donny miller

ok, so this is not research related at all, but just a link to some *interesting* illustrative art.

Link via Archinect

This one is my absolute favorite.

personifying virtual characters

a few links pointing to Netochka Nezvanova, n4t0's visionary / rhetorician / coder. she is made up. n4t0, or nato, as the less pretentious of us call it, is not my favorite. good art project if that's your sort of thing, but poor documentation made the whole thing more aggravating than it was worth. But it's worth studying, getting a feel for how nezvanova was so successfully fabricated. below are some sample links.

- Ny Arts Magazine Interview
- Salon Article
- Nato Artistic Statement, penned by nezvanova herself...
- Salon Article
- More Nato rhetoric. I swear, the help files actually looked like this.
- If interested, this is a portal to many more of these writings, etc. Certainly the quantity was remarkable.
- And just for fun, nezvanova responds to being tossed from cycling-74's (makers of Max/MSP, the software under which Nato software ran) max forum.

postscript: brooks

As I just posted in a comment - I hope that nobody gets the impression that in my recent entry, I was somehow lauding the work of David Brooks, and especially the Weekly Standard (for those of you who don't know, this is a highly conservative publication). His work is filled with contradictions - read "bobos" and you'll see it immediately. What I was commenting on was a couple of issues he raised that I see as applicable to technological culture building. As I said, I glimpse at his stuff every once and a while not because I agree with him most of the time, but rather, that I disagree with him most of the time. However, I find reading this stuff that exists outside of my leftist tendencies can actually be more challenging than reading, say, Al Franken, who I read with the words "He's so right" oozing out of my mouth after reading every sentence. After all, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.

bobos, superiority complexes, and the commons

I was thinking today about this book I read a couple years ago called Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks - an editor at The Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor to Atlanic Monthly Anyway, it's a good book - a look at the fall of the old, entrenched elites (think the Vanderbilts, the big_family_name) - old money families - and the rise of a new elite who he dubs a "Bourgeois Bohemian." Bobos are educated elites - their spouses are chosen by similarly extraordinary academic backgrounds rather than sterling bloodlines. "They want an oven capacity of 8 cubic feet minimum, just to show they are the sort of people who could roast a bison if necessary." Ok, so how is this topical, or even relevant to interactive media? Let me take a brief stab, with a highly underdeveloped arguement:

I was talking with a friend today about this book, and they were saying that the bobos have helped, in a sense, change the public perception of technology into something less elite and more a part of pop culture. And I would say I totally agree with that. Technological culture has transitioned from an exclusive group to the public sphere, and I think that while the internet was largely responsible for that shift, I think that this "new upper class" was moving in parallel with it - coming up with solutions that made this amorphous network concept marketable - and therefore transferring it to the public sphere. Think of the "dot-com millionaires," and their belief in the perpetual casual friday - stinks of bobo-ism. So what does this mean for this new culture and the future of emerging technolgical spaces like those that Howard Rheingold calls "Wireless Quilts?"

The saturation of technology has serious implications for how the wireless internet will develop. Lawrence Lessig has written that the internet exploded because it "was held in commons-- an innovation commons--instead of auctioned off." Lessig fears that the sale of the radio spectrum to huge corporations will circumscribe this commons, and therefore drastically limit the potential for the wireless web to develop in the productive, unencumbered manner of the internet - as he says, "we need a radical decentralized opportunity to innovate and create using this medium." Which side of Lessig's argument will this new ruling class fall, and how will their influence affect the way that the wireless internet develops? The problem is, that while bobos probably represent the most educated class of elites this country has seen since 1789, and while they have some of the social attributes of the 1960s, they still have the economic attitudes of Reagan era capatilism. Under this style of economics, the idea of the commons more than likely doesn't hold much water with folks who need to sustain specific (high) levels of consumption.

Prompting cause for further concern is the growth of societal passivity that parallels the rise of the bobos. Brooks has a piece in Atlantic Monthly about the development of a Superiority Complex in this bobo elite society - a democratization of elitism in America. He writes "Communications technology has expanded the cultural space. We now have thousands of specialized magazines, newsletters, and Web sites catering to every social, ethnic, religious, and professional clique. You can construct your own multimedia community, in which every magazine you read, every cable show you watch, every radio station you listen to, reaffirms your values and reinforces the sense of your own rightness. It is possible, maybe even inevitable, that you will slide into a solipsism that allows you precious little contact with people totally unlike yourself. But in your enclosed sphere you will feel very important." Such localized spheres of expertise lead to elistist attitudes, regardless of your socio-economic position in society. Even though Bill Gates is smarter and infinitely more wealthy than I am, I still feel superior to him, because I have entrenched myself in a smaller community that finds his company to be morally reprehensible and his products to be full of security holes (among other things). So there, Bill Gates. So a byproduct of this democratic elitism is that people become very passive very quickly, locked in the spheres they occupy where they are at the top. I don't want to engage in the Iraq debate because it might take me out of my little world where I'm always right. Or, more scary from Lessig's perspective: I may resent the fact that AT&T is buying up all the radio spectrum for their wireless operations, but I know that my morals and standards are higher than theirs, so I won't really worry about it. These all are attitudes that are brought about by the rise of bobos and their inherent paradox - consume, yet refute consumerism. We have finally found a way to be apathetic and justify that apathy with this elitist rhetoric we all possess in our little group, and this is a cause for concern in a number of areas, including the way that wireless technology will be developed.

Other notes / thoughts: It is impossible to create a social commons when everyone is in a closed area...These closed nodes are unable to leverage Metcalfe's law. So there. So much to be said about this - so much more I need to think about and write down. Other thoughts: I am better than you all. I am better than you all because I am eating s'mores without putting them in a microwave or toasting them. Microwaves are for losers, and I don't think I need to be bothered with those of you who insist on spreading that low level radiation throughout the immediate vicinity of the microwave. Campfires cause forest fires, and I'm vastly a better person than those of you who would consider destroying our natural resrouces.

FACT: I have work do to that is...gasp...related to classes. Perhaps I should be doing that. Hmmm.