The pervasiveness of the screen in mobile media is pushing convergence development in two particular ways worth noting. The first, how image and text are increasingly treated the same by users, is actually a stepping stone to the second, which is how the convergence (combination) of all media is designed not only to provide the greatest access to as much information as possible, but also to negotiate which material is likely to be noticed first.
In relation to this, NPR recently released an iPhone widget that enables users to download a podcast or listen to live streaming. This particular widget is designed to complement multitasking, as NPR’s Digital SVP & GM Kinsey Wilson explains to Paid Content:
The small television in the kitchen comes to mind when reading Wilson’s explanation: people for the most part listen to the news while getting ready to leave for work in the early morning, or in the evening while preparing dinner. From time to time, when something of interest comes up, people are likely to look up and pay attention to the screen. In this case, the television is used as a radio with visual options. However, as it is obvious, the Television was not initially designed for this function.
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser dedicated to browsing Facebook, called RockMelt, according to rumors we’ve heard from reputable sources. A semi-independent desktop client for Facebook? Doesn’t seem far fetched at all.
The software isn’t publicly available or being discussed yet, but we’ve gotten our hands on an early build and had a look at the front door after download. Robert John Churchill, who was the principal engineer for Netscape Navigator, is the principle engineer for RockMelt as well.
We knew you could make great music on the iPhone. With instrument apps such as Smule’s Ocarina and Leaf Trombone. Still, while they’re cool and surprisingly rich mobile instruments, they’re not all that practical for creating, sampling, and recording musical compositions on the fly.
DopplerPad [iTunes Link] is a turntable-like instrument iPhone app built by one of the two creators of FourTrack [iTunes Link]. Unlike some other apps, this one doesn’t feature just one instrument – it has 37. It doesn’t just play notes; it lets you sample them, no matter where you are. And most of all, you can record and combine the beats to create your own electronic remix.
Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter aren’t just revolutions in online social media. They’re the vanguard of a cultural movement. Illustration: Christoph Niemann
Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.
Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.
As I write this entry, the Internet is flowing with comments and information about Michael Jackson. Here is my drop in the sea of data that will be archived in places people who adopt RSS as part of their daily life will never know exist.
As critical as I am about pop culture, I have to admit that Michael Jackson was ever-present in my growing years; the teenager in me mourns, while the critic cannot help but reflect on the implications of this unexpected and unfortunate death. As sad as Jackson’s passing away is to millions of people, one cannot help but notice how media has changed in the way it handles celebrities and public figures. Just a few years ago there would have been some distance from the dark side of a person’s life. This may still hold true for presidents of the United States as one hardly heard anything negative about Richard Nixon during his funeral. Watergate had become so abstract that it could be cited as a historical moment with no major shame for the country or Nixon’s presidency. This is the power of ahistoricity: people’s lack of historical knowledge made possible by 24 hour news cycles.
But with Michael Jackson a different kind of mourning takes place. His accomplishments and setbacks are cited simultaneously. Everywhere, from CNN to all major newspapers, like the NYTimes and El Pais in Spain, Michael Jackson is remembered for all his deeds–good and bad. As he is remembered as the King of Pop, he is also remembered as a person who was accused of child molestation (this was not proven in court). He is subjected to the aesthetic of reality TV.
In a way this might be healthy for the way people perceive celebrities, as people may become more accepting of public figures’ shortcomings. The sad thing is that scandals sell, and this is the last thing Michael Jackson is remembered for. The King of Pop was planning a comeback, but this one was not to be. He will be remembered as a conflicted figure, who will inevitably be romanticized for his early production and his conflicted last years.
And now, it is time to settle for reissues of MJ’s music in whatever form networked culture will allow. As I write these lines, files of Jackson’s songs are being swapped across the Internet–bootleg remixes made in bedrooms across the world to be shared in just minutes, while music executives figure out a way to cash in on MJ’s music legacy. Such cash-in will be mixed and hard to control. Michael Jackson dies in a time when things for the music industry are not so clear cut and no celebrity is perfect, and that imperfection in the end may mean more cash
He was a person who everyone knew through spectacular images. He may have known himself through the same images as well. As constant exposure rises with social networks, Michael Jackson, the most famous person vanishes. Let this be a rupture in the era of networked media. Michael Jackson is about to become an institution, like Marilyn, like Presley, like Warhol. He will live forever as a spectacular figure. But let’s not forget that somewhere in there was a child who was trying to understand himself. I may be accused of a bit of romanticism with this last statement. Let it be. This is why I chose an early image of Michael Jackson to complement this short reflection on a celebrity I felt I knew, as I had no choice but to acknowledge him everywhere I turned as I grew up. I accepted him as I was bombarded by his presence, just as I am now by the repetition of his spectacular absence. I admit to have moonwalked. RIP MJ.
Just got notice from Zemos 98 of their new book, Codigo Fuente: La Remezcla, which brings together a range of articles on Remix in culture and media. The book is in Spanish. I look forward to reading it and highlight some of the essays. Kudos to Zemos 98.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Che Guevara got some attention at the beginning of 2009 with Steven Soderberg’s film Che, starring Benicio del Toro. More recently, Che is the subject of a book titled, Che’s Afterlife, by Michael Casey. The book is reviewed by the New York Times as a detailed account of Che’s famous image taken by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known professionally as Korda. The story goes that Korda took the photograph during a funeral in Cuba. Korda’s creativity was not only in knowing when to take the photograph, which is for what most photographers are praised, but also in knowing how to crop it. To quote directly from the New York Times:
“By radically cropping the shot, snipping out a palm tree and the profile of another man, Korda gave the portrait an ageless quality, divorced from the specifics of time and place.”
This divorce is what Walter Benjamin noted in the first half of the twenty century in his well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” An essay that many cultural critics have cited and will probably cite, because Benjamin foresaw many of the elements that today inform media culture in all areas of reproduction. (more…)
At last week’s Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups. And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question. The reason that it’s a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days. Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups — also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites — are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.
The millions of people that viewed on TV and online Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration may be surprised to learn that Yo Yo Ma and his quartet did not play live. They performed to a pre-recorded track. The argument for this maneuver is that the moment had to be perfect. The performance had to live up to the occasion and mistakes could not take place:
NPR intereviewed Yo Yo Ma, who was indifferent about the fact that he did not play live. He was quite comfortable with make-believe. The NPR correspondent did not question Yo Yo Ma’s performance for its artistic delivery. The discussion was more about the necessity for this type of simulacrum.
I wonder how far we have come since the days of Milli Vanilli, when the pop-duo saw an end to their careers because they lip-synced to pre-recorded tracks. It must be pointed out that Milli Vanilli did not actually sing at all, so in this sense Yo Yo Ma’s situation is quite different because, as he explained during the radio interview, the quartet had performed the composition the day before the Inaugural Ceremony. Regardless, the fact that, both, the New York Times as well as NPR appear to discuss Ma’s simulacrum with some comfort and amusement does expose the awareness by people and the media that recordings may be acceptable to use in special occasions. In the past, prior to the pervasiveness of recordings, rituals were bound to the immediacy of the moment. Now, rituals are bound to the ever more important perfect recording for posterity. It was more important in the name of history for the Inaugural to have a perfect performance, than to have a real performance.
