Category Archives: Technology

07/01/2012

Didn’t get the Jobs?

By The Cultured Animal

Hmmmmmmmmmmm .....

If any of you have been trying to get a hold of Steve Jobs’ bio in Australian bookstores since around Christmas time, you’ll have noticed you can’t get it. Anywhere. What nature of fool doesn’t order enough stock of 2011′s most anticipated biography, officially Amazon’s best-selling title of the year?

Well, here’s the reason: according to a sales rep from Alliance Distribution Services, a whole container’s worth of the books – we’re talking the kind of container that causes wharfie uprisings, or gets reappropriated as a temporary inner-city bar in an obscure location – followed poor Stevie into the afterlife when the truck that was transporting them rolled. Perhaps its course was sabotaged by a Google-powered GPS system.

Image courtesy of the talented miss Nicole Firth © 2012

According to the distributor, the book will be back in stores next month. Or you could just get it as an eBook. It’s what Steve would have wanted.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Economy, Literature, Technology

23/10/2011

Censorship and Digital Rights. Or, Things Worth Rioting About

By The Cultured Animal

There is no Such Thing as Society

David Cameron tried to blame this year’s violent riots in England on the family – or lack of discipline and good solid values therin – forgetting that dearest Maggie’s maxim “There is no such thing as society” effectively dismisses any kind of social unit. Um, The Family. (Woops.)

He also suggested his government may seek to block user access to Twitter and other social networks in the event of similar future crises, to prevent violent calls to action from going viral. While this sounds well within general principles of law and order, in practice it would probably have about as many black holes and failings as Melbourne’s fraught Myki system, with its tendency to overcharge well-meaning passengers (check out this wonderful new website created by a disgruntled but clever uni student, which tracks the half-baked system’s myriad errors). If a government-implemented, multi-million dollar transport ticketing system – a seemingly basic thing that exists in just about every city large enough to have its own public transport system – can’t even do its job, I don’t see the type of advanced and quick-to-react filtering necessary for these proposed objectives happening properly anytime soon. (Drawing a long bow? I don’t know, I just wanted to slag off Myki.)

Just say an innocent person were to have their communication pathways curtailed in such a hypothetical future scenario, through error or simply bad judgment, the act may go far beyond merely inconveniencing an individual. During a crisis, not being able to contact, say, family to let them know you’re alright, may prove very distressing – or worse – for the individual in question.

There is also a murky grey area as to what exactly constitutes bad behaviour – where to draw the line between a bit of good ol’ hearted fun and incitement to criminal activity. For example, a more boisterous friend of mine was once apprehended at the airport and questioned for several hours after stupidly making allusions to anarchist bomb plots during a flight home. In other words, the tendency to take language too literally in matters of security is not new. Perhaps we need to introduce some kind of guage for a sense of humour when recruiting law enforcement professionals in future.

Minefield, I say.

Some good old fashioned Poll Tax rioting

The internet is of course not the only means of communication available to us in high-stakes situations. Responding to the riots, Crikey correspondent Bernard Keane wrote that “No one would seriously talk about targeting the phone system because it is being used to coordinate illegal activity, but the internet is considered fair game.”

How wrong he was. Only weeks after England’s riots, San Francisco government authorities blocked mobile phone networks to quell a protest against public transport provider BART. (Clearly I had a bad experience on the bus today.)  The protest was organised following the shooting of an armed man by BART security guards. BART’s response to the planned protest (which never materialised anyway) was widely criticised as a violation of constitutional rights to freedom of speech.

From Wired:

Some constitutional scholars are likening BART’s actions to an unlawful suppression of First Amendment speech — a digital form of prior restraint. Others, however, say BART’s move would probably survive a court challenge, and will likely be copied by other government agencies as the use of mobile technology and social networking by protesters grows.

If the latter is indeed the outcome, what this incident (along with the political fallout after England’s riots) highlights is insufficient legal frameworks in the area of digital rights and freedoms. This void will become increasingly problematic as we – as a global society – further entrench ourselves in digital realms, increasingly living aspects of both our personal and professional lives via digital media.

Payback: notorious hackers Anonymous leave their mark on BART's website

Central to these trends, and the reason why we get so up in arms at the thought of having our personal communications technologies neutered by authorities, is the growing sense that access to these technologies is some kind of basic human right*. Remember, there was a time when parents didn’t install iPhones in their six-year-olds’ lunch boxes, “Just in case of emergency”. This idea of access to communicative media as a personal right underlines the argument behind governments all over the world advocating for national broadband networks**, and it also largely informs the political sentiment behind open-source software, although this is more concerned with the means of production of these tools, rather than access to them (something for a later discussion).

The internet (though just one example of a communicative tool) is also largely anarchic, so when a liberal democratic state seeks to enforce its power in these realms, the outcomes are unlikely to be straightforward. It’s a whole different world out there, a whole other jurisdiction (or lack thereof). We don’t react very well to limitations online, because we’re so used to not having them when we go there. Communications technologies feel like the ultimate freedom: they allow us to extend our private selves – engage our personal and professional relationships – and any intrusion on this is heading into dangerous waters indeed.

I’m sure David Cameron has been shitting himself for the last three months as to how the riots were able to happen so quickly and violently, and how the British government might prevent anything similar from happening in the future. It will be interesting to see what kind of legislation is developed in these tricky areas as a result.

Communications Technologies: Criminal or Detective?

In a strange twist of irony, while the UK government ultimately did not seek to increase any legislative powers over social media networking sites, it has been able to use them to efficiently track and convict perpetrators of some of the crimes in question, as a measure of deterrence as much as anything else. Similarly, in the United States in August, a large group of youths robbed a Maryland 7-Eleven, but most of them were captured within days after police posted security camera footage online. The irony is that, as with England’s riots, the robbers are believed to have organised the incident via social media.

Any means of communication can clearly be put to good use or to bad. Research from The Guardian shows that during England’s riots, Twitter activity was mostly of a sentiment against violent, criminal acts – leaning instead towards spreading helpful alerts during the crisis and organising the riot cleanup in its aftermath. But then, social media’s potential for use in either direction is probably obvious to everybody but a technological determinist.

I suppose the moral of the story is, if you’re going to use social networks to incite (and therefore, according to British law, commit) serious crime, make sure your personal online account doesn’t lead straight to your front door. I bet those Anonymous folks could give you some pointers – if only you could find them.

…

*There I go again with some good ol’ first world centralism, but let’s take that as a given for the purposes of context and relevance.***

**Well, okay, so that might also be economically motivated.

***Course, I should stop leaving this same disclaimer in every bloody post about technology, and just put it in a page. One day. When I get round to writing those “About” pages.****

****In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m going through a bit of a PoMo Footnotes Phase. Sign of madness, or sign of the times? You decide.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Politics, Technology

23/09/2011

Rabbit holes and rodent hutches

By The Cultured Animal
A Book is Finite.

How satisfying is it when you get to the end of a book? Good or bad, it doesn’t matter – that finiteness gives you a satisfying sense of accomplishment. The extent of your efforts is tangible: the length of the page count, the weight of the tome in your hands. You can file it away in your bookcase, on that shelf for all the other books you’ve devoured. (Underneath the shelf for books you’ve yet to read, but above the shelf for the books who still have bookmarks wedged up their dusty fannies, whom you are desperately trying to forget.) Perhaps yet the most exciting part of finishing a book is the thrill of thinking about what to start reading next.

The Internet, on the other hand, is seemingly infinite. Short of joining an ascetic monkhood ensconced in some remote tropical hills, you will never, ever be done with it. (Even when you die, a cyber imprint of yourself, however small or obscure, will no doubt continue.) Opening your browser is like being Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. No wonder that rabbit was always late – too many distractions down there.

I’m not one of those Internet-fearing catastrophists, no. I’m awed by its palatial garden of promises – even if it doesn’t always deliver the roses. Even if Nicholas Carr says it’s emptying my brain out. And so these and many other reasons are why the love I have for the Internet is a cautious one. Kind of like the love one might have for one’s parents if they’d been a bit lax in their child-rearing skills. Necessary, but not always pleasant or fruitful. Wary, but unshakable.

I get quite dreamy when I think about its utopian possibilities, and more than a little bit worried when I think about all the bad directions in which things could go.

The next few posts here at The Cultured Animal will explore some of those big possibilities – utopian and dystopian, idealistic and practical – that our cybersphere presents us.

Addendum

I know this doesn’t really count as a post. Sorry, I’m incognito. My pet ferret has borrowed the swivel chair, and this is what he has to say to you:*

1. HELP, HELP! I THINK I’M FALLING INTO THE INTERNET!

2. Do electric ferrets eat Astroturf?

3. You might find the answer here.

© The Cultured Animal 2011

*If my pet ferret had really taken up residence on the swivel chair, it’s curious that he should be presently writing about himself in third person. Well, greater minds have failed. Let’s not discount the strange and populist power of rodents just yet. Look at Mr Rabbit. (Sorry, Abbott.)

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13/08/2011

New Skills for a New World

By The Cultured Animal

The Cultured Animal recently tuned in to the always fascinating Australia Talks program on ABC Radio National. For those who don’t know the station, it’s nerd radio, and will fill your brain with wonderful things. (I may be harbouring secret ambitions to replace our number one crush Phillip Adams when he eventually … Well, let’s just say he’s not getting any younger.) For those who don’t know Australia Talks, it’s probably the only talkback program you should ever subject your ears to (because even Biggsy is still a left-wing bigot).

On this particular night the program focused on Australia’s growing service economy, fuelled by the time-poor among us who work so much we can’t clean our own bathrooms. Even if we did have the time, when it comes to doing, say, some of the Mr Fixit things around the house (or vehicle), many of us no longer have the necessary know-how that previous generations did.

It may be easy to view these trends as an indication of how sad we’ve become as a society, and I’m inclined to agree with one listener who commented that it’s a sorry state of affairs indeed if parents no longer have time to spend with their children. (Although this is surely opening up a can of worms, possibly feminist worms, and I don’t want them crawling all over me, so let’s just agree to leave the can shut for now, okay? Good.) It may be equally easy to view any loss of Mr Fixit or or Miss Needle-and-Thread skills as an indication that we are becoming stupider. Or lazier, in the case of outsourcing some of the more thrilling ‘chores’, such as cooking or cleaning.

I’ve put chores here in inverted commas because, as some listeners argued, mundane tasks can sometimes be therapeutic. Nothing like scrubbing the caked-on grime off the ol’ oven to get you feeling really at peace with the world. But these everyday tasks may also provide a more profound function: that of reconnecting us to our biological imperative for survival.

The Survival Scale

We have always remained, as human beings, connected to this survival instinct to some degree or another. Else, we would simply cease to live (or cease to be human). And by degrees I mean, for example, the degree between hunting down a wild boar, ripping it to shreds with a pair of overdeveloped incisors and then wearing its skin during winter; versus, say, buying some Chinese takeaway after a hard slog along Chapel Street foraging for bargain Ugg boots.

And such are the luxuries of contemporary civilisation*, many of us now have the freedom to choose just how far along this scale we might park our arses. Yet that place will probably never be static. You might weed your dear little garlic plants with your bare hands of a morning; download Cowboys and Aliens onto your laptop and tweet about it over a glass of imported Shiraz come evening. You know, mashing things up a bit. It’s all about the mash.

Your cherry-picking of life on the Survivor’s Scale may be deeply personal and conscious, as the retiree who embarks on a mission to free themselves of their worldly possessions and migrate to Costa Rica; or it may be altogether less thought-out, as the tech-savvy Gen Y who ensconces themselves in as much social media as possible through no other cause than an overabundance of time and a sneaking addiction.

Stop the Hysteria!

Viewing the growing trends in outsourcing of areas of our personal, day-to-lives as some kind of debased, immoral reflection on civilisation is really quite absurd when you consider that humans have been getting machines and other humans to do things for us for a very, very long time. Mechanisation and outsourcing merely represent more indirect routes to achieving the same end that we once might have pursued autonomously (ie. our biological imperative), but hinged onto the complex processes of civilisation. Any further developments in this direction, aided by our world of rapidly advancing technological gadgetry, are simply the next steps in the perpetual project of civilisation.

If we choose to live our lives towards the end of the scale, which will move ever further from its original, hands-on-the-dirty-dishes benchmark, the sacrifice may indeed be that we personally lose some skills, and that we distance ourselves, intentionally or otherwise, from that base survival instinct. But we also gain a whole bunch of other skills (even if those skills actually lie in the capabilities of our digital tools, rather than in our own personal ingenuity). My Nanna has probably never even seen the Internet, let alone dreamt what she could do with it.

New Skills for a New World

If our digital revolution is a cultural revolution on par with the impacts following the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, what amazing new roads might we travel down? There’s plenty of hoo-ha about how the Internet is making us stupider, mutilating our attention spans and whatnot; but what about the boon for lateral thinking it might create? It’s so easy to follow a train of thought in so many directions and, with a little discipline from distraction, who knows what truths these new tools may allow us to uncover.

An extension of the Internet’s function as a brilliant tool for making lateral connections is its ability to connect us with other people, all over the world. We know it’s good at this because of the unstoppable rise of social media. Plus these days people are just as likely to seek a personal online review of a product or place rather than some officially produced document. Are we beginning to trust each other more?

The more we connect, the better we may be able to understand each other, and, hopefully, not bomb each other. We may be able to use our new tools to move towards a more positive, global, social consciousness. Perhaps we are closer to the cosmopolitan dream than we thought.**

…

*Yep, this is me being Affluent-Countries-of-the-World-Unite!-centric again. Soz.

**I’m well aware that I’m coming to rash, starry-eyed and barely-referenced conclusions here, and that there might be a particularly large hole in my argument regarding the role of social media in e.g. the recent riots in England; but due to time constraints I’m going to leave the argument wildly unsupported. Contest at your will. But not without checking out what Jeremy Rifkin has to say first.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Cartoons, Economy, Technology

02/08/2011

ABA #3: Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101

By The Cultured Animal

If focus on community was a strong theme running throughout this year’s Australian Booksellers Association conference, then utilising social networks and having an online presence was stressed as an integral part of tapping into community.

Pip Lincolne, whose flair for social media has worked wonders for her business Meet Me at Mike’s, insists that to make that work, a business needs to have ‘really nice online manners that are the same as your offline manners.’

It’s not usual that we talk practicalities at The Cultured Animal – we’re more partial to philosophical cloud-lounging – but Pip was so endearing, I thought we’d reproduce some of her pointers from the conference.

Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101

  • Show off: Speak in your authentic voice across multiple online platforms. Talk to people as you would in real life – because they matter to you.
  • Avoid the niche: Don’t just blog about books. That’s boring, and limits your audience.
  • Share nicely: Link, be generous, give.
  • Eavesdrop: Listen and respond to your readers/customers.
  • Thumbs up: Praise, link and credit others where it’s due. If we support others, we foster community, which in turn supports us.
  • Return calls: Metaphorically speaking, of course. Don’t let your page/blog languish – it’s bad for business. Community is about conversation. Pip says, ‘Providing a place to have a chat and then leaving the room is bad manners. It’s not a monologue.’ You wouldn’t do something like that in real life. (Unless your friends were really, really tedious.)
  • Pied piper: Lead with projects which create and nurture community. Think outside the shop. It all feeds back into business – and good times.
  • Host it: Be a place where communities can share information on events outside your shop doors.
  • Invite: Pip says to ‘smooth out the distinction between online and offline’, following up or preceding real-life events with online content. ‘Blend it together.’

Fundamentally, says Pip, having a blog is the most important thing for any business – it’s where you make yourself heard. A blog can then feed into Twitter and Facebook as secondary plaforms. But it’s important that your voice is sincere, or nobody with listen. ‘Strategy is important, but sincerity is the most important thing.’

What a shame The Cultured Animal isn’t making any money out of its excellent online social skills. But I promise to be nice, if you promise to keep reading. (At least, most of the time.)

So, that sums up our reportage from the ABA Conference for now, although some of the many inspiring ideas from what was an overwhelmingly positive couple of days may pop up again, albeit reincarnated in some other fashion. In the meantime, it’s back to cloud-lounging for a while. Or perhaps lounging on a fence, in the sun. With a real book. Bought from a real shop. (No subliminal messages there.)

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27/07/2011

ABA #2: The Times They Are a-Changin’

By The Cultured Animal

As a very famous person once said, “the times they are a-changin.”

We are in an age of rapid technological change, most of which is not worth bothering to keep up with, because you can’t, not really. The book is a form of technology that has been with us for centuries, and many have compared this age of digital media as having a similar force of impact on reading, thinking and society in general as that following the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, which facilitated the beginnings of mass proliferation of the book. Today, the ubiquity of the Internet means the ways in which we consume books is changing – not just in terms of how and where we buy them, but in what form.

One of the most tense panels at this year’s ABA conference featured competing representatives from the budding eBooks industry marketing their wares. Meanwhile, one of the most compelling speakers was Mark Higginson of Nielsen, whose audience pounced on his wealth of statistical information about consumers’ online book-buying patterns. The flurry of tweeting activity during the presentation indicated a hunger for tangible information in an industry faced with an uncertain future.

It’s certainly not just a matter of choosing between a hardback or paperback any more.

But if we’re hungry for new information about customers, they’re equally curious. Unfortunately, some very uninformed comments and queries are frequently thrown at the good people who stand behind bookshop counters. Plenty of it is well-meaning and borne from a desire to correct any ignorance. Some of it is downright rude, to the point where one’s very purpose in life is undermined. (Sort of like when my musically challenged friend bags out my favourite bands, not understanding that, as a musician, it kinda hurts my feelings.)

We understand that as representatives of the industry we are generally better versed in decoding what the hell is going on for the general public. But when faced with the same handful of recurrent questions, such as “What do you think about Borders closing?”, or “Did you know I can get this cheaper online?”, day after day, how does one quell the spirit of Bernard Black, who lurks dangerously close to the surface of one’s amiable front? How, indeed, to maintain one’s excellent customer service skills as well as one’s dignity (and sanity)?

The thing is, we might look smart (especially when wearing our horn-rimmed glasses), but as The Papa of Independent Bookselling and Publishing Henry Rosenbloom said: “While there’s no clear way forward, we’ve come to the conclusion that we know as little about it as anyone else.”

I'll be honest, I just wanted an excuse to post a photo of Dylan Moran here.

Well, if we can’t give a definitive answer to all that complicated stuff, we can at least try to deal with the yucky ‘feelings’ part of it.

Becky Anderson’s Guide to Dealing With Annoying Questions 101

In her keynote address to the conference, Becky Anderson (President of the American Bookseller’s Association, 5th generation heir to Anderson’s Bookshop, and general champion of independent and community-focused business) read to us a beautiful statement on behalf of Anderson’s, summarising their thoughts and feelings on the collapse of Borders and the state of the industry. She insisted that “first and foremost, we are not celebrating … the loss of so many jobs”, and maintained again and again her mantra: “we [independent bookshops] are still here.” Barwon Booksellers, an absolute treasure trove of second-hand books in Geelong, Victoria, sent out a heartfelt letter to its subscribers expressing similar sentiments.

It’s a good idea, and one which I urge all booksellers to follow. Either that or leave yourselves open to continued onslaughts of misinformed flak, to which you’ll be forced to respond personally each time until you sound like a broken 78. (Which would be ironic, because they’re obsolete.) You can frame your letter in Christmas lights and stick it on the shop door, so as to spare your beloved customers the embarrassment of asking any awkward questions from the get-go.

But let’s emphasise the beloved part. It may be a good idea to, er, bookend your eloquently crafted message with something along the lines of: Dear customers. WE LOVE YOU. We love you because you love us, and your custom is the reason we’re still here. We’re still here, because you’re still here. Thank  you for choosing to buy all your Christmas presents here. We hope you’re not disappointed we don’t also sell turkeys, but did you notice that Borders was kind of turning into a homewares store towards the end? One day it’s turkeys, the next – no more books! By the way – did we mention how much we love you?

And so on, and so forth.

Booksellers and customers alike, please feel free to share below your thoughts on any of these matters. Perhaps you’ve done something similar to Anderson’s or Barwon Booksellers. Maybe you’ve experienced a Bernard moment. I hope you at least got a laugh out of it, or a glass of wine.

Stay tuned for Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101. We do like hands-on ladies.

Ciao for now xx

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Literature, Technology, Economy

24/07/2011

The Cultured Animal at ABA Conference 2011

By The Cultured Animal

Today and tomorrow, along with our wild friend Kate from Bean There Read That, The Cultured Animal will be busy drinking terrible coffee, initiating itself into the glories of Twitter, and doing a lot of listening and talking. Maybe even at the same time.

That’s right, folks – it’s time for the annual Australian Booksellers Association conference. And what fascinating times the book industry is living in!

Bookish people have a lot of ideas, let me tell you. Your Animal will be mulling them over and regurgitating them with the usual treatment over the course of the conference, and no doubt for some time afterwards too. So please do stay tuned.

Two interrelated and recurring ideas worth mentioning so far are:

1. Australia’s Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s recent faux pas predicting bookshops will no longer exist in five years is clearly still a sore point for many of the conference speakers, who have hit back at this ludicrous presumption with their eminent wit and knowledge of evidence to the contrary.

2. Physical communities appear just as important as physical books for booksellers in the digital age. The idea that online retailing is killing bookshops is far from the whole story – a story which, in any case, is only really just beginning. Or, as keynote speaker Becky Anderson of the American Booksellers’ Association and Anderson’s Bookshop put it, ‘This whole thing with eBooks is still to me the Wild West. Who knows where the dust is gonna settle.’

In the meantime, everyone should get themselves acquainted with The Indigenous Literacy Foundation and some of the fabulous work they are doing in communities (including publishing Grug in the Karrawa language). And don’t forget to pop National Indigenous Literacy Day Septemebr 7th 2011 in your diary. We heart.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Literature, Technology, Economy

23/07/2011

Keeping Up with the Mobile-Joneses: The Emotional Trauma of Technological Development*

By The Cultured Animal

It is with great aplomb that your esteemed Animal can announce: I have now entered the world of smart phones. Having once thought my trusty Nokia E71 was classified as thus, I am now proved but a fool. That archaic device, as it turns out, actually suffered from severe learning difficulties and, due to not receiving the requisite nurturing (read: frequently dropping it on its head), it has now come to a tragic end. (Or has it? Oh stop, the suspense is killing you.)

Techno-Trauma

Upgrading one’s phone feels a little bit like plunging down the rabbit hole into a strange and unfamiliar landscape where things don’t quite work the way they used to. It’s two years since I changed my phone, and in that time a lot has happened. There’s a lot of catching up to do.

I missed a shift at work and blamed it on the fact that my new phone’s calendar app is surprisingly shit in comparison to my old Nokia’s simple-but-precise inbuilt planner, which I’d been using in one incarnation or another for about five years across three different models. I can’t even type properly with this new bloody touch-screen predictive text bizzo. Where’s the tactility? How can I hit the right button with my clumsy fat thumb if there’s no button to feel in the first place? Grrrr. I’m barely old enough to have children, and already they should be head-hunting me for the next season of Grumpy Old Women. (Except for the bit where I’m not famous.) (Yet.)

Suffice to say, the week has been a bit stressful.

Retro handset by Yubz. Utterly counterintuitive.

Now, if I were the sort of person who upgraded my gadgetry every time a new gimmick came on the market, this anxiety-ridden technological learning curve would no doubt have been blunted somewhat. Yet it’s not all bad. Actually, it’s kind of refreshing to be privy to a digital time lag, if you will. Not too dissimilar to a mild slap in the face, or a stiff drink after a harrowing day of navigating cubicles and paperwork. It’s a little reminder of just how fast technology develops, and how much we take it for granted.

To Upgrade, Or Not to Upgrade?

Usually whatever digital device I already own does a sufficient job at word processing, making phone calls, scheduling appointments or playing downloaded episodes of Party Down,  as to remove any need to replace it until it starts to give up on life altogether. And, as somebody who never reads technology news or reviews, I don’t have a clue what I’m missing out on in failing to upgrade regularly. Unless, of course, the device in question becomes so socially prevalent (cue, iPhone) that the hipster in me instinctively shuns it anyway by way of its mainstream popularity.

And yet still I struggle with this idea of throwing out a perfectly good phone/MP3 player/tablet thingy simply due to an unhealthy, insatiable, market-driven hunger for new features. (Quite obviously this reveals me as some kind of a freak in my generational bracket.)

There are strong environmental/anti-consumerist arguments against buying the latest, flashiest, smartest, geekiest new piece of technology as soon as it comes on the market. On the other hand, there are also strong health arguments for the regular upgrading of one’s digital assets (I refer you to previous section).

Techno-Consciousness

The answer to all this, dear techno-freaks, is to simply be more mindful of what you use and disown. Are you guilty of hoarding perfectly working (but technologically inferior) phones in a bottom drawer, like little dormant melanomas festering amongst undeveloped rolls of film and gimmicky, once-used kitchen appliances? Sure, it’s no bad thing to have a back-up phone for when your current one mysteriously goes missing during a drunken bender (cue more technological stress – did you know that a mobile phone is actually connected to your cardiovascular system and that if it’s not within ten metres’ reach you will quickly begin to die?), but if you’ve got more mobile appendages than two, perhaps consider giving a new lease of life to your dormant digital device. (You know, like donating your second kidney to a distant cousin afflicted with poor health.)

How COOL is this guy!!!

What better way to assuage your environmental guilt than to recycle your phone? In Australia, the official phone recycling program is called MobileMuster (‘muster’ sounds a little bit Grandpa, but obviously they do not have a marketing budget akin to Apple’s, because Australians do not like paying taxes). They run a joint Landcare Australia initiative to raise money for regenerating our coastline. All you have to do is print this pre-paid label and send in your crappy old phone by post – plenty easier than enduring a bush rave followed by a marathon tree-planting binge the morning after. Or, you could just take your old phone to a phone shop. Or Officeworks. Whatever. Just do it before September 30th, or you’ll have to do the hungover tree-planting marathon instead.

Techno-Branding

Well, that settles the environmental dilemma somewhat; as for the stress issue, my advice is this: don’t go changing the brand of a thing that is integral to the functioning of your everday life, unless you absolutely must, for whatever your own neurotic reasons. I’m not talking phone companies (they are all out to screw us equally) – I’m talking the make of phone.

Every time my Mum buys a new Toyota**, it feels a bit different to handle, yet strangely familiar, like New Dad as opposed to Old Dad. There’s a leap, but there’s continuity too, in simply upgrading to the next model by the same brand, allowing us to ease into the next phase of digital development.

Course, if the car is shit, change the brand.

© The Cultured Animal 2011

*A bit like the trauma after a car accident. Because technology is developing at really high speed. And if you speed a lot you will probably, um, crash.

**I hate to bring my mother into it, but this Animal has only bought one car in its lifetime***, and is therefore not a particularly useful subject here for illustrative purposes.

***Owned two. Wrote both of them off. (Cars are very bad for the environment and should all be destroyed.)

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Cartoons, Environment, Technology

28/06/2011

Everything but the Screen: Finding Mystery and Romance in Digital Dalliances

By The Cultured Animal

Walking home this wintry Melbourne night, I passed under a pair of sneakers hanging from the telephone wires above a crossroads, and was struck by how archaic that old marker of a drug pick-up point seemed. Did people really ever hang out on street corners waiting for their hooded dealer to turn up with an ounce of dope? If they didn’t just use the telephone then, they’ve got plenty more options to choose from now. I imagine an online courier business would work rather well.

Street art by Skewville

The thing is, the immediacy of personal, digital communications devices means nobody has the patience to work on that sort of a clock anymore. Except maybe in Peru, or in remote indigenous communities far from this particular inner-city street corner. In which case, pull up a pew. The telephone line’s not in use, so maybe bring a letter writing set too. I hear the postman passes round this way on Tuesdays.

The immediacy of digital technology removes a lot of the mystery from our lives, some of which can be rather thrilling. Gone is that building of excitement that comes when you just have to wait for something – like finding out who won the game when you get home from work, or waiting till Thursday night for the next episode of your favourite TV drama, instead of downloading it early or buying it on DVD from overseas (although it’s got to be said, the DVD marathon is one of today’s many pleasures). What about hanging around that pretty girl’s favourite café in case you accidentally-on-purpose bump into her? You’re probably more likely to pull off those sorts of casual, just-popping-by airs on Facebook than in the bookshop.

Technology vs. Romance?

I had the privilege of being in Edinburgh during its world-famous Fringe festival last year. One of the highlights was York theatre group Belt Up, patroned by none other than Dame Judi Dench. Belt Up went about transforming one floor of a big old building (owned by the University of Edinburgh and now only in use during the festival due to extensive fire damage) to look like the interior of a 1920s house. Inside this magical space, their wildly original and surreal comedies transported audiences back in time, to the bohemian circles inhabited by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (Lorca is Dead), and to the home of much loved children’s author and creator of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie (The Boy James).

My friend, a gorgeous little thing from Rome who liked to wear grandpa jackets, train driver hats and horn-rimmed glasses bigger than her face, began a romantic affair with a member of the troupe. He was quietly spoken and thoroughly British, with foppish brown hair and good, strong shoulders. Perhaps because she was so romanced by the historical setting of their plays, she refused to give him her mobile phone number. And so they were forced to rendezvous at exciting hours in the ephemeral festival bars, or chance encounters in poster-covered stairwells on their ways to separate shows.

The elimination of technology from their courting injected some magic – and indeed, romance – into what might have otherwise been an enjoyable, but more conventional, holiday fling. When the not-so-heady Scottish summer waned and the besotted couple in turn went their separate ways, there was the requisite emotion and grief; yet the memory of their time together was left intact and pure, untainted by the inevitable markers of a dying romance: the length of phone calls and text messages decreasing, the days between them increasing. The nature of their encounter seemed to distill and celebrate the very thing that matters most in relationships: direct, in-person communication.

Throwing an Electric Spanner in the Works

If technology removes some of the mystery from our lives, genre writers must be tearing their hair out. I remember once watching an episode of Buffy and shaking my head in disbelief as her party faithful ran round hysterically, crying “Where’s Buffy? We can’t find Buffy!” and imagining all sorts of perilous, vampiric ends for her. Why didn’t they just ring her mobile, duh? Panic-driving plot devices like this one can now be trumped by phoning on the run, which means the storyboarders require a little more ingenuity. I suppose the flip side is they’ve now got a lot more to work with when it comes to sci-fi monsters and techno-dystopias. Meanwhile, period dramas such as Mad Men, Deadwood or Downton Abbey are even more appealing for their old world, pre-digital charm.

There’s another way in which our communication devices cause hiccups in storytelling: a screen doesn’t look particularly exciting on another screen. Face-to-face conversation, replete with theatrical expressions and spit, is a far more compelling depiction of character interaction than texts or online chats, and even the old phone conversation. There’s something jarring about having to constantly cut between two people in different places for the duration of a conversation that already feels unnatural anyway. The requisite small talk – “Hi, how’re you going?” – is often glaringly omitted, and too frequently characters neglect to say their farewells before hanging up. (Er, rude! I think you’re de-friended.)

Digital devices provide endless fun for the person using them, but are rather boring (or irritating – think headphones up way too loud on the train) for anyone else around them. I’m reminded of one night, pre-smartphone-owner, when I went out to the pub and became incredibly fed up with my friends who repeatedly pulled out their phones and fiddled around with their apps (if that sounds a bit wrong, that’s because it is). Etiquette, schmetiquette. Us self-involved Westerners should take a leaf out of the Japanese Big Book of Social Niceties (or maybe the ever-popular Social Primer‘s blog pages), and save our personal bits for when we’re in private. No-one wants to hear you yelling at your boyfriend on the street … through a phone. And if you’re selfish enough to not give a rat’s arse about anyone else’s comfort, then at least consider how you might look to them – a bit mentally challenged.

Bringing back good manners: Boston based artist Nick Rodrigues inside his mobile phone booth

“Carn, Show us Yer Texts!”

But technology can do some stuff that more direct interaction isn’t always so good at. Naughty stuff, for instance. It’s easy to hide behind the anonymity of internet chat rooms and proffer vitriolic comments that we’d never say to a person’s face – but removing that nakedness, if you will, of stark, face-to-face contact can also work in the positive. I’m not sure how well I’d do sexy talk over the phone, but having a greater buffer between yourself and the receiver through, say, texting, makes it easier to say a few cheeky words. Phones are still quite personal, though – you’re still giving something of yourself, opening yourself up, when you choose to give someone your phone number. For these reasons, texting is a great invention for anyone who struggles with expressing themselves intimately. Even if that’s not a problem for you (you lucky thing you), it’s still a quick and precise way to remind someone of intimacies shared. Just don’t try to say anything too deep – it may backfire.

© 2011 The Cultured Animal

Muggers are also surely benefiting from the ubiquity of personal digital devices. Who wouldn’t want to exact revenge upon an obnoxious Gen Y who’s wandering obliviously across a road, punching away at buttons, ears plugged up, stylish haircut obscuring everything but the screen? Petty theft just got a whole lot more profitable. I’m not sure why Spain’s economy should be struggling so much, what with its high incidence of pick-pockets. Sure, wired-up youngsters might be fitter than your easy-target Nan, but they’re probably about as switched on, and these days they’re sporting smart phones, headphones, iPods, iPads, netbooks, scooters and expensive sneakers. (Though if Nan’s carrying a wad of cash in her purse, your odds might still be best with her).

Perhaps that’s what the sneakers are doing are up there – they didn’t fit the thief.

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03/06/2011

Innocent But Aware: Cutesiness in Pop Culture, Part 2

By The Cultured Animal

In the second part of a series on all things cute and/or animalistic in pop culture, The Cultured Animal examines their significance in art, craft and fashion. To read the first part (furry things and music), go here.

Candles from Melbourne's Douglas & Hope. So scarily cute that you might just have to burn them.

What’s that? You don’t have a child? That’s okay, perhaps you’d like them for yourself!

Yep, they’re everywhere. Just about every trendy gift shop you walk into in Melbourne is packed wall to wall with things like cut-out deer, jewellery made from children’s storybooks of yesteryear, or bunny rabbit ornaments (even though it’s not Easter anymore). Check out Little Salon (City and Fitzroy), who go delightfully overboard on the theme; or Zakkaya (Fitzroy), whose fine Japanese products are top of the safari range. I Dream a Highway on High Street, Northcote, is also a favourite. Not because it’s Oh So Melbourne Alt-country Rock (complete with their own Western style shirts and a mini music shop stocking local artists), or because they stock independent local designers – but because it’s named after a Gillian Welch song. Who does that? (They do).

Scientist, former Australian of the Year and all-round amazing harbinger of hope for the future, Tim Flannery, argues that we are a world in its infancy, only just beginning to come fully into consciousness. These childish sensibilities may symbolise a coming to terms with this infancy, a declaration of how little we actually know.

Bring Back Baby

Another reading of all this immature paraphernalia is that it’s a backlash against the elusiveness of childhood in today’s world*. Gone are the days when we let our children run off and play freely in the streets – you know, “Just be back by dinner, Rory, we’re having bangers and mash” kind of thing. Whether it’s due to a hyperbolic, fear-inducing media, or simply an attempt to somehow mediate the flow of unfettered information coming from everywhere at our children, today we want to know where our little ones are at every moment, and precisely what they’re doing. We’d tag them with trackers if we could – but smart phones are a good substitute (god knows what else they’re using them for, though).

And so today’s little people are caught in a sort of oxymoronic homeostasis – they have at once less freedom, because they must be kept close tabs on lest they become fodder for some hideous, child-hunting monster; and more, because they have new routes for clandestinely playing out their lives: Internet chat, texting and so on allow them to extend their social selves far beyond anything a parent could ever hope to monitor with any real effect, beyond flagrantly removing a child’s right to privacy. And if anything’s sacred today, it’s the right of the child, is it not?

Informational Trauma

In The Information Age, kids’ brains are like expectant receptors for potentially anything, including highly sexualised images from billboards or Saturday morning pop music videos, which often verge on soft porn. There’s plenty of voice given in the media to concerns about the sexualisation of children, even if ultimately these (not-so-)subliminal influences continue to thwart the censors. But a less talked-about potential threat to childhood, and an extension of this “information overload”, is the knowledge that Earth is (arguably) hurtling towards environmental catastrophe  at an alarming rate.

When I was a child, I used to have nightmares about dolphins washed up on toxic beaches covered in fluorescent, radioactive goop which burnt my feet. I adored dolphins, so this was a truly terrifying image. Yet all this public chatter about global warming and environmental issues was far less prevalent then. Today our kids know more about these issues than we do. Making sure we instill respect for the environment in our children from a young age is crucial; but is there a dark side to knowing in graphic detail the potential consequences of inaction? Does it scare them in the same way it used to scare me (and still does)? If so, isn’t that a form of trauma – the kind of trauma that makes you grow up pretty fast?

Think of the children: 2008 ad campaign for the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

Kill Your Darlings

If real innocence is hard to preserve, artists are immortalising it on canvas. You’ll find it peeking out at you through hooded eyelids as you trawl the galleries of Fitzroy,  or perhaps somewhere a little more famous – think Mark Ryden, the pin-up boy for this movement (if you could call it that). Yet Ryden and his contemporaries are often concerned with exposing the dark sides to these visions of innocence, through juxtaposition or brutalisation. Gore dolls are a pertinent example, as are the nightmarish dystopias of Camille Rose Garcia, which read like dark fairytales full of forlorn creatures who’ve strayed from the safe, childlike havens where they really belong.

Stumbling into dangerous worlds: Camille Rose Garcia

This distortion of innocence in art can be read not merely as children’s loss of innocence, but more broadly as humanity’s loss of innocence. Today we are aware of what we are doing to the planet, and any failure to acknowledge and take responsibility for our actions, or stand up to those who perpetrate them, is immoral (you could use any example of human abomination, really – human rights abuses, war – take your pick). We can no longer feign ignorance when hard science and information are now so easily available to just about everybody**.

These visions of thwarted childhoods can also be read as more literal, direct warnings: if we don’t act now to stem the environmental pressures facing our planet, we are potentially leaving our children the legacy of a damaged environment, which may prove inhospitable to human life as we know it.

Mark Ryden’s Little Boy Blue: is humanity in its infancy, toying with dangerous things it can’t yet comprehend? Or, does childhood elude us entirely – the boy’s knowing facial expression indicates a maturity and awareness beyond his physical years, linking him to the horrific, adult motifs against which his childish appearance is juxtaposed.

Bittersweet Nostalgia

The growing love for childish paraphernalia (the ones that haven’t been subjected to violence, that is) may also indicate a sort of Freudian denial at work in our social subconscious. It’s fun to inhabit our inner child, because it means we don’t have to deal with the heavy responsibility that comes with being aware of our complex world, and our part as a species in shaping it. Wallowing in pastel-coloured ’80s toys purchased from eBay, or flouncing around in a tutu, are delightful acts in reclaiming childhood – a retroversion toward the safety of the foetal position.

Cute craft revivals are a further conflation of this regressive psychological process. Hand-sewn aprons made from vintage children’s fabrics, for instance, hark back to not just childishness, but childishness from eras long gone, from a nostalgic (perhaps fictional) place when the world felt a little less complicated. Yet to view these movements as motivated – however subconsciously – by a denial or rejection of the contemporary world may irk the many crafters whose creative pursuits are underpinned by environmental and/or social philosophies.

Faythe Levine’s film and book, Handmade Nation, documents the rise and significance of indie craft culture in the USA

Recycling old things into something useful is a positive environmental statement, while the renewed recreational interest in crafts – many of which were once practiced as a matter of necessity – is right on cue with increasingly popular “slow” movements (think slow food, slow reading). These movements offer an alternative to the fast-paced, mindless consumerism of contemporary, urban life. They espouse a back-to-basics ethos and a more interactive, social role in the human chain of production and consumption. Even if a handmade product ultimately ends up on sale at a craft market, the buyer is more easily aware of where the product has originated, and therefore more aware of their consumer impact should they choose to buy it.

Peter Pan Rocks

I’m not suggesting for a moment that childish fun just for the hell of it (that is, without a hand-stitched manifesto to justify it) isn’t a good thing – so far as it doesn’t usurp our responsibilities in dealing with the world’s big issues. I’m all for children running around in the street playing cricket, without a mobile phone in sight. In fact, “disconnecting” in healthy doses might be just the thing our society needs. Writer Susan Maushart unplugged her family for six months, to some surprisingly positive results. Embracing play, creativity and childishness reconnects us with humanity and returns us to a state of freedom, unfettered by the chains (or wires) of our fraught, digitalised lives.

Digital media are not intrinsically bad either (unless you take issue with psychological addiction). But we may, from time to time, and whatever our age, need to go and play a game of hide and seek, or steal a shopping trolley and take it for a spin at 3am. Just to allow ourselves a little  mental and spiritual space, so that we might be in a position to better comprehend the ways in which we react to the world of information surrounding us, and the implications this has for our humanity. Hopefully we can then figure out how to swim through it (maybe throw in a few backwards somersaults – but purely for the joy of it), rather than drown.

*I’m being very Western-/First World-centric here. Sorry.

**Sorry.

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