BigShinyThing

Back in the day, Jaron Lanier invented Virtual Reality — or at least Virtual Reality in its original 80s form: helmets, 3D, the works. Since then, his pundity has become an intelligent, annoying and often insightful thorn in the side of mainstream digital culture. His latest volley is against a meta-concept that underlies the Wikipedia and much of Web 2.0 — the belief that ‘no-one is smarter than everyone’:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

It’s a good, contrarian, rant. Enjoy.

[Via the ever-stimulating Edge]

As part of their World Cup promotion, Nike has put together a nice little ad set on the legendary football pitches of Hackney Harshes. They’ve also released a line of World-Cup sportswear emblazoned with the Hackney borough identity. Problem is they didn’t bother to license it from the council first.

Hackney’s newly re-elected Mayor — Jules Pipe — is understandably not amused:

We have been using this logo for more than 40 years — since before England last won the World Cup! I was shocked that such a huge global company would use it without even approaching us for permission. Nike is one of the biggest sportwear companies in the world. They are selling this stuff everywhere — some of our residents have seen it in shops in Spain, and we have seen it marketed on the internet in Japan, Germany, the US and Italy. They have not offered a penny in compensation to the people of Hackney.

One way of putting this right could be giving us a fair percentage of the retail price and some sportswear for every school child in the borough. Nike have taken, for their own profit, something that belongs to the people of Hackney. They have now offered to meet us for talks and I hope they will have the decency to offer a fair settlement and save this going to court.

We have asked them to withdraw all merchandise until this issue can be settled. I also want assurances from Nike that all this kit has been ethically produced.

Mayor Pipe has pledged to spend every penny gained from Nike on sports development in the borough. Given Hackney’s ongoing financial problems, every penny would help.

[Via CMM News]

The stimulus is the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist recently sentenced to 10 years hard labour for using the internet to inform people that newspapers were being censored in their coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yahoo! gave information to the authorities that was used in evidence for his conviction. The campaign site features a neat little ‘fragment’ of suppressed information for bloggers and others to spread virally.

Here’s ours.

And for those who want to register their voice, there is the usual online pledge.

This is nicely positioned on the side of the White Cube gallery and directly in front of our favourite posh eatery, Cru. It’s one of a pair commissioned from Banksy by Bono for his editorship of The Independent but we like it anyway.

Earlier in May, US lawmakers reacted to public fears about online child abuse with proposals for a bill (DOPA) which would block access to social networking sites and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries. Too blunt and misdirected a weapon for the purpose? Many think so — to the extent that Business Week ran a recent analysis which claims that DOPA could spell an early end to the nascent world of Web 2.0:

[DOPA] could rule out content from any number of Internet companies, including Yahoo! and Google. What’s more, DOPA would prohibit sites that enable users to create their own content and share it. That covers a wide swath of the online world, known colloquially as Web 2.0, where users actively create everything from blogs to videos to news-page collections.

Of course, the failure of a few tech startups is less important than the safety of children. But as with all such panics, the question remains as to the real nature of any threat at hand, and how well the proposed legislative solution will address those real threats.

At this point it’s all a bit unclear — for starters, how much impact on kids’ unsupervised access to MySpace and friends will a simple ban on schools and libraries make? But hey! Subtlety is often lost when there’s a moral panic on, and this is just the latest of many. We’ll keep you informed.

For a nice overview of the ‘new reality’ of online youth, check out a recent interview between MIT’s Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. We’ve reported before on boyd’s view that social media sites function as ‘digital publics’ where young people — whose freedoms are heavily constrained in the physical world — can live more freely, via media ‘in which’ (and, crucially, ‘where’, these media being conceptualised and experienced as places) they feel completely ‘at home’.

So — the kids have a new ‘place’ to play. What’s the difference between MySpace and all the other places where generations of young people have hung out to get a bit of freedom — the park, the mall, the video arcade? Maybe the clue is in this quote from Jenkins:

Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks.

Bows and arrows, yes, but fast forward: during the Industrial Revolution, very few children played with live steam and drop forges. During the Atom Age and Cold War, kids never got hands-on with Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactions. But in the Information Age, they’ve got Access All Areas to the most culturally-transformative technologies of our time, and a fluency with them that comes only to digital natives. Children being children, they’ve been getting busy with these toys — people don’t grok where their kids are at because the kids have left the building. They’ve gone. Nobody noticed, while a whole generation bootstrapped itself up and out — offworld, into media-which-is-a-place, where they’re forging a new reality: a vibrant pop culture mashup of late consumerism and virtuality-enabled persona-hacking. And it’s in their world, not ours, that they’re going to learn, invent and grow up. We’ve lost them. Off into elseware. Gone.

Until childhood’s end: we tip 2015-2020 as the period when the grown-up children of this new world start to port their way of being back into our world, enacting their society, their way.

Expect a revolution.

Playing for the Raindance Short Film Award party, Addictive (who we have raved about before) performed their Laurel and Hardy (remixed as the original Ska act — you know it makes sense) and Sex Pistols mashups as well as some of their ‘greatest hits’ — the Italian Boj and Quentin Tarantino vs. Queen. A foray into the commercial world — the remixed trailer for Antonio Banderas’s ballroom dancing film Take The Lead – was also shown.

Visuals really do speak louder than words so check out their site, Samurai.fm and some ‘looks like it was shot on a phone’ footage on youtube.

Mixing puppetry, fantastic lighting and cut outs, the film is viewable online or if you’re really whizzy, on your video iPod. Natch.

Somewhat impressively, the short is now PageRanked higher than the poem itself on Google.

THE TYGER
By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

Via Wooster.

Expect to see more of this type of thing as everyone gets Really Excited about User Generated Content, social networking and hacking — in other words, all the stuff that geeks have been since the dawning of this thing called the Internet.

The Guardian today reports on how Nike and Apple have collaborated to produce a pair of running shoes that uses your iPod to tell you how far you have run and how many calories you have burned:

To some, it is the long overdue synthesis of two of the world’s most fashionable and recognisable brands, a perfect marriage of design, athleticism and entertainment. To others, it’s a posh pedometer that you put in your expensive sneakers.

The Nike+ system, which has taken 18 months to develop, uses a tiny transmitter fitted in the trainers to send information back to the music player with every step. Runners can find out how they are doing by hitting the centre button on their iPod Nano and listening to a spoken update of their progress. Should the hi-tech pavement-pounders start to flag, they can give themselves a quick boost by calling up a pre-chosen “power song” for that all-important motivational lift.

The sensor kit will cost £25 and will be available in the UK from July 13. The first training shoe it can be fitted into, the new Air Zoom Moire, will go on sale at the same time priced at £65. Six more styles will follow.

Speaking at yesterday’s launch in New York, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, said:

I think we’ve come up with something that’s really wonderful.

We’ve just scratched the surface because over time we can do even more sophisticated things.

Like to see more hacks? Check out the Wikipedia article for the ‘true’ meaning of the term.

Neil Boorman, former editor of Sleazenation (RIP) and the man behind Hoxton’s 333 nightclub and the glorious Shoreditch Twat (also RIP), is currently working on a book/burning project. The Bonfire Of The Brand is the title of a book Neil is currently writing, due to be published in 2007. A self-confessed brand addict (and former style journalist), Neil is trying to overcome his dependency and in August 2006 plans to burn all of his branded goods in a massive bonfire. It’s not particularly environmentally-aware as a piece of anti-consumerism but hey. Neil has been sharing his experiences in his blog since March:

It’s the adverts that started to crank up my sense of claustrophobia. Now that I have begun to notice them, I cannot ignore them and spot brands everywhere I look.

The blog reads a bit like ‘the confessions of a former brand whore’ as Boorman frankly recounts a meeting with former clients (a big brand):

Having discussed the book, our meeting quickly trailed off to an end. Not being a style journalist any longer, my use to them was now minimal, and this meeting felt like a friendly send off into obscurity. As I stumbled out onto the busy street lined with shops, happy people streaming in and out with bags of fresh consumer kill, I felt very, very low. My professional bridges are being burnt to the point of no return now. I look around me and everyone it seems is getting on quite happily with their branded lives; working hard to make money to spend on the things that make them happy. Clothes, cars, phones, food, everywhere I see brands, and people enjoying them as if there was nothing wrong at all. I don’t want to be marginalised from the whole of society, disengaged from reality like some paranoid schizophrenic on the run from The Man. Perhaps this is all a big mistake.

And whilst we love picture of trainers on fire (Nike is Burning anyone?) we can’t help but think that branded pyrotechnics create an excuse to just go and buy even more stuff. Last year’s trainer becomes this year’s lucrative art project… and the brand gets namechecked all the same.

Via Fuk.

There’s always been a real division between the physical and online worlds: if you’re sitting in front of a screen, you have only a window into the virtual. Likewise, others online have only limited access to your physical presence, be that through email, IM, webcam — there’s a chokepoint where reality, fantasy and interface bandwidth intersect. Cue much theorising about the ‘cyborg identity construct’ and ‘life on the screen’ in 1990s media theory. As the cultural theorists contended — and the current explosion of MMORPGs proves — there’s much identity-morphing fun to had: today’s digital natives are as comfortable engineering their online personæ as they are changing the ringtone on the latest Nokia.

But there’s a downside to these loose connections between physical and virtual. Think for example of an art gallery. It occupies physical space, and if you’re present there, you can interact with both the artworks and the other people present. The gallery probably also has an online presence, but if you’re online, you don’t generally have any meaningful way to interact with what’s going on in the physical gallery, and vice versa. The two worlds don’t connect.

There have been a few attempts to bridge the void between worlds, and to build hybrid social media, where the physical and the virtual grade one into the other — witness for example Radio One’s clunky integration of their One Big Weekend festival into current darling-of-the-digerati ‘life game’ Second Life. Nice try, but there’s still a gap between the worlds — the BBC concedes that “those attending the Second Life rock festival will not be able to see avatars of their favourite artists”, and likewise those getting down and muddy in the physical world won’t be able to mosh with those online who are experiencing “an authentic festival experience on a virtual mud-slide”. Ahem.

Clumsy indeed. However, tech-art projects (and cybersex technologies) aside, that’s as good a collapsing-together of the physical and virtual as we’ve seen. But as of this week, we suspect that’s all going to change. Why? Google, which has released SketchUp — a 3D design tool which enables punters to create objects and plunk them down in the world of Google Earth.

So what you say? Well, think ahead. Add avatars (currently missing from Google Earth), and suddenly you have a set of technologies that start to close the gap between physical and virtual. Consider the enablers: Google Search knows about stuff. All kinds of stuff. And where it is, who knows about it, what it does. Google Earth knows about physical space. And with the addition of SketchUp, Google enables people to add models of physical-world-things into an easy-to-use representation of that space. And we already have rumours that Google is working on GPS navigation tools.

Glue this all together: imagine Google Earth 2.0 as a Second Life-style virtuality, but using real world maps. If you have a Google navigation-enabled mobile device, your online avatar can follow you around the physical world. Location-sensitive advertising? Check. Interaction between people visiting a site online and people in the related physical location (via IM, VoIP etc)? Check. Possibilities for augmented reality gaming and marketing? Oh yes. We’re seeing the possibility here of Google enabling a whole new augmented media landscape, with a new language of spatial isomorphism between physical and virtual worlds. One step closer, but to what? Stay tuned.

[via Business 2.0]

Delivering on its promise to deliver a translation service, the VoIP market leader has tied up with Voxeo and Language Line Services. Skype is also bringing social networking to crowds as it introduces a service enabling online conversations by groups of up to 100 people at one time.

Just take a minute to consider the implications of this: a free/cheap global internet based phone service which translates.

We’re re-reading one of our favourite books from recent years — John Durham Peters’s epic Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.

This deserves to become a cult classic — up there with Chris Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Harold McGee’s McGee on Food and Cooking and our beloved The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

As a taster, check out this excerpt on the subject of the Dead Letters Office.

Closer in tone to Bachelard than McLuhan, Peters unweaves the phenomenology and psychology of the idea of communication — the desires and fears engendered by our mediated attempts to bridge the distance between individuals, over space and time: from Socrates’ uneasiness about the invariance of writing, which unlike spoken rhetoric, 'signifies the very same thing forever' (as reported by Plato in Phaedrus), to modern obsessions with UFOs and the Turing Test, via Victorian spiritualism and the HMV dog, forever transfixed by the uncanny, mechanically reproduced playback of its (presumably deceased) master’s voice…

Beautifully researched, and charmingly written. Essential Spring reading for anyone wanting to step back from the coalface of ‘Communications’ and marvel at the great mystery of it all.

Google trends is the latest demonstration from Google that it understands us more than we understand ourselves. It’s also part of Google’s reaffirmed emphasis on search since diversifications such as Google Video and Google print.

Our initial searches would indicate that porn is rapidly encroaching on news in terms of volume… especially in Manchester…

However. Note to Google: if you want this blogged, make it easy a la Technorati.

Via Gawker.

It’s list time again — MIT’s Technology Review has just published its annual roundup of important emergent technologies. And what a wide-ranging list it is — ranging from new methods for the early diagnosis of cancer (this time dogs are not required), the mandatory longshot on medical nanotech, and cool new things to do with stretchable silicon. Pick up on the buzzwords now and be prepped for when epigenetics and Diffusion Tensor Imaging start to get namechecked in the mainstream press. Big Hopeful Future or Big Techno-Hype? Read and decide for yourselves.

Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters is an updated digital version of shadow puppets where participants’ hand shapes are augmented with animation and sound — kind of like an interactive Vib Ribbon. There are more sounds and visuals on Worthington’s website.

We were charmed also by pe lang & zimoun’s untitled sound objects — a scattering of solenoids earnestly tapping out a death watch beetle stacatto in an echoey stairwell.

This exhibition is just one strand of the Cybersonica festival of music, sound, art and technology, which itself [like seemingly everything good in London this week], is affiliated with the Encompass electronic music festival.

Check out the shadow monsters and the rest downstairs at Phonica Records, 51 Poland Street, London.

Swarm of angels invites 50,000 “angels” to each pay £25 to fund a £1 million feature film. The Angels are being invited in batches — first 100, now 1,000, next 5,000, 25,000 and 50,000 — with the level of input being determined by the donation (£25 being the entry level). The first very privileged 100 places have now gone, but the 1,000 Swarm is still open (just about). The film –when it comes out — will be produced under Creative Commons so as hackable and remixable as it comes.

A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It’s all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven’t seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals.

We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0.
To do it we need your help.

VJ Collective The Kleptones have just signed up to do the soundtrack so you’ll be in good company. Via Protein feed. [See also our earlier post about Mod Films]

Craig Newmark of the eponymous list was interviewed in The Sunday Times mag over the weekend. Here’s what we learned:

Craigslist is an archetypal web 2.0 success story:

The company employs just 20 people, spends no money on ads, relying on word of mouth, and has been profitable since 1999. Craigslist doesn’t disclose how much money it makes, but industry estimates put 2005 revenues around $20m, and costs at no more than $5m. The site’s devoted users provide all the content for free.

Craigslist has the potential to decimate the print classified market:

Classified Intelligence Report, an industry newsletter, found that in San Francisco the main newspapers lost over $50m in classified revenues in 2004 because of the Craigslist effect… The Bakersfield Californian, an independent, family-owned paper in central California, launched its own free classified website when it heard Craigslist was coming to town. Classified ads comprised 40% of its newspaper revenue, but Richard Beene, the Californian’s chief executive, told The Wall Street Journal: “If we do nothing and newspapers do nothing, we will die of a thousand little cuts.”

To these guys, it’s (apparently) not just about money:

“We are in a period where power is being redistributed,” says Newmark. The current shift is akin to “the glorious revolution in Britain”, he says, when the powers of the monarchy were eclipsed in favour of parliament. “Power was redistributed from a very small number of people to a larger number of people. Now we are seeing a shift of a similar magnitude. There are people fighting that, but they are going to lose,” he says. “Authoritarianism doesn’t sell.”

It’s an attitude that is a big challenge for purely capitalist companies, says Irwin Stelzer, Sunday Times columnist and director of economic-policy studies at Washington’s Hudson Institute:

Capitalism is about maximising profits. There is a real problem here for companies trying to compete with a company that is not interested in the capitalist system. When your primary purpose is making money, how do you compete with free?

…and finally:

At another [industry conference], [Craigslist CEO Jim] Buckmaster sat next to Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, the world’s second-largest advertising group. He didn’t know who Sorrell was or what WPP did. You can bet Sorrell knew all about Craigslist.

Pictures of the Really Big Elephant parading through London are up on Flickr and a vast improvement on the BBC’s coverage. Featured photo from annie_anywhere’s photostream. Relive the whole story on the Sultan’s Elephant site.