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- No events.
10 February 2010
Nanoculture aka “Douglas Coupland has no Facebook or MySpace page.” (But he does have a Twitter.)
Excerpt from one of Deborah Solomon’s infamously condensed interviews in The New York Times Magazine. (I like them.) With Douglas Coupland, famous Canadian, infamous coiner of the term Gen X. The quote in the subject line of this post is drawn directly from his website. Funny, that.
- New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism.
Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
NYT: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Avatar, Deborah Solomon, Douglas Coupland, Generation X, Harry Potter, Internet Fads, Internet Poem, Nanoculture, New York Times, Social Networks, Taylor Swift, The Community Function, The Problem With Nostalgia
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8 January 2010
Fun with problems
The urge is to disclose all my problems.
The problem is that I don’t realize they’re obvious.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Ethics, Internet Fads, Photos, Problems, Youth
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22 October 2009
Doppelganger Alec Bemis
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Dopplegangers, Facebook, Internet Fads
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21 June 2009
Feeling green (for Iran)
So, lots of people are turning their Twitter & Facebook icons hexadecimal color #009900. (Take that Pantone corporation!) Through some lazyGoogling I discovered the significance of this.
- The color in this form is the shade of green used in the Flag of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Islam used/uses this shade of green symbolically because the tribe of the prophet Muhammad had a green banner and because to them green represented paradise (the Persian word for garden) to desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes when they gathered at an oasis.
Islam venerates the color, and it expects paradise to be full of lush greenery.
Many flags of the Islamic world are green, as the color is considered sacred in Islam.
Through some additional lazyGoogling I read a bit about the social networking campaign. I’m definitely suspect about whether a million hexadecimal avatars will change a damn thing. This discussion that appears on The Washington Post strikes a dubious note as to Twitter’s utility as a political tool; this piece on Slate is downright cynical.
My guess is that the most disturbing aspect of the Iranian protests to those in power is that people are taking to the streets not that they’re Twittering. It’s certainly a good marketing move for the activists and for Twitter itself, though.
If Twitter feeds are ineffective then arty YouTube videos about this situation are almost certainly useless in changing the world.
I like arty videos, though, and this one made me stop to think for a second. Thought is indeed capable of changing things, when transmuted into action.
Use this site by Arik Fraimovich if your avatar is green with Iranian activist envy.
UPDATED JUNE 22, 2009: A version of the same video as seen above without soundtrack after the jump.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Activism, Color, Ethics, Hexadecimal, Internet Fads, Iran, Islamic Green
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11 June 2009
Two examples of “visual art” imagery as selected by (semi-)democratic processes
Below are two examples of what visual art looks like as determined by democratic processes. One was determined through a simple Google image search on the term “visual art.” The result is an answer determined via algorithm-enhanced democratic process. The second was arrived at via an open call at the New York Times’ photojournalism blog, a more selective form of democratic process governed by human will and motivation. It was subject to light editing, and the limitation that all images needed to be created via Polaroid.
Click on the images below for more information.
Democracy is a process not an all-encompassing solution to all open questions. Yet, raised as we have been in an era of it’s seeming triumph — viz, American Idol, Barack Obama, the fall of the Soviet empire — the word carries with it all sorts of kneejerk positive implications. There are, however, no absolute goods (just as there are no absolute evils). In some sectors of life & expression, democracy should be considered an, at best, ambiguous tool. (Viz, again, American Idol.) History seems to have determined that democracy is the lesser evil process for making decisions about public affairs. Its use in determining aesthetic issues remains in doubt.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Democracy, Essay, Ethics, Google, Internet Fads, New York Times, Photos, Visual Art