December 2006 Archives
Another blustery Monday evening ushered in our final meeting, again with champagne and anchovies. Sarah Gottesdiener brought a box of chocolates. Sadly missing were Sarah Boss (we hope your daughter feels better soon) and Marc Moscato, who got a “real job” that takes up his evenings.
We discussed You Witness News, a user-generated service of Yahoo and Reuters in which amateurs are encouraged to post their video and snapshots of important events and viewers can see whatever the site’s editors let through for “broadcast.” It includes simple tutorials on videography and encouragements and rewards for successful posters. Many in the class thought this was a regrettable instance of volunteer staffing of a for-profit business which both degraded the quality of the work and could put professionals out of jobs. It was compared to the Willamette Week’s recent call for volunteers to contribute to their blog in exchange for free event tickets and other perks.
On the bright side, we wondered if it might also be an instance of the democratization of media, placing the means to produce news into the hands of an ever-wider band of the general population. Professionalism need no longer be a barrier to the populist production of news. However, the editorial control exercised on the site and the fact that they are making money off volunteer contributions made the workshop feel this was not an instance of democratized media. Again, the ideal of symmetrical relationships was invoked, suggesting that a non-profit site that does the same might be more laudable.
Colin was reminded of Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that, in the Culture Industry, a few select “amateurs” will be soaked up into the ranks of the professionals, and this will give everyone false hope.
This brought up the general question of whether we see the vast network of user-driven web content as a kind of de-centralized realization of Raymond Williams’s ideal, which he called democratic communications. These sites present a condition in which all expression, even that which makes no money, is enabled and the means of production extend broadly into nearly every corner of the culture. Williams, living in a different time, presumed that democratic communications would depend on a centralized socialist authority to make media production available to all, regardless of profit. Instead, the means of production have become so cheap and ubiquitous that ownership is no longer a prerequisite for production. Everyone produces regardless of who owns it.
This brought to mind Williams’s insistence that there are two rights: to produce culture and to receive it. Is it still culture if what we receive is an avalanche of unfiltered information?
Danah Boyd’s work on “friending” was discussed. She sees ways that the virtual world gets filtered and organized — turned from formless information into shared culture — by the process of selecting “friends” on the internet. This happens literally, as with MySpace and Friendster and other “socially networked systems” (SNS), and it happens in effect whenever we select links and associations on the web. Boyd comments that this form of social organization is “egocentric” and differs from the social formation of interest groups. With friending, one chooses the friends that suit your sense of self (egocentric) and this constellation of friends can change and shape your interests. Boyd’s description is very winning and undermines a criticism I had been making — that the web is an engine which turns the world into a mirror reflecting back only your own tastes and interests. Friending can widen and change your interests, even as it shapes a clear and meaningful context for ingesting what the web has to offer.
Marcus offered us some very detailed and intriguing descriptions of the web’s capacity to organize information without an intervening editor, so that it presents a coherent and interesting picture of the world to each of us. He explained the operation of Google Ads, those modest bands of suggestions that stream down the right-hand side of most Google pages, shifting in response to what we have written or received or asked about. It was agreed that these are intriguing and non-intrusive, though very few of us ever click on them. He also said we could all own a “piece of internet real estate” by hosting a server in our own homes, for very little money. This diffused ownership of the actual means of production is radically different from industrial economies.
Workshop members will notice that in this report I am truncating and cleaning up a conversation that was in fact much rangier than our norm. It might be that we have all become accustomed to the workshop setting and each other, so are more voluble and at ease, or perhaps our conversation has somehow replicated the logic of our subject — the internet — and become immensely associational and quick. Or else it might have been the excellent champagne and anchovies.
To skip ahead, I asked if anyone had habits or rules of behavior to suggest for engaging the internet as a medium of expression. Did anyone feel, for example, that posting pseudonymously is either a right or a wrong thing to do?
Chris likes to post as himself and maintain a close correspondence between his online and real life personae. He enjoys meeting those he encounters online in life. That said, he did admit to posting under a pseudonym on certain community blogs that make him angry. Stephen complained that other people’s anonymous or pseudonymous postings had led to his being accused of creating certain malicious sites, such as the PDX Art Mafia site, for which he was never responsible. He enjoys the fugitive nature of web-based publishing and readily creates fictional characters that live on the web, but he does this more in the manner of a novelist and not as a way to hide his identity. No one proposed any rule about anonymous or pseudonymous posting, either pro or con, but once again context and symmetrical relations were invoked as useful yardsticks for judging when such a strategy is the right strategy.
We wondered what other rules of behavior or habits were helpful for users of the internet. Colin offered “don’t use the internet” — it is too thin or too full of froth. He recalled his search for overseas volunteer programs, in which the internet presented a great heap of nothing, while a handful of books and person-to-person conversations revealed a whole world of opportunities. Sarah commented that she had booked an entire band tour on the internet in just a week and wondered how anyone ever booked tours before. Colin amended his advice to “don’t ONLY use the internet.”
I tried to summarize some of the characteristics of culture mediated through the internet — its quickness; its obscured, multiple origins (like a blackberry plant whose shoots can return to the ground and become roots); its rhizomatic spread; its conflicted terms of ownership — but Marcus cautioned that the internet is an enormously flexible tool that can be many things. To attribute characteristics to it can be misleading, like attributing characteristics to language or books. This is exactly right, and is in fact one of the goals of our class — to characterize and compare the habits and predilections of various media, such as spoken language, books, or the internet.
Marcus suggested that we teach HTML to all schoolchildren, and this was endorsed by the whole workshop.
We closed our final session by reviewing some of the pleasures and perils of the workshop and checking our progress against the initial proposed curriculum. Workshop members will provide me with profiles and information to add to our resource data base, so they can continue with us in the virtual realm of our website. They (and all subsequent participants) will form an ever growing pool of skilled, interested parties available to one another through the mechanism of this resource-sharing tool, comprising a modestly-sized global coop, of sorts. The next session begins in late January.
We met on Thursday this week, to accommodate an invitation I received to a Monday party in NY (www.unitedstatesartists.org). Apologies to workshop members (Colin, Stephen, Philip, and Marc) who couldn’t make it Thursday. We had champagne and anchovies.
While reviewing the highlights of my trip to NY, we talked about “selling out.” I suggested that “selling out” is a powerful and largely unexamined idea, underscored by a demonization of money that is the equivalent (and flipside) of a deification of money: In either case money — its presence or absence — determines value. Those who speak of “selling out” believe in the purity of some things (one’s work) and the impurity of others (money, or the wrong collaborators or wrong audience).
We speculated about the history of this idea. Certainly the bible positions money as an antagonist to Christ and so reflects some of these beliefs. (See James Buchan’s excellent book, Frozen Desire, for a history of money.) And poverty has been a badge of honor for artists since at least the Romantic era.
Sarah Gottesdiener pointed out that poor people don’t usually worry about “selling out.” It is a bourgeois concern. Certainly the realm in which we see it every day — mostly among artists and musicians working outside what they describe as “the mainstream” — is a largely bourgeois realm. Rob interjected that he doesn’t believe class is a useful descriptive tool for understanding the means and meanings of artistic work; class obscures other differences (and alliances) through which Rob gets more insight into the work of others. People might have aesthetic concerns or habits in common, even across class difference. The aspects of work that interest Rob are obscured when we understand our work as an articulation of class. Strong objections were made — for one, to erase class as an issue serves extremely narrow class interests — and we agreed to disagree.
The subject of class reminded us of Raymond Williams’s small book, Communications, which Beth introduced by telling us a little about Williams’s background and his intent when, in the early 1960s, he wrote this modest, populist pamphlet about the systems of communication that shape contemporary culture. Williams’s subject was essentially the same as Adorno and Horkheimer’s in “The Culture Industry.”
Yet Williams’s text was plain and applicable where Adorno and Horkheimer’s was dense and discouraging. Where Adorno and Horkheimer turned the conditions of the Culture Industry into a dazzling spectacle — the spectacle of their superb and insightful writing — at which we could gaze in awe, paralyzed, Williams rendered the familiar apparatus around us (the newspapers and television and films, the audience and producers) as a set of divergent realities that could only be understood in the specific, by engaging and changing them. Williams is an activist; Adorno and Horkheimer are not. For example, Williams rejects the idea of a “mass audience” whose stupefaction (as Adorno and Horkheimer would have it) is general. The audience is made of many divergent and constantly changing, evolving parties. If our chance for hope and optimism is embedded in our capacity to change, Williams, argued, our analyses of communications must acknowledge that capacity.
Here was the heart of Williams’s activism: his insistence that the conditions we find ourselves in are “a product of history, and could change.” Williams reminds us to historicize ideas and conditions, to always see them as the product of people and their interests and to recognize our ability, as people, to make history. Along these lines he breaks down the monolithic spectre of “controlled media” into four varieties of control: authoritarian, paternalistic, commercial, and democratic. Authoritarian is, quite simply, when a minority controls the means of communication and uses them to pursue its own interests. In a paternalistic system, a minority controls communications but claims to do so in the interests of all. A commercial system (the most like Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry) is one in which market forces restrict everyone’s freedom by squelching whatever cannot make enough money to pay for itself. Finally, the term “democratic system” does not so much describe an existing reality as it does cloak Williams’s utopian ideal of a socialist system of publicly controlled media made available to all regardless of profit. Democratic media are controlled by democratic processes, largely enacted via centralized authorities who answer to popular will.
At this point, our guest for the evening, Mikey Merrill, arrived with his online cohort Jona Bechtolt to discuss their website (with Steve Schroeder), www.urbanhonking.com. We all had our laptops and, serviced by the classroom’s powerful wireless internet cloud, conducted our discussion half in the physical room and half in the borderless realm of the internet. Mikey gave a PowerPoint history of Urban Honking as it morphed from a kind of local online magazine into the massive, multi-sourced, blog-centric community it is today. “We couldn’t get people to write for us,” Jona recalled, “but we could give them a place to write.”
Mikey and Jona both acknowledged their indifference to the potential monetary rewards of the internet. Very little money moves through Urban Honking. While they have no puritan objections to selling out, they’ve never sought nor wondered about sponsorship or advertising on their site. Mikey said the subject is interesting enough that he’s done some Google ads (netting around $30) and also accepted sponsorship from businesses that interest him. For example, the Nashville Knife Company wanted to run a banner ad during Urban Honking’s "moustache growing competition," and Mikey though it would be cool.
Mikey said the site is “more like a TV network” and less like a magazine or journal. When considering what the right mix of bloggers will be or conceptualizing future projects, they imagine they’re programming a network and aim for the kind of show they think Urban Honking needs. The site includes science, tech geeks, music, photography, art gossip, film makers, and this class, among many other offerings.
Like a TV network, Urban Honking is limited in size, and Mikey and Jona are glad about that. While they have no formula for keeping it the right size and mix, they’re inclined toward a smaller site that is unified by their own sensibilities. “We add something if we really like it,” Mikey said plainly. “And we say ‘no’ to all the stuff we don’t like.” We talked about exclusion and the possibility that the internet caters too easily to each user’s narrow interests, uniting us swiftly with a large sample of people who share our quirkiest, subjective predilections. Mikey said he didn’t know why you would want to find people who don’t share your interests and acknowledged that Urban Honking is in some ways “defined by what it excludes,” as are all groups.
This brought interesting, vigorous objections from the workshop. We reprised some of the discussion covered in workshop #8, critiquing the internet as an engine that can convert an otherwise heterogeneous world — reality — into a reflection of your own, narrow subjectivity. It was suggested that political power and cultural richness might lie in heterogeneous mixing with strangers. The success of Urban Honking might not be its ability to exclude and define a narrow interest, but its publicness and the variety of interests supported by the three co-founders. While it gains identity and clarity from the co-founders imposition of their tastes, it retains its vigor and vitality because they do so in an improvisatory and incomplete way.
Changing the subject, I asked if Mikey or Jona would let other people create things as them, using their names, “Mikey Merrill” or “Jona Bechtolt.” It turns out that Mikey’s brother already does a lot of writing as “Mikey Merrill” and that Mikey is also looking to “outsource” some of his writing to India. (In a follow-up e-mail, he pointed me to http://www.b2kcorp.com/ as his potential collaborator.)
This kind of “open sourcing” of one’s name brought strong objections from Sarah Boss, who felt the economics might become exploitative (as they sometimes do when artists subcontract fabrication of their highly-valued work to minimum-wage workers in factories) and wondered whose work it would be if Mikey wasn’t writing it. Mikey countered that it was just as much an art to manipulate money — moving it around so that it ultimately resulted in the writing or object-fabrication or whatever it was that you wanted — as to manipulate language or materials. Why should the intelligent manipulation of money be any less artistic than the intelligent manipulation of language (writing), paint (painting), or metal or wood or plastic (sculpture)? Mikey was pursuing his art by moving money around. (Jona, by the way, does not want people to produce music using his name.)
It was interesting to watch this unusually lively conversation (it might have been the champagne, but I believe it was also the easy affability of our guests) keep fragmenting into four or five islands of computer-assisted tête-à-têtes, with the class pursuing its four or five sub-conversations in the glow of their enabling laptop screens. There was no anxiety or offense in these breakdowns. In fact they felt like an evolution in our method, a transcendence of our usual cumbersome tethering of everyone to the class’s one, narrow line of inquiry. Now we were liberated by our screens to ascend away from the group and enter into the refined ether of our sub-interests.
The evening ended with an informal survey of some sites we all admired, and then we split up and vanished into the night. Next Monday is our last class. To prepare, please read the two new entries at the Annenberg DIY blog (concerning "YouWitness News" and "socially networked systems."
In regard to the latter, please also consider the Friendster profile of Calvin Johnson (K records, Dub Narcotic, etc.), which reads in part: "Contact me if you meet one or more of the following criteria: Junkie... queerbait... lonesome…disruptive...half-assed...sweaty...shy...poseur... spineless...pigeon toed...kleptomaniac...breathless...anti-social... bikerchick...lard- ass...pinko...autistic...topless...boring... cross-eyed...ugly duckling...compulsive...bad breath...perv...no wave... stoner...V.D....homeless...speedqueen...stutter...fag ...oppressive odor...agoraphobic...lost...emotionally crippled...gutterball...porn addict...shitpunk...distraught...facial birthmark...listless...pot head...coward...wear no underpants...hysterical... abusive... hoarse...Negroid...alcoholic...lesbo...fashion victim...illiterate... missing teeth...dancer...obnoxious...geek...utterly undependable... loner...shoeless...looking for a fat lip...drool...bulimic... greaser... dull as a post...reek...schizo...whistle...internal bleeding...obsessive ...sociopath...fainting spells...wus...communist sympathizer... whore..."
He will be our beacon as we exit the confines of our class room and enter into the world.