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An Elle a Day

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0400

An Elle a Day

A May 5, 2006 news broadcast about Number Stations. Number...

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:16:00 -0400

A May 5, 2006 news broadcast about Number Stations.

Number stations, according to Wikipedia, “are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.”

In 1997, The Conet Project, a four-CD set of numbers stations recordings based on the work of Akin Fernandez, was put out. You can download the MP3s here.

Number station recordings can be heard in the song “Pause” on Stereolab’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements, an album I’ve been listening to for over 15 years, and inspired the title of Wilco’s breakthrough album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

All totally insane. -moth

I understand his fascination. I became obsessed with number stations after reading about them in a zine I found stapled to a telephone pole outside of Princeton Record Exchange when I was 17. I had almost forgotten about them when I started working with the radio art group neuroTransmitter years later. I cracked up when a number station showed up in Lost.

"Someone I recently met at the TED conference told me “part of the magic of youth is that people are..."

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:37:18 -0400

“Someone I recently met at the TED conference told me “part of the magic of youth is that people are able to forgive and forget.” As kids, we say stupid things, and because there’s not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity and in turn we’re sacrificing the ability to be youthful. In 10 years, everything you say and do will be visible online and I think it’s really unfortunate.”

- One on One: Christopher Poole, Founder of 4chan - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Reggie Watts: F_ck Sh_t Stack schlomo: I love you,...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:25:43 -0400

Reggie Watts: F_ck Sh_t Stack

schlomo: I love you, Reggie!!!

(via waverlyflams)

SXSW Interactive Is Dead

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:23:00 -0400

SXSW Interactive Is Dead:

nickdouglas:

I wrote a little essay for SF Weekly’s culture blog. It’s about how VIP sections ruined SXSWi.

This is why Tim and I throw our Rocketboom + Next New Networks SXSW nonparty as a last minute announcement. Sure, it doesn’t get us any PR but we get people there and we have a good time. No lines, no VIP sections, no problem.

Zadi Diaz Interviews Kenyatta Cheese - PepsiCo Podcast...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:34:36 -0400

Zadi Diaz Interviews Kenyatta Cheese - PepsiCo Podcast Playground at SxSW 2010

We talk about Rocketboom, Know Your Meme, and my old pre-videoblogging public access show, BrowseTV.

Consumed - Remixed Messages A blunt slogan and a simple image:...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:58:51 -0400

Consumed - Remixed Messages

A blunt slogan and a simple image: these basic elements of persuasion, protest, propaganda or making a point have been used in tandem and to great effect for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Presumably, these messages have always been received in a variety of ways. But these days, it seems, when a slogan and an image reach a significant audience, that’s not the end of the process. In fact it’s just the beginning.

NYTimes.com via tw

Terrifying picture of @kenyatta @elspethjane… on Twitpic

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:19:31 -0400

Terrifying picture of @kenyatta @elspethjane… on Twitpic

15 memorable quotes from the Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde (SXSW)

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:22 -0400

15 memorable quotes from the Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde (SXSW):

From Elizabeth Stark’s SXSW conversation with Peter. Great pull quotes.

On needing approval for what we create, and losing control over how it’s distributed

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:05:00 -0400

On needing approval for what we create, and losing control over how it’s distributed:

I am not a futurist, but at the end of it all, I’m pretty disappointed by where things seem to be heading. I spend a lot of effort on making things, and trying to get others to make things, and having someone in charge of what I make, and how I distribute it is incredibly grating. And the fact that they’re having this much success with it is saddening.

via benfry.com

Insightful piece by Ben Fry, someone Apple has done a profile of.

fold via dj

shey.net reblog: The Rise of Antisocial Media

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:40:25 -0400

shey.net reblog: The Rise of Antisocial Media:

In our age of oversharing on the Internet, it was only a matter of time before people started looking to the same kinds of tools they use to connect with each other people to try to find ways to disconnect when those same people get to be a little… much. I couldn’t help noticing two of those tools…

braintag: Storm the Celebrity Studio and retake the universe

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:41:00 -0400

braintag: Storm the Celebrity Studio and retake the universe:

Here are my primary notes from my #sxsw talk. I’m going to get up and edit them in the morning with all 40 slides.

note 3.15.2010: more slides added. Thanks for all of the Tumblr reblogs and likes.

3.18.2010: Thanks to Chris for posting video of the session despite the room’s poor acoustics.

Hello, everyone, my name is kenyatta cheese.
I’m from Know Your Meme which is a real community based on the fictional Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies which is part of the non-fictional assemblage of writers, coders, mediamakers, and technologists called Rocketboom.

Know Your Meme is a community obsessed with the Documentation, Accreditation, and Understanding of how memes spread on the internet.

To that end we’ve amassed over 2100 entries in the Internet Meme Database. While most of them are unconfirmed, this should give you an idea of how much of this stuff is out there.

For each entry we document everything we can verify about how these things start, how these things gestate, and how they change over time.

Some people geek out over buses, others build collections of air sickness bags. We geek out over Ken Lee.

So I’m going to talk about internet memes as a phenomenon that is partially both anti-ego and anti-celebrity.

First, let’s have a quick refresher about Celebrity:

Celebrity (as we know it) is an invention of the 20th century.

I’m talking about people who are instantly recognizable because of their exposure through mass media. It’s an emergent process and it reflects a producer to consumer relationship that profits off of our scarcity of attention.

Sociologist Chris Rojek calls celebrity a replacement activity for religion. In particular he says:

“The collapse of organised religion, the absence of having saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies is being filled by celebrity culture - they are the new saints.”

So the attention we once gave to religion we now give to celebrities.

Postmodern philosophy killed God:

Star worship killed the saints:

And Lady Gaga is just killing it.

Celebrity is about the Producer-Consumer dichotomy, believing in the scarcity of attention, and is very much tied to the technologies of Broadcast. So of course, it is also tied to the Dominant Culture.

But there is a side effect of cultural hegemony. Control is never perfect. There is always a counterculture.

And in this space, that counterculture was alternative media. While some of it was aspirational — that is, it wanted to be just like the media it was in opposition to — for the most part it was:

Anti-establishment.

Anti-corporate.

Anti-capitalist.

Anti-market.

What made it so? Well, it was hard to make popular b/c it ignored cultural norms. It was also hard to exploit because a good portion of it ignored copyright. By rejecting the behaviors of the mainstream while re-appropriating many of their signs, they were able to carve out a space where their own ideas could exist.

But because it was often detached from the market, this also meant that it was hard to sustain. It was this spirit that laid the groundwork for internet memes.

So let’s talk memes. What is a meme? Memes are units of cultural ideas that propagate through media, messaging, content, and communication. Coined by Richard Dawkins (the guy who also coined the term ‘genes’). Memetics studies the spread of ideas (sort of) separate from linguistics, and separate from history.

Internet memes are just like regular memes except that they use the medium of the internet to propagate.

What’s the difference? Well, while the act of acquiring & passing on an idea IRL has a real cost (if I want to pass along a bible, I have to buy a copy first), the effective cost of sharing and spreading that information within the online ecosystem is near zero. Therefore, ideas often spread on their merit before anything else.

While internet memes are ideas first and foremost, they take several different forms. These include but are not limited to:

Image Macros (images with captioned text.)

Viral Videos.

Catchphrases.

Like their offline alt brethren, internet memes are anti-exploitative. That is: they often use copyrighted content that can’t be put back into the mass media machine.

Also, because authorship is abstracted out (and often given to an entire community) there is little to no central control over the message. This makes them resistant to corruption of meaning and form.

As part of the process, memes also mutate and iterate. Just because you’re first to a meme doesn’t mean that you get to determine how it will evolve. It can change without you. Last year’s ‘Kanye Interrupts’ started off as a viral video, became a video mashup, and then changed several times before eventually reaching a stable state of image macro + catchphrase.

But back to ‘celebrity’. Does anyone recognize where the title of this talk comes from? It’s a line from William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine…

“This is war to extermination - Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth. Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug. Flesh shuddering from the Ovens. Prisoners of the earth, come out. Storm the studio.

His plan called for total exposure - Wise up all the marks everywhere Show them the rigged wheel - Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe…”

It’s a statement of opposition to outside control of both our bodies and our lives, written for a 20th century equation. Like proletariat taking over the factory, it’s a marxist-anarchist call to storm the broadcast centers, and reclaiming the tools of storytelling and persuasion for our own.

But things have changed.

We’re not in the same century. We’ve built so much more. The broadcast machine remains very much the same but we’ve built an entire infrastructure outside of that.

So don’t burn it down. Leave the factory behind, that relies on tightly held control of message and copyrights, and escape the system that creates hegemony, celebrity.

BTW, this doesn’t mean that the factory won’t still be running. Lest anyone believe that the idea of celebrity will disappear within our lifetime, I leave you with this little gem.

Thank you.

Big cheesy sign. (via yatta)

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:20:08 -0400

Big cheesy sign. (via yatta)

An Elle A Day

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0500

An Elle A Day

Lost Garden: Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:44:00 -0500

Lost Garden: Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game

Imagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. One where the core loop of gameplay involves using and gaining skills in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:

* If an activity can be learned…

* If the player’s performance can be measured…

* If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…

* Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.

Not only can you make a game out of the activity, but you can turn tasks traditionally seen as a rote or frustrating into compelling experiences that users find delightful.

via dj

"Any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:39:58 -0500

“Any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.”

- Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944): The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

An Elle A Day Elle with Dior the Chihuahua at Kiki’s...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:30:00 -0500

An Elle A Day

Elle with Dior the Chihuahua at Kiki’s Doggie Day Care.

An Elle A Day.

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0500

An Elle A Day.

Is it really hip to be glum?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:27:00 -0500

Is it really hip to be glum?:

“Overwhelmingly, models advertising pricier brands were judged to look glummer. This is probably down to signalling, noted researcher Timothy Ketelaar: smiling indicates eagerness to please, suggesting low status. If a Prada model isn’t smiling, she clearly doesn’t need to, implying high status. Brands that target less wealthy customers use smiling models, suggesting lower status, and thus affordability.”

An Elle A Day.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0500

An Elle A Day.