Users, of course, have always been a part of the tech world, and there’s no denying that their tastes, opinions, and preferences have been business and design concerns for some time. But if the Air BnB scandal teaches us anything powerful, it should be that not all users are equal.  It can be said, somewhat reductively, that there are “good users” and “bad users.” The tech world needs to get serious about cultivating good users and avoiding bad users by consciously understanding the people who use and create their products. The reason is simple: good users empower companies, while bad users (looking at your AirBnB) can threaten and destabilize great projects.

:: virtues of the good user

Good users are defined by their commitment to a network, their respect for other users, and their supportiveness of new users. Good users help networks grow quickly but also securely. They are not like rats looking for an easy feast and then moving on when a product’s newness and trendiness has been exhausted.

Like good neighbors, good users are committed to the virtual community that today’s social media and web 2.0 businesses promise. They believe in a set of values (almost always unwritten) that form the heart of acceptable behavior in online spaces. They are also motivated by a love of the network and what it creates, be it photos, stories, videos, restaurant reviews, or places to stay. Good users have meet-ups, share skills, compliment other users, and give constructive criticism to company developers and fellow users alike. Good users take ideas well and enjoy thinking up ways to improve a work-flow or set of tools. Good users are the core of tech business that will succeed when the age of a-startup-a-minute crashes down. Good users will help companies solve their own problems and even monetize their products because they will believe in the network. They will be invested in it. They will be committed to it.

:: vices of the bad user

Bad users bully. Bad users stake out territory and intimidate rather than instruct new users. Bad users look for ways to take advantage of everything and everyone. Bad users may help a network grow quickly, but insecurely because bad users are temperamental and capricious. They do not invest in a community, they exploit it. Bad users are looking for forms of virtual power rather than community. They seek audiences rather than peers. They set up hierarchies to protect their anxieties and support their egos. They criticize others harshly, they do not take criticism themselves.

Users matter. Not simply because they are customers, but because they create the very content that has constitutes the objects and activities that define social media today. The brilliance of YouTube or Vimeo are not the sites’ designs and functionality although they certainly inform user behavior. The brilliance is the content users create and share. YouTube and Vimeo are like open cinema spaces: Vimeo ends up being more art-house, while YouTube brings any type of content, blockbuster FAILs and family films alike.

Users matter. They reshape and create. They thrive in certain circumstances and abandon sites that begin constraining them. Users cannot be a secondary concern of tech companies, but too often that’s exactly what they are. While it’s easy to find the engineers of a product, or the designers of a site, the user liaisons are often only hired later in a company’s development. But that’s absurd. If you are building a technology that relies on users, you need to have user research and co-ordination running in parallel to coding and designing. Because this is not customer service, it’s product development and customer service and strategy rolled into one. In web 2.0, the users are not just the content “customers,” but also the indispensable content “creators.”

Users are not just the future of successful technology, they’re the present.

:: This analysis will continue with case studies in good and bad users and how they impact a media company’s networks

Drawing on my previous work (scholastic and personal) in social media spaces like YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and Twitter, I’ve decided to examine why consumers share what used to be private media content with the world. This is a unique question, because most of the dialog about social media is in the is-it-good or is-it-bad binary, and I feel that in ignoring users directly and interrogating their motivations for production, scholarship and journalism have lost an opportunity. Are YouTubers aspiring filmmakers? Or home movie makers just looking to share memories with friends and family? Are SoundClouders recording for posterity (archiving) or promotion (listen to this man!) ?

For my research, I’ve decide to look at the iPhone app Instagram to see what powers a burgeoning photo-sharing social media network. I presented a more detailed outline of my methods, motivations, and research goals to the department last week.

Here’s the Prezi:

And the recording of the presentation, complete with a friend calling me a humanist (true!):

Zachary McCune presents on Consumer Media Production by zmccune

The Irish became Irish-American. Boston got a basketball team that paid homage to its yankee Brahmins being outpaced by celtic people. Catholic churches proliferated widely. And Newport, itself an emerald isle of sorts, gained a swelling Irish population. The Irish were too poor to stay in Ireland. So they left for brighter shores, altering the shape and accent of history forever.
Now, in the spiraling chaos of the Recession, the Irish are again leaving home.

With unemployment in the Republic over 13%, more than 100,000 citizens expected to leave the country of 4 million in the next three years. They join a bittersweet history of exodus. From Ireland to the world, the Irish have given literature, entertainment, innovation and a celebrated sense of joi de vie best summarized by the (outrageous) Irish word craic meaning fun or a good time. Used in conversation “after the game the lads and I went to the pub for a bit of craic,” Americans can be forgiven for assuming drug use.

The Irish are going to need all the craic they can muster. After the economic collapse of Greece, the Irish have fallen need to a similarly dramatic bailout. Which ends the first, and now possibly only period of general wealth, growth and prosperity that ever occurred in Ireland. Termed the “celtic tiger” this economic force grew from the mid 90’s into years of glory in the early millenials. And now its come crashing down.

Where will the Irish go?

Can they afford to join us in the America again? We’ve enough of our problems to manage- where will they fit in?
Can they go to Europe or the UK, the places they traditionally gone to for short stints to improve their economic viability? Not in a time when Europe is reeling from the very collapse that sends the Irish deep into its heart.

So the Irish must go to places more unlikely. Australia and New Zealand have been suggested, but I wonder if there is not something more dramatic and fascinating to emerge. Will, for instance, the Irish follow the wealth in the world to China or Brazil or India? Those are the developing nations whose growth requires some guidance. And English is already a valorized skill in those countries. Will the Irish teach English to a new generation of students abroad, bringing the playful Irish version of the language with them, fulfilling the promise of Becket, Yeats, and Joyce in Beijing and Delhi? Or might the Irish adopt and entwine themselves into new contexts, creating unique intercultural realities so fresh and unexpected we can scarcely imagine their characteristics?

One might hope so. Especially as the Irish look down at decades of debt and unemployment and collapsed confident. Now more than ever, the world needs the Irish to remember their mirth and craic, if only for themselves.

Zachary McCune asked a man in Ireland what his son’s future would hold. The response had something to do with “abroad” and was said with a smile and a tear.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NEWPORT MERCURY]

The connection between these two statements, if you had not surmised, is great. It is within one frame that I approach the other, and it is not necessarily the order or dynamic you may guess. To be sure, “cultural relativism” could be helpful to think through what this whole Guy Fawkes-British Monarchy-Terrorism and the State complex, but that might be too easy.

No, let’s invert the expectation. What does Cultural Relativism mean when framed by the Fifth of November?

People keep saying it to me. “Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November. Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot.” But what do you do when you can’t “remember” it, because you’ve never known it. You’ve no idea what you’re somehow already supposed to know.
Where I come from, the Fifth of November would be written the fifth of November, or just November 5th. And it certainly wouldn’t be included in a common piece of poetry. A ditty, as it were.

(Incidentally, do you need to know where I come from? Are you wondering about it? Does it matter so long as I imply, as I have, that it’s not here?)

The point is, around here, the Fifth of November is the Fifth of November. And that’s charged with a certain significance that is even evidenced in someone (from here) forgetting that it is the Fifth of November.

Because whenever someone does that, they are often forced to exclaim “I forgot it was the Fifth of November!” or “How could I have forgotten the Fifth of November?”

Both statements are ironic given the mantra of the day.

Remember, Remember.

Perhaps I have committed a logical sin. There has been an implication (mine) that because I don’t know enough about the Fifth of November to have forgotten something vital about it, I am somehow different than everyone else. This wasn’t meant to be and us vs. them game. Although, to some degree, it has to be. The fact is, there are some people who know something about the date and about “gunpowder, treason, and plot.” And there are those who do not. This division is not an accident. It is quite intentional and productive for society writ large.

This, briefly sketched, is the foundation of “cultural relativism.” Which, on the dog-earred page in front of me is defined as such:

Cultural Relativists assert that concepts are socially constructed and vary cross-culturally. These concepts may include such fundamental notions as what is considered true, morally correct, and what constitutes knowledge or even reality itself.

There will be a fireworks display later. I know what that is when a friend tells me of it. When I sit in the rain to watch the display, it looks like fireworks do anywhere else. If I described them to you, you would find them familiar and possibly unremarkable. That familiarity, that seeming universality, seems to fight back against the idea that ideas are somehow unique or different or situated within specific cultural boundaries.

But before we go all the way to concluding the ordinariness of the fireworks I would put it to you that you’ve never seen fireworks that were just fireworks. You may have seen explosions of color in the night sky a hundred times but they were always something- a summer holiday, New Year’s Eve, a crazy weekend, a college prank, or the Fourth of July (America’s own Fifth of November), or Bastille Day, or . And these fireworks meant something within those experiences and never were just fireworks. There value, in short, was connected (related as in relative) to the circumstances they were seen in.

I cannot conclude that the Fifth of November is about remembering anything other than remembering (memory) itself. Despite the history and the rhyme and the explanations I later receive, the importance of the day (evidenced by its title as just a date) is to mark from the ordinary something that is different.

And, in that process, mark those who are different as different.

And burn them on a bonfire as an enemy of the state, and its thinking.

“You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi

The book has not, and will not, die. But it will shift forms. This is because a book is not wood pulp glued together or something that resides exclusively in leather clad coverings. The book is not the codex, for it has been the scroll, the manuscript, and the tablet far before it opened right to left (or left to right) in convenient sequential pagination. The codex, to be clear, has always been merely an avatar or a permutation of the book idea. The book is greater than the form it takes. The book is (or ought to be) defined as an object of boundaries, which is no doubt why books must always be “bound.”

At its most abstracted, the book is very much akin to the Saussurean sign. It is everything that it is not. It is this writing and not that writing, these maps not those charts, this writer not those writers, it is these ideas and not those ones. The book has always been defined by its aspiration to be discrete and differentiated from other objects, most importantly other books. This emphasizes the book’s boundaries (both conceptually and literally) as definitive of what the book is, or what it does/is about.

A book is bound, bounded, and bound up. It is made complete physically, complete in its arguments (discursive binding if you will), and complete in its existence as a discrete object in a world of objects/things. Because it is bounded in all of these ways, readers have learned to consume it in a certain way: they enter the book expecting that it is not a intellectual black hole from which there is not escape. They expect to move through it, as sojourners perhaps, or detectives on a case. The metaphors for reading always treat the book as a subject that somehow, somewhere has limits. And inventiveness and exploration within the limits define the pleasure of reading and writing as invention and play. Roland Barthes famously advocated for the re-invention of the “readerly” as a type of play activity. Like the playing fields of a sport, the limits of books are not to their detriment, but just the opposite: the boundaries beget a marked-off space of inquiry and play. Books are their own worlds and territories as we have celebrated for hundreds of years.

Now we have been incorrectly drawn into a great debate about books defined too narrowly. We have been warned of the death of books, by people who see books only as the codex, the woodpulp tome, the paperback novel. We have been led to see books as publishers see them. In the process, we have forgotten the “book idea” – the idea of binding a discourse or several discourses together, such that they become a bounded object.

People have not stopped writing. They may write differently and in new electronic environments, but they are still fundamentally attempting to produce the same sort of semi-permanent scribblings that form the “content,” which is to say, purpose of books. Born into electronic environments, “digital” writing proves flexible and fast. It can cross massive geographic gaps quickly, and can be manipulated/adjusted/truncated/distorted/improved with equal ease. Electronic writing seems to have no boundaries. It exists in a vast web of connections and discursive vectors. Movement is so easy between electronic texts that one can become lost in them, and can lose sight of the purpose or initiative. The readers of electronic/digital writing are accustomed to be sidetracked, misdirected, and lost. Electronic writing, in short, begs for binding. Not just to arrest and preserve digital content that can be easily lost, but also to chart a path through content. To curate and select and bind material together such that it becomes a new discrete object. Electronic writing, the loosest form of the book idea, can be given more defined edges.

Which is why the world needs Anthologize now. Anthologize, a new, FREE WordPress plugin, is fundamentally about binding that which has become unbound and unbounded: the shifting electronic content of the world wide web. Anthologize was created by a handful of scholars, librarians, and archivists who were gathered for just one week in Northern Virginia to develop a tool for work in the digital humanities (full disclosure here: I was one of the them).

It is not surprising that a publication tool that makes an intervention into the scattered world of digital writing should be the conclusion of such a gathering and such a fast-paced collaborative process. In fact, it is incredibly telling and significant that at this moment in history of literary, intellectual and cultural work, twelve humanists should motivated to build a thing they would call Anthologize. Motivated in equal parts by fears over digital decay (data loss), the need for light free and flexible book publishing interfaces, and the eternal need to actually curate and bind material together into anthologies, Anthologize must be read as a celebration and not a detournment of the book idea. Indeed, even while Anthologize promises new life to electronic writing, and progresses the coming age of the ebooks and ebook reader culture, Anthologize is fundamentally about binding. It is about allowing individuals to create their own boundaries and bindings, to delimit a world that has grown overcrowded with information. It is about marking out, if only for ourselves, the boundaries of what we know, want to know, and hope to know.

a recent art projec by Schuyler Maclay, Al Urim and others foregrounds the impending crisis of augmented reality. in the project Maclay and a fellow artist build a 10 by 10 by 10 foot cube, open at the top that seals them in along with a host of raw (de)construction materials. two webcams survey the cube’s interior, streaming the artists live to the web.

theopencube.net

the cube was placed on Brown University’s Main Green on May 1st, 2010. it was a part of a broad curation of outdoor art pieces comprising a second student project called “Green Screen.” the cube was one of the most successful pieces on the green, because it was big, loud, and literally/figuratively opaque. when visitors drew near the cube, they often walked completely around it, looking for something to see. instead, they were directed to a computer monitor, forcing them uncomfortably to mediate their immediate physical experience of the cube. in their desire to see inside the cube, and understand the project, visitors were forced to look away from it, into an entire different object. theoretically, this was to keep access to the cube as an artistic site consistent across experiences (online and in person) as the project was offered for the two communities of physical and virtual reality.

in practice however, these tactic forced viewers to confront the growing mediation of physical events. it suggested the capitulation of society to mediation (what guy debord would have called his “society of the spectacle”) and forced visitors to live in the world they are creating- where direct access has become impossible because of our fascination with it being “everywhere” rather than “somewhere.” the global aspiration of local events like the cube erases and ignores their position as a locality at all. the artists in the open cube are neighbors you cannot speak to, or knock on the door and say hi.

because there is no door, and they won’t speak to you.

responding only to messages and instructirons posted live on their website, the open cube artists were compelled to not make a home of their cube, but to raucously destroy it. like a gamer who shoots up his environment, shooting friends to see if they will die, and throwing a grenade at his own feet to see if he can kill himself, the avatared-artists of the open cube were forced to rip up pillows, cut a couch in half, and graffiti the walls.

then some one (pretty sure it was me) told them to cut a whole in the wall so the spectators outside could see in. this proved a terrible mistake. for once the walls were rendered porous, attention shifted away from the problematic experience/foregrounding of mediation and instead became artists-as-zoo-animals. in the future, disallowing commands for interior views other than from the webcam should be added to the project’s instructions.

it’s been a few days since i was on the main green, typing commands to my friends in the cube. but the project is still working its way through my thoughts. i think its a wonderful project to have travel, for it seems to fight travel and local specificity by aspiring to just being somewhere in the non-space of the internet, but it is somewhere, and the people that comment on it will surely change depending on its location.

who knows, maybe some people won’t want the artists to destroy themselves or the interior space. maybe they’ll ask the artists to write poetry, or take a nap, or become home-makers. and that would be quite interesting.

Stop cheaping out on the young ambitious people of the world by offering only “unpaid internships.” It’s class warfare anyway you cut it, and unless you are quite literally a mom and pop establishment, I think you can afford to shell out $3,000 for a summer of exploitative work.

Don’t even try to defend yourselves. You are the Museum of Modern Art. The cost of an intern doesn’t even equal the cost of mounting a single painting. What do you expect me to do? Live in New York City for a summer without even my housing costs covered? Perhaps in your cushy life as a curator you’ve forgotten how expensive your fair island is. Imagine trying to live here, eat here, all in o

rder to simply work here. I will be that reminder: its f***ing expensive.

And we’re just talking about costs. We’re not talking about students who need to make enough money to cover tuition, or school housing, or books. No, we’re just talking about being able to make an internship in New York City, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Chicago a reality.

The unpaid internship is everywhere. It’s become a common facet of the student workplace. And I can see the attraction to employers. A whole summer/fall/winter/spring or even a year of work provided at no cost? All you need to offer is a place for someone to work? Perhaps a letter of recommendation somewhere after the fact?

What a deal indeed. From an employer perspective it’s a steal.

Yes, truly it is theft. It steals opportunities from all students or workers and gives it only to the students who can afford it. Students or workers from secure financial backgrounds. Students or workers with private wealth. Which means that the unpaid internship always acts a social filter, reinforcing the idea that jobs in the arts, in print, in museums, in broadcasting are continually reserved for those in the middle class who can afford them. And students from other backgrounds are kept from even considering these positions.

Employers of the world, stop being socially thrifty. Stop confusing saving money with preserving the class-orientation of higher employment.

It may be true that merit is considered among an applicant pool for unpaid internships. No doubt, the most qualified applicant is selected for the job. But what can be said for the applicants who are not present because they cannot afford to even consider such a position? Their merits have not even been considered. Their perspectives, talents, and qualifications have been erased by a financial bottom line. Your financial bottom line.

So what can you do? It’s quite simple: fund your internships. Here’s the minimum equation: find the average cost of housing in your immediate (10 mile) vicinity for a summer. Add $100 for food a week for the duration of the internship. Then add the cost of a monthly pass for local public transportation. You know have a working idea of how much an internship should promise in terms of funding. It’s probably around $3,000.

If you are charitable soul, consider adding money for tuition/books. It may be a small thing for you, but it will mean the world to your intern. S/he will work harder, and think higher of you.

As will we all.

Such a moment in the history of the video game offers a wonderful opportunity: why not begin an initiative to get people to think critically about games. By critical, I mean think about games as society expects us to think about films or books: to ask questions about how they are made, why they are successful (or fail), and what the reflect about us as players and society as a whole.

This “critical gaming” is hardly new, or even novel. Fantastic scholars exist in the United States (such as Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech, or Nick Montfort at MIT) and from around the world (McKenzie Wark and Jesper Juul) who have pushed the academic world to accept the vitality of games as spaces for study. But I am really trying to advocate for a more broad consideration of criticality in games. I am hopeful that gamers around the world could consider becoming “critical gamers” by committing themselves to thinking about games as exciting social texts.

What should a critical gamer do? Well, s/he should enjoy video games, and enjoy thinking about what they have to say and how they say it. The critical gamer should not be afraid to “think” about games, they should not fear “academizing” the activity of game play for fear of losing some sense of innocence, escapism and distraction. To the contrary, the “critical gamer” will love the conversation of games and the analysis of game texts. Which does not mean they have to write papers or read theory or have degrees in video games (though that might be nice) but rather that they communicate in language comfortable for him/her.

The Critical Gamer wants to play and think about play.

This midnight idea wants to change how people think about games, and how gamers think about themselves. I’ve chosen to call this a “critical gamer initiative” because it is about people not institutions, its founded on gamers not colleges or consoles or even countries. It is an international idea for individuals to be united under a common commitment to play games critically. So if you fancy yourself a critical gamer, link to this article, and/or send me an email, and let’s see what we can build together.

Anyone finished Mass Effect 2 yet? Thoughts?

If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion of a picture plane is something that has been foundational in Western art and visual regimes for nearly 500 years. But the idea of “depth” has only existed as a sign- a trick that suggests but does not manifest. Spectators, aware of the contradiction (how can depth be translated in a plane?), have willing participated in this signifying of depth, imagining some things “further back” than others even as they were represented on a single plane. Film scholars like Sigfried Kracauer have joyfully praised the idea of depth in films as something that makes narrative more complex. With “deep focus” techniques, two or more “levels” of narrative can share a single shot, thus relating two scenes that previously required montage. Deep focus has been a major part of cinema, and suggested that depth of vision complicated and improved the cinema’s ability to represent nature, and tell stories whose events might occur simultaneously.

Avatar changes the history of depth in Western visuality because it problematicizes the assumption that depth can occur in two dimensions. With the single hovering water droplet above our protagonist at the very opening of Avatar, we know that we can no longer believe in the technique of depth in two dimensional images. We can no longer let depth occur where it has not been earned by this new high technique, where our eyes are truly employed (as a biscopic mechanism) to preceive depth. It’s not that this technique is not also a trick, for indeed it is, but rather that it progresses a long stultified evolution of perspective that begins in the West with relief drawing and moves into a whole science of vanishing points. The depth of James Cameron’s Avatar changes our way of seeing, in that it creates new ways for the cinema to be seen, and thus re-informs our expectations of what is possible. This technological urge, to pursue new possibilities in the age of the digital, is something that the 21st century has been thoroughly caught up in, and now we have a film to mythologize our transition to digital culture. For Avatar’s plot is simple and its meaning translucent- in a world of new images and new technologies we are all the closer to identifying with images- the avatar of Second Life and other digital domains has entered cinema, where the out-of-body experience has long been present and is now re-invented.

Three dimensions also means that Avatar’s cinematography provides texture to the spectator in ways never before conceived. In one scene, Jakesully and his attractive love interest, swim beneath a neon brook, and we know they are swimming because the water is dimensional, with so much depth detail, that it feels real. It is some form of kineaesthesia or a visual tactility.  We know it’s water because it looks like water, not because it is a imagic sign of water. Depth changes the image, because depth escapes the picture plane, exploding its limitations however superficially.

Watching Avatar, I came to the conclusion that when 3D filmmaking becomes cheap enough for the avante-garde to try it, we will have some truly incredible objects of cinema. What would Godard do with 3D filmmaking? How best to unravel its techniques? How best to subvert the spectator in a world of depth?

Whatever the avante-garde does with 3D, the history of the image is changed, the expectations of the cinema spectator challenged, and the nature of cultural production complicated. For as powerful as 3D will be in producing new immersive worlds, even the 2D world changes now as it may take on a patina of authenticity and simplicity that black & white film continues to exert in a color world.