Tyler Hellard

Nathan Jurgenson asks “When did TED lose its edge?”

What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch.

The rise of the internet anti-intellectual.

My problem is really not with Jarvis, but the fact that these “books that should have remained a tweet”, as Morozov states, have dominated the conversation about what the rise of new and social media means. I do not care that these fun little books exist, but that they are dominating the public conversation.

Perhaps the fault lies with the more rigorous intellectuals, both in and outside academia, who have made themselves largely absent from the public conversation about new technologies? Where is the Marshall McLuhan of social media? Why is it that Jeff Jarvis is setting the public conversation on publicity, Andrew Keen on amateurism, Tapscott and Williams on prosumption, Siva Vaidhyanathan on the impact of Google on society or Chris Anderson on abundance economies and “free”? To be clear, I think it is good that these folks hit on important topics in a catchy way. But they cannot be the whole picture, nor should they even be at the center. None of them provide a rigorous historical or theoretical treatment of their topics.

This is something that’s been bugging me for awhile, mainly because I’ll be in meetings where people cite certain authors (often poorly) as a way to push forward bad ideas. The problem is these authors are writing business books about cultural questions (that are mostly sold in airports, because if you’ve got four hours to kill, you may as well learn about the state of our society, right?). Often these books don’t seem to require much more effort to write than they do to read. Like anything, there are exceptions, but they are few and far between, and ultimately we’ve created a library of books that give stupid (well, maybe not stupid, but definitely lazy) people fodder to continue making stupid decisions.

I like the question “Where is the Marshall McLuhan of social media?” a lot. Frankly, there aren’t many people who have said more relevant things than McLuhan or Harold Innis did about the web, and those guys have been dead for 32 and 60 (FUCKING 60!) years respectively. I’m by no means an academic — I stopped at an undergrad degree in English lit — but I’m smart enough to know that if a book is really easy for me to get, it probably isn’t worth getting, so I struggle through my heavily marked-up copies of The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Bias of Communication and I get my much-smarter-than-I-am wife to explain bits of them to me, then I read them again.

The discussion about anti-intellectualism has been building and evolving over several years with the rise of “experts” in things that don’t require a whole lot of expertise, who are for some reason treated with a degree of reverence. Critical thinking still exists and there are a lot of smart people still saying a lot of smart things, but they aren’t the ones usually being quoted in the business meetings I’ve been in for the last 12 years. (This is also related to recent articles ripping apart “tried and true” brainstorming techniques, which are also mainly still used in business.)

I once worked for a company that literally gave out copies of From Good to Great to senior management and (briefly) tried to make it their own organizational mantra. It was silly, which I think they finally figured out. This is one of those areas where we can be better. I think we all need to stop buying easy books and reading easy blogs and seeing people discuss easy topics in easy ways at conferences, especially if we’re just going to walk away thinking we’re somehow smarter for it.

Via Instapaper is Instapaper’s most liked articles as determined by Twitter.

Adrian Hon makes the case for eternal copyright, which clearly we need. [via]

Imagine you’re a new parent at 30 years old and you’ve just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the “public good”, simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written?

Tumblr of note: Maddie On Things. [via]

The fear of being without your cellphone is called nomophobia, which spellcheck will try to correct to homophobia. This will lead to some awkward blog posts and undergrad psychology papers.

Sometimes these hit pretty close to home: An open letter to the marketing lady in my office who asked me what my major was in college, and when I said English, responded with, “You’ll never get anywhere with that.”

I can’t defend the English major. But I do have a few words to say about the marketing major.

Marketing majors rely on two basic skills: being mean and knowing when boots are in style.

My first link to Pinterest: A collection of every Paris Review cover. [via]

Another article on the problems with brainstorming and groupthink (previously), this time with more examples of how to achieve great group dynamics. (Spoiler: It’s mostly by accident.)

Nemeth’s studies suggest that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. As Nemeth puts it, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s work and a number of other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict.

I wouldn’t normally link to Apple product news, but Daring Fireball’s sneak peek at the next version of OS X is an interesting story.

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

Everything is a Remix Part 4. (And the others.)

Cereal boxes then and now. Never wonder why Draplin complains about the state of graphics.

An interesting look inside Instagram, who have stayed shockingly small despite their wild success and where Justin Bieber is a “scaling problem.”

Instagram isn’t just small; it’s tiny. It’s miniscule. It is famously located in Twitter’s old digs in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. But here’s the thing: Instagram subleases its space from another company. Instagram isn’t in Twitter’s old office, it’s in Twitter’s old conference room.

Last week I (sort of) joked that sites like Pinterest were declaring war on context. Nav, who is much smarter than I am, has a better argument.

If the free floating nature of 21st century ideas has divorced individual moments from context, the dangerous flipside of the situation is that things that are, by any measure, grossly wrong can seem okay. The history of images and language gets lost in a sea of alternate interpretations or no interpretation at all. University kids dress up in blackface. People talk of the end of racism and sexism. The market is only the choice for decent societies.

The urge of course, is the same urge as those lamenting the loss of print, or religion: if only we could get the good thing back. It’s a false hope and an unhelpful one, though. We can’t untangle history or undo the web. Pinterest, in literal or metaphorical form, is here to stay. But that’s not to say it’s a losing battle.

People are understandably pretty pissed that Chris Brown got to perform at the Grammys last night. Seems like a good time to bring up this video Jay Smooth made almost a year ago.

A more chaotic response to that “Hello” movie-clip video.

Who is Paul McCartney? Ug.

Evgeny Morozov (my new favourite person) on the death of web surfing.

People like speed and efficiency. But the slowly loading pages of old, accompanied by the funky buzz of the modem, had their own weird poetics, opening new spaces for play and interpretation. Occasionally, this slowness may have even alerted us to the fact that we were sitting in front of a computer.

[...]

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive.

CBC launched something called CBC Music today. (And the article.)

I missed this in October, but Evgeny Morozov’s takedown of Jeff Jarvis’ recent book is just. fucking. fantastic.

Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.

If you’ve got 15 minutes, watch this.

The consumer product safety commission has issued a voluntary recall for “Baby Boomers.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the makers of “Baby Boomers” are issuing a voluntary recall for all persons born between the years 1946 and 1964. Consumers should stop using these devices as elected officials, executives, educators, economists, analysts and authorities on any subject of any kind.

How “fail better” has entirely lost meaning.

Hard as it might be to accept, none of Beckett’s work is ever going to reach even one tenth as many people as this little crumb of Worstward Ho taken out of context. Not Waiting for Godot, not Endgame, not the trilogy, not How It Is. “Fail again. Fail better” is on T-shirts, mousepads, mugs, and posters, including one by the same company who did “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It’s been quoted (inaccurately) by Mary Louise Parker’s character on Weeds. In addition to The 4-Hour Workweek, it does inspirational duty in books like What’s Stopping You: Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can, Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Great Customer Service, as well as providing the title for Fail Better!: The World’s Worst Marketers and What We Can Learn from Them and Epic Fail Better: How to Get Rich Off Internet Memes.

I uploaded Walking Without Rhythm 005 before the weekend and am using it now to test the audio post feature here. As always, you can get these at walkingwithoutrhythm.com and SoundCloud.

Footage from the 1989 Paul’s Boutique release party. Amusing interview segment starts at about 15:30.

SFJ thinks MIA has nothing to apologize for.

The outrage is tiresome and deeply hypocritical, in all the tiresome ways you’ve been tired out by before. M.I.A. was illustrating her line, acting out the attitude of the words: performing. Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken. Unless somebody was handing out Xanax with the foam fingers, Lucas Oil Stadium was ringing with the music of profanities last night. More to the point, television viewers were submitted to ad after ad that likened women—negatively—to sofas, cars, and candy. Mr. Winter didn’t have anything to say about that, so I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny.

Also: When did the middle finger become offensive?

The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture. It is saying, ‘this is a phallus’ that you’re offering to people, which is a very primeval display.

(Note: This is two days in a row I’ve linked to something by Frere-Jones and used the word “penis” in a post.)

Tumblr of note: Clubberin’, a catalog of pro wrestling fashion. [via]

Thing writers should know: The small penis rule. [via]

…For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that’s me!

I used to put a great deal of effort into new music. Now I just listen to the new releases in Rdio each week, which is how I found Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. I enjoyed it. But I knew nothing of the Lana Del Rey media storm. I assume that just shows how much attention I now pay to these things. Anyway, here’s the Sasha Frere-Jones primer that told me about everything I missed. I am now complete, I guess. I still like the album.

Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’ ”

Trailer for God Bless America. I want to see this very much.