e cultures

i am a big fan of Ólafur Elíasson and his creations. absolutely brilliant stuff. even working as an account executive in tribal ddb, i try to push installation ideas like these for campaigns when i can. (well i am fresh off the campus, u c).
i have always been interested in the choice of mediums used by artists to respond to cultural shifts. digital technologies have certainly changed the way we live and also the way in which we reflect, we communicate, we perceive. no wonder then that some brilliant work is happening world over that explores the implications of digital intervention in our lives.
one such excellent project i came across was called 'fashion victims'. the reason i loved this project is because i have always advocated communication of efforts that goes into consumption. i have discussed this here and here and here ..
in fashion victims, the mobile communication has been given a tangible face. the electromagnetic radiation converted as patterns on clothes.
check out e culture fair.wish i could go there. :|
will share interesting stuff in this space. share if u know something innovative as well.
cheers,

So bad that it’s good..

Gunda. rick-roll. three wolves moon.
what is common in all these memes?
all went viral and reached millions. true.
all are immensely successful in creating a subculture around themselves. true.
and all were so bad, that they were classic in some respect. and here's an insight that perhaps can be exploited to create brands online.
who can forget mithun's 'do char cheh aath dus, bus'. or numerous people rickrolled online and offline. or the amazingly mediocre t-shit selling like hotcakes. (hmm.. i have never seen hotcakes sales figures really.. or a queue for buying it. where did this expression come from anyways.)

all these examples treaded on a fine balance. an exactitude of badness that necessarily has to go beyond mediocrity. i will not ponder on the measures that need to be undertaken to be exactly bad enough to get viral, but rather lets take a little time to appreciate that it pays to be bad. (hmm.. by that logic i should get an increment in my salary.. ahh.. nevertheless)

why & how they achieve their fandom? their unrivaled positioning in a space as of yet untouched by brands.

i guess the answer lies in the unnerving globalised world we live in, which is highly fragmented. so, culturally speaking, one can be a continuous media consumer who only taps into the fringes of multiple cultures exempting the mainstream or mass cultural memes altogether. this is unnerving because, this kind of culture consumption would rob a person of a cultural anchor. it is here that cultural pastiche burps out blobs of memes that people cling to for a while, before swinging into the marshy lands of another fringe. well this is bound to happen when the conscience towards outside information has to be spread over such large infoscapes. borrowing from Mcluhan's 'media: extension of man' idea, its as if our tentacles growing ever wider, becoming more fragile and numb.
Like a partially deaf ear, which required shouting at to be heard, our addiction to information has got us swinging from extremes such as bad, good, mundane to core, bare and naked, swimming in excesses.. etc.
ok that explains the importance of seeking extremes, but not the particular incidence of memes of bad extremes. well, i guess that has its root in the 'unnerving' sensation that i talked of earlier. the infiniteness of the info that one has to its disposal chops off the benchmarks that a person tries to build. the ensuing uncertainty created thereby, leaves a few routes for one to emerge out of it without looking 'uncool'. its always safe to make fun of something else which is not fantastic, while being sly and appearing 'real'. it also quenches one's need to be deviant, within the narrow sphere of web.

youtube's awesomeness

sheer awesomeness that is youtube..
a while back i was searching for bryan adam's song ' here i am' on youtube. the video is that of the song alright, but the music that gets played is something else altogether. this is something that is happening regularly, with big music labels stripping their audio content from youtube. *
well the awesomeness is in what youtube has done in this situation. the audio that gets played instead is of, presumably, other artists who want to market their music but don't have big labels to back them. youtube puts a label which indicates where the content is sourced from. the link takes to the artist's youtube page.
well, in this case the track is pritty shitty. but i see a brilliant opportunity here for youtube to make money on something that was a cause of headache to them earlier.. wonderful strategy by them. smart buggers.. and it helps the small guys as well, the small guy gets to ride on some established reputation and gets sampled. sampling is essential for any sale, now isn't it?

well, one thing they forgot to do though.. if they could put the music that is somehow similar to the one that was supposed to be playing, then perhaps youtube would piss off less no. of people and actually turn this into a trend of sorts where new artists similar to your fav artists is found through this feature. i see some big marketing moolah saved, and made.


* [quite stupid really. the avenue for paid music content, afaik, is portable music (apart from accessorised offshoots such as ringtones, RBTs etc) . In one of my research conducted earlier, not a single respondent had ever bought music for consumption on their PCs/laptops. though some had spent on RBT, exlusive music content on CDs, etc. making availability of your music on youtube UNCERTAIN is turning off people from both youtube and the content. hey, there are options.]

digital divide

It happened a while back when we were going to Lothal on bikes early in the morning. Before going off, we were sitting at Chhota (canteen in MICA) for tea. I heard a rajasthani/kutchie folk song being played somewhere. It sounded interesting. It was coming off a cell phone of boy who worked at Chhota. (the guy in the pic) I asked him if it was radio and what channel. He said that it was mp3s. i was intrigued. i asked where he got it from. He replied 'internet pe milta hai na'.. He had downloaded the songs on a friend's cell phone, then from there he bluetoothed it to his cell.
we were all :O then. Among the ten of us who were going to the trip, hardly half had bluetooth or GPRS enabled phones. :P Here I am. I write paper on digital natives. Am intereseted in media effects of new media. and I still havent used bluetooth (except for on laptop). :|
It was a wonderful moment :D

an experiment

When one talk of DN, some of the strongest ramifications of this concept is in the field of education. Indeed, the increasing ineffectiveness of education system n pedagogy were the reasons that the concept of DN came to fore.
A few days back, I was thinking of the same while attending a lecture, and thought of an experiment. Essentially, I want to experiment if teaching efficacy increases if we uses multiple media simultaneously during the course of lecture. A normal class here at MICA, employs visual aids (projector, boards, charts, papers), audio aids (speakers, mics) but the use of this media is mostly one sided (though the class participation usually is quite high in conventional sense. Laptops are 'down' during lecture though, faculty just doesn't trust us :P).
what i propose is use of social media such as twitter, social networks, wikis etc real time during a lecture to create a more collaborative atmosphere in a lecture. I talked with prof. Chandan Chatterjee about this idea, and he seemed enthused by it. I am busy for a while due to the course load, however, soon i hope that the class is conducted as soon as we define the matrix to measure the result by and other modalities of it. Please share your ideas to refine this experiment, so that it be more fruitful.

I found something pertinent and am posting it here verbatim -

A search of the Nexis database of English-language publications worldwide finds zero uses of the phrase before 2005 but 600 since then. It appeared in The New York Times apparently for the first time in a quote on May 24:

“Unlike people 65 and older who immigrated online after spending their youths thumbing through reference books, today’s children are digital natives who are fluent in the language of online searches,” said Marc Prensky, an educational consultant and the author of ‘’Don’t Bother Me Mom — I’m Learning!'’

Escape to the other real

It all started with emoticons.
the simple one's - :P, ;)
the anime one's - (0_0) , (u_u), (^-^)b...
then avatars in chat.
Secondlife took it to a whole other level, where an alternate reality is constructed. It is an internet based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc. A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services with one another. (source - wikipedia article)

well, the real thing of consequence about second life is that, that it has a virtual currency - Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for real world currencies in a resident to resident marketplace facilitated by Linden Lab. This allows for second life to be more than just a leisurely diversion to a serious alternate platform for people to interact and conduct their business. It is the platform where most of the residents would be digital natives. Thus these platform provides for a good opportunity to marketers to target their product in much focussed way and making the experience much more enjoyable and informative than a regular communications. Many real companies have set up stores on second life, such as Dell.
Now we are seeing even governments getting interested in the virtual world. Last year a Beijing municipality announced that they will be creating a special zone called the China Virtual Economy District or Cyber Recreation District. This physical business park will be supplemented by a virtual business space called the Dotman World being jointly created by the Beijing Cyber Recreation Development Corp and MindArk ( the Swedish company which created Entropia Universe). It will be the biggest initiative by any government in the world to use Virtual Worlds as a serious business development and promotion multiplier. It will transform the business and social spaces and processes. (- news source, indusgeek post )
Here we have an interesting scenario for Digital natives:
what if governments embrace virtual worlds bigtime like in china, what would be the implications for people in long run?
Being a digital native would be incentivised. In any case, Broadband has people hooked more to net than TV. broadband penetration would be actively increased. Also with the setup of new virtual world sites such as 'small world' where one can access virtual world over web browser only instead of installing a dedicated client software, its becoming even more accessible. Small world also allows for one to share images, watch videos, listen music together with others in the virtual world. This i believe is quite interesting and a step in the continuous evolution of web 2.0.

Some services might be preferred to be handled over the virtual world rather than the real one. How about outsourcing all interaction with the ugly organisation we call government to virtual world. I guess virtual world apart from being a social ground could be a brilliant and efficient place to transact information among larger groups of people.
Think about the seriousness with which one handles affairs with government. and it being performed in an environment that had its root in the philosophy of anonymity and healthy disregard to formality. Well this is not the first time that formality found its champion in cyberpunk manifestation. There are many companies with their outlets on secondlife, and I would like to know if they have changed their way of interaction for the sake of medium or are they sticking to their old form for the sake of consistency. I wonder what would happen to the language of governance.

How would proliferation of alternative identities in terms of avatars affect the interactions of DNs in future?
What if you prefer the avatar version of your friend over his/her real self? Are you conveniently neglecting the part of someone's personality you don't like and choosing the ones u do? The person being broken down into his qualities and characteristics. On the one hand there may be health fallouts of a hardcore digital native lifestyle like obesity and on the other hand, the generation today is much less acquiescing of imperfection in others. In this intensely competitive and non pardoning environment, building healthy relationships is that much more difficult. And since a person can wear a digital mask of a avatar, the relationship building tends to be superfluous or goal oriented. We have examples of healthy relations being built on the cyberspace but either they are exceptions or the relationship was built over some real interactions aswell.
you might be the best of friends on the chat for years, but when you interact in real or even over a telephone call for the first time there is that sense of shock and uncertainty and hesitation.]

please do comment your views.. this is no small question, and demands a bit more consideration.