Dear Jennifer,
You told me that I've been walking, I've been hiding, and I look half dead half the time, and I agreed with you. Back when we were young, you told me to pay close attention. You asked me if I was in or if I was out. You only gave me 20 seconds to comply. But you wouldn't have heard me even if I had built up the nerve to leave my things behind as it all went off without me - you were always too busy writing my tragedy. Ms. Heap (may I call you Imogen?), I could always count on you - I've known you for but a couple of years but it feels like a lifetime. Remember that one night when you slyly told me to sleep here, you'd sleep there, but then the heater would be down again? You were so convenient. Imogen, the threat of your love is still in the headlights. Please be there, please be there.
Imogen Heap is an insanely talented songstress who is equally at home with sequencing and sampling (which she taught herself on Atari computers, a fact that I love) as she is with her diverse array of instruments (piano, cello, marimba) or just her gorgeous voice. She was already a smash in the UK when her music began to pop up on iTunes, and off to the stratosphere she went. Her most recent album, "Speak for Yourself," has dominated the electronic music chart on iTunes for about a year now, a testimony to the power of long-tail market demand. Electronica fans (a crude and often inaccurate term I know), remember when you had to find your music in that one CD rack in Tower Records or elsewhere that lumped together everything that wasn't pop, rock, classical, or "R&B/Soul (where even hip hop was tragically placed for a minute)"? D&B, house, two-step, trance, you name it - put it in the Electronica bin! But now that we live so much of our lives on the internet, long-tail demand is the norm. That's the theory that as we move to just-in-time manufacturing, smaller inventories, a greater diversity of sources for the sounds, tastes, and goods we seek, etc., the area under the asymptoting portion of our collective demand curves (the tail) is greater than under the steep portion, where we find the "blockbusters" and "top sellers" of old. This makes life more interesting and gives fans of artists such as Imogen Heap ready access to talent that years ago may not have seen the light of day.
But what is most striking about Imogen Heap's success is how her song, "Hide and Seek," has become a fixture on iTunes on the electronic music chart. It's been hovering around #1 also for about a year. Why this song? Yes, it was on that silly show The OC. But that doesn't explain its staying power on iTunes. Maybe it's the great lyrics. Here they are:
Where are we?
What the hell
is going on?
The dust has only just
began to form
Crop circles in the carpet
Sinking
feeling
Spin me around
again
And rub my eyes
This can't be happening
When busy streets
A mess with people
Would stop to hold
Their heads heavy
Hide and seek
Trains and
sewing machines
All those years
They were here first
Oily marks appear on walls
Where pleasure moments hung before
The takeover
The sweeping insensitivity of this
still life
Hide and Seek
Trains and sewing machines
Blood and Tears
They were here first
Hmm, what'd you say, mmm, that you only meant well?
Well, of course you did.
Hmm, what'd you say? mmm, that it's all for the best?
Of course it is.
Hmm, what'd you say? mmm, that it's just what we need
You decided this?
Hmm, what'd you say, mmm,
What did she say?
Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
Speak no feeling, no I don't believe you
You don't care a bit, you don't care a bit
Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
Speak no feeling, I don't believe you
You don't care a bit, you don't care a, you don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
You don't care a bit
You don't care a bit
Amazing, on so many levels. But I think the song continues its run because of the vocoder, which is the only "musical instrument" used in the song. Imogen Heap sings into a vocoder (or voice encoder), which is a speech synthesizer that records her speech, converts it to a series of numbers representing the frequencies of the waveforms produced by her vocal cords, and then uses an oscillator to recreate the frequencies. The result is simply stunning. Her voice is at once disaggregated and whole. Everywhere and nowhere. Raw and ethereal. Powerful and timid. Electronic and "unplugged." And the vocoder was the perfect instrument to use for a song about abandonment. Look at the song lyrics: crop circles in the carpet - where the furniture used to sit? oily marks on walls where pleasure moments hung before - where the pictures used to be? "You decided this?" The vocoder gives her voice the echo of a woman alone in her room, in her new world, feeling betrayed, but still strong enough to fill the space with her quiet resolve.
Surely long-tail market demand and the genius of artists like Imogen Heap will give us much more to ponder in the future...some of it hopefully in the form of vocoder-driven "electronica."
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Friday, September 15, 2006
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
The Bridges of Nassau County
Far from existing in a neutral state, ready for use by various publics for good or ill, technologies often emerge ready to privilege certain political or social arrangements by their very existence. To find out how this might be true for a given technology, we must look beyond the instrumental use of the thing to the meaning behind its design and how it rearranges or holds in place other technological artifacts, human interactions, or ways of thinking. Take a striking example from Long Island, NY: the major public works projects brought to fruition by Robert Moses.
Much of the built environment that those who grew up on Long Island regarded simply for its functionality, the Long Island Expressway, the BQE, the roads heading to Jones Beach, among other elements, was developed or brokered by Robert Moses, the master builder (named New York City's construction coordinator in 1946) who influenced much of the city's planning for more than three decades. While we can stand back and admire certain projects for their utility and, in the case of buildings such as Lincoln Center, their beauty, Moses' biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York demonstrates how some of their designs were also political in nature.
In general, Moses led the charge to encourage the suburbanization of the region, a process reliant in large part on his highway and bridge projects (other cities hired him to design freeway networks of their own starting in the 1940's). He mocked public intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford, who tried to point out the dangers in the trend toward a homogenized suburban living experience. In 1961, Mumford described postwar suburbs as
"a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold" - The City in History, p. 486.
Moses replied that "The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents" ("Are Cities Dead," The Atlantic, 1962, p. 57). Turns out Robert Moses had something particular in mind when he envisioned the "average people" inhabiting his suburbs, because he did what he could to make sure that they would be white families with access to automobiles. Have you ever driven under an overpass on one of Moses' parkways on Long Island? Notice how they rise as little as nine feet from the curb? This is because Moses wanted to discourage the use of mass transit, such as buses, on his highways. Buses, even back in the middle of the 20th Century, were about 12 feet tall. Not only did he design the overpasses to keep buses from venturing from low-income portions of the city to the suburbs, but they also made it difficult for low-income (disproportionately minority) families to reach Jones Beach. Moses also opposed adding a stop on the Long Island Railroad near the park that Robert built.
The distribution of cities, suburbs, and exurbs and those who live in them profoundly effects our social interactions, economic opportunities for the privileged and the underclass alike, and our political orientations (much has been written, for example, about how a surge in the creation of exurbs has facilitated continued Republican dominance while Democrats have made inroads in many of the nation's close-in suburbs). But what is not given as much attention is how something as simple as an overpass can stand for more than its functional role in a large-scale infrastructure project. More than a means of facilitating the movement of traffic, it stands for a social arrangement in the suburbs of New York. It's important to give more than a cursory glance to such mundane elements of the built environment, so that we may begin to unpack the values that they are trying to promote.
Innovations in urban design and their influence over our daily lives will be a recurring theme of this blog. What examples come to mind?
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Much of the built environment that those who grew up on Long Island regarded simply for its functionality, the Long Island Expressway, the BQE, the roads heading to Jones Beach, among other elements, was developed or brokered by Robert Moses, the master builder (named New York City's construction coordinator in 1946) who influenced much of the city's planning for more than three decades. While we can stand back and admire certain projects for their utility and, in the case of buildings such as Lincoln Center, their beauty, Moses' biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York demonstrates how some of their designs were also political in nature.
In general, Moses led the charge to encourage the suburbanization of the region, a process reliant in large part on his highway and bridge projects (other cities hired him to design freeway networks of their own starting in the 1940's). He mocked public intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford, who tried to point out the dangers in the trend toward a homogenized suburban living experience. In 1961, Mumford described postwar suburbs as
"a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold" - The City in History, p. 486.
Moses replied that "The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents" ("Are Cities Dead," The Atlantic, 1962, p. 57). Turns out Robert Moses had something particular in mind when he envisioned the "average people" inhabiting his suburbs, because he did what he could to make sure that they would be white families with access to automobiles. Have you ever driven under an overpass on one of Moses' parkways on Long Island? Notice how they rise as little as nine feet from the curb? This is because Moses wanted to discourage the use of mass transit, such as buses, on his highways. Buses, even back in the middle of the 20th Century, were about 12 feet tall. Not only did he design the overpasses to keep buses from venturing from low-income portions of the city to the suburbs, but they also made it difficult for low-income (disproportionately minority) families to reach Jones Beach. Moses also opposed adding a stop on the Long Island Railroad near the park that Robert built.
The distribution of cities, suburbs, and exurbs and those who live in them profoundly effects our social interactions, economic opportunities for the privileged and the underclass alike, and our political orientations (much has been written, for example, about how a surge in the creation of exurbs has facilitated continued Republican dominance while Democrats have made inroads in many of the nation's close-in suburbs). But what is not given as much attention is how something as simple as an overpass can stand for more than its functional role in a large-scale infrastructure project. More than a means of facilitating the movement of traffic, it stands for a social arrangement in the suburbs of New York. It's important to give more than a cursory glance to such mundane elements of the built environment, so that we may begin to unpack the values that they are trying to promote.
Innovations in urban design and their influence over our daily lives will be a recurring theme of this blog. What examples come to mind?
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Monday, September 11, 2006
The Crawl
Here we are, five years after the most significant attack on American soil in the modern era (the Japanese attack on the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 was important in that it might have diverted enough Japanese aircraft carriers to tip the scales in our favor in the Battle of Midway). I remember September 11th, 2001, as a day of sorrow, confusion, and misinformation (bomb at the State Department, evacuation of Stuyvesant High School) for much of the day. After we were allowed to leave work I ended up at a candlelit vigil, and then joined my sister at her apartment to watch what felt like endless amounts of television. I was therefore introduced to a seemingly minor shift in cable news programming: widespread use of "the crawl."
A crawl is a moving line of text at the bottom of a screen, that can provide continuous information while allowing pre-recorded or live programming to continue above it. September 11th marked the advent of near-ubiquity for the crawl on television news. Fox, CNN, and then MSNBC added the crawl to their coverage of the terrorist attacks in order to provide emergency information, even offering the crawl during commercials. Before September 11th, the crawl was used mostly in sports and financial news programming, with a notable exception being CNN's Headline News.
I remember sitting there in Cambridge in awe of the events as they unfolded, particularly some of the more outlandish claims moving along the crawl at what might as well have been breakneck speed; we'd see news of a bomb left in a locker in building x or some other development, and then wait for the entire crawl to reach the same point to learn additional information. Often, it was never provided; the story was in fact not true. This was understandable, given the enormity of what transpired in the early hours of September 11th.
What is less forgivable is how the crawl remained after the dust clouds settled. The major cable news channels continued to make use of the crawl, probably in order to keep viewers with ever-diminishing attention spans glued to their stations. (Of course, the crawl was no longer used during commercials, I guess for similar reasons to why volume control devices and TiVo are so vigorously opposed by advertisers.) While our younger generations are known for their ability to multitask and there are even arguments for why an endless stream of blips and bytes might improve certain kinds of intelligence (see Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter"), you have to be disappointed with how shamelessly the crawl has been exploited at times in the last five years. Plenty of what appears in the crawl offers very little in the way of news. For instance, Fox begins its crawl with the current Threat Level (Elevated, as per usual) and more recently has added the Airline Threat Level (Red - drop that Colgate Total right not!) to boot. Plugs for forthcoming broadcasts, the repetition of network slogans, and the like are now juxtaposed with television news captions, stock index windows, clocks, and bizarre elements (such as CNN's "Countdown to the Ceasefire" clock near the close of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon) to create a verbal collage at the bottom of our screens, much of it repeating what we already know or can intuit if given the chance. News events, through the use of innovations such as the crawl, can be fed to us and dropped at ever-increasing frequencies, saturating and abandoning our minds at will. And while we sit there, imagining all of these boxes and lines of text across the screen as a veritable cornucopia of news sources, we forget that they are all controlled by a central authority (a network), which is managing news cycles and choosing how to brand those cycles as a product of one network rather than the others as much as it is reporting current events.
Which brings to mind the most important question regarding the crawl and its effect on society writ large: does it increase the passivity of television viewing? It is well-established that watching television over time will take our brain-wave activity into "alpha level," which Jerry Mander has labeled the mind's "most receptive mode." How does widespread use of the crawl make us, the viewers, more or less passive? Factors cited for why TV makes us more passive include (a) lack of eye movement due to our ability to take in all of the images without much active scanning of a small TV screen; (b) the flickering TV screen itself; and (c) the fact that images on a TV screen appear as a steady stream and cannot be taken out of the stream and contemplated. How do you think the crawl changes this standard critique of television? Particularly given the fact that we watch, on average, 4-5 hours of it per day? (full disclosure: I don't own a television right now, and have to make friends with those who do : )
I don't have the scientific answer to this question. And I do appreciate some attempts on September 11th, 2006 to improve use of the crawl, at least for the minutes following 8:47 a.m. during coverage on the cable news networks. Fox actually deleted the crawl when cutting to the memorial sites, MSNBC, even though it scandalously rebroadcast the Today Show from that fateful day, used the crawl only to indicate that you were watching something they like to call a "Living History Event," while CNN listed the names and home towns of those who died. But as the networks quickly regressed to use of their new toy long before the Today Show would have ended, I had to wonder whether this little stream of words and numbers was one of the little ways in which our lives took a wrong turn on September 11th.
Perhaps some of you were fortunate enough to be watching one of these stations this morning when for a moment the crawl disappeared - these days, I, for one, will take any additional room to breathe that I can get.
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
A crawl is a moving line of text at the bottom of a screen, that can provide continuous information while allowing pre-recorded or live programming to continue above it. September 11th marked the advent of near-ubiquity for the crawl on television news. Fox, CNN, and then MSNBC added the crawl to their coverage of the terrorist attacks in order to provide emergency information, even offering the crawl during commercials. Before September 11th, the crawl was used mostly in sports and financial news programming, with a notable exception being CNN's Headline News.
I remember sitting there in Cambridge in awe of the events as they unfolded, particularly some of the more outlandish claims moving along the crawl at what might as well have been breakneck speed; we'd see news of a bomb left in a locker in building x or some other development, and then wait for the entire crawl to reach the same point to learn additional information. Often, it was never provided; the story was in fact not true. This was understandable, given the enormity of what transpired in the early hours of September 11th.
What is less forgivable is how the crawl remained after the dust clouds settled. The major cable news channels continued to make use of the crawl, probably in order to keep viewers with ever-diminishing attention spans glued to their stations. (Of course, the crawl was no longer used during commercials, I guess for similar reasons to why volume control devices and TiVo are so vigorously opposed by advertisers.) While our younger generations are known for their ability to multitask and there are even arguments for why an endless stream of blips and bytes might improve certain kinds of intelligence (see Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter"), you have to be disappointed with how shamelessly the crawl has been exploited at times in the last five years. Plenty of what appears in the crawl offers very little in the way of news. For instance, Fox begins its crawl with the current Threat Level (Elevated, as per usual) and more recently has added the Airline Threat Level (Red - drop that Colgate Total right not!) to boot. Plugs for forthcoming broadcasts, the repetition of network slogans, and the like are now juxtaposed with television news captions, stock index windows, clocks, and bizarre elements (such as CNN's "Countdown to the Ceasefire" clock near the close of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon) to create a verbal collage at the bottom of our screens, much of it repeating what we already know or can intuit if given the chance. News events, through the use of innovations such as the crawl, can be fed to us and dropped at ever-increasing frequencies, saturating and abandoning our minds at will. And while we sit there, imagining all of these boxes and lines of text across the screen as a veritable cornucopia of news sources, we forget that they are all controlled by a central authority (a network), which is managing news cycles and choosing how to brand those cycles as a product of one network rather than the others as much as it is reporting current events.
Which brings to mind the most important question regarding the crawl and its effect on society writ large: does it increase the passivity of television viewing? It is well-established that watching television over time will take our brain-wave activity into "alpha level," which Jerry Mander has labeled the mind's "most receptive mode." How does widespread use of the crawl make us, the viewers, more or less passive? Factors cited for why TV makes us more passive include (a) lack of eye movement due to our ability to take in all of the images without much active scanning of a small TV screen; (b) the flickering TV screen itself; and (c) the fact that images on a TV screen appear as a steady stream and cannot be taken out of the stream and contemplated. How do you think the crawl changes this standard critique of television? Particularly given the fact that we watch, on average, 4-5 hours of it per day? (full disclosure: I don't own a television right now, and have to make friends with those who do : )
I don't have the scientific answer to this question. And I do appreciate some attempts on September 11th, 2006 to improve use of the crawl, at least for the minutes following 8:47 a.m. during coverage on the cable news networks. Fox actually deleted the crawl when cutting to the memorial sites, MSNBC, even though it scandalously rebroadcast the Today Show from that fateful day, used the crawl only to indicate that you were watching something they like to call a "Living History Event," while CNN listed the names and home towns of those who died. But as the networks quickly regressed to use of their new toy long before the Today Show would have ended, I had to wonder whether this little stream of words and numbers was one of the little ways in which our lives took a wrong turn on September 11th.
Perhaps some of you were fortunate enough to be watching one of these stations this morning when for a moment the crawl disappeared - these days, I, for one, will take any additional room to breathe that I can get.
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Saturday, September 09, 2006
What's in a name?
This blog will focus its energies on critiquing the modern world, particularly as technological advances, after brief periods of hype, recede into the background and become the structures, environments, white noise, and scaffolding around us. Its central premise is that we should not take dramatic shifts (or even more subtle ones) in pop culture and communications, mass consumerism and marketing, gadgetry, advancements in engineering and the life sciences, changes in military hardware, and the like for granted. We must open them up and consider how they will direct our futures, and the choices with which we will be left years down the road.
Hence, the name: "hit me up on my Myspace" is a common expression used mostly by those at the lower end of the coveted 18-32 marketing bracket that oft-times replaces the "call me on my cell" of old. In its simplest terms, it means "go to my Myspace page and post a comment." It's not beyond even a freestyle hip-hop artist on 106 & Park on BET to end his victorious rap battle with "hit me up on my Myspace." Hollywood productions have begun to offer Myspace pages instead of (or in addition to) websites in their ads or on their movie posters. And music artists are selling their wares (www.myspace.com/mrbt) or being cajoled into producing a new album after a far-too-long hiatus (www.myspace.com/mcpaulbarman - please go and check out his new single released on Myspace, "Ignorance," and support the man). Blogs, myspace pages, IM chats, etc. - what do they mean for how we relate to each other and address the central challenges that come attached to our humanness (1. we are mortal beings; 2. no matter who we're with, we are essentially alone in that our thoughts are encased in a physical shell separate from all others; and 3. how do we go about creating communities and existing in them, particularly given 1 and 2?). How do they tweak our expectations for how we interact interpersonally and in terms of governance?
I also like the curious results that can follow from having such a blog name. For instance, I read that some insane parents are using their babies' T-shirts to advertise their blogs (see BoingBoing, the best blog on earth at www.boingboing.net). If these miserable excuses for human beings gave their children a shirt advertising my blog, the two lines on the T-shirt would negate each other, vastly curtailing the odds of another person looking up their blog (it would read:
check out my father's blog
hit me up on my myspace
I may be the only person on earth that finds this funny, but Who cares? This is my blog and I'm glad that you're a part of it.
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Hence, the name: "hit me up on my Myspace" is a common expression used mostly by those at the lower end of the coveted 18-32 marketing bracket that oft-times replaces the "call me on my cell" of old. In its simplest terms, it means "go to my Myspace page and post a comment." It's not beyond even a freestyle hip-hop artist on 106 & Park on BET to end his victorious rap battle with "hit me up on my Myspace." Hollywood productions have begun to offer Myspace pages instead of (or in addition to) websites in their ads or on their movie posters. And music artists are selling their wares (www.myspace.com/mrbt) or being cajoled into producing a new album after a far-too-long hiatus (www.myspace.com/mcpaulbarman - please go and check out his new single released on Myspace, "Ignorance," and support the man). Blogs, myspace pages, IM chats, etc. - what do they mean for how we relate to each other and address the central challenges that come attached to our humanness (1. we are mortal beings; 2. no matter who we're with, we are essentially alone in that our thoughts are encased in a physical shell separate from all others; and 3. how do we go about creating communities and existing in them, particularly given 1 and 2?). How do they tweak our expectations for how we interact interpersonally and in terms of governance?
I also like the curious results that can follow from having such a blog name. For instance, I read that some insane parents are using their babies' T-shirts to advertise their blogs (see BoingBoing, the best blog on earth at www.boingboing.net). If these miserable excuses for human beings gave their children a shirt advertising my blog, the two lines on the T-shirt would negate each other, vastly curtailing the odds of another person looking up their blog (it would read:
check out my father's blog
hit me up on my myspace
I may be the only person on earth that finds this funny, but Who cares? This is my blog and I'm glad that you're a part of it.
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Welcome
Welcome to the best blog ever.
Brooding: "cast in subdued light so as to convey a somewhat threatening atmosphere"
This little slice of cyberspace will hover at the periphery of all that is taken for granted and left unquestioned in our society, casting aloft occasional verbal incendiary devices. Will it send ripples through the blogosphere? Perhaps not. But let's try our best, and have some fun along the way!
My pledge to you, Dear Reader:
1. I will never use my blog to post meaningless "this is how I spent my last three hours" messages.
2. I won't allow random strangers to use my blog to sell "hey I just earned $250 from my living room" schemes or settle old scores with their anonymous rants. Focus on the issues. Otherwise, I say DELETE!
3. From time to time I will post links to sites that address important causes. Click on them and do what you're told.
4. Once readership hovers above a respectable number, I will print T-shirts. T-shirts: Ain't nothin' wrong with that!
5. I will post as often as I have something to say. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies, but one of these mornings, you'll get a surprise" - The Electric Grandmother (look it up, youngin's!)
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
Brooding: "cast in subdued light so as to convey a somewhat threatening atmosphere"
This little slice of cyberspace will hover at the periphery of all that is taken for granted and left unquestioned in our society, casting aloft occasional verbal incendiary devices. Will it send ripples through the blogosphere? Perhaps not. But let's try our best, and have some fun along the way!
My pledge to you, Dear Reader:
1. I will never use my blog to post meaningless "this is how I spent my last three hours" messages.
2. I won't allow random strangers to use my blog to sell "hey I just earned $250 from my living room" schemes or settle old scores with their anonymous rants. Focus on the issues. Otherwise, I say DELETE!
3. From time to time I will post links to sites that address important causes. Click on them and do what you're told.
4. Once readership hovers above a respectable number, I will print T-shirts. T-shirts: Ain't nothin' wrong with that!
5. I will post as often as I have something to say. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies, but one of these mornings, you'll get a surprise" - The Electric Grandmother (look it up, youngin's!)
Vaya con Dios - brooding presence
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