Time to reflect and drink beer

‘Well that’s it, it’s my final posting,’ I tell myself, but I know it isn’t true. The truth is if all goes to plan I will be continuing with my blog outside of the subject, perhaps on blogger. Despite by initial cynicism on blogs, net communications and technology in general, it seems I have become a blogger – and moreover, I have enjoyed the transition. My original qualms about blogging were as follows; nobody will read it, they are overhyped and utterly egotistical, I’m a pen and paper kind of guy, and blogs are useless. Through the subject, I have come to the realisation that blogging is a potentially powerful format, and a heap of fun.

Sure, they may not be able to replace the mainstream media, but there are many blogs out there are worth reading. The long tail dictates that with a bit of sleuth work, anyone can uncover a blog on whatever it is they like to do outside of uni/work/school. This may seem obvious, but before doing the subject I had never read a blog before, beside the professional ‘Huffington Post’, which covers US Politics (and to be fair I didn’t consider this a blog, but a website). Through blogging I have discovered the passion of the amateur. Reading a blog from someone completely passionate and knowledgeable on their niche, the sense of excitement is utterly contagious.

As well as blogging, the subject (in a rather roundabout way) has sparked my growing interest in the theories of Geert Lovink, Anna Nimus and Matteo Pasquinelli, among others.

The internet is a fascinating economy of information, conflict, finance, subversion and politics, and the listed theorists have opened up my mind to this reality.

Once again, outside the bounds of the subject I plan to read on, starting with Arther Krokers’s ‘The Will to Technology and Culture of Nihilism’ and Matteo Pasquinelli’s ‘Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons’.

Ironically, in the crowded blogosphere, the blogs which seemed to get the most hits were not my intermittent music reviews but the actual academic blogs written for the subject. The obvious weakness of net communications (as I’m sure many, many students wrote in their reflections) is the clash between the niche blogs, and academic blogs.

The requirement to blog ‘academically’ strips the blogs of any credibility, overshadowing the niche blogs themselves, effectively incubating the  experience.

That noted, without the academic component, this wouldn’t be a university subject, and I never would have jhad so much fun reading up on Techno-Nihilism, or the Grammar of Sabotage.

While I have put considerable work into the posts themselves, my knowledge of wordpress could definitely be improved. I purposefully chose to limit by blogs to words and pictures, almost like an ebook of a magazine. Personally, I don’t enjoy watching videos and clips while trying to read an article – I find it a bit self defeating, as if admitting that the textual component is inferior to (often generic) youtube clips.

The one aspect I definitely need to work on is the blog networking. Given the academic nature, I was hesitant to do this, and ultimately settled with a blogroll of links instead.

Despite the shrinking lecture attendance, and minimal tute participation I enjoyed this subject. Hopefully ‘You Will Be Judged’ will be up and running on blogger in the next few weeks.

So that’s the semester done and it’s time to crack a tinny, turn up the tunes and sit back – reflection time is over!

Cheers,

Michael Kingston

Comments have now been removed from this blog

The question of whether blogs should be open or closed to comments is really a question of the nature of blogs. Are blogs collaborative, interactive and egalitarian, or are they in fact a modified form of the traditional media one-to-many communication style?       

To comment or not to comment: the battle rages late into the night

  

In his rather excellent appraisal on blogs and blog culture, Geert Lovink argues that blogs do not have a strong comment culture. Lovink acknowledges that ‘users are tired of top down communication,’ but states there is, ‘nowhere to go’[1]. Blogging is consequently defined as an ‘amputated existence’[2]. On the ability to comment on blogs, Lovink writes, ‘users are guests, not equal partners, let alone antagonists’[3] – thus dismissing the ‘power’ of comments because they can always be moderated by the blog author.      

This analysis challenges a variety of utopian visions of blog comments that have been floating around since the turn of the 21st century. Representing the basic themes of the ‘optimistic perspective’ is a chapter from Kayz Varnelis’ ‘Networked Publics’. The book asserts that through blogs, ‘the top-down, one-to-many relationship between mass media is being replaced… [by] networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture’[4]. These collectives, it is argued consist of ‘comment communities’, which operate (presumably) under egalitarian philosophy.      

Assessing the variety of music review blogs, it is Geert Lovink’s analysis that is vindicated. Spending an hour trawling though wordpress reviews, the most engaging comments I could find were a few scatted emoticons, and the very occasional ‘lol’. Persevering, I broadened my search beyond wordpress to the established online music review industry. The trend continued.     

The most heated discussion I could unearth was two angry ravers on Pitchfork.

The review itself for the new Pendulum[5] album seemed begging for attack, giving a dismal 4/10 score (not to say I disagree…) and running with the provocative by-line, ‘Coming to a field near you. Just remember to not look back as you’re running far, far away[6]’.       

Despite being one of the ‘most viewed’ articles on Pitchfork, the best the Pendulum defence could muster up was[7]:

      

Ayerock: Hadouken? Don’t make me laugh      

Liacasino: You are an old fashioned tosser of the most idiotic kind.      

But where was the rowdy crowd when the forking took place?

  

      

 

       However, this perspective of a non-existent comment culture is limited by the niche I am assessing. A review is, almost by nature a definitive judgement, and as such is not a genre particularly susceptible to ‘community collectives’. This is partially explained by the power imbalance that exists between reviewer and reader. Reading a review, the reader (at least most of the time), has no experience with the product.       

 But this analysis doesn’t answer the question of whether blogs should have comments open or closed. Obviously, this needs to be addressed by individual bloggers.      

      

John Gruger, the blogger behind ‘Daring Fireball’[10] presents an interesting argument as to why he allows no comments on his blog[11].   

‘It’s totally egotistical. I want daring Fireball to be a site you can’t skim if you’re in the target audience for. You say, ‘Oh a new article form John. I need to read it,’ and your deadlines go whizzing by because you have to read what I wrote. If I turn comments on I feel like its two different directions.’

As for the opposing side, blogger Georgina Laidlaw recently questioned the decision by tech gadget blog Engadget to turn off its comments. While concluding ultimately that it is a personal decision, Georgina writes that her first reaction was almost aggressively critical.[12]   

When I first read about Engadget’s move, I thought “this looks like a step back to the traditional publication model, where the publisher controlled what was said. It negates the notion of free speech – of free broadcast – that the web was lauded for putting into everyone’s hands.”

As for Youwillbejudged (despite the post title), I will be keeping the comments feature. I have a few reasons for this.   

Firstly, politically I subscribe to the view that you need no reason to give people rights, but a damn good reason to take them away.

The downside to having comments is the curse of the ‘zero comment’, but besides that there is no reason to take away the feature. Since beginning this blog, I have enjoyed posting a few comments on others blogs. I have rarely been ‘blogged back’ but I have roused some interest in what I am writing about.     

 This is not to say that I cannot see the downside. Degenerating, puerile, back-and-forth trash can be seen in the comment sections of thousands of YouTube video’s, Failblog entries and online newspapers. Blogs may not have a strong ‘comment culture’, and the structure of blogs may hinder collaboration but that doesn’t mean one has to bow to the inevitable and disable comments. Well at least not until Viagra spam starts flooding my comments…          

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[1] Geert Lovink, ‘Blogging the Nihilist impulse’, 2007, pp 18.      

[2] Geert Lovink, 2007, pp 12.      

[3] Geert Lovink, 2007, pp 20.      

[4] Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Todd Richmond and Marc Tuters, ‘Culture: Media Convergence and Networked Participation’, in Kayz Varnelis (ed.) Networked Publics Cambridge, M.A, 2008, pp 43.      

[5] Pendulum Myspace, www.myspace.com/pendulum      

[6] Pendulum Review, http://www.nme.com/reviews/pendulum      

[7] Pendulum Review Comments, http://www.nme.com/reviews/pendulum/11321#comments      

[8] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli      

[9] Geert Lovink, 2007 pp 13      

[10] Daring Fireball Blog, http://daringfireball.net/      

[11] Shaun Blanc Blog on Daring Fireball, http://shawnblanc.net/2007/07/why-daring-fireball-is-comment-free/      

[12]Web Worker Daily Blog, http://webworkerdaily.com/2010/02/04/are-blog-comments-worth-it/ 

The Commons

‘You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do what common people do
You’ll never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do’      

(Pulp, Common People)      

Jarvis Cocker (Pulp frontman)

  

What licence did I attach to my blog? Well, thanks to the Creative Commons project it was a relatively easy task. In essence I answered a few automated questions, and was recommended a licence. The rationale behind my answers was as follows; I want people to read my work, I want people to use my work – but if it is used directly I want to be cited, and I don’t want to be used for commercial purposes. The end. With that, I was recommended a ‘Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia Licence.’ I pasted the code for the recommended licence into a widget on wordpress and the deed was done.      

Glad to get another academic task out of the way, I left the Creative Commons licence intact for a couple of weeks before deciding to blog about it.  

 Reading into creative commons and broader issues of internet licensing I was surprised at what a political decision attributing a blog to a CC licence actually is. 

Signing up to the licence, I subscribe to the political and even social beliefs of the CC project.      

      

Creative Commons is basically an alternative licence framed in opposition to the tyranny of ‘intellectual property.’ Intellectual property law, as argued by CC patriarch Lawrence Lessig is a subversion of law by big media which have created de facto monopolies over creative works[1]. This copyright control is essentially what makes big media money.  Artists, musicians, intellectuals, writers and engineers effectively sign away their rights to these companies in order to have their works distributed and sold[2]. Creative commons advocates frame the licence as an egalitarian seizure of control by the cultural producers themselves.      

However, at least in the mind of the creative commons lobby, this re-structuring is more conservative than revolutionary. Both Lessig and fellow CC advocate Marc Garcelon frame creative commons in terms of US Constitutional law – as inscribed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s view, as summarised by Garcelon dictates that, ‘only the expression of ideas in artistic works [should] be eligible for copyright protection and then only for a limited period of time [14 years],[3]’ before entering the public domain. Losing a copyright Supreme Court case in 2003, Lessig invoked the ghost of Jefferson[4].      

Jefferson: Father of Copyright

  

Understandably, the advocates paint a rosy picture of creative commons; however the ideology does have significant weaknesses. Firstly, creative commons functions firmly in implicit complicity with global capitalism[5].      

As identified by Pasquinelli, Lessig harks back to the Anglo-American libertarian tradition, where free speech is a synonym for free market, and the line between ideology and action is blurred[6]. This is painfully apparent in Lessig’s analysis of ‘rivalrous’ (limited resources) and ‘non-rivalrous’ (unlimited) resources[7]. Here, Lessig wilfully ignores the cultural capital and physical work that goes into producing online content to embark on a purely economic appraisal of cultural commodities.      

Pasquinelli in particular highlights this limitation in the rhetoric of creative commons, and wider ‘digitalism’ ideology. He challenges the disembodied politics of creative commons, noting, ‘the flesh is first, before the Logos… merged with the global economy, each bit of free information carries its own micro slave like a forgotten twin.[8]’ This micro-slave means that creative commons, far from empowering producers simply facilitates existing producer exploitation.      

Big media and the Micro slave (you!)

  

The wider point here is that all copyright reallocates profits in favour of owners rather than producers.  Creative commons is still a copyright licence, and thus exists within the existing paradigm of copyright protection.

 Creative commons, as Anna Nimus argues, ‘legitimises, rather than denies, producer-control, and enforces, rather that abolishes, the distinction between producer and consumer.[9]     

So how does this fit into the context of my use of a creative commons licence? The arguments against creative commons are strong. Politically, I concur. However, as with so much radical theory, no substantial, practicable and usable alternative are offered by the far left. Creative commons is flawed, but it is there – in the public sphere and easily available for use. Licensing a blog with a non-commercial, no derivative attribution licence, is, for my purpose, favourable to refraining from licensing altogether.          

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[1] Lawrence Lessig ‘Open Code and Open Societies’ 2005, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/lessig/final.PDF      

[2] Anna Nimus (alias Dmytri Kleiner & Joanne Richardson), “Copyright, Copyleft & the      

Creative Anti-Commons”, Dec. 2006. Web: www.subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html      

[3] Marc Garcelon, ‘An Information Commons? Creative Commons and Public Access to Cultural Creations’ 2009, pp. 1308      

[4] Marc Garcelon, 2009, pp. 1313      

[5] Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage’ 2009 www.rekombinant.org/mat      

[6]Matteo Pasquinelli 2009, pp. 5      

[7] Lawrence Lessig ‘Open Code and Open Societies’ 2005 pp.122-23      

[8] Matteo Pasquinelli 2009 pp. 4      

[9] Anna Nimus, 2006

I Anoint Thee… Cool

Wading through the blogosphere, the importance of design doesn’t really strike me. That is until I come across my first ‘cool blog’. It’s hard to identify exactly what raises these blog above the rest. They’re just… better. Now, before I have anyone blasting comments (because there’s such a big chance that will happen), yes, I know. Cool is subjective. Of cause, what I consider cool will be informed by my cultural context, my upbringing, who I want to be, who I am, the people and movements I identify with, what mood I’m in and what time of day it is. That said cool is cool. And the best thing about cool is the rub-off effect. I read cool blogs, therefore I am cool. Well, not really.

 According to a rather excellent article by Alan Lui, ‘Information is Style’[1], cool design online is intrinsically tied to functionality. To be cool is to be useful, or more broadly, it is to convey useful meanings clearly[2]. Lui, from what I could understand, argues that online design draws from modernist artistic heritage.

 The point (I dare say) is that cool website design and cool, effective real world design, are essentially the same thing.

 Drawing tenuously back to the assessment topics, Lui’s article suggests that the balance between form and content is good design. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether design is minimalist or complex, if the design is there for a reason, it’s cool.

 In another interesting piece, ‘Comic resistance’, Leo Merz even shows how the hated ‘Comic Sans’  font can be as cool as an underground electronic music collective[3] – it’s all about context apparently…

 But where does this fit in with my earlier rant about the subjectivity of cool?

Well, it does and it doesn’t. For the academics, cool is an abstract concept.  It is a design ideal. For me at least cool is also a personal ideal. With that in mind, here are my critical appraisals of a blog I think is pretty damn cool. It’s a Canadian music blog[4] called ‘trendhoar.’

 Here’s the link.

 http://www.trendwhore.ca/

 For me the blog nails it. The colour scheme errs on the side of minimalist. Each time you click on a category the ‘banner image’ changes. These images don’t really contextualise or add to the functuality of the relevant category (Sorry Alan). They’re all black and white, have the sheen of vintage and feature a variety of nonchalant ne’do’well’s smoking, pashing, sitting, card playing and talking.

The minimalist scheme works well and the widgets are kept to the essentials. It helps the blog that the Montreal punk/alternative/cool music scene seems to be made up of artists with such cool poster art. Drawing back to Alan Liu, the site is easy to navigate and has a knowingly amateur feel about it, which interacts well with the retro aesthetics to balence a sense of underground/independence with more professional functionality.

 I could prattle on about trendhoar’s insanely cool design for another couple of loosely linked paragraphs, but if you haven’t followed the link by now, I’m guessing you don’t give a shit.

 Apart from the design, something I really liked about trendhoar was the links to other Montreal music blogs. There’s seven blogs listed as ‘Amigo’s’. The linked blogs all fit the Montreal music niche, but even better, the Amigo’s create the sense of community so often missing in blogs. Reading them, you get a good sense of the scope of the independent music scene in Montreal, from the art to the music and even politics.

 Geert Lovink’s thesis, which I have so gleefully drawn from and quoted for much of this blog is finally challenged. The Montreal music blogs highlight the advantage of networking built into design.

 Oh, and trendhoar, and all the Montreal ‘Amigo blogs’ are COMPLETLY FREE OF ADVERTISING. Sure, they spruke local bands and venues, but it’s all part of the blog. There is no third party rubbish crowding for attention anywhere. The side panel is for widgets ONLY. The main section is for BLOGS only. Just the way it should be!   

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[1] Found in the book ‘laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and Culture’ Chicago: university of Chicago press, 2004

[2] This is why most academic article’s fall so short of the ‘cool test’ – not because they are intellectual, but because they shroud their good ideas (presuming the author/s have any) in impenetrable jargon! Well that’s what I think anyway!

[3] It appears in a 2009 book (damn books) called Digital Folklaw Reader’, Stuttgart: Merz Akademie. 

[4] Unfortunatly it’s in my niche

A Niche Analysis to put in your Pipe and Smoke

The term long tail appears time and time again in blog literature. The philosophy of the ‘long tail’ is that the wealth of information available on the internet allows smaller, niche markets, to be targeted. Software researcher Chris Anderson writes about the ‘infinite choice’ blogs provide ‘where the aggregate size of many small markets’, will eclipse ‘traditional, broad markets[1]’. This starry eyed analysis is sadly typical in the field.

Blogs are a great example of the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘long tail’ in action. It is true that the most successful amateur blogs are niche specific. In the crowded blogosphere, this narrows the field of competitors and allows a degree of depth that would be impossible in broader reportage. Bloggers, for the most part don’t have the skills or resources to defeat the mainstream media at their own game (if indeed this is their purpose), so the long tail is the logical blogger’s guerrilla tactic.

The key problem is, as identified by Geert Lovlink in his much loathed article, a great blog, seen from the, ‘larger picture of the internet with its one billion users [is] an ever shifting collection of buzzword clouds[2].’ If blogs are attempting to destroy mainstream media, they do not offer a tangible alternative. Drawing back to Lovlink, blogs are, in the very essence of the term, a ‘nihilistic impulse.’[3]

Despite the ‘long tail’, trawling through the world of music blogs, I had trouble finding anything that interested me, even on the most superficial level.

Eventually, I found many I hated, and one I enjoyed.  

http://www.livemusicblog.com/

This blog pretty much represents the worst of the major music blog’s. The blog is dedicated to ‘bands that know how to play live’[4]. It basically lists upcoming tours from bands marketed under the ‘alternative’ or (even more repulsive)’indie’ banner by major record labels. The tours are largely of US cities and in medium-sized to stadium venues. Links are even provided to buy tickets from ticketing ‘partners’ who (one is guessing) support the blog.

Despite the blatant ‘selling’, the blog attempts to maintain a facade of ‘independence’. Classic lines such as, ‘I’ve got friends who got tickets and are stoked’, or ‘sounds awesome’ do nothing to disguise the fact the short articles are largely press releases. This pretence of ‘independence’ becomes even more laughable in the photo gallery section. On the day I stumbled across the blog, some professionally taken Pearl Jam photos were tagged, ‘I just got a few quick texts from friends who were boozing it up…’[5], as if they were taken by boozing  amateurs on a phone.

The side panels of the blog are crowded with advertising and the uninspired layout serves as a constant reminder as to how generic the blog is. Depressingly, livemusicblog has a huge number of followers, and appears on Technorati as one of the most popular music blogs currently online[6]. This popularity is further evidence that, ‘far from what most pioneers preach, blogs fit perfectly well into the concert of big media’[7]. The targeted audience is not explicitly stated, but one would have to guess American’s (almost all of the touring information is relevant only to the US) and alternative music fans (whatever that means).

Ok, well the music blogging industry isn’t all bad. The best blog I found was entitled, ‘It’s not the band I hate it’s the fans.’

http://www.itsnotthebandihateitstheirfans.blogspot.com/

The blog opens with the summary,

‘A completely arrogant and pretentious outlet for me to rant about the state of pop music today, make a few recommendations and talk about any show’s I’ve recently seen.[8]’

Already, my pulse had quickened. Finally, here was a blog that acknowledged the ridiculousness and supreme hubris of the ‘blog’. 

 It didn’t disappoint. It featured a myriad of album and concert reviews from acts from a variety of genres. All are witty and grounded in a distinctive writing style. Take this excerpt from a review of Dinosaur Jr’s album Beyond:

‘The new Dinosaur Jr. CD is a total throwback… THROWBACK TO AWESOMENESS!!!! With their egos in check and dollar signs in their eyes, J. Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph have decided to let bygones be bygones…[9]’

You may have noticed my shift to past tense. For once this isn’t lazy grammar, ‘itsnotthebandihateitsthefans’ is dead. Sadly, the staunchly independent nature of the blog seems to have facilitated its downfall. In the final post, dated March 2010, the blogger writes, ‘it’s just that it’s an awful lot of work and I think that I’ve taken it as far as I’m physically and mentally able to’. The blog’s three and a bit year survival marks it ancient in the blogosphere.

The death of this blog, which appears to have been relatively popular among the Toronto music scene, demonstrates the difficulties in sustaining an amateur music blog over a number of years. The average age of a web page is 6 months[10].   

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[1] Chris Anderson, ‘The Long Tail in a Nutshell’ http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/about.html

[2] Geert Lovink, ‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse’, in Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 36

[3] Geert Lovink, 2007, pp. 1

[4] MGMT are featured heavily, easily one of the worst live bands I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. This is just one examples of the dubious acts featured on the page, where alternative seems to detonate Pearl Jam – what is this 1996?

[5] Pearl Jam Photos,  http://www.livemusicblog.com/2010/05/03/photos-pearl-jam-jazz-fest-2010/

[6] http://technorati.com/search?return=sites&authority=all&q=live+music+

[7] Geert Lovink ‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse’ pp 2

[8] http://www.itsnotthebandihateitstheirfans.blogspot.com/

[9] http://rpc.blogrolling.com/redirect.php?r=e7239936aa787d83b93b892f5d184d7d&url=http%3A%2F%2Fitsnotthebandihateitstheirfans.blogspot.com

[10] Geert Lovink ‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse’