Digital Culture Studies

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.
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In today’s NYT, the headline reads, McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out. In the interest of helping clear up the controversy, yes, McCain is eligible, under section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the child of two US citizen parents citizenship at birth, as long as one of the parents has resided in the US for any length of time prior to the child’s birth. One is a naturally born citizen as long as they are citizens at birth.

But it drums up controversy, obfuscates real questions about McCain’s fitness to lead, wastes time and energy, and is, in the end, another “McCain Has A Black Baby” story.

NYT, the better story is, why can’t McCain’s daughter Bridget ever run for president? As a child adopted internationally, she held citizenship in another country at birth, and while she is a US citizen now, she, and the other quarter of a million children adopted internationally into the United States, are not eligible for the presidency. Why don’t these citizens hold the same rights as their biological siblings?

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.

I must have my head too far in the books, because it never ocurred to me that people just print fake versions of real degrees from real schools and sell them, but this sure looks like the University of Cambridge seal to me. Best of all, this one comes with a transcript. It does make me wonder, though - how prevelant is stuff like this? If I saw this framed, in an office somewhere, I would assume it was real -  this is a real bricks and mortar school and a real emblem. I realize that anyone with photoshop could do something like this at home,  but it is troubling to see something so clearly meant to pass as legit being sold on Ebay. Apparently you can ask for any school that you want. Ugh.

I just got a new computer, an early birthday present, to replace my old desktop, itself a birthday present, albeit seven years ago. Seven years! But it was a Hewlett Packard, and they aren’t known for being particularly upgradeable, and it was time. My new box is a big monster, with an nicely integrated media centre, a DVD burner, and enough memory to make my own movies, should I want to. Which I might, given how small and portable digital cameras have become.

I am not particularly brand consistent when it comes to electronics - I buy what works for me, which is why I am a PC user with an Ipod, and why my monitor is made by a different company than my computer. What I do know, though, is that I don’t think I will buy another HP product. And here is why - HP’s new cameras, with a ’slimming’ feature. (found via Bitch, PhD)

First of all, hello - isn’t that what Photoshop is for? :)

But more seriously, I have some issues with this, starting with the fact that the female model used to demonstrate the product is already a slim and healthy size. When I see gadgets, I always wonder who they are being designed for. This past week, I was fortunate to be able to hear Brenda Laurel speak about design (off topic, but do read her rant, Saving It For Good, which is inspiring me to one day work up the courage to serve a meal on my grandmother’s china, which I inherited and that I am too afraid to use). Something that really jumped out at me was what she had to say about getting to know who you were designing for - not what you think you know, not the stereotype about soccer moms and skater bois, but about who the people who are going to use your design really are, what they need, and what they want.

I had started writing this post before I saw Ms. Laurel speak, and was already less than impressed with HP’s new product, but now - now, I am nearly speechless. And I wonder … who, exactly, did HP design this camera for? This camera, that screws up the perspective of one’s photos for the opportunity to stretch subjects vertically in a vain attempt to make them thinner. Who did they think the target market was?
As for Photoshop, if you, like me, spend a lot of time watching it load, you probably know who Seetharaman Narayanan is - his is one of the names credited on the openin screen. But did you know there is a Flickr fan club devoted to him? (Link via Unbeige). I love the internet.

As a former Vancouver resident, I use the web to keep up with designers and artists back home. I am a fan of this guy’s work, and was not surprised to find other people are, too. However, some people take that fandom a little too far.

What is really fun though, is reading through these comments, especially those from other artists whose work was also stolen. Kids, the lesson here is, if you steal, the People Will Find You. And then, they will publically pants you.

But part of the issue, I think, goes back to the notion that design is supposed to all look the same. When we negate the power of creativity, we empower plagarism.

This is the first time that I have ever set up a WordPress blog, and so far, there have only been a few surprises.  I have never used MySQL before, or PHP, and every site that I have ever administered was built using notepad and a lot of  ‘< ' and '>‘. One dropped bracket and the site stops working. Ah, the good old days, wading through nested tables to find the dropped bracket! I miss 1996!

Naturally, when I decided to put this site together, I opened up Photoshop, designed a site, redesigned it, cleaned it up, sliced it in ImageReady, coded a site around it, and put  up the result as my index page, assuming (erroneously) that I would just drop WordPress code into the areas on the page that I wanted to be dynamic. I assumed that it would work like Blogger, which drops Blogger code into one’s own design.

[ed note: interesting....I hit 'Save and Continue Editing', but WordPress lost the next two paragraphs in the save. And I just had a sick flashback to the moment that the computer on which I had just finished my GRE essays crashed, thinking of which, to this day, makes me sick and a little anxious!]

It doesn’t though, and my pretty design is for naught, unless (or, lets face it until) I teach myself some PHP - enough to design my own theme. The theme aspect is nice though, and I have wasted  spent the better part of the last week looking at all the theme options. They are all different, and yet look eerily similar to one another. It is the death of personal design, but at the same time, the level of design in most publically distributed themes is astonishingly high, so perhaps the true measure of the death of design is that such good work is being given away, free.

Since I started this entry, I have switched themes twice, because neither of the first two had all the sidebar info that I wanted. I can easily see themes becoming my new digital habit, in the way that font collecting was for me in the nineties.

Ah, Chank, the font foundry of my fondest youthful days.