prosumption

“Basic,” “painful,” “embarrassing,” and comparable to necrophilia: a small sampling from the reviews of Fuller House over the last couple of months. The Netflix original, a remake of the classic 1980s/90s sitcom Full House, may become a lasting icon of terrible, terrible, really quite bad moments in television history. The kindest sentiment I came across was expressed by Maureen Ryan in Variety, who generously conceded that “[t]hose who enjoyed the original…and don’t mind its patented blend of cloying sentiment, cutesy mugging and predictable humor might find enjoyment in this unspectacular retread.”

Naturally, I binge watched. Of course, it was as awful as expected. Maybe worse. The remake is identical to the original in both form and feel. The characters are unidimensional, the story is episodic and shallow, the catch-phrases are somehow even less catchy, and oh the racism. Kimmy Gibbler’s ex-husband is a cringe-worthy Latino caricature whose lustful propensities can hardly be contained and the 11^th episode centers around an Indian themed party which acts as the foil for copious jokes, includes an almost entirely white cast dressed in saris and jamas, and culminates with the party attendees spontaneously breaking into a choreographed dance for which mysteriously, they each know all of the moves. That last part may or may not be racist, but as a storytelling decision, asks the audience to suspend an unfair amount of belief.

Fuller House could not have been worse if it tried. Which is why I reinterpreted the season as though it did try. And then, Fuller House was very good. more...

We’ve all been there. Sweaty palms, racing heart, left eye that winks at involuntary intervals. You’re emotionally fraught and having a physiological response. It could be an upcoming exam, a big presentation, or that one friend who can’t stop telling you about their fantastic job/spouse/kids/new shoes while wondering out loud how you manage living in such messy quarters.

Our bodies are key sources of information and guidance. Bodied reactions, coupled with culturally situated reflexive analyses, help us make sense of day-to-day events and make behavioral decisions. Feel like you’re going to vomit every time that colleague stops by your office? Maybe they’re toxic. Maybe you’re in love. The bodily response prompts you to do something, and how you interpret that response tells you what that something is. more...

The contemporary information economy is made up of prosumers—those who simultaneously produce and consume. This is exciting, as we lay-folk become micro-journalists, creating content and spreading what others create. However, such a system poses serious questions about the ethics of sharing practices.

In what follows, I offer a skeleton guideline for the ethics of sharing. It is purposely broad so as to remain flexible. I offer three key guiding principles: Who always matters; Intention always matters; and The law is a really good suggestion. more...

EDIT (17 January 2013): Please see update below.

The scene is San Francisco, late 2009, and a friend is explaining—animatedly, excitedly—“why there are so many poly [polyamorous] people on OkCupid.” I wasn’t paying much attention to online dating at the time, so the precise details are fuzzy, but it basically boiled down to the options that OkCupid offered for “relationship status.” In addition to the expected categories like “single,” “seeing someone,” or “married” offered by other social networking and dating sites, OkCupid offered the label “available.”

To know why this distinction would matter to someone who identifies as “poly” or “polyamorous” (as did this particular friend), you need to know a little bit about what polyamory is. more...

Chris Anderson’s Makers: The New Industrial Revolution reveals its productivist bias in both its title and subtitle. Makers is, of course, a term that is synonymous with producers. The Industrial Revolutions- both the “first” (the factories of the 1850s), and the “second” (the assembly-line of the early 20^th century)- form the backdrop for, and inform, Anderson’s analysis. They represented the height of production and to this day are the source of our lingering bias toward seeing the world through the lens of production. As the title makes clear, Anderson foresees, and is a cheerleader for, a new Industrial Revolution, a revolution in (personal) production based on the computer, the Internet, and especially new technologies such as the desktop CAD, the laser cutter and the 3-D printer (which squirts liquids such as plastic rather than ink). These technologies will allow us (in collaboration with others in open-source online communities) to make more things from the bottom up by ourselves, or in shared maker-spaces, than relying on large-scale organizations to produce them for us. I think Anderson is on to something important here and we will see a dramatic shift away from enormous organizations devoted to production and toward small, even one-person, arrangements capable of producing a wide range of things on their own. more...

“Hey, don’t let me forget to TiVo Two and a Half Men”—said nobody ever.

NPR has been running a series that looks at the ways in which new technologies are changing how we consume television[i].  The latest installment, based on an interview with Jessica Helfand, author of Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture has a troublesome tone. Helfand worries that on-demand television is ruining our attention spans, as we consume only what we want, when we want. She worries that we watch on our own time, rather than as part of a collective schedule-following community. She worries that content will have to get shorter, more easily consumable, and that the focus will shift from away from the story, and towards the medium itself. Referencing a colleague, she labels today’s media consumption environment as a “narrative deprivation culture.”  Below are a few representative quotes from Helfand: more...

Presidential debates might be the single political event where Marshall McLuhan’s infamous phrase “the medium is the message” rings most true. Candidates know well that content takes the back seat, perhaps even stuffed in the trunk, during these hyper-performative news events. The video above of McLuhan on the Today show analyzing a Ford-Carter debate from 1976 is well worth a watch. The professor’s points still ring provocative this morning after the first Obama-Romney debate of 2012; a debate that treated the Twitter-prosumer as a television-consumer and thoroughly failed the social medium.  more...

When the novel Fifty Shades of Grey was published, it sparked a wide range of slightly frothy responses, from the (shocking!) truth about its history as Twilight AU (Alternate Universe) fanfiction to the (even more shocking!) indication that many women like to read erotic fiction and that sometimes that erotica can get pretty kinky. Much of the press coverage that paid attention to the fandom aspect of the story focused on the copyright issues inherent in fanfiction and other transformative works, which is still up for some debate —  and which, thanks to Fifty Shades, will likely continue to be debated into the foreseeable future.

To the extent that people seem willing to own that there might be something ethically amiss with the publication and subsequent success of Fifty Shades, the copyright issues seem, again, to be the primary focus. These rest not only with the fact that Fifty Shades began life as a work of freely available fanfiction and was then “pulled to publish” (removed and altered) — this is not an entirely uncommon phenomenon in publishing or in fandom, though opinions regarding its integrity as a practice vary somewhat in both spheres — but with the extent to which Fifty Shades appears to be different from its fandom incarnation. Which is to say, hardly at all, as the book blog Dear Author demonstrated.

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In case you’ve missed it, the latest internet phenomena (and weekend entertainment) in L.A. has been “Caine’s Arcade,” a delightful project created by 9 year old Caine Monroy and documented by filmmaker Nirvan Mullick. Caine built an arcade for himself out of the cardboard boxes in his dad’s auto parts shop. Unfortunately, he didn’t have many customers,

(Film “Caine’s Arcade” © 2012 Caine’s Arcade/Nivan Mullick)

but after Nirvan organized a smartmob using the Hidden LA Facebook page and Reddit, Caine now has lots of customers. The coverage for Caine’s Arcade has been phenomenal. News sites and websites have all lauded his arcade. Caine was invited to bring his arcade to MakerFaire™ at the Exploratorium (Makers are individuals who create) for their Make day for trash. Caine was invited to visit the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to learn about rockets. Caine’s Arcade has gone on the road to participate in Art celebrations around L.A., and Caine recently received the Latino Spirit Award. These have all great opportunities for what seems to be a nice young man with a curious mind. It’s great that people have reached out to offer him opportunities to learn and grow. Many have donated to a scholarship fund for Caine and a foundation has been established to help other young makers. The Goldhirsch foundation will match dollar-for-dollar donations contributed to Caine up to $250K. more...

Tomorrow’s initial public offering of Facebook stock has both business and tech commentators chattering away (though, in most mainstream publications, there isn’t meaningful distinction between the two). Technology coverage is too often reduced to the business of technology. Consider the top four tech headlines on the New York Times site today: “Long Odds on a Big Facebook Payday,” “Ahead of Facebook I.P.O., a Skeptical Madison Ave.,” “Spotify Deal Would Value Company at $4 Billion, “Pinterest Raises $100 Million.”

Buried in the all the personal investing advice, some interesting quesitons are being raised. For example: How can a company with few employees and so little material infrastructure generate so much value? What is it that Facebook actually produces? Is an economy based in immaterial products and services sustainable (especially given that it’s profitability is largely dependent on it’s ability to drive additional consumption in other sectors through advertising)?

But there are also a lot of questions that aren’t being asked—the kinds of culturally significant questions that business folks and economists aren’t (though perhaps should be) interested in. Here, I want ask one such question: Will Facebook’s transition to a public corporation change the way users perceive their participation on the site? While I can only speculate about how this institutional change will effect users, I want offer a few reasons I think Facebook’s IPO may cause users to see themselves in more of an explicit work-like relationship with Facebook (based on rationalistic principles of minimizing cost and maximizing gain) and less a part of some sort of non-rationalized gift economy (based on principles of sharing and reciprocity). I should be clear, here, that I am talking about users’ relationship to the platform, not their relationships with each other. Users are, of course, primarily motivated to use the platform because of their relationships with other users; however, as recent privacy debates have illustrated, a user’s perceptions of Facebook are important in determining how users use the platform and whether they use it at all. more...