Archive for June 2007
Drop Internet knowledge, you say.
Alright.
I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook – MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.
You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.
But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.
Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)
I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.
Knowledge dropped.
P.S. – Sorry, Friendster.
We all just want some muesli. That’s why “Flight of the Conchords” is phat.
Even though I don’t eat much meat anymore thanks to my quasi-veg diet, nothing stirs the passions of my stomach quite like those brown, finely breaded morsels of undetermined poultry origin.
You hook us young, oh nugget. From those early years when mom and dad would head out to a night on the town, leaving the babysitter to whip up some chicken nuggets with Kraft macaroni and cheese, we learnt the appeal of your oven-baked ways. (Or occasionally deep-fried!) You called to us from the Golden Arches, that two-letter prefix somehow conveying a sense of a more refined, enlightened chicken nugget, particularly when engulfed in your transformative chamber of high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden barbecue sauce. (Or occasionally sweet and sour!)
But aging in the world of chicken nuggets was no case of putting away childish things. On the contrary, you held total sway over the Woody High cafeteria, when nugget day was the best of the school lunch rotation, even lording it over the nachos. Wikipedia tells the unknowing hearts that your secret goodness is primarily chicken skin and reconstituted meat slurry, but to us, you’ve always been love in breaded form. Sure, your cousin the chicken strip has taken dominance of the handheld boneless chicken market, but we all know that’s just a veneer of clever, “wholesome food” marketing that only plays off of your undying appeal.
Whether sodden with hot sauce (my personal favorite), sticky with honey or zinged with ketchup, you, chicken nugget, remain the king of the cafeteria. I salute you, product of 1950s food innovation, when it was only our faith in God and reconstituted meat slurry that kept the free world afloat in a world of atheist, borscht-swilling communists. You are an emblem of freedom and the unvarnished appeal of stuff that simply tastes awesome.
Well played, sir, well played.
Hey, Internets.
Don’t hate.
This week, Sports Illustrated had a big piece about Miami Dolphin and Pittsburgh native Jason Taylor. Not only did the article improve my opinion of Taylor a great deal (check out the part where a pro athlete puts sports into perspective with politics), but Woodland Hills H.S., the alma mater of JT and your resident author, even got a name-check. (Taylor was home-schooled but played senior year football for the school team as a district resident.)
That was cool, and I was pumped reading the article. Then I got to this part:
Yet as much as Taylor, in this instance, is guilty of stereotyping his fellow pros, he bristles when others’ expectations of how an athlete should act are used against him … And don’t get Taylor started on the notion some have that his unabashed ambition makes him something of a sellout to his roots. (He grew up in a largely underprivileged neighborhood.)
Huh say what???
Woodland Hills has its nasty areas (shoutout to Rankin and Braddock!) but it’s otherwise smack dab in the middle of American socioeconomic strata. Both Jason Taylor and myself are from Wilkins Township, one of the municipalities in WHSD (read this old Akron page), which I don’t know how someone could see as being “underprivileged”. (Peep these housing prices).
Woody High has a pretty battered rep in the local media, and it’s true that I have plenty of weird stories that I probably wouldn’t have gotten at Upper Middle Whitebread High. But some writer-reporter here is painting the whole district with a pretty broad brush that makes for a better story, but isn’t quite true.
What more can I say: The streetz is a mutha.
Random | June 19th, 2007
- I’ve got a little Short Bus from Filter playing on the iTunes right now. What happened to industrial rock? There was a glory era from about 1992-1999 or so, and then it really faded away. Nine Inch Nails are still around, but they just don’t have the prominence they used to have. I blame Clear Channel Communications, because why not.
- There really aren’t many people who are happy with the direction of the United States at the moment. Whose fault is this? The media? The Republicans? The President? The Democrats? The military?
I feel like our wise commentators are afraid to call out the common cause behind all of those: the citizens of this currently misguided nation. Because in our society, the people are the ones putting their government in place, consuming the media and shaping the economy, and I just can’t help but think that most peeps have been pretty derelict in their citizenly duties.
- Speaking of that, I gotta read this.
Luckily though, you readaz are bright people. So I know you’ll go check out Slate’s new video magazine, Slate V, when it launches soon. Help a blogga out: I’ve been working like a mug to get this thing ready to go on a really tight deadline.- It’s not quite new anymore, but I still think Dirty Jobs is one of the best cable shows in years. Watching a dude get all mudded up and covered in sludge for the sake of good television has a great, dumb appeal, but to roll Gompers-style for a minute, I gotta give it up for the matter-of-fact, highly popular, non-preachy throwback glorification of the American worker in this age of obscene fetishization of the horded wealth of the few. I didn’t like when Mike Rowe shilled for Ford, but otherwise the show is a high-quality effort to remind us bourgeois slobs that societal consumerism doesn’t come easy.
Also, I like to watch people smash things.
I’m out.
Back from the Slate retreat at Mohonk House, readaz. It was a good time: lots of smart-writer conversation, lake swimming and board games. Why is it that every time someone proposes board or parlor games, I think, “This is mad lame,” only to end up having mad fun instead?
At least this stereotype is enjoyable
Anyway, my friend Steve and I were getting our IM on today and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as we seem to often do. A number of people see things over there and compare them to what’s happened in Northern Ireland. (In fact, there’s allegorical evidence that the PLO and the IRA have worked together in the past.) I think people who make that analogy aren’t going far enough back in their comparison, because the Palestinian situation today is a lot more relatable to that of the Irish directly after World War I.
Back then, you had a similar situation to what’s going on in the occupied territories today: there was a general consensus among rational people on both sides that the British shouldn’t be occupying land where they were a tiny minority, and that required a system which discriminated against the ethnically-different majority. Despite this, the charged atmosphere and radicals on both sides made a negotiated settlement essentially impossible. There was a serious attempt by the British to give Home Rule to the Irish in 1913-14, but the Protestant British settlers in Ulster were so fanatical that they were openly threatening violence against their countrymen if forced to relinquish control over the land they had “settled”. If not for WWI, this could very well have happened: The population back home in Britain was split on whether to give a state to the Irish and undercut their more violent countrymen, or to crack down harder on those savage and stupid Irish, who only understood force and demagoguery.
After WWI, the negotiations were essentially dead. The IRA, knowing it couldn’t stand up directly to Britain’s military, started a guerrilla war against the established order. The British sent in tough veterans (the Black and Tans) to put down the guerrillas, but the Tans’ constant interference in the community and their discriminatory tactics only succeeded in turning more and more of the population against the British and in favor of the IRA. After a few years of this, the British finally reached for an end to the long headache of occupying Ireland and offered the Irish a deal: a Free State for the 26 counties of the south, but six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster would remain part of the UK.
He does kinda look like Liam Neeson
Many Irish were furious that the British would carve up their ancestral homeland to protect the interests of a fanatical, religiously paranoid settler minority, and these Irish demanded the continuation of anti-British violence: all 32 counties or none at all. (I’m sensing a historical pattern here.) Clearly this ignored the mighty British military reality, and more practical elements of the Irish nation thought differently: taking the deal would be a path to full independence and a potential chance to gain the other six counties through later diplomacy and governmental negotiation, instead of violence. Leading the Free Staters was Michael Collins, an IRA commander from extra-rebellious western Ireland who led the guerrilla campaign. Ultimately the conflict led to a civil war between the Republicans and the Free Staters, with the Free Staters eventually victorious. Michael Collins, however, was assassinated by Republican snipers, perhaps the war’s most prominent victim. (For a good movie, check out the obviously named Michael Collins sometime, even if Julia Roberts’ Irish accent is worse than that of the Lucky Charms spokesprechaun.)
The Collins dude is where the parallel has its biggest hole: who’s the Palestinian equivalent? I guess the closest they’ve had is Arafat, but dude was more than willing to keep up the violence to score political points, rather than making the tough choices to give his people a shot at their own rule. With him gone, though, forget it. In the past few days we’ve seen 1922 Irish-style civil-war action between the Palestinian Free-Staters (Fatah) and Republicans (Hamas), but this time the “keep up the struggle” Republicans are winning and are in control of the government, while the Free Stater not-equivalents in Gaza and the West Bank are corrupt, weak and hardly viewed by their people as a worthy leadership. Also, you can’t ignore the fact that it took another 75 years and many deaths before the North of Ireland calmed down. Not encouraging for the Israeli settlement areas, even in the nigh-impossible scenario that everything else does play out similar to Ireland.
Still, while it likely will never happen, at least the Irish experience offers the Palestinians a model with some hope for the future. It may have taken 800 years for the Irish to reach a settlement, and the Palestinians have been in their predicament since 1948, but if recent history repeats itself, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see a sensible reduction of violence sometime soon.
Probably not, though.
High horses are one thing, readaz, but reality is anutha.
My journalism education came from the mother of all ivory-tower purist j-school institutions, that being the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. We were always taught that what matters in the media world is ethics, proper sourcing and the pursuit of objective truth without fear of those controlling the money or the power.
Tru dat; I can’t belittle that sentiment because the shred of a hopeful idealist in me still clings to it. It’s why I went into my chosen profession. But being in the real-world media market has taught me that two other things are just as important, and possibly moreso: a proper business model and a sense of cultural relativity.
That’s why, despite the usual cries of “Look at this garbage the media pushes on us,” media peeps are right to flog Paris Hilton’s arrest, jailing, release and subsequent re-jailing.
The lede from this story in the New York Times perfectly summarizes the knowledge I’m about to drop. This story is important because it’s a collision of the two aspects of the media that we learned in college: spinach and ice cream. (Quick explainer, and thanks to Prof. Craig LaMay for the well-named concept: Spinach is politics, foreign affairs, policy, science and economics, a.k.a. the stuff that’s good for citizens but they hate to consume. Ice cream is sports, fashion, celebrities, lifestyle and entertainment. We all enjoy it, but it makes you into a fat slug of a citizen if you consume it in more than moderation. Most of the ice cream could be construed as “chick crap”, but dudes, you need to stop lying to yourself about this “glory of human endeavor” bull and admit that sports coverage is the exact equivalent in frivolity.)
In the Hilton story, we have a direct trump of ice cream by spinach: Paris, embodying the frivolity obsession perhaps more than any other human ever, clashes against the spinach-fueled legal system and ultimately loses. The story here isn’t something normally in the realm of valid disgust with the media like “Paris Hilton insulted Lindsay Lohan’s genitals,” but instead is a larger lesson on eating only the ice cream of life: we have here the real world (jail and judges) ultimately proving more powerful than the celebrity world, which while built up in popular culture to the point that it seems to float above the real world on a cloud of great importance, proved in this case to be a defeated paper tiger.
Cynics up in this piece will note that the judge had no choice but to take harsh command of the situation: Al “I’m all up in everything, everywhere” Sharpton and John Edwards publicly questioned Hilton’s release, as did commentators and public moralists everywhere. (Holla back, New York Post.) This backlash represented the other side of the country’s celebrity-obsession duality, that being the part that wants to burn these muthas down and force them to live in the same world as the rest of us, instead of lifting them up high like we do otherwise. Regardless, the end result is the same: the subjugation of the celebrity world’s greatest “I’m rich, I do what the hell I want, and I’m famous for it” icon at the feet of the real world.
That is the type of story that symbolizes the clash of cultural paradigms. And paradigm clashes that are so easily embodied have sociological significance. Significance = media organizations should get their coverage on.
Say what.
Ducks | June 6th, 2007
I was all set to be angry that another warm-weather city won the Stanley Cup, but I’ll give Anaheim the benefit of the doubt for the following reasons:
- People in the region seem to care about the team at least a little bit.
- Changing the name to just Ducks to get rid of the Disneyfied “Mighty Ducks” legacy reversed one of the most emblematic embarrassments of the corroded, corporatized and corpulent 1990s NHL.
- It gave me a reason to re-read the hilarious anger directed by Edmonton fans at Chris Pronger and his wife. For Pittsburgh fans to understand, this stuff rivals the local hatred of Barry Bonds.
- Teemu Selanne crying. I didn’t even think the Euros cared about the Stanley Cup, yet he was on there bawling his eyes out. Funny stuff.
- Ottawa knocked out the Penguins, and it’s fun to watch them lose yet again.
It helps to have the triple deke.
older posts
