Tag Archives: media

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Rumours of publishing’s death etc etc etc

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Apologies for lack of content here today; without going in to too much detail, I’ve spent much of the last 18 hours talking to unspecified Lovecraftian deities on the big white porcelain telephone, and as such blogging is somewhat off the agenda (along with most things that involve thinking clearly or moving around much).

But I thought I should at least pop in and mention Cory Doctorow’s latest Publisher’s Weekly piece, wherein he ruminates on what he’s learned from elaborately self-publishing his latest short fiction collection, With A Little Help.

With a Little Help has helped me realize something: whatever I do next, I don’t want to be in charge of all these moving parts. I can’t be both a Zen, let-it-all-happen-at-its-own-pace writer and an aggressive, deadline-pushing publisher. If I were realistically going to keep up this publishing stuff, I would need to outsource every task that requires the virtues inherent in agents, editors, sales, marketing, distribution and retail, especially that willingness to tithe a large portion of my working day to logistics, follow-ups, and calls.

Talks the talk, walks the walk, learns in public, shares the lessons. Could this be the same Doctorow who gets accused of advocating all artists give their work away for nothing, and of dismantling old business models with no thought to what will succeed them? I guess someone’s only hearing what they want to hear… and I look forward to the inevitable attempts to explain that it’s me. 🙂

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Crashvertising, or “why I don’t watch exploitative shit like the X Factor”

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It’s a tip o’ the hat to Chairman Bruce for bringing this to light: Crashvertising. I’m pretty sure it’s a subversive art prank rather than a real service, (although, as the months pass by in the weird weird world of the intertubes, I get less and less confident in saying that about… well, about anything). But the basic premise is this: you know how everyone rubbernecks at road accidents, right? Well, the folks behind Crashvertise will hang around by road accidents with banners and placards advertising your product or service, getting full commercial value out of that captive audience. Genius, right?

Part of me is reluctant to spell out the subtext, because I’m sure you can all see it anyway. But nonetheless I’m going to take this opportunity to climb onto one of my little soapboxes, because my circle of friends both online and off contain a depressingly large subset of people: people more than smart enough to see (and deplore) the subtext of Crashvertise, but seemingly unable to make the logical leap to identifying the grotesque exploitation of shows like The X Factor, America’s Got Talent and their ilk. This frustrates me greatly. They are the same thing.

The most common response I get from people when I call them out on watching those shows is along the lines of “oh, I know it’s dreadful, but it’s car-crash TV, isn’t it? You can’t help yourself but watch!” My counter-response has always been something remarkably similar to Crashvertise: sure, we all instinctively rubber-neck at car-crashes, but are you still morally comfortable with looking at car-crashes which have been staged with the express purpose of attracting your attention toward the billboards just behind them?

Oh, I can hear what you’re thinking. Believe me, I’ve had every possible counter-response to my counter-response that there is: “it’s just entertainment”, “no one’s forced into doing it”, “no one gets hurt”. Well, to tackle those three in order:

  • if The X Factor is just entertainment, then we should start encouraging and monetising bullying at schools and in workplaces rather than trying to prevent it (heck, it might help make up the funding shortfalls in the education systems, right?);
  • sure, no one is physically forced into doing it, but the cultural forces that encourage people to debase themselves so thoroughly for the chance to “become famous” (read as “be exploited even more publicly, thoroughly and systematically for the profit of others”) are insidious and incredibly powerful nonetheless, not to mention indicative of something deeply cruel, selfish and objectifying in the way we see the world;
  • and as for no one getting hurt, well, if the tabloid headlines chronicling the wrecks and burnouts on the hard shoulder of the fame highway aren’t stories of people being deeply hurt by a machine that makes money from selling their pain, I don’t know what they are.

“Oh, Paul, don’t take it so seriously; it’s just a bit of fun for Saturday night! I’m not harming anyone!” Well, I’m sorry, but yes, you are.

And the “I’m watching it ironically!” defence is bullshit, too; in fact, that annoys me even more than the people who believe it’s a genuine competition rather than a rigged open-air market research focus group. You know it’s fake, you know it’s scripted; you know, then, that everything you see is done with the intent of maximising viewer appeal, and that while the public votes themselves may not be rigged, the way the candidates are portrayed to the voting public most certainly is. You know that the poor schmucks who audition for the shows are either too ignorant to understand what they’re letting themselves in for, or foolish enough to gamble against the house and think they can win in the long run. And you still encourage that debasement and exploitation, simply by tuning in every week.

By watching these shows, “ironically” or otherwise, you are complicit in a form of public cruelty to other human beings. You see the ads that support the shows, see the brands that co-promote with them, watch performances by the ailing glove-puppet entertainers that are the only things left the big record labels know how to sell; your eyeballs not only validate that cruelty, but monetise it as well.

You are voluntarily staring at car crashes that were deliberately staged in front of billboards, and you are calling it entertainment.

Ballard would be proud of his prescience.

Rant over.

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The global recession that isn’t

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You can’t turn a page or click a tab here in the UK without reading about the ongoing woes of the global recession, and I rather suspect the situation is similar for Stateside readers.

Thing is, the global recession isn’t quite so global as it looks from our standpoint in the “developed” West; via Tobias Buckell, here’s a piece at Foreign Policy that paints the nations of Africa as a golden investment opportunity – a far cry from the war-scarred deserts and shanty-towns of popular perception.

Africa, in fact, is now one of the world’s fastest-growing economic regions. Between 2000 and 2008, the continent’s collective GDP grew at 4.9 percent per year — twice as fast as in the preceding two decades. By 2008, that put Africa’s economic output at $1.6 trillion, roughly on par with Russia and Brazil. Africa was one of only two regions — Asia being the other — where GDP rose during 2009’s global recession. And revenues from natural resources, the old foundation of Africa’s economy, directly accounted for just 24 percent of growth during the last decade; the rest came from other booming sectors, such as finance, retail, agriculture, and telecommunications. Not every country in Africa is resource rich, yet GDP growth accelerated almost everywhere.

Toby goes on to do some back-of-the-envelope maths:

The world population is estimated to be 6.7 Billion.

Asia and India, both currently in growth patterns, represent 60% of the world’s population. Africa represents 15%. So 75% of the world is actually right now currently growing.

However most of Western Europe, parts of North America, and parts of South America are not. So it’s a global lack of growth for 25% of the world’s population.

There’s no denying that things are looking pretty grim economically for us Euros and Yanks, and that our problems are having a knock-on effect elsewhere. But rather than a global recession, perhaps what we’re seeing is simply a globe that doesn’t spin around us as the pivot point any more. Cold comfort for the myopic, I suppose, but I’m kind of relieved; we’ve had our time in the sun, but the sun hasn’t stopped shining just yet.

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Excellent Bill Gibson interview

The best author interviews are surely the ones where the interviewer asks the sort of questions that you yourself would have picked, had the opportunity arisen. Granted, the list of questions I’d like to ask of William Gibson is long enough that I could keep the poor guy occupied with them until the heat death of the universe, but Aileen Gallagher of NY Mag‘s The Vulture column has whittled a few of them away on my behalf [via MetaFilter]. Here he is, rethinking terrorism:

You also wrote in Zero History that terrorism is “almost exclusively about branding but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.” How so?

If you’re a terrorist (or a national hero, depending on who’s looking at you), there are relatively few of you and relatively a lot of the big guys you’re up against. Terrorism is about branding because a brand is most of what you have as a terrorist. Terrorists have virtually no resources. I don’t even like using the word terrorism. It’s not an accurate descriptor of what’s going on.

What do you think is going on?

Asymmetric warfare, when you’ve got a little guy and a big guy. [There are] a lot of strategies that the little guy uses to go after the big guy, and a lot of them are branding strategies. The little guy needs a brand because that’s basically all he’s got. He’s got very little manpower, very little money compared to the big guy. The big guy’s got a ton of manpower and a ton of money. So this small coterie of plotters decides to go after a nation-state. If they don’t have a strong brand, nothing’s going to happen. From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding. By the same token, you get these other, surreal moments where they call up and say, “We didn’t do that one.” That’s branding. That’s all it is. A terrorist without a brand is like a fish without a bicycle. It’s just not going anywhere.

And a vindication of Twitter:

I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

[…]

Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

Lots more good nuggets in there; go read.

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Batman Incorporated and Kanye West: media homunculi

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Here’s a super bit of cyborg-media-culture-identity riffing from Kevin Lovelace at grinding.be about the power of brands and/or identities (the difference between the two is getting pretty fuzzy) as prosthetic cyborg extensions of our selves. A post that mashes up Grant Morrison’s Batman Inc., Kanye West and open-source umbrella identities like Anonymous – what’s not to love?

By becoming a transmedia brand, the Batman gains the ability to clone itself and sent out its conceptual mind-babies out into the world, doing the work of Batman even in the actual absence of Batman.   Many people “know” Kanye via his body of work and his carefully sculpted public persona – a persona so information rich and media saturated that it can spawn its own meta-narratives.  Kanye West is the puppet of the Illuminati, and we can prove it!  He’s brilliant!  He’s insane!  He’s…  He’s a story.  The Kanye that 99% of the people reading this know is a story about a man who makes music – a narrative crafted largely BY the man who makes that music.  Its is a story with granularity and richness enough to allow many points of entry and engagement, spin-offs, theories and supposition.    The Kanye West we “know” is a prosthetic identity – an interface program that uses media as its computational substrate that exists between “us” the audience and the “real” Kanye (and his PR team) who operate the prosthetic.

Lots of connections to our earlier discussions of the ubiquity of narrative in an altermodern culture… we are all the stories of ourselves, but we can change the plot whenever we like, or even let other people write their own versions. Go read it.