As streaming and studios waste your time with far too much pablum compared to quality watching, making sure the defend the time you have in front of the screen becomes a priority. Here’s my list of online and offline media you probably won’t hate yourself for watching.
There was not a lot of truly great stuff in 2023. I’m not sure if this is just spillover from covid when every studio and streaming service were just thumping out any content to keep people engaged, so much bilgewater made it into production, or simply the fact that a lot of material seemed highly derivative of other shows, but 2023 had a lot of things to watch, but very little quality. While there were some gems in amongst the sea glass, they felt few. Let’s hope for more quality in 2024 though, and that the writer’s strike ended up honing rather than increasing pablum.
I already tweeted this, but it was such an amazingly interesting video, I’m posting it on the blog.
PBS Idea Channel on the phenomenon of My Little Pony lovers in the young, male demographic and changing ideas about masculinity. Have to admit to never having run across PBS Idea Channel before, but being super impressed with this as an intellectual inquiry.
Being a non-traditional kind of guy (yeah, not so into the watching sports on tv, fast cars, and playing XBox till my fingers fall off.) I find this interesting because, at least growing up, there was definite pressure on conforming into accepted “male” roles if not outright sterotypes. Not doing so reflected upon not just your social status, but also implied sexuality. It made me a very socially awkward teen, an overly competitive and achievement obsessed young adult and it was a long time before I was comfortable with the fact that I just didn’t fit into the “normal” guy mode (in fact, I’d still say it’s a problem in terms of dating where women influence these gender biases as much as men.).
Kirby Ferguson has just posted the last of his brilliant four-part series on remix culture that we talked about here a few months back .
Insightful, interesting and food for thought. Enjoy the finale and make sure to see all four if you haven’t already checked them out.).
Copy. Transform. Combine. Everything is a Remix .
The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths.
The whole series is super interesting and well done (though does make you realize how many revered artists “ripped off” heavily) so do check it out if you get a chance. Even better, episode four is still to be completed so kickstart Kirby some cash so he can finish it. It’s a pretty interesting foursome and the guy definitely deserves your support.
Kutiman took a bunch of public domain YouTube videos and remixed them into something pretty damn spectacular (an album practically).
Most of the chatter on the web about this has mostly been about whether this sort of remixing is the future of entertainment and what precisely record execs may do about it (and even if they have any relevance as an industry any longer), but in the meantime, you can watch and wonder…
I think this is pretty cool: Ads while you’re browsing are constantly becoming more and more intrusive and annoying.
The Add Art firefox plugin works in conjunction with AdBlock (also part of the download) to block the incoming ads and place a curated art exhibit in their place. The images are local so as not to slow down your browsing experience.
Love this. Anything to beautify the browsing landscape. Now if I could just somehow to do the same with billboards in the real world.
I think it was Lawrence Lessig who said words to the effect that open source is good, but Open Culture is everything… and the Creative Commons will become a much bigger battle with private firms and IP advocates in the coming years (and this is why you need copyright laws that favour innovation rather than dusty old companies lobbying to extend their tired old revenue streams ad infinitum).
Examples abound of how it has changed how we do with knowledge, for example take a look at how transformative Wikipedia or Open CourseWare at MIT has been, but where does the rubber hit the road in terms of changing the world in real, substantive terms (ie. stuff that doesn’t just matter to geeks)?
Fascinating essay from the always insightful Danah Boyd on generational differences between rss, blog and IM. Particularly interesting after the Web 2.0 conference’s vision of the future of syndication.
The difference, as she points out too near the end (I really, really wish she’d continued on with those ideas rather than obsessing on youth IM/LJ use), is really about content versus community. Resolving that issue is really the tension that syndication needs to deal with in order to leap into the business mainstream. People only being peripherally aware of a conversation without participating are really only eavesdropping on the train. Unless they participate the usefulness is really only about newsfeed neuroses (or take and use it in other ways). The point about youth culture using feeds is that they are more involved with the conversation. IM is their community. Because communities are conversations.
Since my plane buddies from the other night and I talked at length about what could be done to stop this slow, terrible erosion of democracy we all seemed to see and help resurrect public discourse about real issues :
Adbusters, the anti-consumerism culturejammers , have launched a legal challenge against the major Canadian media outlets which refuse to let Adbusters buy airtime on Canadian networks for airing their ads.
How important is this case? For a generation of people, and a growing social movement that sees the media as its main battleground, a victory here will change everything. Without media democracy - which means genuine public access to the most powerful forms of communication - we can’t raise healthy children, create good public policy or hold elections that are legitimate or that matter. We lose power to shape our consciousness, our culture and our future. We even lose the power to imagine what that future should look like.