It’s easy to see … why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”).
[…] However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur.
In the second half of the 19th century, Paris was experiencing rapid and profound change. The architectural and city planning reforms advanced by Baron Haussmann during the rule of Napoleon III were particularly consequential: the demolition of small medieval streets, the numbering of buildings for administrative purposes, the establishment of wide, open, transparent boulevards (built partly to improve hygiene, partly to hamper revolutionary blockades), the proliferation of gas street lighting and the growing appeal of spending time outdoors radically transformed the city.
[…] Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. … [I]f today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.
It’s easy to blame Facebook’s business model (e.g., the loss of online anonymity allows it to make more money from advertising), but the problem resides much deeper. Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.
What this means in practice was explained by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, on that same show. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” he asked, immediately answering his own question: “You want to go with your friends.”
[…] IT’S this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.
— Evgeny Morozov on “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” New York TimesWith the passing of [Steve] Jobs this week, we are also mourning a man who defined a new kind of worker. The Jobs world-view consecrates the sacrifices of an ambitious, dedicated, and committed professional class that seeks recognition and passion in creative work. The language of love and intimacy is central to this career project. Over the past two decades, IT hardware manufacturers have made fortunes selling products through an association with the fantasy of satisfying, challenging work.
[…] When iPads and smartphones function as the signifiers of what it means to live the good life, freedom no longer entails liberation from labour. It is instead to be found in the release of personal productivity, in an ever-growing number of locations, with technology as conduit. As images of mobile devices continue to invade public spaces and airwaves, their middle-class address should not go unnoticed.
— Melissa Gregg, “How Steve taught us to love our Jobs too much,” The ConversationThe radical in me smiles, but I also wonder if it’s too soon to call the consequences, good and bad, of a WikiLeaked world? At what cost do we “embrace this authenticity”?
Stephen Fry: In defence of the modern digital world | ABC Radio PM
“[Those who scoff at new technology and social media such as Twitter] should bear in mind that in the early 18th century there was the new technology of handpresses, as printing became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and it wasn’t the full invention of printing anymore than Twitter is the full invention of the internet; it was a little development within it…that lead to magazines, journalism, political pamphlets. And you know what, oddly enough, the many famous ones had names that were very like ‘Twitter.’ They were called things like ‘The Rambler,’ ‘The Idler,’ ‘The Spectator,’ ‘The Bystander.’ They weren’t called ‘Earnest Debate’ or ‘Serious Penetration of Issues’ or ‘The Philosopher.’ And by such strange and curious byways huge upheavals in the way people relate, and respond to one another, and political ideas and the way they push their ideas forward can be promulgated, and it isn’t anything you can predict, certainly anything you can control.”
The work of mishobaranovic in And Now It’s In Print, a Melbourne-based publication featuring the work of online artists, writers, photographers and podcasters “now in print” – combining the ephemeral, limitless, DIY nature of blogging with the editorially-focussed, design-enhanced, and serendipitous print form.
By screen culture, I mean literally that; a world of two dimensions where for six hours a day or more, people in the western developed world, more particularly kids, are spending time either playing games or on social networking sites and thereby putting themselves in an environment that is very much in the here and now, that has very strong audio and visual sensations, where at the press of a button you get instant feedback from whatever you’re doing.
But at the same time, you’re perhaps removed from some of the aspects that we take for granted. Those of us who are older or those of us who are born in the 20th century, that we taken for granted. Things like metaphor, abstract concepts, logical narrative, conceptual frame works, long attention spans, imagination. The kind of areas we can explore in more detail, if you like.
But it’s primarily a world of a small child, a world of the here and now, a world of a sound byte, a world of an instant frozen moment where nothing has consequences, and where everything is literal. Where nothing has a meaning, you’re not saying one thing in terms of something else, you’re saying literally, what you see is what you get.
— Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield on the 7.30 Report last year (via whilebird)How Do Literary Journals Survive? | newmatilda.com
It’s not the internet that threatens little magazines and journals, writes Overland editor Jeff Sparrow, it’s the waning of communities of readers:
“In his famous study of social relationships in the US, Robert Putnam famously explained: “For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago — silently, without warning — that tide reversed, and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of a century. ”
The same trends are apparent here, and you can plausibly correlate them to the hyperindividualism and atomisation resulting from 30 years of neoliberalism. Significantly, as Margaret Simons notes in The Content Makers, the decline in newspaper readerships was already marked long before the internet arrived. Newspapers depend on a shared public — and that shared public has been disintegrating ever since the 70s.
In a society that works like a lonely crowd, traditional writing and traditional reading can seem as out of place as, say, five day cricket. An unrestrained free market fosters instead a kind of Twenty20 writing: short, punchy and entirely disposable. Years ago, Bill Hicks predicted that, in the future, the media would consist of a naked woman masturbating next to a slogan. If you look across the web today, you can see exactly what he meant.
What’s the alternative?
Contrary to appearances, serious reading has always been communal. In Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill’s new book Radical Sydney, Bruce Scates describes the political bookshops of the late nineteenth century as “vibrant social centres … [places that] ended the isolation, loneliness and confusion that so often plagued the working-class reader. In the reading rooms, books and newspapers, light and warmth and companionship could all be had for a penny’s admission.”
Overland, as it happens, emerged alongside similarcluster of political and literary organisations — the Realist Writers Groups, the Australasian Book Society, etc — that collectively forged a community of readers and writers.
To survive today, alternative publications will need to do something similar. Overland has become a project as much as a journal, in which public events, festival appearances, a group blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts all play a part. Yes, we still depend on subscriptions — but we’re increasingly thinking about subscribers in much the same way as a public radio station does. You take out a subscription to 3RRR or PBSnot so much because you have to (there’s plenty of people who listen for free) but because you identify with the station and you want it to continue.
So too with Overland. The community around the journal and its political and aesthetic goals not only ensures a base level of financial support but it also fosters an environment in which reading and writing seem to matter.
It’s not a model that will work for everyone but it does gesture to a broader point — which is simply that the media crisis is, at base, a political one. The real opposition in these debates is not between print and screen but between the collective and the individual, the market and the people, the public and the private.”
Late last year the Federal Government announced that it intended to go ahead with one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. The Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy – presumably assuming Australia was distracted by Christmas and Copenhagen to notice – announced that an expensive, ineffective and intrusive filter will be installed on every Internet connection in the country.
It’s philosophically dubious and practically unworkable. It will leave artists and creative enterprises particularly vulnerable to its errors, complexities and abuses. It calls into the question the very idea of Australia as a culturally liberal western democracy that values open cultural exchange, free speech and freedom of expression…. I hope and expect that it will profoundly resisted by artists and the creative community.
— Marcus Westbury, “Internet Censorship and The Arts”Modern Love - The Boundaries of a Breakup - NYTimes.com
In which writer Charles H. Antin confronts his anger over his ex-girlfriend and his grandfather becoming Facebook friends:
“I had to face the truth: this wasn’t about the rules and etiquette of Facebook. It wasn’t about my grandfather. It wasn’t even about Charles 2.0. It was about my lingering attachment, one I’d tried to drop cold turkey. And that’s not how attachment works.
In the beginning, following my ex on Facebook seemed like a harmless, if slightly stressful, way of easing out of our relationship. I’d always prided myself as being on the outskirts of the online social networking world. And now here I was, officially a crazy Facebook person, not just stalking my ex but also feeling threatened by my own Frangelico-drinking grandfather.”
Huffington Post’s longtime contributing style editor Lesley M. M. Blume on 13 yr old fashion blogger Tavi, via “Editors Like Tavi But Don’t Take Her Fashion Advice Seriously” at The Cut.
Although, how a blog that started in 2005 can really have a “longtime contributing” style editor is beyond me.
(via somethingchanged)
So that means Tavi was 9 years old when the HuffPo was born…
Tavi Gevinson, aka Style Rookie (via calivintage: richtong: aristobrat)
