BigShinyThing

Last week, US unemployment jumped to an official level of around 6.8%. But, according to MarketWatch, when you include

…discouraged workers and those whose hours have been cut back to part-time — [the numbers] rose to 12.5% from 11.8%. The number of workers forced to work part-time rose by 621,000 to 7.3 million.

The difference between those percentages offers a glimpse of the scale of the Precariat — those workers with the most tenuous connection to the Experience Formerly Known as Employment. The term Precarity has been kicking around for a while now in leftie Academia and the anti-globalisation movement, to describe

…a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence.

Precarity is most commonly associated with outsiders who compete for low-paying retail and service jobs. Perversely, a similar state of uncertainty falls to the skilled, individualistic young, working their time with zero job security as digital freelancers in the post-industrial economies. A familiar scene at your local coffee-shop franchise is probably the closest the depoliticised members of both groups come to meeting — the one group toiling behind the tills, the other slaving against client deadlines on their MacBooks, making each drink last half a day.

Precariat, meet Digital Precariat. Help yourself to sugar over there, by the door. On the way out.

First up: fear forward. As in ‘fashion forward’, but more (f)era-appropriate. For instance, those who are enjoying their ‘I told you so’ moment with regards to the current global recession, can be rightly described as ‘fear forward’.

With apologies and props to Word Spy.

Hot on the dangerously high heels of the ‘hemline index’, comes another economic indicator from the fashion world. A recent issue of the FT’s How to Spend It glossie features a shoot in an alien-looking location. Fashionistas are even more notorious than ad folk when it comes to jetting off to the Maldives ‘for the light’, but this shoot is different. This fashionably sparse landscape doesn’t come courtesy of some desert or even Lanzarote. Instead, the photo credits include “Bryant Homes, new homes development, Oxfordshire” who are clearly diversifying in the absence of any houses to build. Times is hard.

Yes, slow news and the heat getting to journalists’ brains means that it’s time to put together lists of the most influential/cool/powerful people in media. Folks in advertising and TV will be frantically scanning the Mediaguardian 100 — in particular for leads, mates, or (most importantly) themselves. Meanwhile, BigShinyThing was delighted to have got a namecheck on our friend Lisa Devaney’s renegade list on BrandRepublic which was MUCH more interesting than the Mediaguardian’s (natch). Also worthy of note is The Hospital Club’s Top 100 which is sooo alternative and cool you have to be a member to read it. (Full disclosure: we write for The Hospital Club’s site.)

Now this is not just a pat piece about our mates (honest). There is — as The Hospital contends — a new world order upon us, and one in which the old heirarchies no longer apply. It’s very sweet and retro of newspapers to ply us with the Mediaguardian Power List and Observer journalists’ idea of what stands for ‘cool’ but we don’t have to listen to them any more. Besides, old media has always been obsessed with glorifying those who have already made it — those cronies who are already ‘in the club’. We’re much more interested in the renegades, the iconoclasts, the innovators… Generation Next. Some of them have been paid lip service — drag artist extraordinaire Jonny Woo gets a namecheck in the Observer cool list — but we suspect that’s just print journalists trying to look ‘with it’.

No, the new power networks are defined by all of us and not by them. And influence is no longer a numbers game dictated by salary, age, employees, readership, viewership … all of that is blown. The true influencers now exist in a long tail of cohorts: the clubkids, knitting circles, flash mobsters, gamers, bloggers, weirdos, geeks, freaks, kids … whatever. For instance, within the perfomance art cohort, Lisa Lee’s Underconstruction night has quietly helped launch the career of many a star of the current Performance Art explosion. And in street art, stencil originator Blek le Rat is finally getting his dues. And those are just in BST’s little corner of the world.

With Generation Next, their influence is obvious: it’s in the clubs, in social media, on the bus, on the street… where it matters.

On February 8th, the US state of Nebraska declared that execution by electric chair amounted to an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The US state was the only one still using electrocution as its sole method of execution and the move came after a condemned man, Raymond Mata, appealed against his sentence. In its nine-decade history, this particular chair had been used 15 times.

Little by little, America is beginning to balk at capital punishment: the method rather the madness of it. The most popular method — lethal injection — is currently being investigated by the Supreme Court and Nebraska may struggle to find a replacement way of meting out ‘justice’.

Source: The Economist.

In 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Source: The Economist. Apologies to Don McLean.

We are BIG fans of CSI: its noirish plots, zeitgeist-grabbing storylines (remember the Furries episode?) and general ridiculousness. This season, it has got the geeks gossiping about the use of Twitter in a scene and the attendant neat explanation of what drives people to live their lives online:

“Some people just don’t value privacy.”
“They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.”

Nice bit of transmedia advertising/storytelling too. Via Plasticbag.org.

Recently we were discussing Wikipedia’s anti-business bias: Wikipedians tend to find businesses ‘not notable’ and often dismiss entries about them as them as ‘advertising’. Whilst it is admirable to root out the many articles on Wikipedia which are barely-disguised pat pieces, just because Wikipedians don’t find business interesting doesn’t mean it isn’t. It’s as if the resurgence of the long tail has become its own kind of snobbery — a land where the entry for Anna Nicole Smith can stretch to several pages but where entries about famous businesses get deleted.

A similar debate has been going on on Cute Overload. Put simply: do possums make the cut? A Wiki ‘delete war’ can stretch out for weeks and hundreds of empassioned postings. Cute Overload — understanding the nature of social media, and therefore its community, opened and closed the debate within the space of two posts:

People, it’s tough at Cute O headquarters. We can never decide if possums are cute, or just horribly evil. (There is a fine line, and otters LOVE to jump back and forth across that line, taunting! always taunting!)

But I digest. Check out this dewd with this anerable paws. Don’t look at his schnozzle or ears tho. OK, you can look at his schnozzle.

Rebecca M. claims:

• They RULE in the Moist Nosicle category.
• They have a thumb without a nail on their back feet.
• They have elaborate whiskers.
• Their ears are pink when they’re babies and turn black as they grow up.
• They CARRY LEAVES CURLED UP IN THEIR TAILS — Come ON!
• And let’s not forget they carry their babies in a pouch — North America’s only marsupial.

Wikipedants, take note. There should be a joke here about possums and long tails, but frankly we’ve got better things to be getting on with.

Our favourite anecdote in the IHT article — which is well worth reading all the way through — is this:

Kristina Grish, author of The Joy of Text: Mating, Dating and Techno-relating, said she grew so accustomed to making the :−P symbol (a tongue hanging out) in instant messages at work that it once accidentally popped up, in three dimensions, on a date.

“When the waiter told us the specials,” she recalled in an e-mail message, “I made that face — not on purpose of course — because they sounded really drab and uninteresting. And the guy I was out with looked at me like I was insane and said: ‘Did you just make an IM face?‘ “

Prediction: the spillover of online behaviours, etiquette and worldviews into offline life is going to be big news over the next couple of years.

News from Old Europe, which goes something like this:

1. Organised labour has serious problem with management at bike factory
2. Workers occupy the factory, but rather than sitting on their arses waiting to be kicked out, they hit on the idea of using the resources around them to build their own branded bikes…
3. …and sell them on the internet to fund their struggle.

Fucking brilliant, and an inspiration to those of us in the knowledge precariate as well. Use your internet time at work wisely, fellow workers. You know what I mean.

[OK, this story is pieced together from dodgy Google translations. Not all of it might be 'really' true. However this is such a nice myth/meme that we couldn't resist.]

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The shot, from the artist’s Thanksgiving series, was to be exhibited at the Baltic Modern Art gallery, Tyneside, this week along with some of her other work in a collection owned by Elton John (there’s the mainstream hook). But the day before it was due to be viewed by the public, police came and removed the image over fears that it might be breaking the law. It is thought that one of the assistant directors at the centre called in the authorities last Thursday after a private view as he was concerned that the picture could be offensive. The picture is now being examined by lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service.

A Northumbria police spokesman said yesterday: “The circumstances around who may have been involved in the production of the image and who may have owned it or owns it forms part of the investigation.”

According to the obviously really well researched article, “Goldin, 54, is well known for her shots of young, semi-clothed girls.” Strange — the Nan Goldin we know and love is famed for her images of people on the edges of society, drug addicts and AIDS patients. The work concerned is also readily viewable on this art auction site as well as on various blogs (where it has been well before this particular storm).

UPDATE: The case has been dropped, but not before causing the gallery to close the show after only nine days. It was due to run until January 2008 …

An article on Page 46 of The Times Magazine today about Rachel Zoe, a stylist who works with many film and TV stars, misstated the location of the premiere of the Nicole Kidman film Fur, for which Ms. Kidman requested a travel budget of more than $100,000 for her stylist and other assistants. It was the Rome Film Festival, not the Venice Film Festival.

BTW: big congrats to the NYT for going free online today: welcome to the 21st Century. WSJ and FT — please take note. UPDATE: apparently the Rupert Murdoch has …

According to a report in The Times, the Nintendo Wii – which is currently outselling Sony’s PlayStation 3 by three to one – has begun to “steal” prime-time television audiences in Japan.

The Nintendo machine, which was specifically designed to repackage video gaming as a family-oriented affair – otherwise known as ‘casual gaming’, is believed by media insiders to be responsible for an unprecedented decline in early-evening viewing figures for Japan’s top-rated shows.

According to one senior executive of the country’s largest commercial television channel, Fuji TV, families who used to tune in to its colourful diet of soap operas, panel games and comedy variety shows may, instead, be drifting away and choosing to spend the same, economically-critical “golden hour” time playing on their Wii.

His comments come as Japanese television executives are reeling in horror at recent figures from Japan’s audience-tracking firms: last week was the first in nearly two decades where no single show on any commercial station attracted more than a 9 per cent audience share.

“The quality of programming has always been a little cyclical in Japan, but there has never been a period of decline like the one we are seeing now. There are outside factors at work. One is people watching TV on their cell phones where we can’t track them, but the really big factor is the time people are spending on the Wii,” an executive of TBS, another major commercial channel, said. He added that the “theft” of audiences was taking place because television producers and programming directors were used only to the idea of competing for time with other channels.

Parents – the critical decision-makers of family entertainment between 7pm and 9pm – were being wooed by something more interactive than television offers at present.

Investors have already shown their excitement over the Wii, despite the fact that it has yet to produce a range of titles that appeal to so-called “hard-core” games enthusiasts (you could say that it doesn’t need to). Nintendo’s stock has soared of late and the company now commands a greater market capitalisation than Sony – a rival that has a massive portfolio of businesses and eight times the global revenues of Nintendo. Sony has however encountered massive problems with the launch of its much-anticipated Sony Playstation 3 and a raft of PR blunders. By contrast, the Wii has even managed to turn negative PR to its advantage, with reports of Wii-related injuries just proving how compelling (and compulsive) the user experience is.

The Wii console, which is controlled by a motion-sensitive baton, has introduced a range of new experiences to the $30 billion (£15 billion)-a-year games industry. Because the controller can be used to simulate everything from a bowling ball to a battle-axe, software designers have come up with a range of titles that encourage gaming in a wider target audience than Nintendo’s old constituency of eight-to-16-year-olds. It has also put paid to the image of the coach-potato gamer.

Analysts at Nomura, for example, pin high hopes on a forthcoming Wii game with the working title of “Wii Health”. The game is expected to offer its users a full range of workouts and fitness activities using the motion-sensitive controller; it is also expected to snatch market share from the many fitness and health shows that dominate the daytime television schedules. Given the versatility of the Wii controller – it could simulate any kitchen utensil from a fish slice to an egg whisk – the Wii might also stage an assault on that bastion of prime-time Japanese television, the celebrity chef cookery show.

We are clearly witnessing the advent of a new type of leisure activity – the rise of ‘casual gaming’. Traditional TV has even more problems than we thought …

People laughed when we reported on that anecdote a while back that Google was developing an artificial intelligence. Well — it doesn’t seem so ludicrous now does it? This nice post points out exactly what Google knows about us at any one time. And it’s A LOT.

Bits that we’ve hacked out of the post:

With its acquisition of Feedburner, Google now controls the leading company for managing RSS feeds. Thus, Google knows everything about my readers – how many of them there are, where they come from, and how they access my content. How might Google use this information? Targeting ads in my feeds based on context or geography sounds like a start, but using cookies the company could also theoretically collect data on my readers and better tailor ads to them throughout Google’s product line.

[...]

With an estimated 30% market share (based on bloggers, many of whom use Google-owned Blogger, reporting statistics from the now Google-owned Feedburner!), Google Reader is one of the most popular tools for aggregating RSS feeds. By knowing the blogs and news sites I read, Google can tailor ads to my preferences. Additionally, Google could use this data to customize my search results by favoring sites similar to those to which I subscribe.

[...]

Through Gmail and Gchat, Google knows everyone I contact. While you can turn a chat session “off the record,” Gmail’s 2.859GB (and counting!) of storage provides enough space so most people never need to delete a message. Thus, Google has both a history of all of my emails and chats, and can also make inferences about my strongest connections are based on how frequently I correspond with them

[...]

While Google’s photo sharing application Picasa is far from a market leader, with its purchase of YouTube and its homegrown Google Video product, Google is the undisputed dominant player in online video. Thus, Google knows not only what I search for, but what I produce.

(Around here is where it gets scary … )

Hopefully you’re not so unlucky to be one of the guys photographed leaving the strip club or adult book store in the new Google Street View feature, but there is a good chance your house or workplace can be seen via satellite in Google Maps. Additionally, Google Maps competes with MapQuest, Yahoo, and a host of others for providing driving directions, so they have a good idea of the places you frequent.

[...]

While Google is still in the early stages of building out its suite of Office-like applications, their ambitions have become fairly clear. With Docs & Spreadsheets, an upcoming PowerPoint competitor, and partnerships with the likes of Intuit and Salesforce.com, Google is spreading its tentacles far and wide in the business applications space, gaining knowledge into what you do, your finances, and who your contacts are.

With thanks to Adam Ostrow, whose post “MySoul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns” this is based on.

So that’s what £400k spent on Wolff Olins’s endless meetings and stale Pret sarnies bought us. Good to see that some of the money ‘freed-up’ by the arts funding cuts we mentioned earlier has been spent so wisely.

But, enough enough already with the sarcasm. More constructive critics might argue that the desire for “reaching out and engaging young people” (presumably that’s a reference to the ‘funky’ shapes and colours, a la Thompson Twins 7-inch sleeves circa 1982) could have been more usefully satisfied by — for example — actually reaching out and engaging with them. London has a unique street-art culture, and that 400k could surely have funded some ongoing recognition of and support for the nascent design talent on the streets of East London — which might have generated some real interest in the design aspects of the Olympics amongst young people. And just maybe, a better logo. A sadly missed opportunity.

(BST’s editor points out that it does look just a teeny bit new rave. Maybe. If you squint. Hard. After downing a litre of ‘vodka’ at a mid-week Dalston lock-in.)

Anyways. You know you’re experiencing a post-’that kidney show hoax‘ sign-o-the-times moment when the BBC News blog speculates that the whole thing might be a set-up to get publicity, after which the plan is to replace the controversial identity with one ‘made by the people for the people’.

We believe they really do think that their design rocks. The suspicious absence of ‘approved’ comments on the official london2012 blog posting also suggests that they don’t want anyone cluttering up their special happy place with naysaying negativity. Maybe they need ‘blogging’ explained to them, as well as ‘design’.

See how frightened they look? Free the crackhead 3!

Via the much-better-than perezhilton blog, dlisted.

UPDATE (also courtesy of dlisted). Kitten-flaunting appears to be an emergent celebrity trend. Where’s PETA when you need them?

The Economist (yes we’re catching up with our feeds) reports that porn may no longer be the world’s favourite online pastime. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October — the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat” — chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to those sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see lovely chart):

The Economist muses:

Does this mean the internet has matured as a medium? After all, pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. “Sex is a virus that infects new technology first,” as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn . Although this may soon be true for the web, however, it is not true for the internet as a whole. Much pornographic content may simply have shifted from the web to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, for example.

We think — with absolutely no scientific back up — that this is really a non-story, fun though it is to info-graphic. The Economist is measuring interest in sex in old media terms — passive watching and searching for images. They’re right to flag that people are consuming content in different ways — after all, why look at a grainy webcam image when you can file-share HD?

But what about all the people out there using the Net as way to get a shag? After all, the first ’social networking’ success story wasn’t Facebook or MySpace — even though they have a dating service aspect. No it was Gaydar. And what has really driven the fascination in Craigslist? You guessed it. People using it for (ahem) ‘dating’. It’s not what people are looking at but the connections that are being made. And believe us, everyone’s at it.

Forbes reports that because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children has made it nearly impossible for them to find housing, the five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval. The five men under the Julia Tuttle Causeway are the only known sex offenders authorized to live outdoors in Florida, said state Corrections Department spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger.

They have fishing poles to catch food, cook with small stoves, use battery-powered TVs and radios and keep their belongings in plastic bags. Javier Diaz, 30, has trouble charging the GPS tracking device he is required to wear; there are no power outlets nearby.

You just pray to God every night, so if you fall asleep for a minute or two, you know, nothing happens to you.

says Diaz, who arrived this week. He was sentenced in 2005 to three years’ probation for lewd and lascivious conduct involving a girl under 16.

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed in Florida and elsewhere around the US to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”

Before taking up residence under the causeway, some of the men were initially told to live under the Dolphin Expressway flyover near 12th Street and 12th Avenue. It is used as a parking lot for a courthouse, but it is also across the street from Kristi House, a center for sexually abused children.

Trudy Novicki, executive director for the Kristi House, wasn’t pleased when she learned about her new neighbors while reading the Miami New Times, which first reported the story.

“As a child advocate and someone that treats children that have been sexually abused, my answer is keep them in jail,” Novicki said.

“This is not an ideal situation for anybody, but at this point we don’t have any other options,” said Plessinger. “We’re still looking. The offenders are still actively searching for residences.”

“If we drive these offenders so far underground or we can’t supervise them because they become so transient, it’s not making us safer,” Plessinger said.

Twenty-two states and hundreds of municipalities have sex offender residency restrictions, according to a California Research Bureau report from last August. It states in the executive summary:

“Banishment: to expel from or relegate to a country or place by authoritative decree… to compel to depart.” Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Second Edition.

Banishment was a form of legal punishment in Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy and England. Colonial America received its share of banished English thieves and other offenders, as did Australia. During the American Revolution, the colonies banished English loyalists. More recently, the former Soviet Union restricted inmate’s rights upon release from the Gulag to 101 kilometres from large urban centers, resulting in a number of rural settlements.

Today, some communities in the United States banish sex offenders from living in their midst, resulting in a difficult dilemma: where can these offenders live, and where can they best be supervised and receive treatment, if available?