oh dear…
Surely not...
Oz firm seeks talented IT developer • The Register.
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Random Pix
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A song by the wonderfully talented Tiffany Eckhardt tells me to shine today, something I’m sure Auntie Gertrude would agree with, my lack of illumination not withstanding, yet I am sorely troubled by two things that have surfaced on my screen in recent times. The first one I want to share is a job ad. I won’t bore you with all of it, just the summary should suffice.
Now I don’t know about you (I mean really I don’t, drop me a line sometime and tell me) but being passionate about death and dying? Okay there is the bit about attitudes and understanding as well as social change but is this really the right tact? If I think about people who are passionate about their interests artists and musicians come to mind, and accountants… actually no, sorry accountants don’t have an entry in their system for passion but I digress. This idea that one can be passionate about death and dying or changing people’s attitudes to it is intriguing. The only other people I can quickly think of who want to change social attitudes towards the end of our days usually come knocking on my door nicely dressed in suits and or dresses clutching copies of the Watchtower and offering to shine a bit of light into the dark corners of my troubled soul. That is not to say that social attitudes to death and dying couldn’t do with a nudge but given the constraints of a part time position for ten hours a week just how much change could we expect to see? Society is a big scene and one person for ten hours a week hardly seems like social changing event but maybe I’m just cynical. On the other hand it might just be a cover for some kind of evangelical organisation that’s busy recruiting passionate people to spread the word that it’s okay to die because our suffering and death leads to a better world. The other thing that crossed my screen this morning that deserves some reflection is (warning…adult material) this. News from the Expo is slowly making its way into the mainstream press which I guess just goes to show how easy it is to get publicity if you smile sweetly. But something about this easy adoption of the sex industry by the traditional conservative mainstream media is worrying me a little and it coincides with the avalanche of publicity over eReaders that has swamped the tubes recently. Volumes have been written about the sex industry and my opinion is covered somewhere by someone so I’ll skip most of it. What I do find interesting about the “industry” is its implication for relationships between the sexes. Douglas Hines illustrates the point perfectly. A middle aged man sitting next to a piece of plastic that he can have sex with. Sure sex dolls are nothing new but people like Douglas are making money out of selling dolls to other men presumably because they can’t have a normal sexual relationship with another human being. It’s hardly surprising that women simply go and buy an unobtrusive vibrating thing that neatly fits in the drawer next to their bed but men have to buy a “recreational innovation” that can talk but still ”has a full C cup and is ready for action” for a quiet little $7000. That the sex industry is primarily directed towards fulfilling heterosexual male fantasies is pretty much beyond question but what does it say about our societies? Like the 3D experience that Lance Johnson and his muse Breanne Benson are selling (and a virtual reality scenario putting it all together can surely be just around the corner) I am inclined to ask, is this the pointy end of the capitalist system as applied to our fundamental desires? It certainly seems like it. Create an environment where sex is commodified, regulate supply through various social agencies which increase the demand and then sell a solution. That would simply be business 101. Am I passionate about death and dying…is selling sex ok? It’s worth thinking about, death as something we end up doing alone and sex as something infinitely more meaningful when it’s done with someone else. Twitter has been on my mind a bit lately and David Carr’s piece reminded me of a draft post I have in the pile of unfinished stuff lying around. At first I thought the two lines of thought might cross over but Davi’d article takes a fairly familiar line so I guess my Twitter Confession will have to wait. I am going to have a look at David’s article because I am starting to suspect that Twitter is more hype than substance but it may yet become something. What? Well I think Twitter is a ready made tool to replace the News and Advertising industries that until recently was married under the auspices of the newspaper industry. I think there are some reasonable grounds to make that assertion but let’s have a look at some of David’s claims with regard to Twitter. First, there is the claim that Twitter is somehow an essential part of the internet plumbing, that the internet service provided by Twitter is so deeply meshed with all the other services that it must survive. An example is this blog, where you can tweet this story using the “share/save” button. This groovy little bit of code makes it easy for you to send these words anywhere else with just a few mouse clicks. If you take that functionality and apply it across the web then you can get some sort of picture of the sort infiltration that David means by his quote
Okay, Twitter is part of the landscape whether or not it does anything. With such built in connectivity it is likely that Twitter will achieve some sort of critical mass and take on a life of its own. Possibly it is already there but before it becomes entrenched it will need to do a couple of things. First it needs to start making money for someone because no web service can survive for free over time, either they are subsidised by another profitable activity or they make a buck in their own right. The hard fact of life is that there is nothing free about providing a service on the net. This site costs money, facebook costs money to the people supplying it, Google costs money. So Twitter will eventually have to attend to business. When it does then we will have a better idea about motivation and rewards, until then however Twitter’s business model seems primarily one of garnering sufficient mindshare to justify its existence. The other thing Twitter will need to do is establish a much better track record in terms of service availability. Twitter Fail is fairly common in my experience and this is tied in with the business side of Twitter. To put it simply, providing a 99.999% reliable service on the net costs money, more money than Twitter can probably afford. So the gurus at Twitter probably sweat their arses off hoping it all holds together until someone comes up with the money for them to deploy a better service. In the meantime we get lots of “we are working on it” type announcements. David acknowledges the issue of service reliability in his article but he seems more concerned with what Twitter can do for you and me. According to David, Twitter can keep us informed and up-to-date. It’s the electronic pulse of humanity, you just need to put your finger on the right spot. It’s at this point that I think we need to stop and look seriously at what is being claimed for Twitter. According to Clay Shirky who David quotes;
How is this raw capacity defined? It sounds like an impressive claim but one that David fails to substantiate. He then goes on to parrot the now familiar lines that Twitter represents some collective networked intelligence, a claim that may be true but one that begs the question of so what? According to David, this collective intelligence is best deployed helping him decide what netbook to buy or what is going on with flights during a US style terror scare. It seems uncritical thinking on his part, and it avoid the corollary. That is just how much time and mindshare is absorbed by being part of the Twitter experience. And it is at this point that I really depart from David’s line of thinking. From my experience Twitter is a interactive now type of internet service. What is happening now is millions of tweets are filling up cyberspace with what’s currently of interest to the authors. And then there are the retweets and the corresponding conversations, but all of it is very NOW. Switch off twitter, as I have done for the last month or so of my break from uni, and suddenly life seems slower. What you get from Twitter depends on who you follow and how often you use the service. For journalists and other media professionals I can easily see the usefulness of Twitter after all currency is the what drives the News industry. For the average punter I guess there is some value in tapping directly into the mindshare of the masses when something is happening but the question remains is it something we need? And given the business imperative that Twitter must deal with sooner or later, what will commercial interests do once they figure out a way to exploit the collective mind? The bottom line for me is that Twitter is another time sink. It is also another mind grabber. Sure I can ration my use, I can organise my internet patterns so that it’s sitting in the background but the fundamental fact remains that unless I actually engage with Twitter, which means time and effort, it does nothing extra for me. The collective wisdom is what Andrew Keen discussed in his book “The Cult of The Amateur” and although I disagree with his predictions with regard to the creative mind, his points about the wisdom of the masses are well worth considering. David is probably right in the sense that Twitter is here for the foreseeable future even if the retention rate of service adopters remains at it’s current level. It is hard to see Twitter disappearing overnight but it is also hard to see what is going to take Twitter to the next level of a “must have” internet service. Hype of the kind that David and other evangelists preach might drive a few more people to look at Twitter but the constant on feature is not, as claimed, a bonus in terms of our already busy lives. Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com. If you missed this doco on SBS, here is a web version. (inbedded player not working) RIP: A remix Manifesto 2.0 | Open Source Cinema – An Open Source Documentary Film about Copyright. I love boing boing! Check out the cameras and the typewriters but the fashions…omfg! YouTube – WITI TV-6 – News Update [1982] {1 min}. Auntie Gertrude alerted me to this luvly little video… YouTube – Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff. Guy’s article caught my attention because he revealed the rather depressing news that eBooks outsold their physical predecessors on Amazon over the Christmas Consumer Festival. His argument though is nothing particularly new, the idea that our society and culture are underpinned by various needs and the material way in which these needs are satisfied which is in turn threatened by the ever expanding reach of technology is fairly familiar to anyone who has been following the debate. That does not mean the idea is less valid nor is the question of who benefits from the new technology unrelated. I looked at a Kindle recently and after a few minutes with it I could easily imagine the marketing potential. It looks a bit like a book, it feels a bit like a book and it has words in it like a book. You can carry it with you like a book and it works in standalone mode quite well for a few weeks until the tiny power consumption overwhelms the inbuild battery. So far it’s just like a book, except it needs charging every now and then, but the real marketing power lies in the fact that a kindle like device means you can read or view a variety of things on the same device. So instead of having to lug fifty books around with you on your holidays, if that’s what you do, you can simply load them into your kindle and provided you have a source of power handy your reading pleasure is assured. But a part of me feels like this is a con job. I struggle to read enough now and having another device will not actually give me more time to read. Convenience in having a small library neatly tucked into a book like object might be a good thing but it isn’t convenience that prevents me from reading, it is time and sometimes motivation. My reservation about the eBook phenomenon is that is a solution to a problem we don’t have. Carrying a bunch of books around isn’t really the issue unless you are a student perhaps, what is an issue for books and reading is that people are so busy consuming other physical things or absorbing neatly packaged media that reading books is becoming a chore. The marketing solution is simply to package the reading experience into a something new that can be sold to consumers as a benefit. The essence of the this technology is that a. it is convenient and b. it is something we don’t have but need. I disagree with both. It is not convenient for me to have yet another gadget that I must come to terms with so I can then do my reading. I refuse to have to learn that a book needs to plugged in every now and then or connected to the internet to get is material or any of the other idiosyncrasies that go with a new bit of technology. And I refuse to learn those things not because I am some rebellious hippy but because in learning those things Amazon can make money from its investment in technology. I think we need to be very clear about this. The eBook has arrived now because the business model that has driven the computer age is rapidly running out of options. Making a buck out of the computer business is getting harder, consumer fatigue has set in, the market is saturated with workstations, laptops or netbooks and the technology has become so ridiculously cheap that growth is looking decidedly limited. Yet the financial investment in the technology and needs of capitalism to sustain ongoing growth mean that something must be produced that will maintain consumer demand. Since the computer age has already liberated many bits of writing already, the eBook is a logical extension. What is clear is that this technology is being sold as a benefit to consumers but in reality it is a benefit to the producers of the technology and those that have financial investments in the technology business. And like all con jobs it carries with it hidden costs that are ignored in the glossy sales pitch. The eWaste problem, the consumption of limited resources, the assault on the writing process that has grounded book publishing for hundreds of years and the questionable rationale that the internet is somehow beyond the reach of controlling interests. All of these issues are non-existent in the glossy sales pitch, its all about the convenience of buying online everything you can imagine. But if what we can imagine is driven in part by what we are exposed to in our daily lives, what we see or hear or read, then the eBook disease becomes another form of thought control in much the same way as TV functions. Books as standalone things that take people out of the world at large will become things that put people back into the larger world. I will be spared the serendipitous experience of sharing a read experience with people I meet because my read experience will simply become just another pattern of consumption online. However I think Guy’s essay on the potential impact of technology on our society misses the point. It isn’t the technology that threatens our culture and our society, it is the capitalist imperative to commodify every part of our lives that poses a greater threat. The eBook disease is simply a logical extension of combining capital and marketing with applied science without imposing social limits on the growth of money. Wringing one’s hands over the death of books without recognising that it is a consequence of our ongoing acceptance of money as the determining force in our lives simply allows the debate to miss the point. We are not harnessing technology to do what we really need it to do, that is, to produced a more sustainable and socially agreeable place because we have allowed technology and money to determine our cultural and social agenda. What can we do? Well I’m not buying a Kindle anytime soon despite the tsunami of publicity that is swamping me. I don’t need one. The internet is sundering the social connections we need. A good friend recently introduced me to McSweeney’s so I’m sharing the love around… McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.. |
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