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Friday, May 09, 2003
News You Can Abuse III My friend Tom Hopkins, who works with Soft Skull Press in New York City, is featured in a recent edition of the Onion. The article isn't about Tom, but the face in the photo is definitely Tom. "A guy in this cartooning class I took at SVA this past fall was a staff photographer for the Onion," Tom says. "He took pictures of everyone in the class who was game -- and willing to be potentially humiliated in public like that." Comic Book Collections V I've got to come up for another header for these zine library, archive, and infoshop notices. Because this is another library or archive not of comics, but of zines. In the Austin Chronicle, Josh Medsker chronicles his efforts to organize a zine library in Austin. Sounds like he's approaching the project in the right way, and I look forward to future reports on his progress! Thanks to Bookslut. Music to My Ears XXXVII Thanks to Jim Munroe's delightful DIY video CD-ROM zine Novel Amusements #3 and Jon Sasaki's clever submission "Mixed Tape," I've been introduced to Dictionaraoke. Dictionaraoke is a Web site collecting MP3 files made by combining online dictionaries' computer-generated voices with karaoke music for hits of yesterday and today. I've never heard such a dry, passionless rendition of the Beastie Boys' "Girls." Ball2000's version of Kiss' "Rock and Roll All Nite" alternates male and female computer vocals, making for an energetic, giggle-ridden number. The chorus cracks me up. Awesome... I'll be spending some time here. Rock 'n' Roll Business School? Today's Boston Globe offers an interesting pairing of related items. Hilary Price's Rhymes with Orange comic strip today takes a look at what happens when dance companies go multinational. And Joan Anderman's feature story about the local band Elcodrive indicates an interesting direction for independent bands to take. When Elcodrive sends its demo recordings to labels for consideration, they included a six-page marketing plan that outlines promotional programs for radio, retail, and touring; a report from Polyphonic HMI, a company that uses software to predict potential hits; and Soundscan and Broadcast Data Systems reports. It's a band in a box! But the truly intriguing thing here is Polyphonic HMI (Human Media Interface). Based in Barcelona, Polyphonic has developed music analysis software called Hit Song Science. The program predicts the hit potential of a given song by applying algorithms to compare the song to the last five years' worth of Top 30 hits from Billboard and UK Official charts. While the software applies no science to song lyrics -- just musical content compared to previously popular songs -- all five majors use Polyphonic's service, which runs $3,000 an album. Someone want to gift the Anchormen $3,000? Our new CD will come out May 16. Maybe it's better we don't know how good or bad we really are. Among the Literati XXXVI Wil Wheaton, former a cast member for Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as a blogger himself, recently founded Monolith Press. Aiming to "give the unconventional a voice, and the world a chance to hear them," Monolith's first book is by Wheaton himself. Dancing Barefoot collects five short stories about life in the so-called Space Age. Hide and seek, time machines, Car Wars, Star Trek, and Wheaton figure prominently in the book, which looks promising. Make with the clicky click already! The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXIII This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project. Codename: Strykeforce #8 (Image, November 1994). Writers: Marc Silvestri and Mike Heisler. Artist: Joe Benitez. Location: Given to my friend Tim while on the Red Line between Park Street and Central Square. For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry. Thursday, May 08, 2003
See You in the Funny Pages XII In today's installment of Get Fuzzy, Boston-based cartoonist Darby Conley proposes a new movie rating: NC-99. "Absolutely nobody under 99 allowed to see it!" I like the idea of movie ratings that are more specific. But do we really need rating systems? In Reader's Digest Canada, Rod Gustafson wonders whether viewers can trust movie ratings. Gretchen Ellis proposes some alternate meanings for the ratings. And Franklin Harris thinks we should get rid of them entirely. For video games, we've got the Entertainment Software Rating Board's rating system. Joseph Lieberman doesn't think these ratings work either. David Walsh and Douglas Gentile have researched their validity. Gamersmark lays into "dumbass parents." Online, there's the Internet Content Rating Association. And PC World wonders whether you can trust e-commerce rating services. "Who's rating the raters?" The Comics Code Authority. The struggling Underwriters Laboratories. So many ratings organizations! I had no idea there were so many. I just don't ever pay attention to them. Outside of Consumer Reports, ratings don't influence my buying habits. They mean nothing to me. They bring neither comfort nor confidence. Regardless, I am going to rate this Media Diet entry PG. Pretty Good. North End Moment XXXVIII Overheard at Prince Pantry: Customer: I'll have a small tuna sub. Yes, the cook is Asian. I was glad that the owner said something because I was about to comment on the other customer's racist remark. Is there such a thing as Chinese tuna? There is such a thing as a Chinese tuna bake. The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXII This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project. Catwoman #46 (DC, June 1997). Writer: Doug Moench. Artist: Jim Balent. Location: On a table in J.J. Foley's in the South End. For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry. Television-Impaired XIII Disney Consumer Products has come out with a line of Disney-branded consumer electronics products aimed at children. The new Disney television, DVD player, digital radio, stereo CD boombox, CD player, and clock radio were designed by frog design and manufactured by Memcorp Inc., maker of the Memorex consumer electronics line.  With televisions being so boringly black and boxy these days, it's nice to see a new approach to TV design. Reminds me of the many forms vintage televisions took. The television is by far the best designed, but the Buzz & Beyond clock radio has a nice blobject-like form as well. Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Mention Me! XXXVIII Thanks to Anil Dash and Good Experience for prominently mentioning my Gel reports. Media Diet traffic has doubled over the last few days, and I'm sure it's their doing. Welcome to everyone who's finding their way here for the first time. I hope you'll stick around. Technofetishism XXXVII Akin to my enthusiasm about News Is Free and NetNewsWire, I've been geeking out to Mass Info Paging lately. Basicallly, Mass Info Paging offers pager- or email-based distribution of Massachusetts and New England police, fire, and emergency services announcements similar to scanner reports. Receiving the email on my Sidekick, I've been enjoying an odd form of vicarious awareness. This is a page I just received: ROWLEY ATV ACCIDENT FOREST RIDGE BEHIND WINFRIES FUDGE 15 Y/O MALE FELL 25 FEET OFF CLIFF ON ATV UNCONCIOUS REQ MEDFLIGHT And last night, while IM'ing a friend, the Mobil station on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge was held up... not too many blocks away from my house. I didn't really do anything with that information beyond not leaving the house, but there's no way I would have know that had happened so quickly otherwise. The service costs $36 a year, but the first 30 days are free. And I've exchanged several emails with one of the developers, who was extremely helpful providing assistance -- even tweaking the site so it was easier to use. Just continuing my search for more news than I can use. NetWork IV Not satisfied with Friendster, Ryze, and Ecademy? Well, now there's LinkedIn, which strikes me as a more professionally oriented Friendster. Currently linked to two people -- Joichi Ito and Gordon Strause, who both invited me to join -- I've been playing with the search and connection request process and building out my profile. In the end, the profile development process will result in the creation of a pretty serious-looking online resume -- an activity that may prove useful in the future! Remember the days when all we had was Six Degrees? Wow. Music to My Eyes XVIII In the fall of 2001, James Kochalka Superstar took to a rooftop in Burlington, Vermont, for an impromptu concert that was almost shut down by the police. Austin Sipes caught some of the shenanigans on video and word from Icebox Records is that more footage is yet to come. Lesson: People falling down are funny. This Saturday, May 10, James opens for Mike Watt at Higher Ground. You can catch a live Webcast of the performance around 9 p.m. courtesy of the Digital Club Network. Magazine Me XXXII The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the National Magazine Awards today. Kudos to our upstairs neighbor, the Atlantic Monthly! Newsletters of Note VIII I've known Steve O'Keefe for as long as I've been involved in publishing, professionally and otherwise. Formerly of Loompanics, Steve now interacts with me occasionally because of his online book promotion work. With 20 years of publishing experience, Steve has launched online marketing campaigns for more than 1,000 books. As the head of Patron Saint Productions, Steve also publishes a newsletter entitled the Beautiful Plan. It's quite different than the last newsletter-cum-zine Steve published, Piano, which focused on piano playing and instruction. But, similar to everything else he's done, it's worth reading. The Spring 2003 edition, the seventh issue, leads with the article "Why Authors Hate You." He draws on the experiences of folks such as Steve Roth, Richard Hoy, Katharine Harmon, and Glenn Fleishman to explore the failings of author-publisher interaction -- and how an author-focused publishing cooperative might be a viable option. Edwin Colyer looks at whether books are bound by the brands of their publishers. And Steve suggests that publishers should offer the writers they work with an outline and plan for the publishing process, identifying the responsible parties at each step. It's a slim read at eight pages, but there are a lot of ideas here worth pursuing -- some of which remind me of the work Ben Brown and Dave Eggers are doing with their respective projects. One of the better newsletters I've come across in a while. It's not available online, but you can subscribe by sending your request on company letterhead to the Beautiful Plan, Patron Saint Productions, 741 Saint Philip St. #241, New Orleans, LA 70116. Workaday World XXX I've spent a couple of hours tidying up my office so far today, weeding out stuff I don't need on hand, boxing up books I don't need at work to ship home, and otherwise getting my Fast Company house in order. It's interesting how a manic cleaning binge -- and clutter purge -- can lighten one's mood. It's also interesting how this exercise is almost an exercise in professional anthropology or archaeology. Piles of stuff contain stratified layers of our past, and going through them brings back memories, reminds us of opportunities lost and experiences lived, and refocuses our attention and energy. I was planning on enacting a similar manic cleaning binge at home tonight, but now we've got Anchormen practice. It's early, which is good because I still need to get my apartment in order for my mother's visit this weekend. I also need to practice my saxophone part in the Velvet Underground's "Rock 'n' Roll" for Kurt and Geraldine's wedding this weekend. Back to work! Cleaning breeds clarity. Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Comics and Community XI The Cambridge Comix Festival kicks off this month. A convention will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, May 17, at Hannum Hall, 7 Temple St. on Central Square in Cambridge. The convention will feature artists' and publishers' exhibits, guest speakers, and video demonstrations. The festival also includes exhibits at four different locations: Exhibitors include Rick Altergott, Ariel Bordeaux, Craig Bostick, Doug Chapel, Dan Moynihan, and others. For more information, email Hans Rickheit. I won't be going to any of the openings May 11, but I hope to be at the con May 17 -- and perhaps the Zeitgeist opening May 18. Technofetishism XXXVI Mmm. I just ordered a Geko 201. With spring and summer coming, I'm quite looking forward to Geocaching. Ravaging Radio VIII It's being hyped as Tivo for your radio, and PoGo! Product's Radio YourWay digital AM/FM radio recorder looks promising. Combining a digital voice recorder, MP3 player, and on-the-fly or scheduled digital recording of radio broadcasts, the YourWay might work well for people who don't like sticking near their stereos. Scheduled to ship later this month, the YourWay is available for pre-order now. While I like the idea of regularly recording radio shows such as WMBR's Breakfast of Champions or Pipeline! without having to be home or aware of the time, I'm slightly skeptical of the YourWay's portable radio stature. The quality of the recordings will be totally dependent on the device's location while recording, and the assumed mindfulness required to make sure you're getting good reception while recording seems to indicate that you can't just carry this with you all the time. I wonder whether a more stereo peripheral-based, streaming radio computer-based, or satellite radio recording approach might not be more promising. Regardless, it's interesting to think about saving radio broadcasts on my laptop, and I must admit that I'm tempted. I just emailed them to see if the device is Mac compatible. It is not. Well, that's that. Maybe I should just get the Garmin Geko GPS device I've been coveting instead. Thanks to Lockergnome. Technofetishism XXXV Just when my Sidekick is starting to crap out -- the navigation wheel is increasingly difficult to use, and it sounds like there are pieces of something rattling around inside the device -- Danger is coming out with a new color Sidekick. I was going to stop by T-Mobile to swap my Sidekick for a new one because I take good care of things like this and doubt it should break so soon after buying it -- I've only had it four months! -- but maybe I'll trade up. Mmm, color. Thanks to Gizmodo. Magazine Me XXXI According to the New York Times, Wal-Mart has decided not to stock lad mags such as Maxim, Stuff, and FHM on its newsstands. Seems that customers and employees complained that the magazines were to racy. Also seems out that Wal-Mart can account for 15% of all single-copy magazine sales. If you get bumped by Wal-Mart, it can bruise indeed. For the lad mags, however, it's just a glancing blow because Wal-Mart only accounts for 3% of their newsstand sell through. Thanks to Media Dietician Jodie Peotter. Corollary: These Links Were Made for Breaking? VIII Maybe I was too early an adopter of Friendster when I first wrote about it in December. I was initially frustrated by the Web service because there weren't enough people in the system for me to connect to many. Now, however, I'm starting to reach some sort of critical mass. With only 15 friends, I'm connected to more than 15,500 people. Already, I've had a conversation with Jen about how Friendster oddly formalizes connections and friendships that have pre-existed for years: "It's official!" And I just learned now that someone I just met online recently -- Gregory Blake, who helped me get my RSS feed up and running -- and I are connected 10 different ways to three degrees of separation. We would've met eventually anyway! I'm slowly warming to the service despite my early snarkiness. Digesting the Daily XIII Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians. Decades of dissent On-campus activism evolves since first Gulf War (April 21, 2003) Library to conform to policy NU librarians fear new plan to comply with Patriot Act could violate patrons' privacy (April 21, 2003) Students, Web stalkers benefit from search services Google offers information, amusement to users in 88 countries, 53 languages (April 21, 2003) Wherehouse store not where it's at anymore Soon-to-close establishment tries its best to unload the last of its music, but nyou finds plenty of crap left. (April 24, 2003) Harvard urges punishment for illegal file-sharing cases Although NU receives complaints, it evaluates the charges individually (April 25, 2003) Keeping face, baring more: Playboy at NU (April 25, 2003) Playboy to seek NU students for "Girls of the Big Ten" issue (April 25, 2003) Video didn't kill WNUR radio drama stars Student actors, producers keep tradition of on-air theater alive with new show on Sunday afternoons. (April 29, 2003) If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left. The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXI This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project. Yesterday: Booster Gold #19 (DC, August 1987). Writer and artist: Dan Jurgens. Location: On the Red Line between Park Street and Central Square. For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry. Monday, May 05, 2003
Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition VI Tom Vreeland: "Mycasts: New Genre of Global Television" Tom Vreeland has been involved with electronic publishing, television, computing, and networks for 40 years. With the creation of the Mycast technology for the Web, he is bringing a new genre of television and video technology to schools, teachers, and students. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Vreeland presented at MiT3: It's interesting on a panel about convergence to have so many different perspectives. The technical requirements to bring tailor-made e-learning systems into the K-12 classroom are the same technical requirements to develop a massively multiplayer game. This is a big deal. What we're seeing in this change isn't just a paradigm shift. It's an earthquake. It's not convergence as we thought convergence would be. It's disintermediated. It's based on a one-to-one technology model. It's nonlinear interactive hypervideo. It breaks out of the current video taxonomy. We're looking at pull, not push. I don't want 500 channels. I want one channel with everything on it when I want it. Mycasts are personal. My TV hasn't become a computer yet, and my computer hasn't become a TV yet, but my cell phone is becoming a TV studio. My PDA is becoming a video computer. The traditional information economies of scale become inverted. It becomes as easy to produce 10,000 different books as it is to make 10,000 copies of one book. You can produce 10,000 different TV shows rather than one show for 10,000 viewers. Information and knowledge, the core currency of learning, are now available to learners without the traditional hierarchy of teachers. As we disintermediate the connection between learners and information, we see one of the most fundamental differents in education. If you think about the Reuters feeds during the war, individuals could watch video of what was going on in Baghdad. You can construct your own meaning rather than have your meaning constructed for you. Other than developing a distribution system, we're creating a hosting service with which students will be able to upload there own video commentaries. In the Berkshires, we work with a group called the Visionaries. They just granted us $10 million in educational video. It's time for the students to take back television. Students take more techhnology to school than the school district can afford to buy them. We're going to have two networks: the informal and individual, and the organizational. We know which one is going to get the attention. We need to figure out how to use them both. This media is not static. We're not trying to add interactivity. Interactivity comes with it. Using a technology called Tapestry, you can create video blogs like Oneworld.org. There are also tools for co-browsing and collaborative viewing. These things create a need for a new literacy for teachers and students. Organizing that information and providing access to that information is part of what we're working on. Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition V Christian McCrea: Games, Agency, and Television Christian McCrea is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, where his thesis examines the deployment of narrative, celebrity, desire, and success in computer games. Here is a rough transcript of the paper McCrea presented at MiT3: My presentation is called "Whose Screen Is It Any Way? Games, Agency, and the New Television." There is something about games that connects with convergence, but I'm not going to talk about technological convergence, but I am going to talk about behavior and habit convergence. Games studies is a very new academic field. Right now it's not even a field. But in the next year, we're going to see 10-12 books and collections about games studies. There's one group of theorists that say we need a very specific approach to games. They're mythologists and formalists. The people at MIT focus too much on the cultural content of games, looking at narrative and interactive. A lot of good work has been done. I'm not going to focus on this too much. My investment is to assess the moment of game play as having a moment of narrative in and of itself. I want to erase the difference. What am I doing at a TV conference? The computer game console all require TVs to operate. Games are part and parcel to the history of TV itself. The TV is not a single text. It's a receptacle. And real convergence is happening at the back of the TV set. The logic of game play is part of our television experience. When we play a computer game, we have two options: to move forward or to fail. Most games require you to move forward. We often judge game characters and our interactions with them not on how convincing they are but on what capacity they have to react to us. Games give us incentives to succeed. How might this idea affect how televisions are used? What has changed in television? How has the text changed? How is the home changing? The screen places new demands on our leisure time. Screen culture demands of us agency and activity. What does this mean for a generation of children? The practice of anime fandom in the west is best described as procreation. They'll take anime series, copy them onto tape, and add subtitles themselves. It's operating on the fan level. And it's basically writing on the screen. They interact with it. These groups take pride in one translation over another. This writing on the screen allows others to access that media. Media piracy is something that academia has been ignoring to its own detriment. Pirates have new opportunities to incorporate media. People act surprised that a generation of media-savvy kids steeped in antiauthoritarianism copy and distribute music as much as they do. Media piracy is a natural instinct to access our media histories. I also want to look at things like the DVD, the first important sign of media collectivity. The viewer becomes an archivist. We don't just want to watch something, we want to collect all of it. These aren't distinct phenomena. It's part of a broader cultural movement. There's something attractive to the idea of communities and groups of people who are able to interconnect to access more and more media. The logic of agency, success, and the archival impulse are seeping into our culture in many ways. TV is the most important aspect of this cultural shift. Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition IV Lanfranco Aceti: Interactive Integrated Media in the "Agon" of Convergence Lanfranco Aceti is a researcher at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London. He collaborates with the Imperial College, and his research focuses on the avant garde in digital media, interactivity, and intelligent systems. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Aceti presented at MiT3: The interactive integrated media are a new form of media structure that has a multiplicity of forms and codes interacting within a superseding structured content. These formats for old and new cross-platform media will be structured in a single content producer which assumes the amorphous characteristic of a meta-medium. The production of content is multileveled, multilayered, and omnipresent. I don't want to call it a TV show that we will be living, but it's similar to that. We will be carrying it with us. The concept of A+B=C is changed. In the theory of Pasolini, Deluze, Eco, and Baudrillard, A+B=Z. We will have several aesthetics that are new. The new narratives are composing a meta-language, which is based on the use of old media-specific narratives. We have seen a reduction to a minimum common denominator. In England, we call it "dumbing it down." This creates a process of standardization and homogenization, which is fought in the anti-globalization world. The issue of interpretation and emergence related to the "presence of the media object" is related to the homogeny or homology of the media itself. The distinction between the two concepts becomes the element that may permit a distinction between phenomena of emergence in the aesthetic and digital structure of media interaction. In England, Big Brother was the first interesting example of pervasive media. People would go online during working hours. They could get messages on their cell phones. Then they'd go home and read the newspaper. And it wasn't just to get updates on the show. Apple is sponsoring a reality TV show. The industry will create its own media. If you look at that picture, you can tell that they're Indian. But if you didn't know that the picture was taken in India, the picture could have been taken anywhere. The quality of the pictures is all the same. There is a Taiwanese movie called "Tears of the Black Tiger." It looked like it was made in Bollywood during the 1950s. The war on terrorism has inspired a reality TV series that will track the U.S. military in action. The images that were coming from the war looked like a fashion magazine. They were those kinds of shoots. It was the same glossiness you would see in a magazine. That cleanness is not reality. The next one is a reality TV show to determine the new ruler of Iraq. We can see ourselves moving from that within the political system around the world. In 1973, there was a reality TV show called An American Family. It followed a middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California, with five daughters. There is one majority element that is being forced onto society. The rest is being pushed down underground. The BBC has been working on a show for two years with a working title of "X-Box." It's basically a video game in which people can create their own avatar regardless of whether it is real. They will be fighting each other online, and the winners will end up on the TV show. It is a video game that will translate to TV. Will the immaculate war be the next interactive reality show? And if my army wins, do I get a million dollars? Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition III Michele Malach: "Behind Bars: Guilt, Redemption, and Oz Fans" Michele Malach is professor of media studies in the Department of English at Fort Lewis College. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Malach presented at MiT3: I'm going to be talking about a show that has no video game and no role-playing games. A comic would be great. There's lots and lots of fan fiction though. And lots and lots of discussion. Kurt and I had been talking about fandom and mythology and how people incorporate that into their every day lives. Another colleague came to me and talked about how our favorite stories tend to frame our lives. She suggested that the stories that we tend to care about choose us based on something about us. I think it's the other way around. What does that say about fans of a prison show? The show was created by Tom Fontana, who was probably best known for his early work on St. Elsewhere. It started in 1997 and ran for six seasons. They only made eight episodes for each season, except one season in which they made 16. It was also HBO's first original, hour-long dramatic series. It was pretty groundbreaking even though It hasn't gotten as much attention. Unlike a lot of more well-known fandoms, this one is built around a show that was never really commercially popular. But it was critically acclaimed. Most people don’t think about the show at all, but if they do its as a prison-based soap opera featuring graphic violence and male nudity. The demographics of the fans who watched it were really broad. There were clusters, but it covered a broad range. The fandom is dominated by mostly straight, educated, white women. The people who I communicated for this particular project were all active fans online and mostly fanfic authors. I've been active in a number of Oz-related groups for a number of years, so I had relatively easy access to these people. The character who spoke the final narrative, Augustus Hill, was basically a Greek chorus for the show. He would directly address the camera and express what the creator wanted us to take away. But of course, economies of desire are not so easily controlled, even if parts of the monologue did overlap with what the fans got out of it. I had always thought of Oz as a Catholic kind of show. Largely because Fontana is Catholic, Homicide had a lot of Catholic themes, and there are a lot of Catholic characters in Oz. Most of the fans didn't perceive it as particularly Catholic. But the issues of guilt and redemption, at least as they're portrayed in the show, are particularly Catholic. Religion doesn't work too well as a mythology for fandom because it's too literal. Roman Catholicism is much closer to that relationship -- not a literal belief but a contextual mythological belief. Like Umberto Eco's Macintosh, fandom is Catholic in a sense. One woman in the group was a Quaker. Some had pagan beliefs. But they did feel drawn to the themes that came up in the show, which include the interconnection of good and evil, particularly within the individual, the possibility of redemption, and inherent humanity. The prisoners that are not religious often seem to try and find god or a meaning behind their actions and sins. Most of the people don't espouse a particular religion belief, but they still try to find a balance. Perhaps the most consistent themes that arose in the Ozverse were guilt and redemption. These are not new themes for a prison show, but the depth that these themes were explored is new. Characters feel guilt over things that they don't do as well as things that they do do. Most of us have guilt over something. Most of us want redemption. Redemption isn't something that you just get. Redemption is something that you work at every day You may get little bits and pieces of it, but it can also be taken away. Characters in the show are never completely redeemed. We're left with a really hopeless situation for one particular character, which is offset by more hopeful endings for other characters. You end up feeling a great deal of empathy. I felt the same thing watching Homicide. You’ve got characters who are unquestionably evil but also quite human. Finally, there's the idea of personal responsibility in an extreme environment. Humanizing prisoners is a critique of the prison industry. When you have that extremity, you can’t always predict the kinds of choices you would make. You do have to take responsibility. Nearly everyone who responded to the questions I was asking talked about lessons they'd learned that they could apply to their own lives. Part of what fans got was what the creator wanted. The values reflected in the show don’t necessarily reflect the values that we all hold, but the values still get taken out, twisted around, and reconstructed. Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition II Dan Mackay: Genre Television and the Imaginary Entertainment Environments Dan Mackay is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, where he studies the historical development of fantasy and theorizes about changing conceptions of the imagination in literature. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Mackay presented at MiT3: How should we begin to discuss the genre of television fiction? Fantasy, science fiction, and other genres of television should be treated differently than other forms of television drama. There's something about the imaginary entertainment environment. TV drama tends to focus more on character. Imaginary television tends to have more sprawling story arcs that don’t allow for as much character development. The environment takes on more of an importance. The environment itself at a certain point takes on even more of an importance than the author. The fictional environment cuts across media. It's expressed in many forms. And each form slightly changes the environment. Each new form will incorporate the changes that have been made. Let's use Lord of the Rings. It was a discrete story written by Tolkien. There have been a couple of animated versions. There's the Peter Jackson version, which is ongoing. None of these are changing the Lord of the Rings world. The world is set. You can explore Tolkien's papers. Then there's Star Trek. It's ongoing. Each change made in a new video game, television series, or comic book will be taken into consideration. Jean Baudrillard looks at three main stages -- an early primitive stage in which an image represents a profound reality. The second stage is an image that masks a profound reality. It no longer refers to an actual event. The third stage is one in which the image begins to mask and signify, but it masks the absence of reality. That's the existential crisis. We take this and apply it to the world of television fiction, something like Seinfeld, for example. The streets and sets are signs for actual New York locations. In Boston, you can go to the Cheers bar. MASH signified Vietnam even though it was set during Korea. It was competing with the nightly news reports. Fantasy, science-fiction, and horror television has no such signifiers. But as Baudrillard would say, the reality signified represents the absence of reality. The image is seductive. It's a hook. It fills your vision and hearing, and you're left with questions. What is it that's about this environment? How does this work? As you answer the questions about this absolutely useless world, a subject is constructed. There's a whole universe of meaning embodied by the show. People inhabit their viewing selves and are creative when they watch Babylon 5 and then they project those selves back out through discussion forums and newsgroups. They allow a subject that’s only momentarily created to be continually created. They allow for the pleasure of the signifier to come out. The pleasure is their own momentary creativity that comes out while inhabiting the medium. In the fan forums, through the performance of this self, the self is reinscribed. The subject that is created becomes an author. We see a jump at the end when the fans themselves become an author. Look at Stracyzinski. Look at Kevin Smith, They become successful to such an extent that they’re able to return to that pleasure and make a vocation of it. Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition I got back from New York and the Good Experience Live conference in time to make much of the Media in Transition 3 conference held by MIT's Comparative Media Studies department. I didn't make it to all of the sessions that interested me, but I did hit a couple. Kurt Lancaster: "Babylon 5: Book of Quotations -- Parallels between USA Patriot Act and Babylon 5's Nightwatch" Kurt Lancaster is an assistant professor at Fort Lewis College. He is the creator of the video-streaming Web narrative Letters from Orion and the co-author of Building a Home Movie Studio and Getting Your Films Online. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Lancaster presented at MiT3: What I want to do is talk about the parallels between the USA Patriot Act and the how the Nightwatch developed in Babylon 5 to bridge nonfiction and fiction. "The realization that one person can change the universe ... That if one man with a bullet can change the world in Dallas and Memphis and a hotel in Los Angeles, how much more can one person with a dream, with an idea, change the world?" -- 2003 interview with Bill Baker What is Babylon 5? It's a television series that ran from 1993-1998 with a five-year story arc. J. Michael Stracyzinski wrote 90% of the scripts, so you can see the continuity running throughout. The series continues to run in syndication. And the space station is a parallel to the United Nations. There's a war without, and there's a war within. Within the series, the Earth government, which Babylon 5 is an extension of, created this guard called the Nightwatch as a way to have citizens police each other. I want to look at how this is a parallel to the USA Patriot Act. The parallels are frighteningly similar. This document was passed on Oct. 26, 2001, in reaction to the World Trade Center. The House and Senate voted in overwhelming favor of it. The language is written in it so that if you say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, you can be arrested. Even in the Battle of Seattle, people could be arrested without any rights. The law allows the government to track who takes what books out of the library. There was one dissenting vote in the Senate, Democrat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. A man in Denver was arrested a couple of weeks ago for taking pictures of the hotel that Dick Cheney was staying at. He was arrested under the USA Patriot Act. Investigators called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty pinko faggot." For his one telephone call, he called the Denver Post, and the police immediately hung up the phone. Now there are no records that this even happened. It's interesting to see how this is playing out in the fan discussion boards. One fan takes an actual fact that happened in the real world and couches it in the plot line of Babylon 5. "Relating Babylon 5 to global five can be so much fun!" Stracyzinski intervenes and talks about how Nightwatch started as something little and built itself up from preying on people's fear. What's interesting is the debate, One fan says fine, prove your point. Stracyzinski says that's it's about what happens after you speak up, not whether you're able to speak up. In America, we had freedom after speech. I conclude with the fact that what’s interesting about this whole thing is that you get a civil, real debate going on within the discussion board. If you look at the mainstream news, you don't get any kind of debate. You get the debate relating to this television show. All Dolled Up My weekend reading on the Big Blue Couch on Church Corner included a lot of serendipitous mentions of new-school dolls, action figures, and related items. KidRobot is a San Francisco-based shop that specializes in urban vinyl action figures. Think Michael Lau and Eric So, as well as Kubricks and Qees mini-figures, and the lovely plushes of Friends&Friends and Prettyugly. Wonderful stuff! As the war continues to "end," maybe we can expect a price decrease on the President Bush and Saddam Hussein action figures from Hero Builders. You can even buy a pink dress or S&M outfit for your dolls: "Embarass your villain action figure by dressing it with this lovely pink dress." Lastly, I don't know how many Media Dieticians are active travelers -- much less Red Roof Inn loyalists -- but if red is your hotel roof color of choice, rest assured that you can now acquire your very own "Red" bobble head doll. It doesn't seem to me that "Red" is a mascot with a lot of clout to get out, but for $10, bobble on. Among the Literati XXXV Rob's Amazing Poem Generator takes the content of Web sites and turns it into poetry. Here's how Media Diet looks all poetic like: function pr n {n ;} Thanks to Boing Boing. Hiptop Nation V Here are some ambient snaps from my day in New York City last week for the Good Experience Live conference:             One of the highlights of the trip was briefly meeting Thomas Madsen-Mygdal of CommonMe. He's good people. See You in the Funny Pages XI Sunday's installation of Gary Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury was largely in French. He offers a helpful translation online. Good Experience Live XV Stephen Bauman: Thresholds to Mindfulness Stephen Bauman is senior minister of Christ Church United Methodist in New York City. With a master of divinity degree from Yale University Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Bauman also has work experience that has taken him to office buildings, oil fields, and Times Square, where he worked with runaway and homeless youth. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live: I guess it is by design, although it wouldn't have been my design, that I am the last speaker. And having been here all day, I guess it is appropriate that the day end with a minister. I operate from the premise that all of us are spiritual beings. All of us function with a set of implicit or explicit transcendent values. Sometimes these are conscious. And sometimes these are unconscious. These values leave a wake behind us as we travel through life. All of us believe the world is generally safe or unsafe.That people are generally to be trusted or not trusted. That things are more true or less true. To hold a conference called Good Experience Live reflects that some experiences are better than others. Evidentally, because you're here, you are on the lookout for the good ones. As part of this benediction, I want to offer some snapshots of great American religious organizations. All but one are Christian because that's what I know best. For instance, Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri, an outgrowth of the Precious Moments greeting cards and porcelain figurines. He bought up 3,000 acres in both as his graphic art and life-size figurines feature prominently. This is a destination attraction, so parking lots surround the property. This is a closeup of his depictio of heaven. The Precious Moments Chapel has nearly a million visitors a year. Just north of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, is a new theme park called the Holy Land Experience. It's educational. It's inspirational. It's theatrical. Calvary's Garden Tomb is near the Dromedary Depot. Admission for a one-day pass costs $30 or you can purchase the Jerusalem Gold Pass for $75. Now let's step back for a moment from these destination sites and consider some living, breathing churches. One is my own, Christ Church United Methodist in New York City. It sits right on the sidewalk. It is meant to be a part of people's daily experience. The doors are just three steps up from the sidewalk. What interests me about this is what I refer to as the threshold experience, stepping off the sidewalk and into this space. There's often a physical response in first-time visitors. If one has a taste for god or depth of thinking or silence, this space makes that connection. There is no parking lot attached. In direct contrast to this, consider the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. Willow Creek is the model for the megachurch. Their model is that of the mall. It's I'm OK, You're OK design. Crossing the threshold of a megachurch is meant to be as easy as crossing the threshold of the Galleria mall, complete with a foodcourt, a Starbucks, and a sanctuary designed much like a movie theater. Here, the horizontal human experience is emphasized rather than the vertical experience. Since you're here in New York, it seems appropriate to say a word about a walk. Start at the Bethesda Fountain near 72nd Street in Central Park and walk past the band shell, down through the mall, out into the Grand Army Plaza in front of the Plaza Hotel, and down 5th Avenue to about 50th street. This walk won't take much more than an hour. This park was designed as a space of spiritual respite. As you come out onto the Grand Army Plaza, take note of the buildings and spaces, and become mindful of your experience. What is it that it does to you? The mall near Rockefeller Center is embued with mythological meaning -- spiritual meaning. At the end of the mall is the golden image of Prometheus. It's an extraordinary public space. If we were to become mindful and thoughtful, the benediction is to take that into your world. If you were to take the stroll from Bethesda Fountain to 50th Street and 5th Avenue, being mindful of spiritual matters, I guarantee that you will have a good experience. A very good experience. Good Experience Live XIV Marissa Mayer: Google Doodles Marissa Mayer is the director of consumer products and a product manager for Google. A Google employee since 1999, Bayer is former technical lead for the user interface team. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live: How many people here have used Google? That question always gets some chuckles. I'm going to focus on the UI philosophies and processes within Google. Google's mission is to organize the world's information so it's universally accessible and useful. That's very broad. And it has nothing to do with Web searches. But the Web has changed the paradigm of research. More than the Web search, Googlers are interested in doing things that matter. You can't build a search engine unless you have too much data. You need to build something that's fundamentally useful to people and then build usability on top of that. If all you have is usability, you don't have much. Let's look at usability. Let's look at Google's big blank home page. If you ask Sergey what were you trying to say with the big blank home page, he'd say, "We didn't have a Webmaster, and I don't do HTML." Our characteristic look was a happy accident. One thing we do at Google to understand what's happening is user studies. At our very first one, there were four of us on the UI time. None of us had ever done a user study. We found all sorts of fundamental problems. What did we find? Users have a razor focus on results. They have the uncanny ability to cut off the rest of the site. Also, they couldn't find Helo. We also had confusing blurts of engineering speak scattered around the site. This also served as our first focus group. We got all sorts of user reactions. People didn't get the blank home page at all. Google's come a long way since then, and a streamlined Web page seems to work well. You need to eat your own dog food. Everyone Google hires is a Google user. We use it all the time. In February 2000, we went on a ski trip, and Sergey said the day would be our greatest test. We thought he meant a bunch of nerds hitting the slopes, but he meant that we needed to see how much of our traffic was self-generated. Iterations are also important. Try, try again. We tested several versions of Google News. 64 iterations later, we settled on the Google News that you see on our site. The last thing I want to talk about is the importance of humor. How many of you have seen the Google logo change? It's a glimpse at who's behind this thing. Don't be afraid to be human. We call these Google Doodles. We get huge amounts of user feedback. We've been Slashdotted. Now we have a very talented graphic designer who does all of our logos. You'd be amazed how offended Australians get when you equate the holidays with ice and snow. We've also branched out into more cultural holidays. One of my contributions to this has been some of the more cultural logos. We've done some artists, the anniversary of the Nobel Prize. And we did DNA. But my favorite logo of all time is the Dali logo that we did last May. The logo even inspired a book store manager to organize one of the best Dali book displays I've ever seen. Good Experience Live XIII Andrew Zolli: After "Experience Design" Andrew Zolli is a partner in Z + Partners. A forecaster and design strategist, Zolli edited the Catalog of Tomorrow. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live: I'm representing the big and tall wing of the decidedly less sexy than the last speaker contingent of today's program. My most recent design challenge occurred at 6:45 this morning. I had to get to a car service, and I was running a little late. There's a huge South Indian community that's grown up near where I live. The car took off. "To the New York Historical Society!" We end up somewhere that I think was Bellevue, and my driver said we're here. This isn't it! I think it's on the west side. He said, "This is the New York Hysterical Society." We tend to equate experiences with brands. We tend to think less about the linkages between experiences and culture. I started to work on a book that's coming out next year that's about what it's like working in the sausage factory that is today's economy. I went out an dinterviewed a lot of white happy people. 400 people. 100 people in an urban context. 100 in a suburban context. 100 in a rural context. Today companies are in the business of culture. They're brands are culture. But they're not measured or rewarded for the extent to which they further the values of our culture. In urban areas, people are averse to logos on their clothing. What they wear makes a statement. If you go to a rural area, people welcome logos. I went to Muncie, Indiana, to a church that was putting a Starbucks in. The day I visited, the two televangelists were writing a sermon called "Christianity: Are you living the brand?" Across the street, there was a funeral for someone being buried with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. These are complex ambiguities. The people on the left of our society have found a new cause celebre. We have moved beyond identity politics. In Monroe, Alabama, there's a company selling brand new police cars to rural communities for $1. The state has vacated. There's no infrastructure. The deal is that the cars are adorned with corporate logos. Now, you won't just see interstitial ads in between shots of white trash on the Cops TV show, you'll see it during the arrest itself. Why is this happening? This is not these companies' fault. It's because the market has become a central meaning-making organization in people's lives. Meaning-making organizations like churches and political parties. How many of you know who your congressman is? But everyone has an opinion about Wal-Mart. The state has taken a step back, and the market has taken its place. There are two interesting periods in history. One is the one in which everything was invented. And one was the most recent period. Think about the change you've experienced in the last two decades, multiply it by 25, and that's the change experienced in the initial invention period. What causes this thrusting upward? Globalization, new technology, deregulation, tax policy, and public policy. Back in the early 1980s we embarked on two critical decisions. One was to deregulate. And one was to cut back on making public policy. The first one looks like Enron when you swing it all the way out. And the other looks like corporate logos on cop cars when you swing it all the way out. Companies practically wet themselves over these curves. We pushed the market into the public sphere. At the same time, the conversation moved. Commodities changed into products changed into services changed into experiences. You can differentiate there, so do it. Here's the interesting thing. Our conversation as professionals and designers stopped there. The other side of that is culture. It's about being a cultural icon and having a different relationship. There's also a collision between the force of intimacy and transparency. Google Home Depot. The first thing that comes up is Home Depot. Then Home Depot Sucks. Then Home Depot's suppliers. One of my favorite sites is BrandDating.nl, which matches people based on whether they're Coke and Pepsi people. What comes next? What's likely to come is a new curve elevated by new drivers: values, sustainability, accountability, dialogue. Is growth the paramount virtue? Is scale the enemy of authenticity? Do we need a longer term view? Is profit merely financial? Are we only consumers? How should we measure and reward? Eamonn Kelly, head of the Global Business Network summed it up best: "We've pushed market wisdom and moral wisdom as far apart as possible. The goal now is to bring them back together." Good Experience Live XII Maryam Mohit: Good Web Customer Experience Maryam Mohit is vice president of UI and product reviews for Amazon.com. As such, she has been involved in Amazon's online customer experience, user interface, usability, consumer research, program management, design, and Web development. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live: What I know a little a bit about is creating good Web customer experiences. I've been at Amazon for about forever. One of the reasons I joined Amazon was because of a bad experience I had at E3 in 1995 at the LA Convention Center. There I was at E3 and the rage was all virtual reality. I said, you know what? I don't want to do this. I don't want to spend my time and whatever intellectual capital I have doing this, getting kids to spend time inside and in their computers. I'm going to figure out how to do something different with technology. How can we use technology to help people do less unpleasant things like drive to a shopping mall and parking and shorten those experiences. How can we spend more time outside and in the world? 9. Let the data drive. Whenever possible, it's better to make decisions based on statistics and quantitative data than just on an opinion. If everyone has an opinion, that's not really a useful way to spend our time. For example, we moved the Proceed to Checkout button from the left side to the right side because our tests showed a statistically significant difference. We're all on the same team. Let's let the best design win. 8. Measure the right things. If you're going to use a data-driven approach, it's really important to measure the right things. In spring 2000, our business had been growing really fast. We could no longer show all of our stores in a single row of tabs. So we added a second row of tabs. The Ziggurat of tabs was looming out there if we weren't careful. So we started working on a new mode of navigation. In fall 2000 we launched what we called personalized navigation. These five buttons included personalized stores based on your activity, as well as some stores we thought you would like. We got great quantitative statistics as well as great qualitative feedback. So we launched the new navigation. But as we used it over time, something just didn't feel right. We went back and investigated. We realized that we'd done the wrong experiment. We'd had too many variables in the experiment -- design and navigation plus personalization. There was another option: Keep the tabs, but add navigation. Being data driven is crucial but tricky. What are you really testing? 7. Listen to your customers. The point I want to make is that it's really important to listen to your customers when you don't want to hear what they have to say -- or when you don't like what they have to say. Or when they ask you to do something that's really hard. For years, customers would say to us that they loved browsing and shopping for books online, they really want to pick up the book and flip through it. We said that's too hard. It's a limitation of the medium. But we looked at it. And in 2001 we added a feature Look Inside the Book. You can read part of the first chapter. We would rather have you not buy a book than buy a book that you don't want. We want people to make the right decision when they buy a book. 90% of the people who used the feature said that it influenced their purchase decision. Doing this project was a really big pain in the butt. But listening to the customers was very important. 6. Innovate on their behalf. Use the expert knowledge that you have to innovate and make your customers' lives and experiences better. This is different than innovating to impress your friends and colleagues. The classic example at Amazon is one-click shopping. No customer ever came to us and said what I really want is one-click shopping. In fact, our first user tests made people really nervous. They thought that it was just a little too fast. We knew that people wanted fast easy shopping. One of the ways we modified the design was adding small parentheses that said, "You can always cancel it later." Another more recent example is Listmania. The idea behind Listmania is that it's a community-driven list-building feature. You can make a list of items that surface along with relevant search results. Again, this isn't something that someone asked for. Mark's giving me the time signal, so I'm going to skip ahead. 2. Don't let your org chart show on your home page. There's no reason search is on the left side on some pages and on the right here other than that different teams built different parts of the site at different times. It's one customer. It's one Web site. It's one experience. Customers don't care who built one part of the site. 1. It's not just about the Web. It's about the 360-degree customer experience. Good Experience Live XI James Howard Kunstler: The Horror of the Industrial City James Howard Kunstler is author of the books The Geography of Nowhere and the City in Mind. A resident of upstate New York, Kunstler is a regular contributor to the New York Times. He has no formal training in architecture or urban design. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live: We're concerned here with the issue of place. How many of you come from places that are more like this than New York City. Sometimes we call it suburban sprawl. I call it the national automobile slum. There's a lot of misunderstanding about this. There's tremendous distress among Americans who have to live in places like this. One of the big concerns about America is that it's all the same. Well, the hill towns of Tuscany are all the same. The boulevards of Paris are all the same. It's not that these environments are the same, it's that the experiences you have there are uniformly terrible. The virtual is not an adequate substitution for the authentic. There's a part of our every day world called the public realm. It's the physical manifestation of the public interest and public good. And it's the container of our civic life. You have to treat that in a certain way. You have to use architecture and buildings to define space. We need to honor the public realm in order to make civic life possible. We need to be oriented in time and culture. We need to see visibly in the language that surrounds us to know where we've come from and where we're going. We also need to have hope for the future. To remove that hope is a catastrophic event. This is all part of the culture of civic design. And it has a culture as strong as that of Web design. Your ability to create a sense of place depends entirely on the ability to define space. There are places not worth caring about. There are environments in which no one wants to be. Then there are public spaces worth caring about. There's a particular way that you assemble a public gathering place. This place succeeds because it has an active permeable edge in which things can enter and leave. Boston City Hall Plaza is a public space failure. And we don’t want to fix it because we don't want to hurt IM Pei's feeling. This is the back of city hall. And remember that this is an architecture design competition winner. There's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel good about walking down this block. Ask yourself, what are the languages, grammars, and rhythms that this is saying? A kind of despotism that is unspoken. This is a picture of the convention center in the town I live in. This building is designed like a DVD player. Aux. In. Power supply. Who gives a fuck? Now this is Main street America. You've got convenient space for shopping. You've got stores on the first floor, and other stuff happens upstairs. Also, access is on the first floor. We call that at grade. Then we've got the nature Band-Aid. We think that if we're green we can heal the sick urbanism we've got in our culture. Here's an example of part of that culture. There's a role for nature in the urban center, and it tends to be formal. The trees have four jobs to do, and that's it. Job number one is to spatially create a special pedestrian zone visually. Job number two is to protect the pedestrians psychologically and physically from the vehicular traffic on the street. Number three is to filter the light and make the sidewalk a more pleasant place to be. And job number four is to soften the urban hardscape. We've gotten away from that. Where does the problem lie? I call it the horror of the industrial city. You've got this congestion. The idea gets fixed in our collective urban consciousness that we need to go back to the country. You know, live in the woods. The first incarnation of that can be seen in suburbia. We'll work half a day in urbanism, and then we'll go home to our rural villa. What happened is that it mutates. It becomes kind of traffic. It ends up being not country living but a cartoon of country living. Suburbia has been promising country living for the last 50 years. It ends up having all of the congestion of city living and none of the urban amenities. Here's a perfect example of subdivision living. What's really going on here? Why aren't there any windows on the side? The family that built the house may say they wanted to save the $4,000 it would've cost to add windows. That's bullshit. They're blinders to maintain the illusion of country living. And look at the size of that porch. That's just a television screen. You'd have to be a family of pituitary dwarves to use that porch. It's 14 inches deep. It projects the illusion that we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. And what message does this building, a school in Las Vegas, send? It tells children that they must have done something really wrong to end of there. Notice the token bit of nature. Thank you, Sierra Club of Las Vegas. We need a new urbanism. I've been very proud to be associated with the new urbanist movement for the last 10 years. It's a movement working to reform the public realm of America, the shared public place. We've been busy diving into the dumpster of history to retrieve all of the information we haven't used for 50 years. Like, how do we design a town? You've got the public stuff, the monumental stuff. And you've got the private stuff. Put them together and you get the civitas. One neighborhood is a village. Several neighborhoods are a town. Several towns make up a city. Cities are living organisms, and cities are more than the sum of their parts. There's a lot of experimentation going on for attempting to retrofit the architectural garbage that we're left with. This is a good example. This is a dead mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Eastgate Mall. The idea was that it would be redesigned as a new neighborhood. We would impose a new street and block system over the old parking lots and structures. The more frontages you create, small little blocks, the more opportunities you will have for reconstruction. Finally, we're using the idea of the normal building block as the new approach to urban planning, not the megastructures. We can return mutilated urban places to neighborhood centers. We're going to have to reorganize just about everything in America. Things like Wal-Mart are going to be gone in five to 10 years. The damage that these places do is difficult to calculate. And they did it with the complicity of America. That's the law of perverse outcomes. People don't get what they expect. They get what they deserve. We need to rebuild these local networks of economic dependence. Life is tragic. Bruce Willis isn't going to come in in the third act and save us. We need to do this ourselves. The end result of creating 27,000 places that might not be worth caring about is that we might have created a country that’s not worth defending. Good Experience Live X Sam Brown: Computers and Comic Art Sam Brown is the creator of Explodingdog, a Web site that is interactive only if you are lucky enough to have Brown draw a picture based on a title that you suggest. An active video gamer, Brown specializes in stick figures. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live: My name is Sam Brown. I do the Web site Explodingdog. Basically, it's just a collection of 1,200-1,500 drawings I've done over the last three years. They all work the same way. They're drawn based on phrases emailed to me by fans of the site. I've been doing this for about three years. They're a journal or a book about my life. I have pictures of old girlfriends. I have pictures of old jobs. I've also drawn pictures of nightmares I've had about crazy-looking Roman emperors trying to steal my car keys. All of these were drawn on a drawing tablet on the computer. My father was always really into computers. I was always into drawing and art and never got into computers until I took a class in which you plotted points to make shapes and draw pictures. When I was in fourth grade, I had to do a science project. It was the first time I had to present something I'd made on the computer to people on the computer. I made a Hypercard presentation about bridges. Everyone else came in with your usual science-fair projects. I came in with a computer. I didn't win. The kid next to me who'd glued rocks to a piece of cardboard won. But I didn't just win, I got yelled at. Everyone else had worked so hard, and all I did was bring in my father's computer. I had tried to explain how you could click around and go through the presentation, but I don't think any of my teachers had even seen a computer. Then my dad tried getting me into the Internet in 1994 or 1995. I was a senior in high school, and if it didn't have anything to do with girls or beer, I wasn't interested. That was pretty much my attitude until 1999 when I was a senior in college. I was fed up with art school. Everything was so precious, and it was such junk. In response to these projects, I made a series of talking dogs. If you plugged their tail in, they'd say things like, "Hello, I'm a talking car." I even made a metal dog that peed oil. At the same time I made a series of 10 dog animations. They were all about half an hour long each. And they made absolutely no sense whatsoever. One of them was Exploding Dog. I graduated from college and got this office job where all I did was sit in front of the computer. That was when I learned how cool the Internet was. And since I was no longer in school, I had no outlet form my artwork. So I made an awful Web site. At the same time I had a friend who had a performance at an art gallery. I said that I'd like to do a performance at an art gallery. I don't remember what I was going to do because I never did it. The night before the presentation I decided that if I was going to fail I'd fail big. So I made up hundreds of posters saying Come see the artwork of Sam Brown One night only. My name's not even Sam Brown. It's Adam. I made up that name for the performance and now I'm stuck with it. I went to a convenience store, bought some pads of paper, and sat at the gallery all night drawing pictures for people. After that I put up three pictures I'd drawn with a mouse in five minutes and said send me a title, and I'll draw more pictures. I've done that for the last three years. I like to think of this as more than a title and a picture. But I like to think about it as a title, the picture, and the space between them so they make more of a story. Does that make sense? The story happens in your head. That led me to making books, which is what I've been doing for the last year and a half. I've been trying to do stories more. I wanted to do more than a dumb comic strip or dumb comics. I'm really sold on the Internet now. Explodingdog kinda makes sense if you see one picture or two pictures, but you really need to see 28 pictures for it to make sense. There are characters, and there's a kind of Explodingdog world. Good Experience Live IX The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players: Look at Us The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players is a three-piece musical group that creates music based on photographic slides acquired at yard sales and estate sales. Here is a rough transcript of remarks made during their performance at Good Experience Live: We are the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. My name is Jason, and I play the keyboard. My name is Tina, and I run the slide projector. My name is Rachel, and I play the drums. We are a conceptual art rock band. We read the newspapers to track down strangers' yard sales. We look for obituaries to see who died. We go to their estate sales, and we buy their slide collections. Assuming they have a slide collection. We turn these slide collections into pop rock performance exposes. We're going to do the best 15 minutes of our songs this afternoon. This song is called Look at Me and is about two retired military nurses named Jean and Cathy. How do we know their names? Sometimes they write them on the bottoms of the slides. Everyone's slide collections says, "Look at us!" And by us I mean them. For this next song, we were fortunate enough to acquire slides taken from a traffic education class in the '70s. We like to call this one "Middle America." This is a slide that's been in our act for about a year now. But you see that Hershey bar guy? I just noticed him and every time I look at him he is so disturbing. This is the content of the Opnad Contribution Study Committee Report from June 1977. This song will justify our existence. These were taken from an internal McDonald's corporate marketing meeting. These slides were meant to be buried for absolutely forever. We unearthed them in Seattle. We turned these into a six-song rock opera. Part one, "Theme from Opnad." Part two, "What Will the Corporation Do?" We took Ed Schmitt's quote here word for word and turned it into a rock opera number. Words by Ed Schmitt. Music by the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. This is a controversial piece. This song was banned in 17 states, along with our first two CD's. This song is called "Wendy's, Sambo's, and Long John Silver's." "New competitors are using network television to take advantage of efficiency." I just got the hurry up from the drummer here. That's OK. This is part four of six, and it's called "Let's Not Have the Same Weight in 1978." Joe Casper raises several troubling questions, actually. We're at part five of six. They're at the crucial part where they need to ask the eternal important question of, "Why did we decide to take this decision to you?" Who should we take this question to, Ed Schmitt? Ed Schmitt? Then you hear some rumblings in the back: Joe Casper. Look at Joe. Everyone wanted to be a white-collar executive. Joe was a vinyl-collar executive. They don't make executives like Joe Casper any more. Joe Casper was not a man of many words. He was a many of high fashion." Thank you so much! This is part six of six. It's the final song of our part of the afternoon. "Together, As a System, We Are Unbeatable." It's how they wrapped up their business meeting rock opera. That's all! Good Experience Live VIII Ze Frank: Participative Projects and Popularity Ze Frank is an interactive artist and humorist, as well as co-founder of the design collective MediaBrand. Frank's freelance Web design and animation has been featured in Print Magazine and Communication Arts. In 2002, Frank's personal Web site won the People's Voice Webby Award in the best personal Web site category. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live: Radically inclusive environments. That's amazing. I dread any alternative. Since 1997 the porn industry is the only sector that has posted more than a 40% growth rate. I apologize for some of the terminology I'll be using. Hardware. Software. Embedded objects. Under the fold. Unix. Layouts. Mounting a drive. Web logs. GUI. Flash. I'm a little flustered today. In March 2000 I created a poignant flash piece that was an invitation to my 29th birthday party. I sent it out to 17 people. Within four days, 750,000 people a day were coming to this site. For those of you not familiar with numbers, that's about the number of grains of salt that will fit into a toilet. I'm apparently some sort of viral marketing genius. I was contacted by Kodak three weeks later and asked to fly down to Atlanta to talk to them about heading up their viral marketing department, The meeting went really well. It's been really great being poplar. You become fascinated by what is popular and, more importantly, how to remain popular. I maintain the site as a place for my own personal experimentation in new media. Two, it's really pretty cool. And three, it's interesting to interact with people. In the last few years, I've responded to 30,000 emails. In the beginning, I was really, really interested in developing new content. I began to rely on audience suggestions for new content ideas. One woman emailed me to say that if I ever came out to Boulder I should rock out with them. This is me rocking out. Oh! I have a cat. Another young woman wrote me that her mother was extremely interested in kaleidoscopes. She had a collection of more than 100 kaleidoscopes. She asked me to make her mother an online kaleidoscope. It's also a drawing tool. It was my first opportunity to interact with an audience. People could send me screenshots of images they made. I now have a gallery of thousands of images. That's the opportunity that I have. To interact with thousands and thousands of people. These aren't designers. But I can motivate people to create things and become part of something bigger. For one project, I created an online interactive alphabet. That's the letter project. I've done a lot of these, trying to figure out the boundaries of participative projects that end up with something that's somewhat aesthetic. In the fiction project, there are thousands and thousands of posts, and about 50 completed stories. And this year I've partnered with the people who run 24-hour blogathon to develop a 24-hour fiction writing contest to raise money for charity. The important thing when starting a project is to know what you want to do. Before I did the letter project, I did the word project. I ended up with 2,000 words I didn't know what to do with. I wasted a lot of people's time. I apologize. I'm also interested in games. A lot of us spent a lot of time indoors playing Zork. We felt like we were mastering something, but there's a lot that happens in the game that's totally random. You feel like you're getting really good at something, but it all comes down to a random number. I've created some games: Atheist, it's misspelled; Buddhist; and a racing game in which at the end, I subtract a random number from your score -- that quadrupled the amount of times people would refresh to play the game. A lot of what I've done has been random, but there are a few things I've held true to. One is intimacy. I email everyone back who emails me. I talk in the first person on the site. The other thing is that I don't use any humor that insults anyone else but me. I'd rather see more humor that's self-deprecating than sarcastic and biting. Simplicity, obviously. Having limitations. And also ambiguity. I've experienced this site as a linear process. A lot of people come to the site and experience it as a whole. I have an nsFAQ, not so frequently asked questions in which I list all of the questions but none of the answers. You can make up myths about yourself. You can work on your own self-perception in a way. Good Experience Live VII Pam Lewis: Grassroots (Show) Business Pam Lewis is the director of youth programs for the All Stars Project Inc., a nonprofit focusing on anti-violence activism. Lewis also co-directs the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth, a leadership training program. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live: I find it very moving about people coming together. That's what we do at the All Stars Project, bring different people together to see what they can do. The All Stars has been around for a little more than 20 years. I came to New York from Kansas City with $50 in my pocket to volunteer for the All Stars. We didn't want to take any money from the government, so we hit the streets asked people for money. We now have a donor base of 20,000 donors. We're a $4.5 million (?) nonprofit, and we haven't taken any money from the federal government. We work with 20,000, and we'd like to change the world. We talk a lot about possibilities, experiences, and environment. The All Stars is about play, creativity, and performance. Our flagship program is the All Stars Talent Show Network. 350 kids show up for an audition, and everyone makes the show. It's a radically inclusive environment where the kids are welcome. The kids have to come back for a workshop. The groups are led by graduates of the program, and they have to come up with a show with people that they don't know. We're building community. There are a lot of communities we don't go to. That's where the All Stars is. But we're not the kind of crazy where we're liberal. We go in slowly. We ask parents to volunteer. The community is producing it. That's the success. Two weeks after the workshop we put on a show. Sometimes we have to turn 400 people away. Now we stay in a community as long as we need to and put on as many shows as we need to so everyone can see the show. This is grassroots showbiz. Now we're moving into business itself. We've got the Development School for Youth. We're looking for kids who want to grow. When we interview people, we ask them the standard interview questions, and at the end, we say, OK, we'll cal you in two weeks to let you know if you got in. Guess what, everyone gets in, They go through a 12-week program. It's not important to learn facts, it's important to have experiences. Kids in failing skills don't need more remediation. They need development. Look at Take A Child to Work Day. Poor kids don't have those kinds of experiences. So we take them to Wall Street. We don't tell kids that the way they talk is wrong. We tell them that they need to expand their repertoire and develop some new performances. We don't look for the top 10%. We look for the bottom 90. Having more experiences is motivating. We need to think about how we're growing our kids and not giving up on the children in failing schools. We're developing new models that work. They're performance based, not acquisitional based. Our program is a growth program for everyone. Good Experience Live VI Rick Robinson: Connecting People Rick Robinson is vice president of AOL Community Products. The former editor in chief of BBS Magazine, Robinson joined AOL in 1996 as the founding managing editor of Digital City Philadelphia. In 1998, he became director of the Digital City network. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live: I have a couple of rules. If you have a phone, please turn it on. Feel free to communicate. I'm OK with that. The other thing is that I'll be reading a little bit. I'm sorry if that deters your attention, but I can't remember everything. Lastly, I get a little nervous when I speak, so if someone wants to come up and sit on stage with me, feel free. Mark? Thank you. What is this AOL community thing? It's hard to pin down, but here are some examples. In the '90s, before I went to work for AOL, I read about people who would get married in chat rooms. At the time, that crystallized my thinking about what the possibilities online were. There are no boundaries. It's the people. Shortly after I joined AOL in 1996, there were people spending $300 a month to communicate with other people. That was when people paid by the minute not by flat rate. And these weren't basement dwelling people. They were people like you and me. We try to empower our members. We give them an easy to use platform of tools and get out of the way. What you find is not professional-looking screens, not poetry, but real human emotions. We also try to zipper our experience. We make it one experience, taking all of the member-contributed content and zipper it together. One of te benefits of having such a large membership is that we can connect people in a lot of different ways. People stay online for that companionship. Those connections. Despite all the gloom about AOL and Time Warner, the community is still flourishing. Connecting people is really what we do. When people discover that people are as reachable as information online, they're hooked. | |
