Digital Culture Studies

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.

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.

After clearing out more than 10,000 spam comments, although the email for this site is still non-functional (thanks, spam!), this site may or may not be working again. New design to come, but in the meantime, the last 3 things I looked at online:

• Top 87 bad predictions about the future. I will let you make your own flying car joke.
• iPhones ad parody, via Kottke.
• Flock - the ’social web browser’.

Are college students techno-idiots? While I don’t like the term ‘idiot’, I do wonder sometimes about the nature of technology fluency at the undergraduate level and whether or not colleges plan to address this in terms of core competancy in the same way that alcohol use and other social norms are addressed. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that this isn’t a problem limited strictly to students on campuses - how do you understand the need for technology-fluency if you yourself are not fluent? And even if you can understand it, how do you impart knowledge you don’t have to your students?

The 13 most embarassing web moments: interestingly, I just saw #6 for the first time, at a talk given by Jonathan Gratch. I am currently reading Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, and now, everything is convergence to me.

Including this: UIC is exploring the possibility of setting up a college endorsed Livejournal site [via gapers block]. What makes it so fascinating to me is that I have been watching and studying college livejournal communities for a number of years, and this is the first time that I have ever seen a college officially get involved with these dynamic, student-driven communities. Good for UIC! Also, and off-topic, is it just me, or does Brad Fitzpatrick look like Jim from The Office in his user pic?

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?

While it has been around a while in a sort of cool kids beta, it looks like Vox is finally open to the public. The good: a pretty good user interface, easy theme skinning (a great feature in wordpress, but not everyone is able to install a wordpress blog), great integration with Amazon to add book, music, and DVD collections. I have a Vox account - I wasn’t cool enough to be offered one during the long beta, but I know cool people, and wrangled an invite, friend of a friend-like.

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If you are a fan of the Wiki, Wikiality cannot be beat. Make sure to run some searches. I found the “George Bush” entry to be amusing.

Many years ago I saw a hilarious comic whose name escapes me, and who my Google-Fu cannot locate, but who made laugh with one line: I am a writer. [sotto voce] I write checks. Mostly fiction.

Twenty years ago, being a ‘writer’ meant publishing - being a professional writer meant sending your work to a magazine, a journal, or a book publisher, having it accepted, seeing it in print, often months after you wrote it. Sometimes years. Or it meant you were that annoying guy that ate all the brie at every party and went on and on an on about your one unpublished but brilliant novel. But one of the things I love so much about the internet is how it makes everyone with a point of view a writer. Even me! Maybe not a good writer, but a published one.

What is even more astonishing to me is how fast the culture has changed to accommodate this shift in communication. In 1995, when I read Carolyn’s online diary, I can remember thinking to myself how big this was going to be - how monumentally huge it would be if everyone had a platform for personal expression. And then they did, and that is a story for another day, the history of online diaries, but she was the first, and I think what she did in publishing her diary online opened the floodgates for the vast scope of personal expression we see today.

One of my favourite categories in that vast scope is what I call in my bookmarks and de.licio.us account “Amateur Experts”.

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Web 2.0 is so 5 minutes ago. Today, those in the know know it is all about CHMOD 777

Ah, Fred….you had me at “breathless conflation.”

Lovely school on the hill, if I had had your templates when I was formatting my master’s thesis, maybe I wouldn’t have spent the night before it was due trying not to cry. And since you have a template called portable thesis, maybe the Very Very bad formatting error that somehow mashed my Excel spreadsheets of data into my Word document formated thesis would never have happened, if I had only used this.

,p> note to self: some day write the saddest blog post in the world about what happened when I took the GRE, what happened to my thesis the night before it was due in hard copy, and why /. saved me and the GRE testing place did not. Thesis: I love computers, but sometimes, computers do not love me back.