My Other Half
On Friday, my phone almost died. It literally sent me into a ‘frenzy’ of stressful emtions. These emotions got me thinking about an article posted by Dr. Strangelove that discussed how cell phones are stressing teenagers out. Although I’m no longer a teenager (having the double-deuce b-dizzle in 13 days) I felt like the article just all of a sudden clicked. I am actually addicted to my phone.
Having had a cell phone since the age of 16, the thought of losing my phone threw me into a whirlwind of “what am I going to do” questions. The study done in the article had ‘excessive’ cell phone use at about 15 calls and/or texts per day, I’m not trying to brag, but there are days when I’m probably hovering around 100 texts a day.
Gaby Badre said that “youngsters feel a group pressure to remain reachable around the clock.” This quote really got me thinking about my ‘reachability’ and how long this has been a part of my daily life. As a Generation Y (iGeneration, the Net Generation, etc.) member I realized how I’ve been “reachable around the clock” since I was probably about 12 or 13, when I first became an MSN user. I suppose with the progression of cellular phones I didn’t really notice how much this was affecting my everyday life. Somedays I’ll go to work and realize that I forgot my cell phone and it’s like my entire world just stops.
Badre also announced in this article that there appears to “be a connection between intensive use of cell phones and health-compromising behaviour such as smoking, snuffing, and the use of alcohol.” This quote made me wonder if intensive use of cell phones is triggered by a more ‘addictive’ personality which would in turn explains the “the health-compromising behaviours” that cell phone addicts such as myself partake in.
Either way, maybe my cell phone ‘dying’ would be a good thing for me for a while, maybe it will help me sleep a little better, not be so restless.
But in the words of a true addict; Maybe one day I’ll stop.
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MeMeMolly
MeMeMolly, a teeny-boppin’ YouTube sensation, with 57 videos and 71 454 subscribers MeMeMolly is Canada’s #6 most subcribed of all time, according to her YouTube stats. MeMemolly is also ranked as #86 on istardom as a famous Internet entertainer.
As much as I really approve of YouTube and have succumb to hundreds of mind-numbing hours watching videos similar to these Cats Inspired By Cats or Bing Bang it’s kind of got me wondering what really makes someone an ‘istar’? As an experiment I typed into google “online popularity” to gain some insight into the celebrity life of online users, and saw a lot of sights that were geared towards “improving your online popularity!”
In my almost-educated opinion YouTube stars just reflect the usual movie star in terms of what makes who popular, LOOKS! I mean, really. Most of the popular YouTube channels are young, good-looking girls/boys, singing, dancing, i.e. doing irrelevant things in front of the camera, they just look good doing it. I have yet to see a YouTube channel that just totally entertains me, rather than irritates for the most part.
In a Blog by Tech Digest they have apparantly come up with the 10 best ways to become a YouTube star; 1. Lip Synching, 2. Animals doing funny things, 3. Having an original idea, 4. Fighting strangers in the street, 5. Use your camphone at concerts, 6. Be exceptionally good at video-games, 7. Corrupt children’s characters, 8. Get Drunk, 9. Rip off Japanese cartoons, and 10. Review hot-gadgets in a minute or less.
This is what I watch, people getting drunk and corrupting my beloved childhood cartoons.
Filed under: Amateur Media, Pop Culture | 1 Comment
The IPhone and My Online Future.
The Future of the Internet.
I want an IPhone, seriously.
I want a Mac too.
(This is me, on the Internet CLEARLY NOT conforming to capitalistic wishes, HaHa!)
“i’m a right clicka, not an ibook flippa!” Buttttt I want to be. The Introduction of The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It sort of starts off with a brief introduction of the IPhone and its functions, as well as products-past, and sort of goes on to discuss how these are “not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and who can pressure them” (p.05). It leads into this question of what is comming and how we should handle them.
Zittrain brings up the notion of fear and the computer. Fear of the unknown, fear of viruses, and spam, fear of turning a “standard mobile phone into a roving microphone” (p.04) and the fear of “bad code that can infect huge swaths of the Web in a heartbeat” (p.04). I too suffer from this syndrome, and the more applications, and programs, and broadband that I use the more I begin to consider the consequences of my online actions… but as the saying goes “once it’s done, it’s done!” As we have learned, there is no real way of going back and undoing what you’ve done, even Facebook for example, I’ve pretty much signed my life away (or at least the life I portray online) to Facebook to use, and continue to use even when I ‘delete’ my profile.
This book appears to focus on much of the past of the Internet, of computers, of major networking corporations in order to better predict for the future. Zittrain brings up an interesting point of re-embracing “thethered appliances” which a “bundled hardware and software that is created and controlled by one company” (p.09) which can severely hinder the “amateur innovation” that occurs. This is a big deal. Right now a huge premise of the Internet is based on the “amateur innovations,” like what I am doing right now. I don’t really know how ready i am to be regulated, and to have the creations of others heavily regulated either. This is the way that new products are going however, even my beloved IPhone. 
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I believe this right here, this blog, may be my contribution to the “emancipation of humanity!” (p. 200)
I have kind of hated the word “utopic” or “utopian” since reading Orwell’s 1984, but for lack of a better descriptive word I have to side with Pierre Levy’s idealistic “utopic futurology” of the Internet, it kind of makes me feel relevant and excited while I sit here writing this post. This “utopic futurology” insists that our communicative freedom is a stepping stone towards “cultural, technological, and moral improvement!” (p. 201) (It’s true that by reading this, I am improving your morale! haha) The main component of this ‘improvement’ is that with the use of the internet and its communicative capabilities, we can ALL participate. “ALL” a word relatively unheard of in former revolutions. I am talking coast to coast, time zone to time zone, kind of “ALL!”
Levy talks about this globalized communicative freedom that the Internet gives us and believes that it will “produce a new type of universality, a globally shared context of economy, law, meaning, and governance” (p.202). To certain Internet theorists the Internet is sort of becomming very romantic, a “cosmic brain that will blook like an infinite flower made of love” (p.201). This is evidenced by “how oppositional cultures find a public space within the Internet” (p.212). This freedom is allowing for a revolution, a media revolution that will lead to this utopic Internet future rather than the counter normalizing future brought forth by the Normalization Thesis.
Bibliography
Strangelove, M. (2005) The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc.
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Charlie the Unicorn
The Banana King.
Meeting the Muffin Man.
Return to the Leo Pluredon.
Maple Story Version.
How about Charlie the Unicorn in Spanish?
Charlie the Unicorn and his travels, is an animated YouTube show that has quickly become very popular. 34, 536, 645 views on Charlie the Unicorn travels to Candy mountain.
“It’s a land of sweet, joy, and joyness!”
The show itself is actually pretty humourous, it’s got a kind of candy coated dark obscene humour that is a characteristic of amateur work on the Internet. Dr. Strangelove has expressed in class how amateur culture is “very much uncensored, and more raw” than that of most things produced culturally. He also compares this raw and uncensored Internet movement to certain obsenities that have played an important role in large social movements in centuries past, such as the Enlightenment. He explains this movement as “delegitimizing the santity of the authority’s position.”
Charlie the Unicorn also proves that it’s not only corporations who can produce compelling material, and I think with 35 million viewers that, that statement speaks for itself. Corporations have lost control over us, and over their content.. Actually!
This show brings to mind another Dr. Strangelove lecture that dicussed how the cultural mode of production equals mode of social life, and how it produces a new way of life.
Charlie the Unicorn is compelling, funny, and most of all done by us. With new YouTube shows like this, we are changing the basic mode of production in order to produce a new mode of social life.
Filed under: Amateur Media, Pop Culture | 1 Comment
The Non-Commercial Press
The Internet as non-commercial press.
It comes down to a battle between an institutionalized system and a deinstitutionalized system.
The Internet has allowed for all of us to become amateur journalists and put a spin on goings on, or comment and try and sway public opinion from our bedrooms, our desks at work, or from a cafe. No matter where these opinions are being transmitted from, we are single-handedly beginning to control the news. The Internet’s unruly characteristics and deinstitutionalized life allows for us to take more risks, and be more brash with our newsworthy items and comments and not really fear the repercussions of these risks (if any).
Following the normalization thesis, there are certain theorists and media moguls, such as Robert McChesney who believe that “the media giants will be able to draw the Internet into their existing empire” (p.163). I personally think this is bullocks!
In Dr. Strangelove’s book, Empire of Mind he refers to this as the “third-major historical shift in the economy, ownership, and structure of news production” (p.166). He refers to this as the third-stage because it is “disconnected from the constraints of the corporate sector and connected to a very inexpensive global distribution platform (the Internet)” (p.166). This shift describes how never before so many people have been able to reach out and communicate to so many others around the globe.
This non-commercial press is rebelling against the commercial press which serves merely in economic interest. The non-commercial press is done by amateurs and for the most part, is non-profit.
It’s similar to what I am doing here. Discussing the media, exposing truths, all in the name of freedom! (& for class).
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The YouTube Generation
A brief discussion about YouTube, and the way that we, the new media are using it. The way in which we are claiming it as our own public space and using it to rebel against our loss of a public voice. This YouTube video was done as a mid-term project for CMN2170B, to discuss a realm of amateur videos and their purpose and effects.
Bibliography:
Strangelove, M. (2005). The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy & the Anti-Capitalist Movement. Toronto: Universiy of Toronto Press, Inc.
Strangelove, M. (2009). CMN2170 New Media Lectures. Ottawa: University of Ottawa, Simard Hall.
Video clips courtesy of YouTube.
Photos courtesy of Google & Adbusters.org.
Music: Quiet Please, Cold War Kids
Filed under: Amateur Media | 1 Comment
Barbie Hits Mid-Life (Crisis?).
Fifty years ago, an icon was born. The ideal driven woman, who has overcome divorce from long time boyfriend Ken in 2004, a little under-the-knife-nip/tuck action in 1997, and 110 jobs since birth. Astronaught Barbie, Rock-Star Barbie, Pediatrician Barbie, Canidate for Presidency Barbie, Air-Force Fighter Pilot Barbie, plus 95 other types of Barbie that show off how truly accomplished she is.
Barbie, every little girls “pink princess” is turning into “a resistance fighter in a cultural war of the 21st century” (137). Who is she fighting? her parents, her parents’ parents, their extended family, every huge corporation that has played into Barbie’s “consumption programming” or laid eyes on those huge boobs and saw dollar signs, and the puppy-dog eyes of little girls everywhere pining away for their Barbie and constructing an impossible opinion of beauty (beauty? ha!) The beauty of Barbie really came with the Internet’s ability to reject Barbie’s plastic tits and legitimate jobs and give us something better.
Now we’ve got Transgender Barbie, Prison Barbie, Exotic Dancer Barbie, Porn Barbie, and Gangster-Bitch Barbie.
It’s kind of strange to me how we’re always comparing Barbie to how she would be in real life, an article that was written in the Ottawa Citizen devote to the almost-senior-citizen vixen was almost completely devoted to Barbie today, alive and breathing, not plastic and stiff. In Misty Harris’ article she consulted several ‘experts’ and discussed Barbie as though she was iterally a 50 year old woman, not a plastic doll that will look like she’s 16 until Mattel implodes. One of these experts was Barbara Mitchell, a sociologist who described Barbie as being ” relatively healthy and expected to live well into her 80s.” Really?
I am always confused with our online revolutions, as much as they please me, they puzzle me. In Empire of Mind Douglas’s theory of social order is discussed, which boils down to how Porn Barbie is “a symbolic deconstruction of Mattel’s plastic princess and a proposal for a new range of experiences” (146). So as much as I enjoy looking at these ‘new Barbie experiences’ I feel like I am still buying into Barbie, like no matter how many disturbing Barbie pictures I see, I’m still looking at Barbie and kind of yearning to be 10 again.
Either way, Happy Birthday!
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Hit Me Baby One More Time.
Celebrity blogs. I seriously can not help myself indulge (and/or waste) a couple hours of my day, almost every day. I always thought that I didn’t care to follow the lives of certain public figures but by the time Britney was shaving her head I was hooked. Oh No They Didn’t! Perez Hilton, and The Superficial are a few of my favorites, and favorites of other fellow celebrity blog obsessed comrades.
Safe to say I’m not the only one reading, Perez Hilton announced yesterday on his site that according to sitemeter he had 236.6 million page views in January. With views like that it’s no wonder that advertisers are willing to pay up to $54 000to run a one day ad package on his site. The Superficial appears to be a little bit more budget, but I can’t help but belt out in laughter to all the ridiculous references and sarcastic wit that pours out of each blog. With titles like “Sarah Paling adds F-ck Me Boots to GOP Arsenal” or “Miley Cyrus’ Side Boob Just Sank Your Disney Stock!” who wouldn’t want to know what other ridiculous things will come out of this man/woman’s mouth!
This obsession of mine has been coined as ‘infotainment’ which I’ve learned over the three and a half years (thus far) of my degree is a mix between information and entertainment, this term was always synonymous with television, and most significantly, the news. However I think it’s important to note that infotainment has crossed the television boundary line and can now be found all over the Internet, not just in celebrity blogs but on YouTube channels, normal blogs, or any of the other million places on the Internet where people can mix their fascination with information with a little entertainment to jazz it up a little.
Filed under: Infotainment | 1 Comment
lol, wtf bbq.
If the Internet is giving us the ability to control our message, what kind of message are we trying to send? or what kind of messages are we absorbing?
YouTube is kind of a fickle bitch which allows us the option of being raw and obscene a sort of online revolution against ‘the man.’ Our revolutionary messages (or vlogs), the ideas and rebellious ideas have been overthrown by videos of our drunk friends
or how to be a ninja
or just videos that are totally irrelevant to anything
Dr. Strangelove expressed in class (also taken from Chapter 3 of Empire of Mind) that originally, only corporations could create compelling material, and as irrelevant and uncompelling as our own content seems we’re obviously doing something right. An article written in 2006 proclaimed that the “total time the people of the world spent watching YouTube is 9,305 years.” Seriously, how insane is that? I don’t even know how much time that is!
The material we’re putting out there does prove the fact however that “corporations have lost control over us, and over their content” (M. Strangelove). We are sort of literally controlling our own media, not just our own content, but through streamlining television shows and movies on sites such as Surf The Channel, and through file sharing over the Internet on sites like Kazaa and Limewire. Although we’re not necessarily creating the message that these songs and shows are putting out there, we are sending a message by streamlining and pirating their material. I just don’t know what the implications of this message will be.
Filed under: Amateur Media, Corporate Control | Leave a Comment
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