Tag Archives: Internet

Mock Retro Soup

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It’s Christmas time yet again. If you couldn’t tell by the growing appearance of ‘What to Buy’ lists appearing in newspapers or by various shops now displaying a glut of festive tat and unsubtly changing their jarringly bland muzak to some saccharine festive anthems. If it by some bizarre chance you haven’t yet noticed, it doesn’t matter anyway, the calendar would inevitably catch up as would the intensity of Xmas media saturation ensuring you’ll be pretty much unable to escape it bar going into an early mince-pie induced coma. But of course I’m not telling you anything new here, and I’m not now going to go on a pointless Christmas rant saying how Xmas is perhaps a capitalist conspiracy to get us all to spend what we don’t have.

As it happens I don’t actually fester with bah-humbugism, I do actually embrace Christmas, but doing so in a stiff upper lip manner, that is to say I don’t get childishly excited; I have an appreciation for the general good feeling that swills about while playing down the Christian/Captialist aspects. One reason I particularly like the festival, that being said, is that it gives me a reason, as if I really needed one anyway, to purchase books for people.

I must confess here that it’s not often that I actually visit major high-street bookshops; I make heavy use of second-hand stores (Readers World in Birmingham is great, don’t let the poor reviews in the link here put you off), libraries and yes, Amazon.

But it was when visiting a bricks and mortar store recently, with the intention of gift purchasing, that I once again encountered a phenomena which I’m calling ‘Designer Covers’. This new breed of books are typically hardback although special paperback editions have seemingly now got in on the game, presumably because the iconised hardbacks have been doing so well. I can of course easily understand from a marketing point of view as to why publishers would create such books, eBooks are forever on the up, or so we are told, and the USP actual books retain over their digital rivals is that they exist in the physical world, (you know, the world of matter, you know, where things actually exist) so it’s obvious even to the most brain-dead marketeer to play this up and fetishize this aspect. But sod marketing and their evil scheming ways. Especially because my first instinct on seeing those books is, but never said, “Oh wow, how cool” Damn them for making me feel like that!

This feeling very quickly dissipates when I actually think about it for a few seconds, leaving me with a quandary. I do, as I can tell from from my initial reaction, like the effort that has gone into re-designing the various book covers, which, I believe, can be an interesting art-form in its own right. But then, with perhaps a smidge of Hipster syndrome at play, I can’t help but think why would I pay for this mock retro when there are are surely plenty of actual old books waiting to be found. But does the genuine matter? In a society of signs surely the synthetic image of old is much more appealing than actual oldness, isn’t it? It’s pastiche of oldness feels more real than the ‘actual’ real article. Well capitalism is certainly banking on it anyway. Eventually the argument at hand here can become tautological. The whole thing ultimately boils down to image, which the marketeers behind this new retro are of course all too aware. The choice is then, do you want to appropriate neo-retro and remain modern in your oldness or acquire ’real’ retro and fool yourself into thinking that the age of the item actually makes a difference to how genuine your delusion of living in a past utopia is.

But ultimately what needs to be questioned is why is this interest in the old even around in the first place? Why despite myself occasionally being critical of it, do I still find myself attracted to such propositions. Is it perhaps that with ever-increasing digitalisation of the world, in which the firm borders of time and space are collapsing, whereby not only does the digital bleed into the physical but whereby the physical, with technology such as RFID, is increasingly, via “The Intertnet of Things, bleeding into the Wired. In such circumstances perhaps we feel the need to grab onto something stable, something physical, something with a defined sense of time, even if that something is essentially nothing, a token relic of times when metanarrative gave us structure and stability.

Rather than being a case of Luddism, I’d suggest the people most susceptible to such purchasing are in fact amongst some of those most integrated in the digital world such as myself. Like reality, there is no real binary, or neither is there pro-tech or anti-tech camps as such, there is space in-between. Hipsters are the classic example actually. They live there life in a digital world, but they taint it with sepia hues and pseudo lens flare, they listen to MP3s but do so with a cassette iPhone cover. Rather than creating new futures, they are creating new pasts.

So where does this leave me? Are these new ‘designer books’ to be scorned or embraced? Essentially, there is no absolute answer; how can there be when we’ve allowed, for better or worse, our main pillars of stability of time and space to corrode? I may end up purchasing one or two of the books, they are nice objects in themselves, but while books can furnish a home that certainly isn’t the point of them. But seeing as they take up space in ones decreasingly lived-in physical environment why not purchase books that serve as art as well as content? As the marketeers have noted and as hipsters like to indulge, the physical item is more than just content, it has an essence of its own. I’m still no clearer as to where my position on ‘the issue’ stands, and to be honest, I glad that’s the case.

 

 

Time out of Sync.

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I think I have finally fully settled on what my dissertation for my MA Popular Culture course is going to be. For the past month and a half I’ve roughly known the area but I’ve now decided on something a bit more solid, although there is still plenty of room to manoeuvre, if I so wish. The project is loosely about cultural memory in the digital world, the end of history and hauntology. I’m going to be looking at lost utopias and how the internet prevents us from forgetting and how it ultimately turns us all into ghosts. As you can tell it’s not fully cohesive yet (well not in terms of being able to explain it briefly) but it’s at least more directed that it was only about a month ago. While looking into it I’ll be sure to share little nuggets I find on this blog.

Which brings me onto my original intention for this blog post, media sharing. I’ve been emerging myself in a genre(s) of music, if you can call them that, known as Eccojam, Chillwave, Computer Gaze, Hypnagogic Pop et al. Here I share some pieces which have stood out for me so far and at the bottom of the pile is a quick attempt by me of making something in the style. I will come back to this music in a later post, I’m sure, and talk/explain it in more detail. But for now, enjoy:

The Media Trolls

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There is nothing mythical about the trolls plaguing the Internet today. Many of them are real-life monsters, perverted weirdos who get their kicks in posting obscenities on tribute pages. (The Sun)

Is this how you would describe a troll? Well this is how The Sun portrayed them in its editorial to go with the launch of its latest witch hunt called “Target a Troll” which started on 15/09/11. This description clearly does not truly reflect the phenomena of trolling, as far as I can see it is a cynical attempt from The Sun to regain its position as being the main pseudo moral compass for the nation by co-opting a term and twisting it for its own means. A troll by their account (and others in the media) is a simple buzzword to describe any person they see as behaving “badly” on the Internet; it seems to me that they want to make labelling someone a troll as powerful as the labelling someone a pedophile. If trolls then are not what are described by The Sun what can be considered a satisfactory definition? Well, this is clearly like many definitions, rather hard to describe fully due to the semi-subjective nature of language, however, the one I like the most is a cut-off version of the definition posted on the wikipedia article about Internet trolls as it covers in my mind the full breadth of the term rather well:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers

The reason I favour this definition is because it demonstrates that while trolls can be, and often are, a nuisance, they are not necessarily bad and on some occasions are quite entertaining in a way which does not automatically denote either bullying or nastiness as The Sun and other media outlets will have you believe. Take for example this blog demonstrating people trolling bad spelling on Facebook (do feel free to point out my bad spelling by the way)

On the whole these posts are not evil, yes they might be joshing someone over a mistake they have made but on the whole it is, in this example at least, a bit of fun. Of course not all trolling is nice, there are many examples of nasty trolling but this does not mean therefore The Sun should be able to step in and redefine the term, trolls are not necessarily “monsters and perverted weirdos”, The Sun just happens to have highlighted some cases of idiots with a broadband connections and painted them as being representative.

The main element of The Sun’s campaign which caused me annoyance is the idea that labelling someone a troll could be used as a censorship tool. Take for example this line taken from their scare piece used to launch the campaign “… it was also trolled by a Facebook user who wrote: ‘Who agrees the parents did it?.’ The McCanns’ spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: There is constant activity by these ghouls. They have accused Kate and Gerry of child neglect and worse, and covering up Madeline’s Death”

Now the opinion the person holds may not be a popular one, but surely they have the right to hold it and even discuss it, it’s not as if the person has made the accusation up out of nowhere seeing as many newspapers even printed this could be legitimate scenario. You could equally take the statement made by the McCanns’ spokesman and apply it to press when the story was at its peak, does this mean that our media are trolls? Some of them sure do seem to get kicks from writing obscenities it would seem.

There are times in online conversations that a troll will appear and try to ruin a discussion which can be annoying, however the danger we have of redefining the term troll as meaning anything which maybe controversial being posted online is that freedom of speech the Internet gives even the craziest ideas is essentially threatened, this would be of great detriment to society. If being labeled a troll can provoke the same stigma as what being labelled a pedophile can the freedom of speech the Internet has allowed us all could easily be at threat by simple character assassination. This is of course only what could perhaps happen as a result of demonising and redefining trolls and this is why I believe the campaign by The Sun is a disingenuous one. I do not deny that trolls can be nasty, calculating and cold hearted, however this is not true of all trolls whereas the same tags could be universally applied to all tabloids and particularly with how they treat celebrities, yet they also have the nerve to try and take the moral high ground.

The Sun states in the same article launching Target a Troll that “A viciously inaccurate message on website memebase.com read: ‘Amy Winehouse sang about not going to rehab, then OD’d'” Describing this as viciously inaccurate seems laughable, it is clearly a joke, not a great one, but a joke nonetheless, and besides it’s not as if The Sun or other tabloids have never printed viciously inaccurate stories, but when they do it’s perfectly acceptable.

Trolls then, the way I see it, are not inherently bad, however I cannot argue that there are, as The Sun puts it, “…creatures of hate who spread cruel poison around the web”. These can commonly be found at The Sun and The Daily Mail and other such publications. I do not wish to defend all trolls, some of their behaviour can be abhorrent, however not all trolls are bad and I would much rather have an Internet with freedom of speech, with all of what that entails, than a muted one.

Graze Box Review

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Cross-posted at www.snackfoam.co.uk

The newspaper I read more often than not, of late, is “I”. (Although out of interest of the spectacle of the the newspaper alone I’ve also been reading the Daily Star) The reason for reading the “I” over other newspapers is quite simply because doing a Masters Degree requires a lot of reading and buying a more traditional broadsheet can take too much time. I find getting full use from a broadsheet takes at least an hour if not more if you read a majority of articles which I tend to do. Anyway, within the paper a few months ago I saw a small advertisement for a free Graze Box which took my eye and a promptly signed up to see what it was all about.

The unofficial motto of graze.com is “Eat less biscuits” which sums up how the owner of this small business came up with the idea. They wanted to start eating healthier and started creating there own boxes of health foods when they came across the idea of straight to door customisable boxes of healthfoods. There are many different categories of foods avalaible such as Breads, Olives, Nuts, Seeds and Dried Fruit etc. When you create an account you are asked to go through all the different products and rank how much you like (or think you will like) them as this will determine the frequency in which you receive certain products over others as they try and make the boxes a surprise each time you receive them, although if you’d prefer you can request specific items.

I tried the service out for about three weeks receiving two boxes a week and I must say I was impressed by the service but at a price of £3.50 a box it can seem costly for what you get. Per box you receive four packets containing from about 25g to 60g worth of contents per packet. The reason for small portions is that they aim to keep the box small enough to fit through your door and presumably keep postage costs down. Ultimately the graze box will suit you if either you buy healthfood products which just end up being ate once and left in a cupboard for years on end to just be thrown away or it may appeal if you work in an office environment as they will deliver to any business address and the form factor of the packaging lends nicely to mid-work snacking.

Overall the service is great, its food shopping 2.0, some may consider the cost a tad high but the food is fresh and if your seeking healthy convenient food or just want to “eat less biscuits” it maybe something to consider.

If you like to try a free box paste this code “7QC9GBT” when signing up!

Distractions = Creative Productivity?

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For me, this Monday didn’t turn out to be the productive day I wanted it to be, due to various electronic distractions, but despite this I don’t believe that social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, amongst other various Internet delights, are in fact leading us to be less productive.

On Sky News last Sunday, they reported that a study from the University of Northampton suggests that people are becoming addicted to there gadgets.

The scenarios they give are worryingly familiar.

Interrupted from our primary task by a pop-up alerting us to an email, we stop what we are doing to read the email.

That then directs us elsewhere, perhaps to another link on the internet.

We may then check other emails stacked up behind the new one. A quick look on Facebook, Twitter or something else, and it may be half an hour before we’re back to that primary task.

“You can not any more do effectively the task you were originally doing, even if it was routine,” Professor Kakabadse said.

“You will suddenly feel low energy, you become clumsy and you have a spatial disorder. You become exhausted,” she said. (Sky News)

This sort of reporting regarding technology hardly new, neigh it is expected, take for example the scares around televisions.  In relation to this story, which is nothing special; it seems to have only got coverage due to the PR department at the University of Northampton, I would suggest that you can find addiction in almost anything from cheese to stamp collecting from computer gaming to knitting.

It is of my opinion, and partly that of Russel M Davies from Wired magazine UK, that distraction may infact aid productivity. We were not designed to work solely on one task, as Davies points out, “we’re easily distracted creatures, evolved to be continually scanning for new stimuli…” I personally find that when doing creative work. i.e. not reading, it is much easier to do it with the occasional look at YouTube, the occasional bit of tweeting on twitter and the occasional stumble on stumble-upon. This personal affirmation seems to be proved plausible by a  study pointed out by Davies who states that:

A study from the universities of Harvard and Toronto suggests that people with reduced latent inhibition are more likely to have original thoughts than the rest of us. Latent inhibition is “the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant”. I think this means that imaginative people are worse at screening out the world than you and me. Or better at being distracted. So maybe we mortals can increase our originality by deliberately and purposefully using distracting and unfocused tools. (Wired Magazine UK)

I must now end this blog post and get some work done,  well, I’m going to have a quick look at facebook first, naturally.