creativity/machine

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the PostSecret thing, now ported to YouTube for Valentine’s day as a video montage complete with hipster ‘home-made’ animation:

[the video is an advertisement for the books, btw, which is entirely appropriate for this made-up ‘holiday’]

Happy Hallmark Card Day.

Update: I didn’t realise how many Postsecret fanvids there were until just now. Such a nice change for me from the Jonas Brothers. Some of them are masterful examples of the ubiquitous Ken Burns effect, some of them have entirely too much pink cursive writing and Tori Amos. But I liked this one:

And after watching about another 20 of those, I am at least a little bit sick of the postsecret thing now.

The other day I had the pleasure of participating in this week’s episode of Spark, a CBC Radio One show on tech culture news and ideas. It was a lot of fun being part of such a smart show - yay, public service broadcasting, long may it reign.
The full show and related info, links etc is now available at the Spark website.

I was there to provide some comments from a cultural research point of view on Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s now-notorious ’secret strategies’ for manufacturing ‘virality’. My main point really was that I didn’t think you could use the virus metaphor to simply describe a piece of content becoming very popular through word-of-mouth or peer-to-peer distribution. However I do think it is tremendously interesting to think about the ways in which ideas, recipes, and practices become available for re-use via mass replication and variation; to try to understand what these little units of knowledge actually are, and how it all works.

It’s the difference between talking about the Crank That music video ‘going viral’, and the Crank That dance steps.

Actually, moving away from video and to mix the metaphors, it is so-called ‘internet memes’ like the lolcats that are the best examples.

With those, you have a form, a set of essential elements, and a set of constantly evolving ‘rules’ for practice, producing apparently infinite lol-possibilities. These ‘rules’ are like cultural building blocks that can be re-used, remixed, and re-combined to produce new ideas, always hybrid, always - in a particular sense of the word - creative. This is far more interesting to me than the banal quest to get more eyeballs onto your piece of ‘content’.

The catch is, it seems to be almost entirely unpredictable which of these ideas will be repeated and built on to the extent that they go truly ‘viral’.

Do you doubt me?

Oh, and by the way, Joshua Green and I are very busily writing a book about YouTube that draws on our collaborative research project. It will be out on Polity Press later this year, and, to misappropriate physics instead of biology, it will hopefully provide some useful angles to think through the politics of participatory culture, using YouTube as a lens through which to refract the competing dynamics of user-created content, expertise and agency. That’s keeping me quiet and away from the blog a bit, but I’ll be posting updates (and attempting to generate enough hype to make the book go ‘viral’) later on.

Kodak-au-go-go!

This is not the parody I was looking for, but at least this very obviously calculated-to-provoke-youtube-responses fan ‘ad’ features women. I’m proudly reading very much against the grain here, but as much as I love cheap and nasty, the PS3 is way, way, sexier. Go Karaoke:

Yeah, like the young people say, we don’t need feminism anymore, right? And beyond gender, is this what ‘play’ has been reduced to? Jesus.

YouTubeFanBoyFanVideo prediction: PC and PS3 fall in love.

In response to a bit of discussion going on about the ads reinforcing stereotypes, mainly started by Jill, who kindly linked to my last post on the topic:

The Mac is one sort of instantly recognisable, vaguely urban, effortlessly cool white American guy, the PC is another, deeply unattractive, old economy nerd sort of (much whiter) American guy. Yes, because they’re stock characters, they’re ’stereotypes’, and so is the supermodel in the ‘better’ results’ ad.

My issue was more basic than that, but also more problematic, if that makes sense. It’s simply that at this level of communication, when a human body is made to represent a global brand community via the process of standing in for the whole computer system associated with that brand (including its design and its ‘thingness’, its GUI, its applications, its users and its cultural meanings), that body has to be white and male.

Jill says:

If you were in any doubt that men are the default and women the aberration (or, on occasion, the creation or possession of men as in this ad), you might want to note how men’s naked bodies are “human anatomy” while women’s naked bodies are “female anatomy”

But in the specific context of the ‘get a mac ads’ it’s not just ‘by default’, it’s not really possible any other way, except in first year communication studies ‘commutation test‘ posters. That’s the first thing. The second thing is what kind of female and ‘non-white’ bodies can appear at all, and what kinds of technologies they get to be* when they do appear.

It’s all so obvious and completely expected and even making comments about it makes me feel like I’m writing a first-year communication studies essay, but that’s why I wondered if, instead of being just crap, it’s ‘really’ super-clever and an invitation to parody? Otherwise I’m just depressed.

*In fact the supermodel only gets to be ‘content‘ anyway, whereas at least the cute young Japanese woman got to be a fun little digital camera. We could say the counselor (sic) is a particular construction of ‘mediation’ where communication is disarticulated from ‘technology’ altogether, but that’s going way too far, even for an eager undergraduate essay.

See also how to dress like a mac.

Just in case I was too subtle last time about the race and gender politics of the personification of technology in the ‘Get a Mac’ ads, here are two new ones (one, two). I’m speechless. Thanks Anne.

There are about a bazillion spoofs of these ads, of course - in fact, they positively beg to be parodied (as in, on purpose). Has anyone seen any good/funny/clever videos that do a good job of taking on the cultural politics? I mean something other than the ubiquitous geeky hilarity of introducing a Linux character and/or having the computers be secretly gay and in love with each other? I am so not allowed to be trawling YouTube all day, so recommendations would be most welcome.

This is the second time I’ve seen this ad, the first time was on a traffic light pole near my house. I have always been intrigued by the stories behind the ads and notices people put up in public places. I remember one at UQ that was scrawled in big felt pen lettering and said something like “Kate. From UQ. Met in Sweden. I have been looking for you, please call…” which I just found so poignant somehow, sitting there all crumpled, flapping in the breeze, obviously having been rained on one too many times. Another one I saw at my local fish and chip shop said “Lost whippersnipper. Reward.” I wondered how on earth you lose a whippersnipper? What if the guy was cleaning up the grass at the edge of the driveway when his wife suddenly went into labour, so he bundled her into the ute and hightailed it to the hospital, leaving the gardening tool to be snatched up by some other ute-driving passerby? I’ve often toyed with the idea of calling the numbers to find out whether the backstory is as interesting as what I make up in my head.

So today I did just that - I just rang the shoe guy and he sounded really sweet, and didn’t think there was anything at all odd about his way of reaching the buying public. He says he had no luck with the classifieds in the local paper or the one posted up on the traffic signal, but has been getting a lot of interest from the letterbox drop. If you doubted that mobile phones are the best candidate for ubiquitous technology, just look at the contact number, and then think about the mode of distribution for his marketing material - the process of *hand*writing hundreds of these and putting them in letterboxes, rather than putting an ad on ebay, or online classifieds.

Anyway, some of the shoes are apparently just about brand new, including some big brand names like Colorado.
And he still has five pairs. $10. Perfect condition.

I captured this ‘event’ in my morning commute for Glen (well, and a little bit for me re: gender and the mastery of technologies).

Current thesis word count: 26,733 (URGH).

Apple’s new ads run a line familiar from my research into 80s advertising (speed, ease of use, corporate vs. ‘everyday’). But this time, the brands are personified. And they’re kinda funny.

But just in case you were in any doubt, yes, it’s true. Technologies are made in their creators’ images. And they wear the pants (unless they are small ‘creative’ devices, like digital cameras from japan).