Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Could “localism” help dilute “narcissism”?

Update, see end of post.

Ok, ok, I know it’s not a question I (or anyone) could possibly answer in a short blog post, but consider the discussions around the Emily Gould phenomenon (here, here, here, or a million other sites online). Fast Company’s Laura Palotie column, How Emily Gould Turns Us On, closes as follows:

…we like to equally spit on fictional New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw, traditional celebrity Denise Richards and the newest, self-made breed that Gould represents. We scarf down the private, aggravating realities of each with equal appetite, and let the resulting schadenfreude provide a soothing distraction from our own neuroses.

Well, um, maybe. Except that until someone in my Twitter stream tweeted about Gould’s NYT piece, blissfully ignorant me didn’t know who she was — except of course that I had heard of Gawker.

Yes, I did on one or two occasions glance at Gawker, but never really read it and certainly didn’t “follow” it. Why not? Because I don’t live in New York City. Call me naive, but I thought Gawker was all about New York — rather a long ways away from this (literally) “neck of the woods.”

And until reading Palotie’s piece, I didn’t know who Carrie Bradshaw was — I had to reread one sentence to understand that she doesn’t really exist and is in fact one of the characters on …um, a TV show? Something called Sex and the City?

Why would I not know who the Sex and the City characters are? Um, well, …I don’t watch TV. I have a TV (I have sex, too), but I have no access to TV channels (antennae don’t work in Victoria, and I refuse to pay money to the cable company). All I ever watch are DVDs — I don’t have a clue what’s on actual TV this season.

Instead, I know a lot about what’s going on in my local space — some of which overlaps with my online spaces. Not to sound too colloquial, but I’m totally about keeping my eye on the pulse of trends, seeing patterns emerge, knowing what’s coming up in terms of technological innovation. My interest lies in figuring out how that can apply to where I live, to the local.

Neither Carrie Bradshaw or Emily Gould have a locality in my world. Maybe that makes me sound backwards (or just really old) in pop cultural terms? Or perhaps if I were a psychiatrist, I might be interested in one or the other as an emblem for some sort of mental disorder; if I were a professional sociologist, I might be interested in one or the other as a specimen of forensic interest. But I’m not.

From what I recall of Emily Gould’s fantastic (and probably fantastically paid) 8,000 word ramble, there wasn’t anything that I could pattern-match in any useful sort of way to anything I’m interested in figuring out here.

Reading some of the commentaries on Gould, and the underlying assumptions they make that, exuding Schadenfreude, we must all be greedily “scarfing up” each breaking scandal, I can’t help but think that a passionate interest in your locale, in where you are, is a kind of vaccination against the narcissism that serves as a prerequisite to keeping the culture industry humming along.

Technology is making narcissism easier, but it would be wrong to blame technology just because it’s used by what appear to be the terminally narcissistic to amplify their ends. After all, that same technology is also making possible a renaissance of localism, enabling a community’s place-making voices to emerge from under the choke-hold of broadcast media.

It all depends on what you choose to focus on. Obviously, if you focus on the Goulds or the even more fictional Carrie Bradshaws, and you lose your place. Your life is where you make it.

Update, May 30, 7:30am: So, this is ironic… As it happens, I checked our local paper’s “Arts” section this morning — something I usually never do because this paper rarely reports on local arts happenings, instead typically filling this section with pop culture “news” I can easily pick up just about anywhere else. I don’t get why they (the paper) don’t get that I wouldn’t bother looking in my local paper for stuff I can read anywhere else. But I digress…: what did my bleary eyes see on the “local” paper’s “Arts” pages this cloudy a.m.? Not one, not two, not three, but four (4!) “stories” about …yup, you guessed it, Sex and the City. The movie and the TV show. And all of them, save one, were recycled filler from the feed of Canwest News Service. The one that wasn’t from that outlet was a cut and paste job of critics’ snippets cobbled together into an “article,” entitled”From the sublime to the ridiculous, the critics’ take on Sex and the City,” by “Special to the Times Colonist.” It’s enough to make you weep.

And some people think the bloggers are unprofessional or shallow or full of crap, and that those in official media are the professionals. Well, if that were true, one would have to rethink the whole notion of “professional.”

(Oops, my bad: I just now realized that I hadn’t actually included a link to Gould’s NYT piece, and just added it, above, and here.)

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU on Vimeo

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU on Vimeo

Click on the title (above) to see a stop-motion animation of some fantastic graffiti carried out by BLU in Buenos Aires.  Amazing.

Found via Cool Hunting (click through for their description/ commentary).

It probably all comes down to quality

A couple of days ago, I finished reading Walter Kirn’s hilarious article, The Autumn of the Multitaskers, in the current issue of The Atlantic monthly. I suppose part of “successful” multitasking (if you grant that multitasking actually exists successfully in any way shape or form) is having a clear vision of what exactly it is you’re trying to accomplish. And having a clear vision of what the quality of that “way” should be (that’s a bit of a “zen” reference — the way is the goal and all that…)

Today I came across two new online services that promise to customize and micromanage my potential multitasks. In the latest MIT Technology Review, Erica Naone reports on a new start-up: “Maintaining Multiple Personas Online.” Naone’s article describes MOLI, which (as Naone’s subtitle explains), is a “new site [that] lets users create profiles for the different sides of their personality.”

Will this mean that your multiple personalities can multitask independently of one another? Walter Kirn must be doing backflips…

On the other hand, MOLI does seem to offer real help to the chronically (or promiscuously?) connected:

Online social networks have allowed people to easily stay in touch with large groups of friends, but the flip side has been well publicized. Some users have struggled over what to do when certain people–such as a boss or an ex-boyfriend–ask to be listed as a friend on their profile. Adding someone as a friend gives him access to the user’s profile, photos, and daily musings. Worries about privacy were renewed recently when Facebook’s Beacon advertising initiative began broadcasting information about users’ purchasing habits throughout its networks. (See “Evolving Privacy Concerns.”) Now Moli, a recently launched social-networking site, aims to win over concerned users. President and COO Judy Balint says that the site is intended for a more mature audience than the teenagers targeted by many social-networking websites. Directed at users who are trying to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles–with different privacy settings–within one account.

(…snip…)

Users of Moli can set up as many profiles as they want, and they can choose to make them public, private, or hidden. Anyone, whether he has signed up for Moli or not, can search for and view a public profile. A private profile will show up on searches, but to access it, a user must be a member of Moli and must have approval from the profile’s owner. A hidden profile is invisible in searches and can only be viewed by people invited by the owner. Balint says that users are free to set up multiple profiles of various types, with the requirement that they must designate at least one public profile.

Balint says that the site is also intended to appeal to small-business owners, who can use it to set up an intranet and extranet for free. For a fee, businesses can run a store through Moli.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20183/page1

And as if that weren’t enough, my husband just sent me this press release from a start-up based in Victoria’s own Vancouver Island Technology Park, a new company called Sprout:

MT Mind Technology announced the launch of its first product, Sprout, as a public beta on February 8th, 2008. Sprout is a new platform that sources hyper-personal online content. Sprout learns the user’s likes and dislikes based on simple positive and negative feedback. Designed with no initial set-up and a low cognitive load, users can start cultivating their content immediately.

To try Sprout for yourself, check out www.yoursprout.ca.

Located at the Vancouver Island Technology Park in Victoria, BC, MT Mind Technology was founded in 2006 by Evan Willms and Duncan MacRae. The company is developing solutions for individuals and organizations to effortlessly avoid information overload.

According to Sprout’s webpage, the service aims to personalize web content for all the yous you are:

Can a search engine, blog or newsreader personalize its content to suit your tastes perfectly? The straight answer is “no”. So, we designed Sprout to be everything they’re not; from its ability to pull the freshest content from thousands of sources online, to its ability to learn what you’re into and weed out the rest. That’s right, folks. The future of intelligent online content sourcing is here. And it’s leafy.

A new leaf. A fig leaf, too, perhaps? Could be very interesting.

…Now if only Walter wouldn’t make such a racket, jumping up and down!

Fairtilizer

Very fun site — tons to explore, much to hear. I have one invite left…

Fairtilizer - Track 3898 - Chungking - Love Is Here To Stay (Kissy Sell Out’s Own Private Idaho)

Wow… (Body by Dance — Nike)

An amazing ad for Nike on YouTube, must see. (Click through — I can’t seem to be able to embed YouTube videos here.)

(found via if! from PSFK, who got it via Buenos Aires Spotting. Thanks, guys!)

(PS/edit: in particular, if you want more background information on the ad, click through to Buenos Aires Spotting — very useful.)

Virtual “reality”?

MIT Technology Review blogger Simson Garfinkel just posted an interview with Brian Shuster, CEO of Red Light Center, a virtual reality site for, well, red light type activities (or what a homogenised and American-centric perspective believes to be red light reality). I watched the introduction (which you can view without having to open an account or download the software), and it struck me that Barbie-doll babes are alive and well in computer-land.

Anyway, Garfinkel’s blog interview asks Are Virtual Drugs a Gateway to the Real Thing?, because — yup, that’s right — you can now indulge in virtual ecstacy, marijuana, or “even munch on some virtual mushrooms” online.

I must be hopelessly beyond the pale, but I don’t “get” how or why a virtual “drug experience” could possibly approximate even remotely a real drug experience — just as I don’t get how a virtual sex experience with the hopelessly “perfected” tits-at-attention (but flaccid penises) of these virtual “bodies” could ever come close to the surround-sound and immersive experience of a real sexual encounter between real bodies. Those online “bodies” look only slightly less less-convincing than the plastic blow-up dolls that men used to purchase for their solitary delectation.

It seems to me that Shuster is striking a pseudo-pedagogical pose when he says:

By separating the social pressure from the real-world application, users have a totally revolutionary mechanism to deal with peer pressure, and actually to give in to peer pressure, without the negative consequences.

Huh. So, we’re supposed to learn something here?

But what, exactly?

Shuster elaborates:

Just as with the sexual experimentation within Red Light Center, users will have the ability to decide for themselves whether using drugs is an enhancement or detriment to their life experience, even before ever using drugs in the real world. Armed with that information, they can then make more-rational decisions if they are confronted with that choice in the real world because they will have already gone through it virtually.

That said, it is critical to recognize that users who develop a full social circle within Red Light Center will have an online support structure of friends. Being accepted into a social community and having genuine friends are defenses that can be called on to prevent substance abuse in the real world. There is no reason to believe that this wouldn’t hold true for online users, and thus provide them with additional deterrence to ongoing real-world drug use.

Have we, collectively, come to this: a con not by real drug pushers, but by their virtual kin? Are we so bereft of biological, full-body feeling that a virtual high would convince us of anything? Are consequences only that which can be calculated by the mind, but not experienced viscerally?

Here’s a question: if virtual drug experiences were possible, how come no one has yet introduced a virtual wine-tasting club? (Hint: the answer has something to do with your body, and that you have taste buds.)

The key word is perhaps “hopeless,” whether it’s those “hopelessly ‘perfected’ tits-at-attention” I referenced above or the hopelessness of real people looking for a “full social circle within Red Light Center” and thinking they’ll have “genuine friends” there.

Loft Cube: from Trailer Park Boys to …real men who know design?

This is interesting — via cultural blah blah: the sexy mobile home. Did I say sexy? I meant sexy! This isn’t your hick cousin’s trailer park trailer: this is tasty….

Called the Loft Cube, it’s currently making the rounds in Europe, according to Men Style. The design is by Werner Aisslinger. It’s 400-550 square feet, which isn’t palatial, but given the size of some newer condo developments, it’s square footage that can hold its own. For details on how to purchase, see the Loft Cube website…

This is the weirdest fashion thing I ever saw…

I think I must be getting old or something, or else maybe it’s Carneval…
Ok, I don’t know what to say. Must be the hair down my throat…

Click on the link:
The Hole - video powered by Metacafe

What is on his chest, though?

(via Diane, A Shaded View on Fashion, via Regine.)

That was …clean. (And not at all [stormy]…)

I was going to write “that was easy,” but realised that while it was “easy,” it wasn’t easy. “Clean” more appropriately describes the procedure: surgical, “that’s it, then,” as they put it. I just deleted my flickr account.

Now I’m off to the theatre. Am going to see something called [storm], by battery opera of Vancouver. It had a terrible review in the today’s local paper, but then a friend of mine insists that this reviewer knows nothing of dance. We’ll see.
Oh well.

PS/Update, March 15/07: Alas, Grania Litwin’s review (see above) of [storm] was only too accurate. It was not a compelling experience. I thought the choreography was best during the “aikido” sequence, which really didn’t involve dance as much as it involved copying the moves of an ancient martial art. The rest of it was repetitive, and I kept wondering how it was supposed to resonate with, or amplify, either the accompanying music (sea shanties, for the most part, accompanied by an amplifed saxophone fixated on the basso range) or the narrated bits. “Narrated” is actually the wrong word entirely — spoken text, perhaps, conveys it better, as the emphasis was on surrealistic juxtaposition of specific anecdote with universal meaning and complexity. (You know, surely! Don’t we all vaguely recall some old canard about surrealism as the meeting of an umbrella and a …what was the other thing?, on a sewing machine? Well, yeah, something like that…) The whole thing was thin, but really pretentious.