culture « Pete Hindle

October 5, 2010

Shush

The argument for comments on a website is something like “it allows you to have a conversation with your audience”, but I’m no longer so sure about that. I’m lucky to get some nice comments here, which makes me very happy when it happens, but in the past few months I’ve been fighting an avalanche of spam. I’m not about to turn off comments just yet, but I have been tempted to recently.

Because, jeez, that spam is irritating. And jeez, the comments on other sites are fucking irritating. In fact, commenting has got to such a stage at this point in history that it’s propensity to turn into a slanging match is well known. But is that the right thing? Should we keep commenting as it is, or is it a system that should evolve?

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory – normal person + anonymity + audience = fuckwad. It’s a truism that you can also get on a slightly-more-polite t-shirt.
Engadget Turns Off Comments – when a bear-pit like Engadget, whose business plan is dependent upon page-views, turns off it’s comments, you know something is up. “What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.” they said, because citing the above theory would not have a calming effect. They’re back on now though, but by default casual browsers don’t see them.
Speak Your Branes – one of the earliest sites dedicated to lampooning the miserable commentator. The choices are mainly culled from the Have Your Say forums of the BBC, which I’m not familiar with. Sounds hellish though.
Help us improve debate on CiF (Guardian) – the Guardian is one of the sites where I feel most dismayed by comments. Some subjects, especially the arts coverage, turn into a spiteful mirror of the message of the written article when the comments start. I think that some of what they are suggesting might help, but I’m not sure that having the author of a piece engage with trollish behaviour will do anything to improve matters there.
Antisocial Web Script for Greasemonkey – if you can’t beat ‘em, delete ‘em.
A Comment on Comments – from Suw Anderson, a mover and shaker in the media world, who notes that most news websites forums are toxic wastelands, and asks these organisations to reconsider the idea of ‘social’. I actually left a length comment on this piece, maybe you could read that. I only made one spelling mistake (I think…)
Why there are no comments on Daring Fireball – one of my favourite blogs on the internet, as much as for the voice as the content, responds to criticism that his site should have comments: “I care about what’s best.” Scroll down to the second half of the post for his extended views, which are worth reading.
Anger Management for Trolls – a contemporary piece from Wired magazine, which states that science will stop those pesky humans with their bad thoughts. I dunno, Wired, I’m dubious… maybe it has something to do with human nature?

That is a lot of linkage for now, and I’m going to let you click and mull to your own conclusion. But here’s one last thing, from Mitchell and Webb, which Suw Anderson used in her piece:

4 comments

September 9, 2010

Well, Now I Feel Like A Douche, But I Still Don’t Think Your Magazine’s That Good

Some people have taken to describing the Internet’s current state as “the attention economy”, where it’s the attention of the casual reader or browser that is the main earner. The logic states that where we spend our attention is where we will spend our money.

This accounts for the popularity and success of boingboing, digg, and reddit – websites where you see a curated collection of things that you might find interesting. The downside of this is that nearly everything on those websites isn’t something new, but rather something that is on the internet in an easily consumable form. The person version of this could be called attention philanthropy. It’s a form of information that you can slurp down whilst sitting in your easy chair, browsing the internet.

I’m not saying I’m browsing the internet from a chakra-enhancing spike, but it’s important to get out and do real stuff occasionally. Not everything should be something that comes in webpage-sized chunks.

This is one of the reasons I like magazines. Magazines are very much like those attention economy websites I mentioned early, except that they are not bound by the drive for new stuff that can be linked to, and that they can create new things. That’s why I’ve been subscribing to a few different magazines this year, looking out for new and interesting things – the sort of thing I won’t hear about on my favourite online hangouts.

One of those magazines was Aesthetica, a magazine based in the UK which covers a high-end cultural remit. I had some big hopes for Aesthetica, but I ended up cancelling by subscription to it today. I couldn’t work out why, but every issue that I picked up wasn’t that engaging. It just seemed to end up buried under a pile of other stuff. It wasn’t until the most recent issue’s article about a show at the MoMa that I realised why – because the author took the time to describe the concept of a readymade.

I’m not going to waste my time describing what a readymade is to you. You’re smart. You already know what a readymade is, and you’d just be bored by my description. But if you were writing an academic essay, you’d throw that description in for context. In the context of this article, however – in an expensive, high-end cultural magazine? It’s not fun to be dragged back to the classroom. Academic writing isn’t entertaining writing, as Paul Graham pointed out recently.

I’m still keeping my eye on the magazine market. I got the new issue of Coilhouse recently, which seems to have a lot of interesting things in it, and The Believer’s collected essays are a great read. Today saw my first issues of Interzone drop through the door, which brought me a wealth of information on obscure scifi movies. None of these magazines adopt mock-academic tones and lecture me about things I already know. Why is it that assuming a position of cultural superiority is something that art magazines feel they have to do?

2 comments

January 5, 2009

On Mavernship (part one: rafts and curves)

Part one of some, in which you can read me espousing in a generalised year-end type way.

The other day, a very clever man explained to me about careers and learning curves. He was saying that every two years we complete another learning curve, take a look around at the career we’ve been having, and say to ourselves “has that worked? Do I really want to keep doing that for another two years, or longer?”

I’ve had a similar conversation with a few different artists recently, except that there seems to be one essential difference between the art world and the world of regular work, which is that people who work in the “straight” world (please excuse the crass generalisation) don’t really see themselves as having a choice about what they do. Whereas people who work within creative fields such as art often find themselves drawn there and stuck there by internal pressures.

It’s this pressure to make that I find interesting. Although make isn’t really the entire description: it’s also dance, sing, perform, paint, sculpt, install… any selection of words that you want to use to talk about creative work. The fact that we don’t have one single word that can sum up the creative span says a lot about our attitudes as a culture to anything outside the narrow band of work-in-an-office-sense-of-the-word work. Because these creative fields are work.

And, while it’s well known that these creative fields are not the most well remunerated, it’s still something that people want to make a living doing. Hans Abbing, the dutch economist who studied the artistic population of Holland, noted that when art stopped being the primary concern of the creative types, they often got more interesting jobs in related areas. This would be the raft of gallery, museum, and university-level jobs that enable cultural creativity to continue in the local area.

As pure conjecture, I would say that it’s impossible to rely on that raft to keep the creative economy going in any one area. For instance, the remit of universities and galleries is actually very different to what artists need. These large institutions need a constant foot-fall of visitors that they can show to funding bodies in order to qualify their existence. Artists need a way of producing work and being supported while producing work. Sometimes these two needs overlap like a venn diagram, but there will always be an overabundance of creativity that cannot be supported.

Continuing with my conjecturable musing, 2009 promises to be the start of penny-pinching times for a lot of organisations. Contrary to most people who are (like me) spouting unasked for opinion in a textual form, I can see some great upsides to this, such as finally encouraging people to take a two-year look around themselves and ask if they truly are happy at the end of their learning curve. I also think it’s a great time for people to ask if they are getting what they want from floating along with the raft.

The next section will have some thoughts on what is around apart from clinging to the raft, and will also get round to the question of mavernship in cultural circles.

1 comment

Pete Hindle