Digital space is here to stay

I thought Chris Anderson’s introduction to The Long Tail was interesting coming from a non-market, non-economic background. I think he’s right to say his hypothetical “Ben” is growing up in a different world in terms of information and the way culture or entertainment is being consumed. I’m interested in “this shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards” (8). Personally, I’m skeptical of this development in terms of its long term subversive power (which I think is the attitude Anderson takes here), but it seems to be a very powerful idea indeed.

My guess is that the market hasn’t caught up yet with the developments he mentions, but that it’s going to with a vengeance whether we recognize it as such or not. We constantly have new models replacing the old ie iTunes replaced the BMG catalog, netflix replaced Blockbuster, and Amazon replaced the retail catalog to name a few. Anderson’s argument is that these models are better because now instead of choosing between 100 things, you get to choose between 10,000 or more. This seems problematic in some ways--what about that video store I loved and the employees that could recommend me amazing films and give me different personal insights? What about that music store? that book store? But regardless, whether “mainstream” as we know it dies (American Idol, McDonald’s, South Park, NBC, Disney, Sony, Starbucks) it’s undeniably changing and undeniably powerful and here to stay for the time being. In fact, the only two things that really seem to be drastically changing market-wise in this introduction are movie and music consumption and distribution. Maybe it’s because these are the two forms of art/entertainment that everyone consumes in some way whether you’re 8 or 80, and they both are able exist dismembered from packaging; the kind of physicality you can hold in your hand.

Maybe because I’m not as engaged with digital communities or the web as others, I don’t understand the quote: “[today] The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for [sic] attention” (6). It depends where you go on the web and if you’re like me who visits larger commercial sites like Facebook or CNN or NPR you get adds for Mercedes Benz, Slumdog Millionaire, Netflix, Sports Illustrated, Washington Post, Hershey’s, Advil—it’s essentially the same things you get in a television commercial. I also think this statement starts leaking pretty quickly when you take it outside the internet and apply it to other spaces like an urban one—you have local fliers, posters, advertisements, and graffiti (depending where you are geographically), but they’re drowned by a commercial and linguistic landslide of road signs, billboards, shopping malls, marquees, logos, maps, etc. Here, I’m constantly engaged in narrative, narrative space, and micro-histories ie “Boulder Historic District” or “Since 1985” that saturate, organize and orient. In a city I think those “niche” markets are always there, but they have to access you through the tradition channels—newspaper, newsletter, radio, flier, or physical interaction, and ultimately stay invisible. It also depends on how you experience or access a city space (or whatever space you navigate)—whether you walk through it, around it, whether you drive it or see it from a plane, but maybe as Kelly is suggesting, that is changing.

We are starting to experience these physical spaces differently—the supermarket, the gas station, the movie theatre, the stadium, the airport, are all being infiltrated by screens that require your skillful manipulation to successfully navigate those spaces. But so far, the technology hasn’t made these places obsolete or replaceable or revolutionized—it doesn’t yet drastically alter my experience there, but the offspring of that technology may soon.

Let's make digital poetry

In Stephanie Strickland’s talk given at Hamlin University (Go Pipers!!!) in 1997 she spends a lot of time describing and explaining what digital writing is (here it’s just hypertext—snore) and how it’s the future of writing. My first question is why? Why, in 12 years hasn’t this exploded onto the literary scene? Why aren’t poets churning out digital works? This year at AWP they were running workshops explaining what the hell a digital poem is and where you might go to find one—Strickland is still up there talking about the computer as the real future of the poem but it still seems like she’s all alone in her enthusiasm and conviction. It just really still feels like a subculture of artists at this point. Is it nostalgia for the physical page that’s holding us back? Skepticism about digital art’s integrity? Fear of computers or collaborative partners? To me, hypertext is dead mostly because it’s boring—sure it might be interesting to talk about conceptually and metaphorically for about 5 minutes but I’m really interested in the more complicated collaborative efforts of journals like New River: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/index.html
or even Born Magazine that really push the limits of what can be done visually, sonically, and interactively. Much of this stuff is valid art, and most importantly for me, contains some good writing. I think it’s unwillingness or laziness or selfishness to collaborate and talk to other disciplines and artists that’s really unfortunate here and I really think that’s what it’s going to take to produce interesting innovative work.

I think her doubting space metaphors to describe the internet is interesting—something I think Mark brought up within the first few weeks of class. Mostly because you have this new hugely popular innovation and for the first time we get to really name something new as a society. I think Mark pointed out that most of our language for the internet comes from books and talking about books—“pages” for example “scroll” for another which is an interesting kind of space and special referent. What was so exciting about the internet (and computers in general) during the recycle and conservation phase in the 90s is that it was going to eliminate paper—oh, we were going to save trees and not have to shuffle through papers anymore but with printers and who knows what we actually doubled our consumption of paper. I really believe that we’re not ready to let go of the book—its physical “thing-ness.”

Strickland talks a little bit about “orientation” in a digital space and I think it’s exactly this that’s so overwhelming to the average web navigator—the question of how do I even begin to navigate or position myself in all this chaos seems to me to get at the root of the post-modern question. Lostness and being lost is something we’re still terrified of I think and why there are so many publications and writings stuck in what’s maybe modernism or something at least “safer” in a sense.

Better Late than Never

So like I said I’ve been deliriously sick for about a week and so it’s been pretty difficult to keep up and not think crazy thoughts—I’ve been watching a lot of television and the new fad in cable news (at least last week) is to really probe and dig deep and make inflammatory, over-simplified statements like “racism is over,” the logic being that if we can elect a half-black man from Kansas and educated at Columbia Law, we’re ready to do anything. Sean Hannity for example believes this but I’m not convinced we agree on what racism means or what being racist is now—I think that he’s right when he says only a small minority of Americans are racist, but I’d argue that what he means is open and unashamed racism—you’re not marrying my daughter I’ve got a shotgun kind of racism. Sure, we’re no longer doing violence against blacks, latinos, or Asians, (for the most part) and we’ve mostly done away with open racial slang (great), but racial preference is rampant; we’re not hiring—black unemployment is double white, blacks make less money etc. So obviously "racism is over" is an absurd statement and deserves about one minute of someone’s time that has any intelligence but it still made me angry and so I wanted to tackle some sort of social/racial issue with my sound project (also I’ve never tried to create a politically/socially driven piece of art so it could be interesting) the theme being “dialogue.” So I sat at the tv with a microphone and recorded people discussing race and racism for a few days mostly on pbs and fox news (mostly because of the discrepancy between intelligence and respect, and just because it would give me a wider range of voices and kinds of voices). Basically what I’ve done is collage, mash, and break up different voices—to make them mostly intelligible, but also allow them to interact, play, contradict, compete. I couldn’t help myself trying to make Sean Hannity sound like a jerk and a moron though—I cut him off and looped moments of stuttering or stumbling over words, but I also feel that the privileged middle aged white man doesn’t need the last word or the loudest voice in this situation. I tried to give a louder voice so to speak to those with the smallest voices—the everyday people protesting the NY post after the chimpanzee cartoon they ran. Here’s the link to the article/video: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/20/hundreds_protest_ny_post_cartoon_seen

(By the way, if anyone wants any of the clips I used they’re all on my flash drive that I’ll have with me in class). I featured the NY post protests because I think that whites still don’t understand the anger and residual anger blacks feel everyday—it makes me think of that song “Cop Killa” by Ice T that was a big deal in the early 90s that politicians condemned and damned so thoroughly. Maybe it went too far but I think it highlighted a racial gap—white people just couldn’t identify with black skepticism and anger toward authority and more specifically, police. I tried to include as many marginalized voices as I could—women, latinos, blacks, etc. What I thought was really interesting was that after I used a clip of Martin Luther King Jr I realized just how marginalized his actual voice has become—it’s been boiled down to the “I have a dream” bytes which are just so different and watered down from the way he actually talked. So my project is not without bias or preference but I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily—maybe it’s too easy to pick on Hannity like I did and it’s more difficult to really make a smart conceptual project. I hope I’ve still done that while also having some fun in the process. The music that I’ve used underneath the vocal clips is Alias’ “Kill My Television” which is how I felt at the time of its selection, but I ultimately used it for its emotional quality, its versatility. It’s quiet and repetitive enough to compliment vocal audio very well, and since it’s mostly empty, it makes for a perfect instrumental accompaniment that really augments the language and vocal intensities of the individual people I feature in the project. At times it also obscures the “dialogue” so to speak (I say “dialogue” because no one’s actually talking to each other—they talk past each other or to no one most of the time) and rises above the language which I also think is interesting and part of the “aliveness” maybe of the sound???


Also, Gabe can vouch for me that I ran into several problems with the files of my project corrupting and so I lost a bit of it and am now working with an older version that I’m going to try to get in shape for the presentation tomorrow. See you then.