Digital Culture Studies

Over at Crooked Timber, Eszter posted one of my favourite xkcd cartoons, but the real humour is in the comments, especially if banging your forehead against your desk is your idea of funny :)

I have Comcast, and I am unimpressed. My service goes out quite a bit (although to be fair, the last 4 - 5 months it has been pretty good. Sadly, the 60+ months before that were not), and when I call, I always get the worst customer service, in part because, before I call, I reboot my computer, router, and modem, and the first thing they want me to do is those three things, and if I say I have already done them, they are flustered, because that is all they know to ask me. After that, you go to a more advanced tech. More than once, that advanced tech has heard a female voice on the line, and asked me to put my husband on the phone, ‘to expedite the process’.

The account is in my name. And my ovaries, thus far, have not gotten in the way of renewing my IP addresses and rebooting my router. Thus far. Perhaps there is something they know and aren’t telling me.
(more…)

• The White Stuff: Chances are, you’ve run across What White People Like, either online, or now in fancy book form - nowcheck out Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s take on the subject. (found via tiara.org)
• Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion dollar bank notes: Bread costs more than a hundred billion dollars in Zimbabwe.
• GQ interview with Steve Perry: It doesn’t matter when he left the band - to most, he is still the lead singer of Journey.

Two Canadian Psychiatrists, Dr. Gold, and his brother, also Dr. Gold, are suggesting a new edition to the lexicon of mental illness: The Truman Show Delusion, a mental illness categorized by patients who believe that they are being set up by everyone they come in contact with, and filmed, as part of a reality television program, a la the movie The Truman Show.

As quoted from the link above, “…Ian Gold, who holds a Canada Research Chair in philosophy and psychiatry at McGill University, added that there are unprecedented cultural triggers that might explain the phenomenon: the pressure of living in a large, connected community can bring out the unstable side of more vulnerable people.”

What I found so interesting about this is that we are all being filmed in public, some nearly all the time, by ‘official’ government-sanctioned cameras, private-sector surveillance, criminals, and by each other. It isn’t surprising that some people feel constantly watched by unknown viewers, because….they are being watched. We all are. And given the human mind’s overwhelming need to find patterns and find meaning in chaos, it seems a small leap to begin having delusions that all of the surveillance is coordinated for a purpose, even if the only purpose we come up with is reality television.