Digital Culture Studies

I caught Lee Siegel on a late night chat show this week (daily show or colbert), talking about his new book, Against the Machine, Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. I haven’t read it yet - I have the library getting me a copy, via interlibrary loan for some light spring break reading, because watching Siegel talk about his feelings regarding internet use was frustrating, and I always love reading a book that makes me angry :)

There is likely more to his thesis, but the general premise in his interview is that the internet is isolating, and that we are conversing with people we don’t even know, hiding behind usernames, elevating the most banal of interaction to cult-status while the cyber-mob tramples down creativity, intelligence, and freedom. Internet users are like drug addicts, the best of themselves sucked dry by the half-life avatars they pilot through the vapid, commercial-driven construct of the web, blah blah blah….. it isn’t anything you haven’t heard a million times before, and while I could point to a dozen reasons why he is wrong, I will merely ask one question: how is being online any more isolating than reading a book?

We ought to ban books, really - its an activity that isolates our kids, encourages them to sit for hours, staring at the page, and they don’t know anything about the person who wrote those words they are reading. My God! The horreur!

ahem.

Perhaps Mr. Siegel isn’t the best person to critisize the internet, or how people use it. After all, he was suspended from the New Republic for creating a pseudonymous second log-in account in order to post in the comments section of his own New Republic blog posts, in order to make it appear as if he had great support among his readership. That second account, under the name “sprezzatura” was always quick to praise Siegel, and just as quick to excoriate Siegel’s detractors within the comments.

It is the very worst standpoint in conservative academic thought to insist that the masses are unable to adequately care for their themselves, and that better minds, such as Siegel’s, ought act as their cultural gatekeeper. The internet is killing society, but luckily, high-minded thinkers like Siegel are immune. It is the common people that cannot be trusted to use the internet. After all, when we do, according to Siegel:

“Perhaps your husband is, at this very moment, shut away in his office somewhere in your home, carrying on several torrid affairs at the same time under his various aliases: ‘Caliente,’ ‘Curious,’ ‘ActionMan.’ When he emerges from his sequestered lair, red-faced and agitated, is it because he has been arguing for moderation with ‘KillBush46′ on the political blog Eschaton, has failed in his bid to purchase genuine military-issue infrared night goggles on eBay, or has been desperately masturbating while instant-messaging ‘Prehistorical2′?”

(quote via Salon)

Moral Panic! Reefer Madness! Invasion of the Body Snatchers! Teh interwebs can haz cheezburger! I have more to say on the topic, including the delicious irony that Siegel, a man that rails against irony, was promoting his book on an ironic comedy program, but the joke was too obvious, and also, I need to go see what is happening in that lair of ours.

Matthowie (Mefi matthowie, for those playing along at home), demonstrates, via Flickr, how to eat cupcakes.

• Bloggers win the “Test the Nation” trivia challenge. First of all, I would be on any team headed by Samantha Bee. Second, how fun is Canadian television? Third, apparently every blogger in Canada was involved :)
• “What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?” An interesting experiment over on Grand Text Auto.
• Watching the economy dump yesterday got you confused. This Modern World explains the global economy.

Or, how green is mine? In the process of moving, the ugly truth - 2 people do not need 5 computers, plus one that is just itching for an overhaul, maybe a new open source OS, and …. then the rechargers, for phones, for iPods, for the backup hard drive. It gets ridiculous, and wasteful. Over on Rough Type, a post on how much energy avatars consume. Which is, apparently, the equivelant of your average Brazilian citizen. There is some discussion in the comments about how the math is misleading, but linking out from the comments, an interesting idea: how many energy-slaves do Americans use in a day? It led me to Ecoiron, a blog dedicated to green computing. Now my guilt is forcing me to power down, unplug, and read a book. Maybe a book about the environment. By candlelight. Soy candlelight.

That is me, these days, and having fun. Sorry for the dearth of posts here, lately. I have tonnes of stuff I want to post here on my backup brain (sorry, delicious account, I know you thought that you were my backup brain), but no time.

On the plus side, how cool is it to blog professionally? Many incarnations of new media entrepeneur ago I had some portal-type content management gigs, but really, it is amazing to have a job right now that couldn’t not have existed 10 years ago.

Nothing makes a Friday fun like a random call inviting me to come speak about digital culture at a meeting this Spring. And it sure beats the stress of submitting a conference proposal :)

Where rejected Wikipedia articles go to die: The wikepedia knowledge dump.

Writing my dissertation: I bet I would have spent a lot of time reading this guy’s site while I was writing my thesis :)

Apple is the new NASA.

Once, I ate lunch with Satre. I asked him: “What caused Roquentin so much anguish?” I really wanted to confirm what I already know: Roquentin saw the bare existence of life, that which draws back the curtains of absurdity. Sartre looked up at me with one eye, while looking at the diners next to use with the other. He responded in a way that shook me to the very core, in a way that I would never have imagined:…”no, actually, it was that band, Hinder.”

–review of the Hinder Album Extreme Behaviour, by username Aetius.

So…would you buy this album after reading that review?

Information Architecture: Yahoo’s network diagram. one word summary: wow.

Some people write novels in November; others participate in Movember.

How to avoid having someone sit next to you when flying. via [lifehacker]

Speaking of flying, knee defenders - I wonder if other people would catch on if I started using these?

Danah Boyd put together a wiki documenting the timeline of social networking software. It is funny to think that widespread use of the web is only about 11 years old, and that if we don’t write these things done, they will be lost. Funny, in the I was a Classics major in undergrad and we used to drive ourselves nuts thinking about how much was lost because nobody writes down what is most obvious in their day to day lives.

Wikipedia has a great list of social networking sites, for those of you who think that MySpace and Facebook invented social networking :)