists on iPhones and iPads.

The new "features" highlighted as part of Mountain Lion include Messages, a supercharged chat program, Notification Center, exactly what it sounds like translated directly from the iPhone, iCloud integration, Notes (this is a new feature?), Game Center, the most annoying of the forced apps in iOS, Twitter integration, and Gatekeeper, a program that forces you to buy all of your software from Apple provides upgraded security. Combined with the updates in Moutain Lion, OS X (the "Mac" moniker has been dropped) is now a powerful operating system with a ton of decorative iOS crap all over it. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is useful to some people, but in general, I'm not enticed. Where is the sleek, natural-feeling control, the machine that will do what it's told with smooth user control? If I wanted an idiot-proof Christmas tree of a system, I'd use AOL or surf the internet on a Wii. 

And AOL is the apt comparison here. A few weeks ago, Adam Pash artfully decried the attempts of Facebook and Google to be what AOL once was: the be-all end-all of the internet, closed architectures whose design is meant to keep you within their system and only their system. As they've grown up, the services offered by Google and Facebook have only gotten bloated and creepy in a corporate-totalitarian sort of way. And the same thing seems to be happening to OS X.

Gatekeeper is perhaps the most telling feature of the new OS. By default, any program that you attempt to install that has not emanated from the Mac App Store or been registered by the developer with Apple is labeled as dangerous. A window pops up warning the user and suggesting that the offending program be deleted. These settings can be changed to become more flexible, but for many users, all software not approved by Apple will now be considered off limits. Gatekeeper is being touted as a security feature, one that coincidentally happens to direct users to Apple's own software (or software it profits off of). The direction this is going isn't hard to see: a computer architecture in which all software must go through the actual gatekeeper: the App store. And with every other feature seemingly designed to integrate iOS and OS X, Apple is moving towards full integration of all aspects of tech life into its own software and hardware, with all of the money going one way. Apple doesn't yet have the market power to do this, but it seems to be what they're gunnin' for. They are following the path that made Windows a progressively shittier product for a good 10 years: focusing on monetary domination more than user experience.

I'm also not writing to harp on Apple in particular. In "old media" as well as new, and across brands and products, this type of control is becoming more and more common. What worries me as much as the devolution of Mac OS X is the degree to which the internet and computer experience are slowly congealing around several huge companies, all of them working to make their products worse through a focus on control and commerce. We have a Google search enginge that redirects you to its own products, a Mac that tells you non-Apple software is dangerous, a phone that tracks everything you do on it, a social networking site which slowly removes its own privacy controls and sells your information all over the internet. I'm not saying that using Google, Facebook, a Macbook or an iPhone is currently going to stomp your freedom in some horrible way or that any of them are horrible products you shouldn't use (I use all of them); it's because I thought they were all so fantastic for a few years that it bums me out so much that they've all gone in the direction of gimmicks and control. I'm saying that as these things progress, there's a creeping feeling in my mind that all is not right, that the democratic aspects of the internet and the "tech revolution" are being increasingly rolled back by traffic directed to a few sources. Just as 90% of the media is the United States is owned by 6 companies, I guess the internet, and the programs we use to access it, are now the spaces being colonized.

The iPhone 5 is the Message

The announcement of the iPhone 5, or 4s or 4G, or whatever it's called, will occur in about 3 hours. With the pending revelation of the object that has inspired such hysteria and obsession from around the blogosphere and popular news media, I thought it apropos to reflect on how much the medium has truly become the message today. While I don't expect anything grand from this latest iteration- a better camera, quicker loading times, maybe some voice integration- I, along with a shitload of other people, have been thinking about how the iPhone has ushered in a new era of wiring our brains to communication technologies. I had an IPhone for about two years, but even without one, I've retained the habit of constantly looking down to my phone, checking my email ten times a day instead of one or two, of expecting to know the name of any catchy song I hear in an instant. When it is constantly accessible, information takes on the quality of a drug, altering the way we interact with the world around us. I don't believe this is limited to phones either. Steven Totilo, writing on Kotaku about the Wii U, reflects not only on the influence of technology on our lives, but how our lives and relations have changed to such a degree as to demand adaptations from future technoligies that wish to appeal to our new techno-social structure:

For all its faults, Nintendo is probably making the right gaming console for our times. Who sits on a couch with other people in order to all focus on the same thing anymore? Do people really gather to watch a TV show together or have dinner? Think about it. Is their attention undivided and on the same thing? Of course not. At least one person is checking their iPhone, logging onto Facebook, reading a text or sending an e-mail. The globally rich society that plays video games is the same globally rich society that in the year 2011 always already has a private screen in the palm of their hands. (emphasis mine)

Subtly drawing on Louis Althusser's "always already" concept, the gist of which is that all of us are subjects of our society's ideologies before we can really consciously think about whether we are or not, Totilo adds a new technological demention to Althusser, updating subjecthood for the twenty-first century. In the case of the do-everything-for you iPhone and its second-class bretheren, the Android phones, we are already in the grip of the machine, and it in ours, before the first questioning editorial about what might have been lost is even published.
And so, with today's announcement, it seems that quite literally, "medium is the message," or, more elaborately, "the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 8). We are not excited for the announcement of the phone for what its call-making potential, but for the imagined totality of increased access to communicative habits and the imagined, potentially impossible expectations of something that will revolutionize our lives and the way that we interact with our environment, something that will "shape and control the scale and form of human association and action" (9). Beyond my theoretical speculation, neuro-psychologists are starting to study these effects. The New York Times recently described a study that showed immense influence on emotions and reactions that we generally tend to think of as immensely personal, even spiritual:

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone. 

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia. 

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

If even a part of this is the case, no content or function of the phone has a chance of valuation at the level of the phone itself. Today, the phone is the message. From our vantage point in 2011, the reconfiguration of our minds and social relations hasn't yet begun. We are still living in a world shaped largely before the internet, before personal computers and before smart phones. Any one born in the last ten years will live in a world where these are ubiquitous and unquestioned, much as I can hardly imagine life without electricity. It's kind of exciting and maybe a little sad. I miss looking at the same screen as everyone else I know.

See also:
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Singularity
Image via iHackBlog

Nirvana, Grunge & Collective Cultural Longing

Did everyone feel the earthquake yesterday? I felt it here in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Not knowing how earthquakes work or what to do when they come, our supervisors quickly evacuated the building and I walked onto Flatbush Avenue to see thousands of people milling around in the street, excited and chatting about what had just taken place. I was a little shaken up by the experience (da-dum-chh!), but I couldn't help but feel happy about the immediate result. Strangers were talking. And maybe more importantly, they had something to talk about. Like when Obama won the presidency, like being in Hartford after UConn won the national championship, like the few times when everyone seems to have something in common. It's rare now and I was happy to see it taking place. But it also made me think about how our experience of the world now is so shaped by a lack of shared experience. Life without a cultural touchstone is to me one that lacks a wholeness, that is isolating and lonely. And this brings nostalgia for a time when, even if we weren't all holding hands singing Kumbaya, there was at least a greater ability for shared experience through shared cultural focus.

Posted yesterday on Slate, Simon Reynolds has a fantastic peice discussing the psychology around nostalgia, specifically for the grunge period of the early 1990s. As someone weaned on the music of the time, including grunge, its later, softer and mostly more annoying iterations, as well as the disparate popular movements that followed (ska comes to mind), I took a particular interest in its themes. I am, admittedly, a 90s nostalgiac. Reynolds discusses the longing for a defined culture, the feeling of living in "an era," and for the 90s in particular, an era of rebellious authenticity. Thom York sang on The Bends in 1995, "I wish it was the sixties," a line that seems, in a way, to define the 90s. Youthful earnestness, but with a tinge of depression and hopelessness, yearning for a more authentic, powerful life, believing that things should change, but lacking the belief that anything could. This at least, is one analysis, not exactly of the 90s as a whole, but for how early-mid 90s culture was and is conceived. For more, google "Metamodernism." Reynolds moves from the specifics of the 1990s into a discussion of how we define this time in a particular way through a particular lens, deconstructing the concept of "era" itself and the ways in which central, mainstream cultural media are necessary for the creation of our definition of not only this era, but any era, be it the 1990s, the 1920s, or the middle ages. He writes,

When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.

The nostalgia here is not for the 90s per se, but for the escape from cultural isolation. In the age of the internet, of a million new stories from a million sources that register barely beyond the feeling of momentary sensation, I wonder where such cohesive perceptions of the world can arise. What can define us together? We're all staring at different screens...quite literally. Collective viewership, collective listenership (is that a word?) and collective cultural understanding have been dissipating for years now, with nothing to fill the void. The best we can do to define our time, to give identity to our culture in this collection of years, is to point to its infinite divergences; we define it mainly by its lack of a defining feature. And while in many ways this can be good, I wonder if the five thousand or so MP3s on my computer are worth all the cultural loneliness and isolation. I wish it was the 90s.

Image from Taringa.net

Hulu, Sitcoms and Collective Experience

Splitsider ran an interesting piece today examining how DVR, Hulu and other technologies are potentially improving the quality of television sitcoms. The argument runs that new means of delivering television programming make it easier to catch up on plot-lines, give more time for viewers take in shows, and provide the means for dedicated fans to follow a show without having to be at the right place at the right time. As the act of choosing to watch the show becomes a more active process, the demand for complex narratives and more sophisticated humor increases:

As more and more television viewing is done on DVRs and streaming video, the entire experience of absorbing a given comedy show will change. They will be packaged less as single, cohesive episodic pieces and more as installments, which will give writers a degree of freedom that they have not always had. Whereas many sitcoms may have previously stretched themselves thin in search of a set-up, climax, and resolution within less than a half-hour, new viewing methods will continue to encourage writers to situate their comedies in more realistic human spaces. As television comedy writing becomes less shackled by the impossibly canned 23-minute plot model, perhaps laugh tracks will be replaced by real laughs.

In addition to my interest in the ways that new technologies can change the art we consume and the way we consume it, I'm curious about the potential for technology to reinvigorate the collective experience of television watching. In an earlier era, a show came on at a specific time on a specific channel. There was one screen to watch it on and everyone watched it at the same time. As access to television shows has multiplied to include a variety of viewing means and formats, this collective experience has somewhat fallen by the wayside. As much as we might lament the disconnection of a family hunched around a glowing box, it's certainly better than a group of isolated individuals hunched over their own personal screens.

If the analysis on Splitsider is correct and narrative arcs become longer and more involved, I wonder if these technologies can also return some of the sense of shared experience associated with television. While we might not all watch the shows at the same time, it could be that, with increased complexity, increased involvement, and maybe most importantly, increased access to an entire series, television will spark the same type of discussion that a shared viewing would.

Splitsider via Gizmodo

The Sources of Exploration: Miyamoto, Philip K. Dick & The Heart of Art

In Philip K. Dick's 1965 sci-fi classic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the earth has become an unbearable fireball, a perpetual Texas summer that is barely livable. The United Nations is colonizing planets and moons, sending millions of twenty-first century John Smiths to kickstart agriculture on the harsh, cold, crystallized soil of places like Mars and Europa. In these dark and miserable habitats, removed from the comparative bounty of Earth, the colonists find redemption in Can-D, a drug that "transforms" the user to an imagined paradisiacal beach in southern California. The Can-D users are, in their minds, transformed to another world in an experience described as wondrous, mystical and even religious. In Palmer Eldritch, Dick imagines a world in which drug-induced simulation is the only source of natural wonder for a race that has destroyed its own habitat.

I was reminded of Dick's work today while reading Nick Paumgarten's "The Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo game guru Shigeru Miyamoto from the December 20 issue of the New Yorker. Miyamoto is more or less THE man behind Nintendo, engineering not only its classic and still popular games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Wii Sports, but also its philosophy - the fun first, complexity later purity that Nintendo is known for. Paumgarten's profile details Miyamoto's inspirations for games like Mario and Zelda as emerging out of his childhood explorations in the woods of a rural Japanese town:

[Miyamoto grew up] thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

I was familiar with these stories of Miyamoto and had always thought of the Mario and Zelda games as exploratory masterpieces. To me, they were alternate universes, interactive versions of Alice's wonderland, accessible only through the application of the player's imagination. Such games, rendered in now-rudimentary 16-bit sprites, require a certain willingness to play along, to "fill in the gaps" as Wolfgang Iser might say, a willingness that likely benefits the young over the intellectualized and habituated, a willingness perhaps only accessible to adults through hallucinogenic drugs. It seems almost foreign to me now, and I'm sure even moreso to adults divorced from the experience or who never had it, to consider them in this way. It was a later part of the article, however, that brought Dick's work to my mind. Paumgarten continues,

There may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind. In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

It's hard to argue that the world we live in is not more "paved and partitioned" than the world Miyamoto grew up in, fifty-some years ago in rural Japan. Living in New York City, I frequently reflect on the effects of my concrete environment and the feeling that everything has already been discovered a thousand times before. Even the structure of public transportation can make the world feel small; by necessity, a subway prevents the ability to wander off somewhere of your own choosing, as any destination must be one that someone decided it was worthwhile for people to go, and worthwhile enough that millions of people would be regularly going there. No discovery, nothing new. This is, of course, a selective analysis of New York and the subway system, but one that has its roots in real feelings. As the world becomes more urbanized and more and more people grow up in cities, or comparatively urbanized areas, I wonder what avenues will be available for the sense of play described by Miyamoto.

I'm sure the problem feels especially acute in Japan, the world's most urbanized country, but the idea pops up again and again in Western fiction as well, especially in science fiction. In Dick's Palmer Eldritch and a host of other apocolyptic or pseudo-apocalyptic literature, a depreciated natural environment deprives us of essential aspects of our humanity. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep offered a similar vision of the future in which religion was practiced through computer simulation. While I'm not so much concerned here with religion, I do worry that the feeling of wonder that perhaps burgeons into spiritual elation and intellectual curiosity is increasingly inaccessible in an increasingly urbanized world, and, along with this dearth, available only in simulated form.

Link encounters The Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time(1998)

Even looking beyond the medium of computer games, roller coasters, playgrounds, Discovery Zone franchises, and most obviously literature and film provide human-created opportunities to explore other avenues of experience. While video games and other forms of media built on newer technologies are in their infancy, to what degree will we become reliant on them, or more advanced versions of them, for sensations that mirror the ones discussed by Miyamoto? Or, once they are not presented to us through our environment, will we even notice that they are gone?

2 Course Proposals

Descriptions of 2 courses I proposed for Duke University's Talent Identification Program. The first one was accepted and is being offered summer 2011. The second is a proposal for a weekend course in the fall of 2011. I'm writing this post to practice the habit of posting about something other than freewriting about various media issues. While I've posted other things before, I'd like to get better at it. So here goes:

Existentialism in Film and Other Media
This course will explore the ways in which existential philosophy manifests itself in texts from a variety of media sources– films, novels, comic books, music and more. Beginning with an introduction to classic existential texts by Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky, students will get a strong understanding of the basics of existential thought. From here, the class will examine short stories, films and other texts, creating interpretations through discussions, paper writing and in-class activities. The course will help students to create their own philosophical interpretations and grow in their ability to analyze and make sense of literary texts and the world around them.

Inspiring Writing Through Multimedia

This course will explore the ways in which internet and multimedia texts can be used to inspire creative writing. Students will learn how to use photographs to help develop characters, YouTube videos to write inner monologues, electronic music to create settings and more. In addition, the class will offer a brief introduction to online publishing and peer feedback on writing. During the course, students will have the option of producing a short story, several poems, or a multi-genre piece. The goal of the class will be to equip students with simple ways to continue writing on their own by drawing on resources already available to them.  The course materials will build upon the most successful lessons from my Inspired Writer and Writer’s Workshop classes, both offered as part of the 2010 TIP Summer Studies program at Texas A&M University.

It's interesting to see these two side-by-side. I had never written a course proposal before submitting the Existentialism course earlier this year. Since the class was accepted, I used this paragraph as a template for the second. Even on top of the obvious stylistic similarities, it's interesting to see my own interests shining through so similarly in both, despite the fact that they were conceived apart. It's also fun to see a little bit of BS in them both.

What is Love?

Love is an online multiplayer game that seems to function in smaller communities than massive works like World of Warcraft. The idea is to build a civilization with the other plays in the game, rather than blow their faces off. To me, it looks like an impressionist painting mixed with a mid-90's super-polygonal world. The focus seems to be on creating relationships with other players, rather than killing them. Also, I like the whole aesthetic that developer Eskil Steenberg creates. All of my love to these types of aesthetic projects, especially when they are video games.

The Internet Eats Music

For a while now, I've been going on about the role the internet has played in the dumbing-down of popular music. My theory went like this- the internet has allowed people who really love and care about music to seek out new material from a multitude of sources. Whereas in earlier times, someone who loved music would turn to radio, MTV, label catalogues, etc., they now turn to the internet. With an audience made up of both serious music consumers and casual listeners, bands like Nirvana or Radiohead could become huge mainstream successes. With the loss, or relative loss, of the more serious audience, the main consumers of music through mainstream channels are casual music listeners. With this audience, there is less of a need to appeal to consumers looking for better music with more content (as subjective as these designations may be), because these consumers aren't listening, they are scouring blogs or getting music from friends through YouSendIt or Mediafire. The same basic idea applies not just to listening, but to buying music through physical media as well.

I'm not sure that I want to make any sort of value judgment on any of this, but it is sad for me that there are unlikely to be any more genuine rock stars, any major musical acts that are shared across large segments of the population. I used to be able to talk about Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins with nearly anyone. It's a bit more isolating to love Joanna Newsom or even MGMT. I purposely chose very large indie music acts, as even with their massive popularity (tickets to "indie" act Newsom recently cost me $45), these artists are anonymous to large swaths of the population (less so for MGMT). There is less of a shared music culture, and with this loss, communication and community with dissimilar people becomes more difficult, especially if one of the ways you connect to others is through music.

Tirade ended.

Anyway, I came across a fairly in-depth article about the current problems of the major labels and the ways in which they are trying to change. While the article's focus is not the same as my pseudo-thesis on the music industry, it seems to take the internet concept even further- they explore how the broadening accessibility of finding and creating music is killing the music industry. An interesting read: Record Labels: Change or Die

(How) Will Interactive Storytelling Alter Our Perception of Ourselves?

For the past few weeks, I've been following stories about the new Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain follows the story of a serial killer told through 4 different perspectives. The story unfolds through video clips rendered in a real-time graphics engine that is stunningly life-like. Sort of like the old Dragon's Lair games or Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you use the controller to make decisions for the character or perform certain actions. Depending on how you choose, the story alters, but never stops.

Heavy Rain is being described as a much more immersive and engaging experience than most games, blending genres and mediums to create a new form of storytelling- a type of story that many people have envisioned as a perfect project for video games- taking a cinema-esque experience and making it interactive, creating a world in which your choices count, making you a part of the experience. While Heavy Rain doesn't seem to fully realize this gilded dream quite yet, it is a step in the right direction. BTW- Gizmodo has an excellent editorial up about the successes and limitations of the game.

What I am wondering is how things will change if this more interactive form of storytelling becomes a dominant media format. In the nineteenth century, novels emerged as the dominant method for expressing the values and beliefs of our selves and our culture. For the last seventy years of so, film has taken on this role. These are the mediums through which we understand the stories of our lives. We imagine ourselves as movie characters or novel protagonists. We subtly create soundtracks in our heads to different moments, we think in lines from books from time to time, we imagine our prom night the way we saw it in Sixteen Candles, or we expect the type of love John Cusack encounters in a thousand and one romantic comedies. These expectations alter our perceptions of the world and reinforce, or create, in our minds the notion that there is a story to our lives, one to be played out in a certain way, with certain essential events occurring in line with story arcs at least somewhat dictated or influenced by the media we consume.

Mark Wilson, in his article on Gizmodo, has already discussed how video games could come to later the way stories are told. He writes,

If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it's that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they're somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.

Building on his point, if this genre develops into an art form in which we experience a multitude of consequences, in which there is not one path through which we progress, but a multitude of paths based on our own choices, will our concept of narratives in our own lives alter? Instead of imagining the perfect prom that we saw on a TV show, will we imagine a plethora of options based on diverse factors? Will we resign ourselves to the inevitability of chance? Will we see our selves as more responsible in the creation of our fate? We will stop pushing for idealized experiences? Or, is our desire to create narratives and story arcs too embedded in our psychology- either our psychology as humans or our psychology as western thinkers inclined to think with these types of stories regardless of media influence?

Brian Eno on "the death of the uncool"

There is a brief article by Brian Eno in Prospect Magazine on the recent diversification of music tastes. He makes the point that with an ever-increasing number of subcultures and sub-categories of music, that there is no one standard for what makes something "cool." As Eno writes, "The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness." While Eno never uses the word "internet," I would attribute much of the credit for the dissolution of limitations on music taste goes to the accessibility of free music on the internet. With access to millions of songs with little to no cost, it's no wonder that cultural respect has been dissipated across a wider range of music.

At the same time, the music that is mainstream seems to suffer from this leveling of access, at least in terms of quality. Bigger, if not better, media, seems to dominate the attention and pocketbooks of casual customers more and more. Two of the largest media openings in entertainment history have occurred within the past few months, New Moon (film) and Call of Duty 2 (video game).


So, what direction is entertainment media headed in?

the death of uncool

And Yet It Moves

I recently came across And Yet It Moves, a new puzzle-platforming game for PC, Mac, and soon to be released in Nintendo's Wii Ware store. The game was produced as a group project at Vienna University of Technology's Department for Design and Assessment of Technology. Despite lacking a dedicated artist, the game's uniqueness is mostly derived from its use of cut-paper visuals and an overt aesthetic of isolation. The game also sports a unique gameplay mechanism in which players manipulate gravity to move through levels.

See the trailer here

Despite lacking a dedicated game artist, the team at VUT was able to produce an incredibly immersive and unique game experience, based almost entirely on aesthetic factors. While there is a sense of exploration and bemusement that is found in many games, the visuals and music push this game beyond what has come before. All of this without the aid of a visual artist! A team at a university, lacking in major capital or experts dedicated to specific aspects of design, was able to produce one of the most visually immersive games of the year. Here, And Yet it Moves serves as a strong representetive of the independent games movement currently taking off on PCs, Xbox Live Arcade, PSNetwork, and so on. While larger releases have skyrocketing budgets (as always), technology has become accessible enough that with only a few people, a game with strong aesthetic appeal can be put together. And not only made, but released to mass audiences through new distribution channels.

Electronic Music

I think (and talk) a lot about the way the internet is effecting our lives. So do a lot of people. Well, whatever. No one is reading this and so it's fine to cover well-covered topics. Anyhoo, most of these thoughts are too broad to pin down, too rooted in a feeling, a general compiled sense of the way things were and the way things are, rather than sharp, cutting, fit and trimmed thoughts that can be easily translated into words. Some, more specifically my thoughts on music, are prime for such translation.

I was in a class the other day, Education and the Aesthetic Experience, in which we were discussing the role of music for people living under the Soviet Union in the 60's. Slowly, this turned into a lamentation on the fact that music ("rock and roll") (supposedly) doesn't have as much to say as it used to. Examples were thrown around, as Marc Antony and J-Lo were unfavorably compared to Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Ignoring the misuse of the term rock and roll and the clear lack of exposure that the class had to music, it did re-highlight the changing nature of music delivery.

In the past, you didn't need to be a music aficionado to hear good music on the radio. Sure, you would hear a great deal of crappy music as well, but you'd also get in some Nirvana, some Pearl Jam, some Third Eye Blind. These days, quality music coming out of a mainstream source is much more of a rarity. My theory, as I have espoused repeatedly, is that most of the people looking for great music do it through independent channels, a task made infinitely easier due to the internet. For these music-lovers, there is no need for the radio or anything like it. This, I imagine, greatly reduces the market and the buzz around major rock artists. Without the core listeners, record companies need to cast a wider net, hence more generic music that you might buy on impulse at Wal-Mart for a relative, but that you wouldn't spend time scouring Limewire to download (if you've even heard of Limewire).

For me, the internet has been a wonderful source of music. As for the state of mainstream music, I find it lamentable, but it's hard to shed too many tears when you're busy downloading new jams every day. What is currently bothering me, and what I was thinking about after my aesthetics class is that this dissipation of a core group of quality music acts that everyone knows deprives music of its holy celebratory status. Bob Dylan is a legend. He has an aura several decades after his time that almost anyone who was alive, and many that weren't, will talk about. Will the same be true for acts like Conor Oberst, arguably an even better songwriter?

There is a certain wholeness lacking in music. Even with the most loved of artists, the constant accessibility of a million other songs takes something away from the best and most loved groups. This, in a sense, has been one of the tragedies of most modern developments--the loss of holiness surrounding the most elite in any category, the leveling of playing fields. I can't help but feel a special tinge of pain thinking about it with music though, as memories of the hours of repeat listens of the freshly opened cd are still close to my heart. I also can't help but feel that the internet, whether for better or for worse, is going to be pushing us all both into greater public view (on the internet itself), but also into greater anonymity (in our real lives), in a similar way as it is happening to musicians right now.

Thought-Drive & Blogs

It's funny the way posting on a blog effects your thought patterns. Now that I've starting writing online (I can't bring myself to use the word blogging), I've found myself thinking in terms of short, novel writing selections for a nondescript audience. Before now, I would usually think in terms of conversing with close friends. My thoughts would come to me as words I would say to Matt or Elise or Mikey, etc.

There are a few elements of this that I find intruiging. First, it says something about the format of a blog. It is like a worldwide conversation. You're not just talking to a page, you're talking essentially to everyone (and anyone). This is especially true of blogs, rather than other forms of online writing, first because blogging (aha! I did it) is such a constant and fluid activity; it can be done about anything at any time and is expected to be fairly regular. Secondly, it is conversational in that blogs are highly intertextual. They constantly ref each other, almost like a forum posting without an organizer.

The second aspect that this highlighted was the nature of thoughts. Do they always occur in a specific format? I am guessing that most people habitually think in one way or another--to one audience or another--in such a consistent manner that they don't even recognize it. It is only when they switch environments or start reading one type of text so heavily that it starts influencing their thoughts.

Lastly, it highlights for me the idea of conversation as a drive, and further, thoughts as a drive. When I'm thinking to another person, it's like building up little bits of expressive desire. An event happens, or I have a thought, and then I subsequently have the desire to tell it to whatever person I think would be most interested. It is almost like a sex drive. You have a desire and want to express it/satisfy it. That may sound ridiculous and send the middle-schoolers in all of us giggling to the floor, but I think there's something to it; thought drive