BigShinyThing

Indeed that’s the case, under new plans from London Police. Event organisers in 21 London boroughs are requested to ‘co-operate fully’ with police, by completing the new Form 696 before the event, in the interests of ‘risk assessment’.

Requested are not only details of promoters and onsite security, but also the contact numbers and real names of all performers, description of the ‘expected audience’ and the genre(s) of music expected to be performed, the examples given on the form being bashment, R’n'B, garage. No surprise then that many feel the Met is actually planning to use this data to focus police attention on clubs where such ‘dangerous’ forms of music are to be played, as well as for the profiling of the scene(s) and communities who organise and attend.

According to early reports, the form also included questions about the ethnicity of expected audiences. The current version on the Met’s site doesn’t include such information, so we can’t comment on that.

Concerns have been raised by many, including once-Undertone Feargal Sharkey, who now heads up the music campaign organisation UK Music. There’s a petition running on the 10 Downing Street website, a FaceBook group has been set up, and the mainstream press are paying attention.

Simply misguided urban policing, or the precursor of some modern day version of the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill’s rave-busting criminalisaiton of ‘repetitive beats’? Watch and wait. More importantly, act against this.

[Thanks for Helen Noir for tipping us off to this]

According to a new study suggesting that instant messaging (IM) actually represents “an expansive new linguistic renaissance”.

Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis at the University of Toronto, Canada, say teenagers risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up. But instant messaging allows them to deploy a “robust mix” of colloquial and formal language. In a paper to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech, the researchers argue that far from ruining teenagers’ ability to communicate, IM lets teenagers show off what they can do with language.

“IM is interactive discourse among friends that is conducive to informal language,” says Denis, “but at the same time, it is a written interface which tends to be more formal than speech.”

He and Tagliamonte analysed more than a million words of IM communications and a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged between 15 and 20. They found that although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative. For example, teenagers are more likely to use the phrase “He was like, ‘What’s up?’” than “He said, ‘What’s up?’” when speaking — but the opposite is true when they are instant-messaging. This supports the idea that IM represents a hybrid form of communication.

This is not news to us at BST. My dad is in his 70s and an excellent text messager. A recent text reads (sorry dad) “Thks 4 mess re 23rd”. He uses abbreviations just like the kids do. Why? He’s a linguist by training so he just gets it.

Source: New Scientist.

Buster Bennett (previously of legendary Hoxton nights Antisocial and Family) has been running his latest night, Nuke Them All, for a while now. But he’s got a problem — he can’t keep a venue. Nuke was initially hosted at the charming Bethnal Green lapdancing joint, Images. But then the council got wind of it and pulled its licence. So it moved to The Edge, a basement venue on Commercial St. The council did the same thing (do they have clubkid spies or something?) So Buster, showing typical clubland enterprise, moved it to an an abandoned pub. Y’know, like the rave kids do. Then the police shut that down too. Buster’s positioning of Nuke as ‘the most lawless creative gathering ever’ is starting to look a bit too prescient.

We can’t resist quoting in full Buster’s comments on the original eviction, as reported over at Jonty Skrufff’s Skrufff.com:

“It’s the same old story, and exactly why we left the gentrified Shoreditch triangle in the first place. What happens is some wanky trust fund son of an estate agent decides to buy up a flat next to an already established strip club then complains about the noise; specifically; the noise, the giant walking pyramids, the cake fights, the glow in the dark horses, the nudity and our clientele generally. But still, why move there in the first place?”

Why indeed! We’re with Buster.

[Photo ©2008 Darrell Berry]

“I don’t know why they call them TV shows. I never watch them on TV.”

The BBC and the Terrence Higgins Trust have collaborated on this ad to ‘raise awareness of HIV amongst 16-34 year olds’, although the language used (with references to ‘barebacking’ and ‘fisting’) makes it clear who the target audience is. The series of films also direct viewers to an interactive website, where they can find out more about HIV and AIDS and customise their own GI Jonny virtual action figure. Their own creation can then be forwarded to friends and downloaded to Facebook (this bit didn’t seem to be working when we checked it out).

According to the Terrence Higgins Trust, the number of people in the UK with the virus has risen from 30,000 in 2001 to 70,000 this year. Research by the charity also suggests there is still widespread ignorance about HIV, particularly amongst young people. A recent poll of 1,000 people found more than 20% of people aged 18 to 24 mistakenly thought there was a cure for HIV. Among the same age group almost a quarter believed condoms had holes in them which let HIV through. So the more information, the better then. Weird though that it took the agency — in this case Kontraband — to get the thing up on YouTube.

Uptown Downtown saw Horse Meat Disco and Rebel Rebel take over Vauxhall’s club Area on Saturday 29th September for a night of NYC-styled punk and disco. You can access our Uptown Downtown photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. Photo shows Ryan Styles and friend adding a little alt.chic out on the smoking terrace. [Image © Darrell Berry]

Here’s the official release:

100proof announce the release of Issue 3 of their urban culture PDF 100proofTRUTH.

The only publication that gives real props to those it’s due to, still repping all that’s good in the world with 145 pages of visual diversity;

Eclectic interviews, street art, graphics, and photography with a truly global urban youth perspective (uh, no not “urban youth” like pictures of 50 Cent posing with a cognac in Vibe magazine).
— Fallon NYC on 100proofTRUTH.

Featured Photographers are: Witold Krassowksi, Kent Baker, The Face Hunter, Faith 47, Paul Hartnett, Darrell Berry… <blush>

100proofTRUTH Issue 3 is all about the power of the photograph, with a few other talents thrown in for good measure, (like Sfaustina from San Francisco, Sun7 from Paris, Karan Rashad from Iran, Dzyla and Fani1 from Australia, and Laser 3.14 from Amsterdam.)

With big thanks to King Adz.

Dansistor runs monthly. You can access our Dansistor photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

You can access our Bistrotheque Annual Drag Ball photos directly on Flickr, with the rest of our London club photography. Excellent pictures from others can be found in the associated Flickr photo pool. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[And thanks to Jim @ Horse Meat Disco and Helen @ Film Noir]

Pictures from Studio Neon at Egg on Friday 24th August 2007. You can access our Studio Neon photos directly on Flickr, with the rest of our London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[Thanks to Helen @ Film Noir]

Dansistor launched 11th August and will run monthly. Horse Meat (like you didn’t know) is every Sunday. You can access our Dansistor photos directly on Flickr, along with our other London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

[And thanks to Tim for last-minute Nikon CLS tech assistance!]

While that’s hardly a revelation in itself, danah boyd’s latest essay gets down and dirty with the manner in which the FaceBook/Myspace communities reflect or present (American) class divisions… boyd goes to pains to point out that this is subjective research, but it’s provocative reading independent of any cold hard facts… do you know your “subaltern” from your “hegemonic” teens?

Her summary thoughts:

It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the technology. I shouldn’t be surprised — when orkut grew popular in India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users. But there’s something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions.

We challenge you to slip some of this concern into your next social media client presentation, you FaceBook-fetishising media hegemonists, you. At least, please, keep it in mind when you have client money to throw at online communities. There’s an opportunity here to make the world a little less closed for a whole generation of socially-excluded digital natives. If you aren’t part of the solution…

Children’s drawings and paintings of the coca eradication spraying programme in Columbia.

Via DrugStrat via Alcohol and Drugs

We’ve reported on the $100 laptop. We’ve flagged up Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: two innovations poised to set fire to the demographic tinder that’s the youth population of the Developing World. We see truly disruptive times ahead.

The $100 laptop (or its yet-to-be-developed relatives and descendants) will network millions of eager young people. Services like the Turk will give them the opportunity and motivation to take on work that’s too tricky for the best Artificial Intelligences the West can conjour, but too brain-numbingly repetitive and low-paid for most Westerners to bother with. That’s a whole lot of motivation, both supply-side and for the creation of demand. And that means business.

In fact, the one thing missing from the OLPC v1.0 seems to be a workable way to actually get micropayments safely in the hands of those for whom such income could be as life-changing as the educational opportunities which are the prime motivation for the project. If the initial rollout is at all successful, we expect free-enterprise, above-ground or not, to rapidly fill that gap.

The potential is enormous. Exploitation or opportunity? The stakes and possible rewards are too high — and the price of failure too terrible — for us to judge too early. Call it exploitunity, and hope it works out. Watch this space.

Publishers are trying to gain the attention of a young audience by sending books to cell phones and flashing the text before users’ eyes one word at a time. Launched in England less than a year ago, ICUE software lets users read novels on their cell phone without the irritation (to some) of constantly scrolling through heaps of text on a small screen. Instead, the text is flashed on the screen one word (or phrase) at a time. It’s positioning? Moving the way you read. This is clever stuff — a product following the consumer, not the other way around.

The application (like lots of other cool stuff) was originally developed by the military. It is based on the tachistoscope, a rapid image recognition device that was invented by the US Air Force and first used to train pilots to recognise enemy planes from a distance. The device was later used to teach speed-reading techniques.

ICUE currently has some 10,000 customers and claim that their audience are used to digesting content in this way (advertisers and content owners take note) because they already spend hours staring at rapidly moving images of video games. According to ICUE managing director Jane Tappuni,

Our customers are split between business and tech-orientated readers and, obviously, teenagers. It’s the 16 year olds who are using us the most because they are the ones who are on their mobiles the most. Their reading is split between the classic list that has to do with what they’re reading in school and the contemporary list.

ICUE has already brokered deals with mobile books with major publishers like HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan and Pearson. Interestingly, the company plans to launch in the US only once it has cracked the UK market because – in mobile terms — it is so much more developed:

The UK is 18 months to two years ahead of the US cellular market. Only 35 percent of Americans have sent a text message, as compared to almost 100 percent in the UK.

Tappuni says that 80 percent of users who download ICUE and view the demo text go on to buy ebooks and that she often hears from teachers interested in making ICUE books available to their classes. After all, those kids are glued to their mobile screens already.

Source: MIT’s Technology Review.

According to Armando Iannucci, writing recently in The Guardian,

Surveys show that a high proportion of people aged 18 to 36 get most of their information about British politics from [TV panel game show] Have I Got News For You. In America, similar figures show that Jon Stewart’s topical comedy The Daily Show (TDS) supplies a high percentage of 18 to 36-year-old Americans with their main news fix.

In the article, he argues that political comedy fills a void left by the disengagement between the mass audience and ‘real’ news coverage:

There is an emptiness in public argument waiting to be filled. That’s where my lot come in again. If politicians fail to supply politics with content, is it any wonder people turn to other, more entertaining sources?

He’s not the only one thinking this way. We note the New York Times report of the runwaway success Hurry Up, He’s Dead — a home-grown (but Daily Show-inspired) Iraqi current-affairs satire:

Mr. Khalifa [pictured above], the show’s star, is a diminutive comedian who was a well-known theater actor in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s government. The initial episodes were taped in Dubai because the producers decided it would be too dangerous and logistically difficult to film in Baghdad. Despite its madcap humor, he said, the show has a serious message.

“The purpose of the show is to fix Iraq,” he said. “We want to fix the civil services. We want to fix the government officials. We want to fix the relationships between people. We want to fix the government and stop the corruption.”

All well and good — anything that gets people thinking must encourage engagement, right? Unfortunately the jury seems to be out on that one. University of Toronto Professor Megan Boler — whose work we know from the iDC mailing list — has been researching the online culture around TDS as a focus of her studies into ‘digital dissent’. She told BigShinyThing via email that:

Interestingly, our research (including survey of and interviews with bloggers, meme producers, political multimedia producers and TDS bloggers) indicates that TDS fans are possibly less politically motivated than the other groups we are studying who engage in political online networks. There are some surprising instances as well when an author of a political meme states that his motivation was not political but to produce humor.

Research which backs up Iannucci’s claims about the importance of topical comedy as a news source also indicates that watching TDS actually correlates with increased skepticism about politics as a whole amongst its core youth audience. According to study co-author Jonathan Morris, an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.:

We are not saying The Daily Show is bad for democracy. I’m a fan of The Daily Show. I watch it very frequently. We’re just pointing out that exposure to this show among young adults is associated with cynicism toward political candidates and the political process as a whole.

It seems that contemporary topical satire may better represent the worldview of the ‘excluded middle’ than do the incumbent news media, yet still not provide a meaningful ‘call to action’ to get them off the sofa and onto the streets.

Read more of Boler’s researches into the transmedial world of TDS in The Daily Show, Crossfire, and the Will to Truth, in Scan Journal of Media Arts Culture. Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2006) — an excellent dissection of a key moment in the development of the show’s mythology.

We tried to find some choice Hurry Up, He’s Dead moments on YouTube, but alas it doesn’t seem to have ‘crossed over’ yet.

We’re not entirely surprised to see that four of the music majors — Universal, Sony BMG and Warner — have each quietly negotiated to take small stakes in YouTube as part of the video-and-music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the site’s sale to Google. According to reports in the New York Times, the music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from the arrangements. These deals should also help shield Google from the dreaded and much mooted copyright-infringement lawsuits — something that rival Yahoo! has admitted prevented them from swooping on YouTube first.

As the article points out, this pre-emptive and cunning action by the record companies to befriend the ‘enemy’ contrasts with their behaviour a few years’ back:

The decision to take a stake in YouTube is a sharp departure from the tack that the record companies took regarding Napster, the pioneering file-swapping service that transformed the industry in 1999. Back then, after the major companies filed suits against Napster, the two sides discussed various settlements that involved the music companies receiving a big equity stake.

The Napter talks, which were led on the industry side by Edgar Bronfman Jr., then the chief of Universal’s then-parent Seagram — eventually broke down [although Bronfman now helms Warner -- the first record company to join forces with YouTube -- so he eventually gained his chops].

The record companies went on to win a series of legal victories that ultimately forced Napster to shut its site, but the labels have been fighting an uphill battle against free peer-to-peer services ever since.”

As this battle as proved not only extremely expensive but rather ineffectual, the companies have finally decided on a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ approach. Not only have they found a way to actually make money from YouTube, they’ve also finally cottoned on to the marketing potential in file sharing. Techdirt notes with no little schadenfreude an article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) titled Record Labels turn Piracy into a Marketing Opportunity. Because file-sharers are first and foremost fans of the music they distribute.Hence Jay-Z has allowed distribution of an eight minute clip of his recent live concert — full of promotional clips for Coke. According to Jay-Z’s attorney:

The concept here is making the peer-to-peer network work for us. While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience… and this technology allows us to market back to them.

We like to call it crowd surfing — using the P2P network as both media and audience. It’s probably the future of music marketing — or at least one future. Watch and learn.

Antisocial flyer photography by Simian Coates. Model Kelli Jean Drinkwater at Ugly. Antisocial is on Saturday nights at Bar Music Hall, 134 Curtain Road, Shoreditch. Cover photography of Island Life by Jean-Paul Goude. Of course.

Another one bites the dust. Last night Patti Smith performed the last ever gig at CBGB featuring covers from NY City punk scene legends The Ramones and Blondie. Patti finished her set with Gloria. According to the BBC, a dispute over rent rises led owner Hilly Kristal to lose his lease, more than 30 years after the club opened.

Patti Smith said,

We can have CBGB in our hearts, but the new generation is going to have their own places to play. They’re going to find some shit hole and play in it like we did.

Photo source: NME.com.

Vaseline and smilies at the ready: rave is back. In its latest attempt distract those pesky kids from their phones/MySpace profiles/life, the NME has christened a burgeoning music movement new rave. Last week it even featured an indie vs. rave covermount. And it’s not just IPG-generated hype (much). We’re increasingly seeing skinny little things in day-glo clothes and eyes-on-stalks stumbling around Hoxton and savvy fashion brands like Cassetteplaya are getting featured in The Observer.

It’s surely only a matter of time before clubnight Antisocial (usual suspect Trash Fashion‘s Jet Storm pictured — from Brixtona’s Flickr stream) gets a double page spread in Vogue. And we’ve caught a few local news items about kids having noisy dance parties in fields. Frankly, we’re old enough to remember Ravey Davey Gravy but also think that noisy repetitive beats tend to be a Good Thing.

Still not convinced? Stick new rave through Flickr. My eyes…

See also our other (Mostly London-centric) club photos and stories.