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I love the Flobots’ Handlebars, and I wouldn’t be a fan if I didn’t like repetition with variation, so I’ve been happily rewatching all three Handlebars vids. The DW version sends actual physical shivers through me, and I really like the Iron Man one (warning: ginormous file; much smaller version here) as well—I thought the best conceptual choice was to deemphasize Obadiah as an antagonist and have the “holocaust” bits be essentially all set in Afghanistan. The non-Vividcon one, for BSG, is a really interesting contrast to the other two. Rather than taking the lyrics’ voice as a description of a central character, the BSG vid seems to me to have the song speak for the producers of the show. They are trying out all sorts of tricks on the characters, and as gods of their creation they really can end their world in a holocaust. To me, the vid asks us to consider the morality of those choices, even accepting that it’s just fantasy. Or, in other words, if the Doctor is demonstrably creepy as fuck, then what of his creator?
Lucas Conley, OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Business of Illusion and the Illusion of Business: America is suffering from corporate focus on brand experience and promise over actual innovation in products and services. Conley goes back and forth over whether the problem is that branding is wasteful or that attempts to manipulate people through brands don’t work very well, though he mostly lands in the former category, expressing traditional fears about US competitiveness and also warning of increasingly sophisticated techniques to use our own neurons against us to get us to buy, buy, buy. Not a particularly interesting read, though it might be a good corrective if you’re reading a lot of books about brand churches, etc.
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder: Sorry, M.; I didn’t get more out of this than I did from Clay Shirky’s much shorter Ontology is Overrated, even if Shirky misuses “ontology.” The basic argument: given modern digitization, the best way to treat information is to create big piles of it, and sort and rate after intake, if at all, rather than trying to create a Dewey Decimal/Library of Congress style classification system. Categories still matter, but they’re dependent on our aims, not natural or Platonic/Aristotelean. The problem with the book is that a book should not be a pile of information, and I didn’t see a progressive marshalling of evidence or a structure, just a whole lot of anecdotes and arguments. While each was interesting on its own, there wasn’t enough there for me. Better reads: the Shirky plus Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which does a great job on flexible categories.
Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright’s Paradox: Not the right book for me, because I’ve already seen these arguments; Netanel summarizes his work over the past decade or so arguing that copyright is an important guarantor of free speech in that it creates the structural preconditions for an independent media sector funded by small payments from large numbers of people, allowing a different set of voices than those funded by governments or wealthy patrons. At the same time, copyright can extend too far, harming free speech more than it helps. Netanel offers some suggestions for resolving the tensions, though as is often the case with proposals for compulsory licenses of one sort or another he doesn’t really address how noncommercial production of unauthorized derivative works ought to be treated. It’s a decent book on the basic issues of copyright and free speech from an American perspective, but I’d probably recommend Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks to the more theory-tolerant or Lessig’s Free Culture for better rhetoric.
Lucas Conley, OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Business of Illusion and the Illusion of Business: America is suffering from corporate focus on brand experience and promise over actual innovation in products and services. Conley goes back and forth over whether the problem is that branding is wasteful or that attempts to manipulate people through brands don’t work very well, though he mostly lands in the former category, expressing traditional fears about US competitiveness and also warning of increasingly sophisticated techniques to use our own neurons against us to get us to buy, buy, buy. Not a particularly interesting read, though it might be a good corrective if you’re reading a lot of books about brand churches, etc.
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder: Sorry, M.; I didn’t get more out of this than I did from Clay Shirky’s much shorter Ontology is Overrated, even if Shirky misuses “ontology.” The basic argument: given modern digitization, the best way to treat information is to create big piles of it, and sort and rate after intake, if at all, rather than trying to create a Dewey Decimal/Library of Congress style classification system. Categories still matter, but they’re dependent on our aims, not natural or Platonic/Aristotelean. The problem with the book is that a book should not be a pile of information, and I didn’t see a progressive marshalling of evidence or a structure, just a whole lot of anecdotes and arguments. While each was interesting on its own, there wasn’t enough there for me. Better reads: the Shirky plus Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which does a great job on flexible categories.
Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright’s Paradox: Not the right book for me, because I’ve already seen these arguments; Netanel summarizes his work over the past decade or so arguing that copyright is an important guarantor of free speech in that it creates the structural preconditions for an independent media sector funded by small payments from large numbers of people, allowing a different set of voices than those funded by governments or wealthy patrons. At the same time, copyright can extend too far, harming free speech more than it helps. Netanel offers some suggestions for resolving the tensions, though as is often the case with proposals for compulsory licenses of one sort or another he doesn’t really address how noncommercial production of unauthorized derivative works ought to be treated. It’s a decent book on the basic issues of copyright and free speech from an American perspective, but I’d probably recommend Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks to the more theory-tolerant or Lessig’s Free Culture for better rhetoric.
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There's also a much smaller (22MB) version of the IM "Handlebars" on the vidder's vid-announcement post (http://deejay.livejournal.com/121608.html).
I loved contrasting the IM and DW versions-- both interesting, both saying similar things, but each vid has a totally different feel. It's just fascinating.
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