The Novelist: A Trailer
Some random thoughts:
Digital marketers are obsessed with the ‘gamification’ of everything. Make everything a game and people will be interested, ya dig? You get the drill here. It’s lazy and dated strategy. The industry’s approach is basically the equivalent of killing a cow in order to milk it: instead of working with a trend, we strive to own it and in the process render it useless. And instead of looking to see where we might have failed, we look for more cows to kill in the name of milk.
The Novelist is the most clever combination of design, storytelling and gaming I have seen in some time. It gets right what so many of us in the industry get wrong:
- It combines interaction and emotional design in a meaningful way. The player is directly implicated in the story and the actions of the characters. You feel morally obliged to stop writing and put together the boy’s toy car.
- It allows the player access to the interior world of the characters and allows the user to engage in a kind of dialectical exchange with the characters.
- It assumes the user is smart and uses the player’s awareness as kind of baseline for engagement
And the really brilliant part, I think, for marketers: allows players to have agency in a controlled environment without (appearing to) reducing their engagement to a set of limited interactions with the game (i.e., click this and get that)
It seems to me that a lot of digital design experiences fail because marketers (and others) assume users are too lazy for anything complex and too stupid to be emotionally engaged without complete manipulation. Maybe if we give people more credit they might actually surprise us.
“Friedrich Nietzsche established the “declaring things dead” form, when—after trying about 400 other aphorisms in The Gay Science—he struck gold with “God is dead” in 1882. Fifty percent hyperbole, 50 percent trolling. Well played, Nietzsche.”
From “Declaring Things Dead is Dead” Via Slate.
Existentialists were pioneers of trolling.
“We put them in places where we can see, and easily return to them. Watching something twice becomes a radical act; reading something twice is one of love. Yes, you can download things to read later, but the ultimate problem with the Internet, in his estimation, is that it has no album view. Put another way, the problem with the Internet is that it is difficult to build a library.”
The nokia phone brings back memories, y’all.
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Algorithmic recommendation is not simply a higher-resolution representation of a market — a more precise picture of atomistic individuals that does away with the need for larger-scale approximations like market segments. Rather, it is another mode of the synaptic function — another technique for making and interpreting correspondences between persons and things, another way of organizing collective forms. Collaborative filters algorithmically rearticulate the relationship between individual and aggregate traits, suggesting the need for social scientific theories that eschew the classic break between groups and their members (for a preliminary attempt at such an approach, see Latour et al., forthcoming).
The work of recommendation, like the work of demographic marketing, relies on the idea that there are meaningful similarities among consumers and that these similarities correspond with similarities in objects. However, in algorithmic form, these correspondences take on new forms and meanings, blending preference, identity, and similarity. As these theories are built into online infrastructures, shaping the relations between persons and things and articulating new collective forms, they demand attention, not only as material for analysis, but as new modes of analysis itself.
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Issue Number Two: Crowds and Clouds
This issue of LIMN focuses on new social media, data mining and surveillance, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, big data, and Internet revolutions. Rather than follow the well-worn paths of argument typical today, our contributors address the problems in new ways and at odd angles: from the power and politics of statistics and algorithms to crowdsourcing’s discontents to the capriciousness of collectives in an election; from the focus group and the casino to the worlds of micro-finance and data-intensive policing. Together they raise questions about the relationship of technology and the collectives that form in and through them.
At first glance this journal seems to combine everything I love about Public Culture and Social Text with an eye for design and user experience. And they even have a print edition as well.
Recommended Reads: “Microworking the Crowd”
“Algorithmic Recommendations and Synaptic Functions”
(Image from the story linked above)
“Launched in 2010, the app was initially only available to iPhone users and those with iOS software. Its popularity became instant, and within a year, it had over ten million users. In April 2012, Instagram debuted their Android version of the app on the Google Play store, thus opening up its user base to those with Android smartphones. With this launch came an unexpected backlash from the original iPhone users, and a new form of class warfare began to arise on the internet…Digital inequality can become even more persistent as well because it ensures “that people’s socioeconomic status influences the ways in which they have access to and use information and communication technologies” (Hargittai 2008: 939). Even though Instagram was launched in 2010 through the iTunes store, Android users didn’t get to access until 2012. This two-year gap created a distinct user base and sense of entitlement amongst the iPhone Instagram community. The user base was even further isolated through the way in which Instagram acts as a social network. There is no online access to the app or photos through their website. The only way users can browse and share photos is through their cellphone. Therefore, Android users couldn’t access this “gated community,” allowing them to be further alienated and seen as unwanted intruders storming the gates of the sacred iPhone community.”
Two notes:
1. I can’t believe the above tweet. How can you tweet that statement and not realize you are being an over-priveleged, whiney racist techie asshole? To be fair, I don’t have the full context for that tweet but nonetheless I’m finding it difficult to not read it as offensive and classist if nothing else.
2. If you don’t read the Cyborgology blog, you are really missing out.
Courtesy of the Oxford Internet Institute: An infographic mapping discourse about zombies to geographic locations. Key insight: Zombies are a #firstworldproblem.
Sarcasm aside, this infographic reminded me of an article I had to read for my Medical Anthropology class with Jean Camaroff at UChicago. The article is entitled “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism” and is available in Project Muse (unfortunately). Here is the abstract in case you’re interested:
Productive labor—or even production in general—no longer appears as the pillar that defines and sustains capitalist social organization. Production is given an objective quality, as if the capitalist system were a machine that marched forward of its own accord, without labor, a capitalist automaton. —Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society” Automaton, n. Thing imbued with spontaneous motion; living being viewed materially; piece of machinery with concealed motive power; living being whose actions are involuntary or without active intelligence. —Oxford English Dictionary Prolegomenon What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with postcolonial, postrevolutionary nationalism? With labor history? With the “crisis” of the modernist nation-state? Why are these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic, epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why have immigrants—those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper place is always elsewhere—become pariah citizens of a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere…
P.S The Oxford Internet Institute is a fantastic center for research in the social sciences and all things Internet culture related. It’s kind of my dream PhD program but looking at the caliber of students who get in, I think I would need to invent a new internet to get in, which, you know, is likely going to happen.
FoldingStory est la version 2.0 de l’antique cadavres exquis. Créé par un groupe d’amis d’enfance, cette application en ligne permet de créer et de participer à des histoires collaboratives. Comme dans la version IRL du jeu, les participants ne peuvent lire que la dernière phrases, soit ici les 180 derniers signes. Chacun dispose de 3 minutes pour écrire sa contribution avant que le papier ne soit virtuellement « plié » et confié à un autre utilisateurs. Une fois l’histoire terminé, elle est envoyée à tout les participants.
Via Silicon Maniacs (a great French language tech and digital culture blog)
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Modern & Im/material Things
I'm Christina Dennaoui. I like cultural analysis, technology, and electronic music. I make beats. I drink bourbon. I'm a nice lady, so you should talk to me. Content Areas: Electronic Music, Critical Theory, Media Studies, Technology, Digital Culture
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