A neat short on digital enthography and how Web 2.0 is changing our relation to information. This comes from an one Michael Wesch, at the Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography Program. Their blog has some interesting video response to the above video.
Fascinating 18-minute piece on the history of the Amen Break, six seconds of drumming from 1969 that has been very influential on modern electronic music, from techno to hip-hop.
There’s a really great article up at New York Magazine, entitled “Say Everything,” about the way that the newest generations are growing up with a new set of conventions about privacy, transparency, and the role of public media in modern life.
One night at Two Boots pizza, I meet some tourists visiting from Kansas City: Kent Gasaway, his daughter Hannah, and two of her friends. The girls are 15. They have identical shiny hair and Ugg boots, and they answer my questions in a tangle of upspeak. Everyone has a Facebook, they tell me. Everyone used to have a Xanga (“So seventh grade!”). They got computers in third grade. Yes, they post party pictures. Yes, they use “away messages.” When I ask them why they’d like to appear on a reality show, they explain, “It’s the fame and the—well, not the fame, just the whole, ‘Oh, my God, weren’t you on TV?’?”
After a few minutes of this, I turn to Gasaway and ask if he has a Web page. He seems baffled by the question. “I don’t know why I would,” he says, speaking slowly. “I like my privacy.” He’s never seen Hannah’s Facebook profile. “I haven’t gone on it. I don’t know how to get into it!” I ask him if he takes pictures when he attends parties, and he looks at me like I have three heads. “There are a lot of weirdos out there,” he emphasizes. “There are a lot of strangers out there.”
Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”
That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”
Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, “Why would anyone do that?” This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (“you know who you are!”), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?
Australian photographer Antti Kemppainen creates a panorama incorporating all three elements in a single stitched together photo.
I just returned from a trip to Ithaca (recruiting at Cornell). We flew into Syracuse via Chicago. On the way into O’Hare on the first leg of the trip, we wheeled around over the lake for an easterly approach and I saw something I’ve never seen: expansive ice floes in clogging up the lake. I summarized it to friend in an email thusly:
Travel has ways of opening up new dimensions, perspectives. Some enabled by humans, some enabled by technology. I’m sitting in O’Hare (my first and home airport) waiting for a delayed flight to Syracuse. The Midwest is iced over, Iowa a white dream of sparkling hills punctuated by meandering streams and the brown texture of small groves of trees looking like oasises amidst the white desert.
We came in on the eastern approach. In order to do this, we had to fly over the northern suburbs and pinwheel back around, low, over the lake. The lake is partially frozen with waves lapping at the shores while huge ice floes sit stoically surrounded by undulating waves.
Lake Michigan was the first body of water in my life. I grew up 4 blocks away from it. I’ve seen ice from the shore in the dead of winter. But today, seeing it from the air, was a whole new experience. It was beautiful.
Coming over the houses and neighborhoods of the North Shore, I was reminded of the rugged and classic beauty that it Chicago.
Unfortunately, my camera was up in the overhead bin and there was no way to grab it while strapped in for landing. But on the way back, I was prepared. I snapped a lot of shots and stuck the best ones (still not really well culled, I just pulled the really bad ones) in this gallery.
