Audio Therapy

In the wrong hands, Progressive House can get so excessively lyrical that it turns artificial and fake. Syrupy, faux-expressive arpeggiated synths that are the bane of the genre are first stop of every ill-considered progressive DJ set. Lucky for us then that Dave Seaman and Luke Chable leave us mercifully free of such excesses. Seaman’s mix revels in dark, techy beats and moody adventures into a private mental border country, while Chable breaks open his funky box of records before setting us down gently towards the last half of the disc. Chable moves a bit too quickly between down-to-earth funky and ethereal for my taste, although in fairness, its a difficult dynamic to navigate.

In recent years, producers have variously embraced minimalist ambient, breaks and electro to revitalize a once-lost genre, and Seaman and Chable aren’t afraid to challenge listeners with newer sounds. Will it receive the recognition it deserves? Almost certainly not. The genre eludes the zeitgeist by being simultaneously personal and communal, a contradiction that relegates it to the emotional interior and ensures public misunderstanding.

Mediated Thoughts

I’m about 75% the way through Mediated : The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things. There’s plenty of insight in this book, so much so that it may take several readings to fully process it. It contains several things that I might disagree with, depending on whether or not I fully understand their implications.

On sports: De Zengotita singles out sports as seeming to avoid the problem of mediation, which if I understand correctly means that something becomes its own simulation. He explains this by observing that sports was from the beginning, a simulation. Sports has always been about the performance, the display, the manufacturing of emotion out of nothing. At the same time, he suggests that the sports activities are one of the last vestige of the ‘real’, since one cannot escape the physicality of such an activity. Perhaps the distinction lies in watching vs. doing?

De Zengotita asserts that optionality is a defining feature of mediation. He says that in the age of the media, all things are available and any identity could be chosen (other than race and gender and so on). But some would argue that the problem of over-mediation is that it presents too few options. The problem with the media is economics. Setting up a traditional media channel is expensive, and because this cost is paid by advertisers, there exists a threshold of viewership that must be achieved after which the channel is profitable. Since advertising is bought and sold in units of number of impressions, a profit-maximizing media entity seeks to broaden the appeal of its content to attract the most viewers. Thus, there is an economic incentive to make content (and images contained within that content) as broadly appealing and generic as possible. When De Zengotita speaks of a plethora of options, in fact the options are highly restricted, dictated by the economics of the medium. Everything must be media-genic, nothing too deep or involved beyond what can be successfully represented within a 20 minute sitcom or 40 minute drama and other formats that are best-suited to delivery of marketing materials. Content must also be broadly appealing or you start to lose viewers and advertising dollars. Media content becomes the substrate by which we relate to one another precisely because we have an economic guarrantee that these identities have broad appeal. In the author’s words, this is mostly a good thing. If the choice is between everyone being their unmediated selves and hating each other, and everyone being a “Rachel” or “Joey” from Friends and tolerating each other, the choice is obvious. But this sitcom is particularly revealing in the way that it treats the Ross character, the paleontologist. Despite the relative tolerance that his choice of career is treated with, there is a certain disdain for things that are inaccessible to the sitcom world. It is obvious to the viewer that even though “Paleontologist” is a tolerable choice, the fact that it is an esoteric one makes it an object of subtle ridicule. Compare that to the treatment of Rachel’s or Chandler’s easily accessible “Office” careers, or Joey’s “Struggling Actor”. Even Monica’s “Professional Chef” co-incides with the popularization and accessibility of the celebrity chef as seen on Food TV.

Lifestyle choices of the mediated person are sharply limited to those that provide broad appeal and alternatives are mocked if they are not ignored. This can be traced directly to an economic need to get the maximum amount of impressions for the advertising dollar. The Pareto Principle says that 20% of the content commands 80% of the money, and therefore attention. It is not a very big step to say that this means that 80% of people define themselves by 20% of the most popular of the already limited, media-genic images they see.

Narcissism Redux

Kristina, commenting on my previous posting, says:

I have always said that with anything you do, the reason or intention behind the action is far more important than the action itself. But this does get tricky. When are your actions a false representation of yourself?

Narcissism is, I think, the core issue at hand. More often than not, holiday celebrations are conducted in accordance with the media generated stereotype. This behavior begins in adolescence, when the question of identity becomes paramount. Without any secure hold on who they are, teenagers align themselves with strong social images and identify themselves to other people in that way. By becoming a Britney fan, you can protect yourself against feared public disapproval because the pervasiveness of Britney’s image assures you that she is widely approved of, and this lessens your own risk. Even if there is some measure of disapproval, you can at least comfort yourself with the fact that there are large numbers of people who do approve of you. In the celebrity fan culture, narcissistic desires are expressed by becoming the number one superfan which means taking on the clothing choices, hair styles, mannerisms and even personality of the celebrity in an effort to draw the attention of one’s social group. In such a culture, those who most closely conform to the archetype receive the most approval.

Similarly, my argument against American holiday celebrations is not against celebration of these holidays per se, but against the practice of using these events to draw attention to oneself. In a narcissistic culture, the most important attribute is conformity, which is not to say that no differentiation is permitted. Creativity is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, but only within a highly restricted range that reflects the holiday archetype. Not wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day and not having Christmas spirit is frowned upon because it doesn’t fall within the range of acceptable behaviors for those days, despite the fact that both of these are perfectly acceptable behaviors. This practice becomes so exaggerated that even Irish people feel alienated from their own holiday.

It is not even the impulse to garner public attention that most troubling, for everyone who communicates does so for those reasons. It is the self-centered belief that one should get attention for completely unremarkable accomplishments that I find difficult to accept. That is, I think, the height of narcissism – to take without feeling called upon to give in return.

New Tracks

Four tracks:

• All Metaphysics Is Local – Despite a strong hook, walls of sounds and chunky breaks, this track is overextended and goes on for far too long. If you can get past needlessly lengthy intro, its probably the best engineered of the bunch, but structurally weak. Sadly, I’ve lost the original Cubase files in a recent shuffling of hard drives. That will teach me to back my shit up…
• Dangerous – The earliest of the bunch, therefore least professional, but its dark and sinister with untamed synth lines. I like that.
• Speaks – A short ambient track with vocals shamelessly lifted from Alpha Centauri.
• Seven – Starts out dubby and subterranean, gets some airy vocals and clear tones towards the middle and lifts off, swirls around for a bit.

We’re All Phony Narcissists

(Kristina hates it when I go off these kinds of rants).

One thing that you notice about America when first stepping off the boat is the proliferation of color co-ordinated holidays. Maybe it started with the Fourth of July (red, white and blue), then spread to Christmas (white and red+green), Halloween (orange and black), Valentine’s Day (pink, red), Easter (pastel shades), St. Patrick’s Day (green). There are other holidays, sure, but the important ones have their colors. On St. Patrick’s Day, in lieu of any meaningful celebratory activities (alcohol is strictly optional), people have fallen back on celebrating the color green itself. Yes, that’s right – in America, we have a holiday for a color.

Who’s to blame for this travesty? My suggestion is: the media. Advertisers love holidays because, on a few special days for reasons no-one quite understands, everyone buys the same stuff. Rather than deal with all the tedious demographic differentiation that you normally find within society and the various biases, beliefs and cultural signifiers that attend to them, marketers just have to slap on some red and green ribbons to their widgets and have Santa sell them to kids and they can knock off early! Man, that sounds great. It’s almost like for a few magical days each year, its the 1950s all over again!

In fairness, other countries also have their holidays, perhaps not quite as vacuous as the American variety, but replete with color schemes and mass marketing. What makes this country so different? One major difference is the uniformity with which we pursue our cultural celebrations. When we think of a traditional Christmas, we invariably think of white snow, pine trees adorned with baubles, jolly fat men in red, fur-lined pajamas, holly, mistletoe, etc. In a word, the Victorian Christmas tradition of 1890. Other cultures celebrate their holidays in ways that are relevant to the local environment, but in America, a 100-year old foreign practice is artificially inserted into people’s lives at the expense of historically legitimate traditions. The end result is a heavily-marketed event that becomes so generic and artificial that it ceases to hold meaning for people, yet due to the pressures of conformity (or as the marketing department calls it, “Christmas spirit”), people are goaded into participating. That’s how we end up celebrating dubious holidays and how Thanksgiving was renamed ‘Turkey Day’. We celebrate colors and the roasting of fowl, the shallowest and least meaningful aspects of the day. And on the Fourth of July, as my friend Jason once said, we celebrate the anniversary of our nation’s first fireworks display.

There’s a new book called Mediated : The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things that all the amateur field sociologists are slavering over and shoving each other around in bookstore aisles in their zeal to uncover the knowledge encased within its freshly-minted pages. I haven’t read it yet, but judging from the reviews, its the kind of book that makes me clap my hands and dance around the room with glee and I’m only half-joking about that. Once again, having not read it, I will bravely attempt to make a half-assed link between the above holiday concepts and the thesis of the book as I understand it from reviews and a Salon.com interview with the author.

To wit: One of the great marketing innovations of the late 20th century was to co-opt individuality. Everywhere I turn, the media tells me that I can have it my way, its my life and everything that I buy is customized to my needs and my preferences. De Zengotita’s thesis is that we are so saturated with this message that large swaths of the country believe that the entire universe revolves around them and their needs, effectively turning us into a culture of narcisssists. Everybody wants to get on American Idol, anyone can be a superstar if only you believe in, yes – yourself. It doesn’t matter that you have nothing to offer other people in the way of talent or personality, what’s important is that other people finally realize how awesome you are and give you the recognition that you so richly deserve. This is a gross perversion of the spirit of the individuality. Being an individual means doing so despite the lack of even basic validation from society and that despite society’s disapproval, you believe in the value of your own path. Just as you ask that no-one make demands on you, you make no impositions on others, and so every individual follows his or her own solitary path. This may seem tangential to the discussion of holiday behavior, but they may be related. In our narcissistic culture, people are always available to perform, to entertain and to fill their fifteen minutes of fame with glittery sparkles, and this is especially evident on holidays. From wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day to emptying a dumptruck filled with Christmas lights over your house, these activities are designed to draw attention to oneself by fulfilling other people’s media-generated expectations.

And that is, I think, the crux of the matter. Such displays are explicitly designed to conform to the media’s generic representation of the event, and are never reflective of an individual interpretation or minority culture. Diversity is permitted insofar as it can be made generic.

P.S. To Kristina: Sorry!

Zen Sister, Zen Blog

Emily over-thinks. A familiar (and possibly familial) trait. I’m hesitant to endorse discipline as a way of life, because our culture emphasizes it so much without giving much thought to what it is you are trying to achieve through discipline. It’s prudent to find out what you are shooting for before igniting the rockets and blasting off, but then we live in a culture that values industriousness above all else. We are more impressed by the smoke and fire of the engines than the point of journey, which may be mistaken for discipline. But do you have the discipline to do nothing? To sit so still and quietly that you vanish completely?

I’m impressed with Emily’s blog. I never knew she could be so literary. Its all crispy-fresh, like a word salad.

Usability Annoyances

One of my pet peeves is useless information cluttering UIs. Here’s an example, courtesy of of Proton Radio’s phpBB forum. There’s probably dozens of superfluous fields in this app, information that is rarely, if ever, useful.

How many users?

This is not terribly important information, and certainly doesn’t deserve the primacy that is afforded to it by putting it directly above the forum. This would be more appropriate under a general information page about the forum.

Moderators

Its not very often that a user needs to know who the moderators of a forum are. Its even less relevant on the front page.

Posts and Threads

Number of Posts and Number of Threads has some importance for new users. Forum names are often ambiguous, and the majority of posts are often concentrated in one or two of them. One infers the amount of traffic on each forum by the number of posts, guiding the user to their most likely destination, but strictly speaking, this number is meaningless. It could be replaced by a more direct graphical indicator showing how busy each section is relative to the others. At the very least, having both columns on the front page clutters it needlessly.

Last Post

In a busy forum, the person who last posted is constantly changing, and noting their name for a split second serves no purpose. There is a link to view this post, which is probably never used. In a forum with a diverse range of topics, users pick what they want to see based on their interest in the subject matter. Simply being the most recent post doesn’t seem to hold value for any of the users other than curiosity.

The time of the last post is useful, but the timestamp is presented in Eastern Standard Time, when I’m using PST. Worse, it doesn’t even include the timezone in the timestamp, but at the bottom of the page, it tells me that all times are GMT – 5, in which case I need to know that PST is GMT – 8, so that means I need to subtract 3 hours from each timestamp to make it useful to me. So I came to the site to check out the posts, and I’m expected to do math in order to use the site! Aren’t computers supposed to be good at math? Users, especially non-technical users, are not very sympathetic to UI developers making them do math problems to use their applications.

The software itself should adjust the timestamp to make it meaningful to the end user, and actually, the date itself is not useful, but by subtracting the timestamp from the current time, I can arrive at a number that represents the age of the last post, which is what I want to know. The software should tell me that the last post was 1 minute ago, 30 minutes ago, 4 hours ago, etc., since that’s the information that is actually meaningful to me.

Various Information

The information in this block is irrelevant to 95% of the users. It could go into a statistics page for the sake of curiosity.

Icons

The visual design of an icon should reflect its meaning, but these icons are arbitrarily chosen colors and are a poor substitute that requires users to refer back to a legend, which defeats the purpose of the icon as a shortcut to understanding. It would be better to use text labels instead – at least users wouldn’t be forced to remember what a yellow block is supposed to mean.

This functionality is also broken. When a user arrives at a page without logging in, all of the forums are marked “No new posts.” Clearly, all of the posts are new, but new users already know that they haven’t read any of the posts. If they are repeat anonymous visitors, the software suggests to the user that its keeping track of new posts that haven’t been read, when clearly it only does this if you are logged in.

Conclusion

phpBB’s front page is cluttered with irrelevant and difficult to use information that prevents the user from making efficient use of it. Average users should be exposed to only the most frequently used functions to reduce the learning curve and cognitive load, and not be overwhelmed with meaningless statistics and data. This places a needless strain on the database and lowers performance.

Fotek

I don’t really mind forgetting the vast majority of things that happened to me. I assume locked away in hidden vaults of my mind there’s a processing machine converting the raw material of Past into the maxims and policies of Now. I’m content to leave it alone to do its work, secure in the knowledge that despite the fact I can barely remember events of significance, it all there in the background.

But Kristina loves pictures, as do many members of our extended family, which we create with cameras digital. One rather fine specimen is of the five megapixel variety, so its seems rather a shame to not put it to good use, which we do with reasonable frequency, but this is but one of several tools with which to execute a successful 21st century photo collection. The problem of organization and management has been neatly solved with Adobe’s Photo Album 2.0, which indulges the most depraved and profligate taxonomies that I can conjure, but the problem of exporting to the web remains.

There are a variety of export options in this software, yet doing so is very much like sending a child off every morning to face the school bully. It cries and trembles as you prepare it to be exposed to the harsh elements of the web, which is wholly unsatisfactory, so I have begun work on what is tentatively named Fotek v0.1.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I initially set about finding an open-source Gallery-type of software that could meet my needs. I wanted it to be flexible, but also a non-intrusive user experience unlike many open-source web apps, but every package I looked at failed in one of these two categories. I will rant about open source usability in more detail in a later post, but I really like Doug Bowman’s gallery. At least the design part of it. The manual effort needed to get the pictures online is a bit much for the non-technical user. I stole his layout, which I should email him about – I know those guys get kind of bent out of shape when you steal their intellectual property.

The two main features that I require are a) usability and b) support for a hierarchal taxonomy. Adobe Photo Album 2.0 has a nice implementation of b), and its an interesting problem to work on. Most galleries implement collections of pictures under a heading, (let’s say “Going to the Beach”) that’s under a broader collection of collections (maybe “Vacation Pictures”). Viewed as a taxonomy, a set of pictures has been assigned the tag ‘Going to the Beach’, which is a child tag of ‘Vacation Pictures’. Under this scheme, each picture has one tag – its gallery name. My plan is to expand this to support Adobe’s tags, and implement a more flexible navigation system based around it. The idea is to get away from linear viewing of pictures slide-show style (although you can still do this), and provide a freer, more natural exploration through the picture database based on who’s in the picture, where it was taken or when it was taken in any combination.

In lieu of real content

Here’s a few random blogs:

Emily has a blog, entitled “Tomorrow we’ll be back for more frolic and fun.” Pretty good – but will she abandon it? Stay tuned…

The Obscurantist Mnemotechnical Archive meanders interestingly. Plus, obscurantist.com is a cool domain name. Who can say no?

One of the few blogs I track regularly via RSS: Adventus! What does it mean? Where did it all go wrong? What’s the obsession with Wittgenstein? All these questions (and more!) are not answered on this blog, so I continue to read it. One of the few blogs I bother putting on the RSS reader.