Piano in a whorehouse

hope you enjoyed it. and thank you for reading!

You’ll find the link to my next blog here, as soon as I start it.

Update 25th March 2008
I’m writing here now.

The harshest criticism one can make of web 2.0 is that it is a playground of amateurs. But to pretend that therefore it is of no consequence, seems to be a little short-sighted.

We’re all amateurs in everything except the things we pretend to be experts in. In that sense, we’re all more parts amateur than expert. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Edison and Gandhi and the Wright Brothers were all amateurs when they began with the ideas they changed the world with. And according to the stories we’ve grown up with, so were Ekalavya and Hamlet and the Famous Five and Hansel and Gretel. It’s also worth arguing that the current ‘Leader of the Free World’ is an amateur, but see how much we’ve all learnt about statecraft from him!

‘The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call “the mainstream media.”‘ writes Nicholas Carr in a classic example of binary thinking.

Skinner Layne, on the other hand speaks from a slightly wider perspective when he says,

‘Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions, and it is perhaps the rhetoric of it all that will define the path. Web 2.0 can be the French Revolution of Technology or it can be the American Revolution of Technology. Joseph Schumpeter’s winds of creative destruction are blowing especially hard in the Internet technology world today, with remarkable improvements to our daily lives. But these winds can blow too hard too often, and an even older economic law, the Law of Diminishing Returns, begins to take over. Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels.’

Layne seems to be hinting that the web, which is also a product of our collective imagination, is constantly learning and evolving and maturing. Just like we do. And it led me to another interesting thought that observes that the Live Web is actually an explosion of postmodern thought.

‘postmodern philosophy is generally viewed as an openness to meaning and authority from unexpected places, so that the ultimate source of authority is the “play” of the discourse itself’, says, that otherwise mostly-unreliable product of amateurish collaboration, the Wikipedia.

I don’t know what you make of it, but for me, this then places a lot of responsibility on individuals and their personal sense of judgement. There are many things on the web, as it is in life, that we never stumble upon until the time has come for us to know about them.

It’s like what we know of the best metaphors that convey wisdom that is almost unapproachable any other way unless one has had a personal experience that triggers the idea contained in the metaphor.

So how are things different from the time when there was no world wide web? Isn’t it also common vanity to be overwhelmed by the symptoms of our own generation and overestimate their effects on what we like to call the human condition? This calls for a concrete example.

Today, googling Ayn Rand with due diligence throws up not just assorted writings by the author, but also from her detractors (Nathaniel Hawthorne for one). Diluting the power of Rand’s rhetoric by putting opposing theories on the same page - something she - like many others - never does herself. While it’s easy to smile and think how this will boggle and mindscrew an immature mind it’s also worth noting that our hypothetical individual has been made privy to many sides of the argument and finds himself weighed with the onerous responsibility (some may call this freedom) to form his own opinions on the subject.

A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the girl’s use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an engaged and self-aware political discourse.
Wealth of Networks,  (p 277), Benkler

Isn’t that also how we interact everyday with youtube and flickr and digg and torrents and blogs? What are tags but a way of saying, ‘it is also this’ - breaking free from the hegemony of the author’s title. It’s in our nature to lose respect for somebody who takes our word for granted. Do your own homework. Read opposing views. As many as you can. Hold them, entertain them, question them, draw your own conclusions. I think this is how many young people who are weaned on the Live Web (as opposed to just television) will learn early to mistrust anything that is said with absolute authority. Interestingly, it is also how we are born to be in the first place.

So to me, interacting with the Live Web will equip us and teach us (some may say, force us) to face the world on the strength of our sense of judgement. One that will be formed and informed only by being open to as many points of view as we can handle. Deal with it. There is no other way.

Because if - to paraphrase a line from a movie i saw recently (’Quigley Down Under’) - “the American wild west saw people made equal with the Colt revolver”, the nature of the web and the way it seems to be evolving, will render us unequal because of the quality of our own sense of judgement. You cannot buy it readymade from a store. It will be formed, as always, by your early influences. Your family, the cultures you are immersed in, the people and places you grow up with, your education, your library, your unlearning and the questions you will let your mind learn to ask.

That’s a good life lesson to learn in the comparative safety of the internet.

Because any sign, or thought or story or even another person, is only as good as the reader. and what you think about something will say more about you than it will about anything else.

This is as true today as the day language was born.

And if you’re bringing up children it might be a good idea to prepare them for this onslaught of responsibility. This too is as true today as it ever was.

“The web is creating a more open society, it is allowing more people to speak out. It’s only natural that upsets some people.” - Egyptian Blogger Amr Gharbeia to the BBC.

i was wondering how you can replace ‘The web’ in that quote with ‘Rock music’ and it’d still make sense. i guess every generation finds its own tools to explore its unique voice. It just seems like the web is a lot more inclusive, in that it has a lot more people playing with it, and a lot more expressive because of the sheer breadth of human experience that it manages to contain within its foggy confines.

On that note…

 Pablo Picasso - “Youth has no age.”

“This wide love for the art springs from the singing school, secular or sacred; from the village band, and from the study of those instruments that are nearest the people. There are more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjos among the working classes of America than in all the rest of the world, and the presence of these instruments in the homes has given employment to enormous numbers of teachers who have patiently taught the children and inculcated a love for music throughout the various communities. [And when machines produce music?] And what is the result? The child becomes indifferent to practice, for when music can be heard in the homes with-out the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely… The tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant.
- John Phillip Sousa, The Menace of Mechanical Music, Appleton’s Magazine 9 (1906).

Incidentally, I saw this quote on Lawrence Lessig’s post about

Heard a funny story lately? Here’s one on Escape Pod.

“What do you see?” he asks.

I want to say a menace, but instead I tap the delivery barrel and give the context-appropriate answer. “Unused ad space.”

Suddenly he’s a schoolmaster who has finally found a bright pupil in a classroom full of dunces.

“Exactly, Ms. Monroe. Exactly. No square millimeter wasted, that’s what I say.” He leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, “We’re looking at co-branding an AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks Lattepaloosa Crave with a Forever Fitness session discount.”

Rated R. Contains sexual innuendo, advertising warfare, and better living through chemistry.  

After an introduction like that, I’d like to see you resist ‘Just do it’.

Just another gratuitous and mildly irrelevant picture to go with a link. Of course.

I love this! Springwise calls it “softdrinks for the undecided”, but it could just as easily be “softdrinks for those who couldn’t care less”.

“Consumers don’t know which flavour they’re getting until they take a sip. Cans are simply labelled Anything and Whatever, and the list of ingredients is limited to generic wording: carbonated water, sugar, permitted flavouring, permitted colouring, preservative, tea extract, fruit juice concentrate.”

“…The key, of course, is to produce products that are good enough to guarantee repeat sales. We think established food and beverage brands could have fun with this one, too, and would have the benefit of working from a brand consumers already trust.”

And I love it because, here’s a brand showing respect for a generation that is rapidly growing tiresome of mass-marketed freedom of choices.

Never, since consumerism took control of our imagination, has there been such a fast-growing group of disenchanted youth who don’t really care to compartmentalize themselves in such shallow and claustrophobic expressions of individuality and apparent choice. And more critically, here is a brand acknowledging your need to save yourself - I almost said mindspace there - for other far more important things in life. It’s a life lesson in a minor key. Let’s just hope it doesn’t become a cult brand.

What the hell is an ikea-person anyway?

“People kept telling us they wanted ‘Anything’ or ‘Whatever’ whenever we asked them what they wanted to drink.” - Johnson Tan, Managing Director, Out of the Box Pte Ltd.

After all, it’s just a momentary, sweetened, artificially flavoured, carbonated drink. take a fucking chance and move on.

So what’s the takehome message? For me, it would be, ‘Remove the pressure’. Help young people destress in a way that’s part-fun, part-subversive (by being a mass-marketed, shallow-appeal brand itself) and adequately rewarding (that’s the bit about the product being good enough). Tell them it’s not worth your time of day to have to decide or even have a preference about this, the product we make. Carry on.

“The choices we are given are the choices we are expected to make.”

Reminds me of the time I was asked if I could write an essay on choice for a global, agency-wide competition. I chose not to.

Nice post on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington about why Facebook will most probably eat up MySpace in the days to come.

MySpace v. Facebook: “It’s Not A Decision. It’s an IQ Test”

“Think about it. If you ran a venture-backed company and had to decide whether you wanted to focus your effort on: (a) a property that welcomed you in and let you keep 100% of the revenue you generate or (b) a company with a vague policy that doesn’t let you generate any revenue, which would you choose? I don’t think it’s even a decision. It’s an IQ test.” Josh Kopelman

 Isn’t that true about every decision though?

And isn’t luck then, just a decision somebody else made without your knowledge?

and oh yeah, as long as we’re bashing myspace here it is in other news.

Isn’t it interesting that the Google logo at the bottom of its youtube sidebar widget isn’t linked? Not to itself, not to youtube, not even to a google search of the keyword that filtered the playlist above it. Instead, It’s that rare, online oddity - the flat, unlinked logo. (And if you’re going, “huh?”, you probably shouldn’t be reading this.)

Call me naive, but something tells me we can’t attribute it to bad design or sloppy engineering or foolish oversight. On the other hand, it seems obvious that if any online entity has the strategic foresight/ security/ balls/ streetsmarts - call it what you will - to do this (leave its own logo on a foreign site unlinked), it has to be Google.

Now, it’s also just common etiquette to link so users can just click and go even if they know how to type your url. So what exactly is Google doing by going against the norm? 
 

 [A brief digression as I try to locate a pattern from my tenuous grasp of history - Woah! Just dropped a stack of books....]

I’m wondering if it has something to do with this. 

Great Britain still doesn’t put its own name on its postal stamps. Is it pretending to be more powerful than it is? Is it just hanging on to its memories of world domination? Or is it just saying that it doesn’t feel the need to do it because everybody knows who it is? 

the omission of an expected sign creates another - often more powerful - in its place.

In the case of the stamps, the omission began life as an oversight caused by the fact that they were, at first, intended only for local use and which later came to be a practice that continued by agreement - aided presumably by diplomatic reinforcement - with foreign postal services. As for Google, I think it’s safe to assume that there has been considerable thought behind the choice to unlink.

So what am i saying about google? That it is smarter, bigger and more powerful than any other player on the web? Maybe. But Bubble Generation says it better.

“It amazes me that most firms pretend Google, as a strategic player, does not exist. Time to wake up. Google has succeeded in part because of it’s technology, but equally well because of it’s strategy. What does that mean?

That means a deep competence in organizational learning - specifically from your consumers, a massive resource in systematic creativity and innovation, a critical resource in ethics (Google is ‘not evil’), a resource in intuitive usability, and of course a strong technological resource. Oh, and a commitment to strategic renewal.

This is pretty much the perfect set of resources to develop in a network market. Of course, the corporates will never understand this - because they don’t have the organizational capacity to even perceive that Google has a strategy.”

“Moral Relativism aside, evil is what I call a player with a better game.”

It’s been almost a year since my first post on Sunsilk’s gangofgirls.com. i revisited it recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that there are now 33530 gangs (up from 8070 when I first checked). So what if most of them seem to be gangs of one? It’s nice to see that there are actually so many people who are willing and passionate enough to stand all by themselves for what they believe in.

“Just because she’s your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be drunk.”
Judge to erring Police Officer who, while on duty, put loyalty to the force above his own sense of judgement. More on that here.

“There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed”

which is probably why it’s always signal vs noise.

because a signal’s biggest enemy - and therefore best friend - is not another signal, but noise. and when the signal is too strong, it gets blindsided, like so much noise.

Here’s an example of a signal surrounded by enough noise to make it work better…

There’s this programme i saw recently on a news channel and it featured a man whose heart has given up on him. He goes about his life, with four pipes that run to his heart through his lower abdomen and a cylinder on a trolley that he pulls around wherever he goes. And as he spoke about his life, I watched in awe. He isn’t bothered. His ailment and its attendant impedimenta don’t make a difference to who he is. Now what was interesting was that he - sitting on a park bench, covered in an easy midshot, for the better part of 3 minutes - was wearing a plain, purple, everyday t-shirt. With a small, white nike logo on his chest. And I caught myself thinking, when a man like that wears a nike t-shirt, what does that make me feel about the brand?

There you go.

The connections I form myself are stronger than the ones I’m fed.

“The idea that the great unwashed are just a herd who will do whatever Machiavellian advertisers want them to do is nonsense. The reason that the advertising industry needs to be skilful in the way it communicates its message is because the masses are so obdurate, they are resistant to these messages.”
A.C. Grayling

“Don’t tell me, show me!” - Eliza

we live. we learn. we read. we observe. we listen. and in the blinding cupidity that our sponge-like minds are capable of, sometimes our thought processes evolve without us even being aware of it.

One of the ways this comes home to you is when you deliberately begin to study how you’ve begun to think. See how you express yourself. Externalized in the symbols you use, and indeed in the sensibility with which you use these symbols, may be the dreams of your mind. The words you use, the ideas you express, and the images you create, are often invested with - or to carry the metaphor to its logical conclusion - carry the flickering reflections of these dreams. And if you read them honestly enough - without prejudice - these clues can often lead to a deeper awareness of your purpose.

The greatest betrayals are the ones we commit against our minds.

- This is borderline mysticism! hopefully, i will soon be back to my own, good self.