Category: Digital Culture

Toby Mundy’s Defense of Books

I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy.  The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com.  Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward the existential threshold.  But from a cultural perspective, Mundy makes a sound plea to consumers not to confuse the book with the information it contains and, thus, not to be lulled by artificially cheap prices into setting fire to the basic economics that make a diversity of books possible.  Mundy writes:

“To price a book in the way information is priced is based on a rather one-eyed view of its value. As any textbook author will tell you, Information is undoubtedly part of a book’s utility. But that is only part of the story. A second purpose is to provide readers with transporting Experiences, usually from reading fiction. A third is to impart current Knowledge. When TS Eliot asked plaintively in ‘The Rock’, ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ he was reminding us that these two things are not the same. Knowledge comes from the interpretation of information, experience and facts. It comes from the stories we tell about those things. Perhaps it is the capacity to create these stories that make us human.”

By contrast, Mundy opens his piece quoting Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP for Kindle, who accurately says that books compete for our time with other things like Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush Saga.  But this somewhat common market view is only a half truth whose half-lie leaves out exactly the point.  There may be individuals who read books and play Candy Crush Saga, but I am confident that they do not value both equally.

See Toby Mundy’s full editorial here.

Owning One’s Data with Jennifer Lyn Morone (Podcast)

Jennifer Lyn Morone Part I
Jennifer Lyn Morone Part II

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are presently grappling with existential questions posed by big data and at the same time, considering the social implications of rulings by the supreme court in both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.   In fact, I believe we have an unprecedented mandate at this point in history to more rigorously consider the distinction between human beings their inventions. The nature of existence itself is changing as we atomize experience into data that is bought and sold as a new commodity.  At the same time, many of us in the United States are concerned about the precedents set when corporate entities appear to be endowed with the same rights as living beings.  A corporation is a tool.  Technology is a tool.  But whether us makers are using these tools or they are using us is a question yet to be answered. And examination includes choices about personal privacy and the economic value of ourselves as expressed in a body of data.

Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc from jennifer morone on Vimeo.

In this podcast, I talk with Jennifer Lyn Morone, who is in the start-up phase of bringing to market Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Incorporated.  An American artist who has lived in Europe for more than a decade, Morone has chosen to address these social, economic, and existential questions with a venture that is part experiment, part cultural statement, and part business.  By incorporating herself, Jennifer Lyn Morone will now be the CEO of Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc., and that means literally treating her life, her experiences, her knowledge, even her biological data, as a set of assets to be fully managed and monetized at the discretion of the corporation.  This Fall, Morone will begin using a combination of cameras and data recording technology to track her activities and store information on servers controlled by the corporation.  I think this is not going to be just another example of web-enabled voyeurism.  Morone is serious about the business venture, and she’s eager to share what she learns as she explores the dual nature of being both a person and a corporation.

Visit Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. website.

So wait, Google is pro censorship?

Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence.  So, I wrote that sentence instead.  But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are “sexually explicit” and, therefore, violate existing policy that Google will not serve ads to sites with “adult or mature content.” Really?  Last I checked, half of Google’s arguments for failing to address matters like contributing to piracy were based on a stance against censorship.

First of all, I can login to YouTube right now, search the word sex, and get scads of results with sexually explicit thumbnails.  In fact, many of these thumbnails link to videos that are not so explicit as the pictures imply. So, I guess it’s okay for Google to use pornographic thumbnails in a bait-and-switch ploy to get users to click on videos that are ad supported, but if an artist depicts the naked human form (newsflash, artists do this sometimes) in a painting or other medium, then Google can arbitrarily label it “adult mature content” and out of bounds? I know one man’s art is another’s pornography, and this subjectivity is an important standard for the protection of free speech; but somehow mainstream advertisers seem to know pornography when they see it because you won’t find their brands on actual pornographic sites (I asked a friend).  But consider this…

One of the covers targeted by Google for censorship was for the album OH (Ohio) by the band Lambchop.  The irony in this case is pretty thick considering the painting depicting two lovers in bed in the foreground with a scene of police brutality through the window in the background evokes of one of the most famous visual themes in the history of Western art — that of Olympia.  Probably the most well-known and most overly-adapted Olympia is Manet’s painting of the nude courtesan, which debuted in 1865.  It was scandalous in its time, not so much for the nudity but for the blatant depiction of a prostitute looking right at the viewer. The Lambchop cover is a painting by artist Michael Peed, a friend and former professor of frontman Kurt Wagner, and Peed references the familiar Manet composition to create a scene that is provocative in our times.  The counterpoint between the intimacy of the lovers and the abuse by the police is a wry statement that one can interpret as one may choose, but that it should be censored by Google of all entities has got to at least make you wonder what all their pro-culture, pro-speech horse shit is all about.  Take this for what it’s worth, but the censored version with pixel blurs over the “naughty bits” inadvertently makes an even more disturbing statement about America — that sex remains offensive while police brutality is not.  Well played, Company That Shall Not Be Evil.

We should not lose sight of the significance of an entity like Google exerting its influence, even in this small case.  An individual advertiser may, and should, choose what kind of media associations best suit its brand.  You probably won’t see Betty Crocker commercials during Adult Swim, for instance.  But should an ad service business — and in this case the only ad service business —  be entitled to arbitrarily label creative works “sexually explicit” and requiring censorship? If Peed’s painting meets that definition, then so does nearly every nude in every museum and gallery in the world. I thought the Internet was the proverbial garden of free expression.  I also thought Google was just a neutral highway that has neither interest in nor responsibility for the manner in which users drive.

Admittedly, even for Google-scale hypocrisy, it is an enigmatic choice to commit such a blatant act of censorship where there isn’t even a hint of gray area regarding the works in question.  Is this the result of killjoy bots?  Or is it a sign that Google will soon be throwing even more prudish sops to its new conservative friends among DC influence-peddlers?  No matter what the thinking (and I use that word generously) may be in this case, the disturbing implications of the precedent cannot be overstated.  To be outside the Google universe is to be effectively off the web, at least as far as monetization goes. This is an absurd amount of power for any single company to wield. And seeing as we are no longer able to distinguish between corporations and people in the United States, I’m not at all ready to let the whims of centaurs in Silicon Valley or anywhere else define what it means to be indecent.