Attention economy

Stumbled across an old Wired article today from Michael Goldhaber that says that the information economy is a misnomer. Instead, he argues, the Internet is ushering a new economic model based on the capture and resale of attention.

While I wouldn't agree that this is an entirely new model (to whit: "This Ed Sullivan Show is brought to you by Quaker Oats, the best oatmeal for your childrens' breakfast") the term itself is quite useful.

I just wish I had found this article and term two weeks ago when I was doing my writeup about the political economy of Second Life.

Feeling "brands r us"

Branding is something that I'd never thought much about beyond just reacting to certain brands and being able to say what I liked about them.

Take the Bell Canada brand. The stylized face has a certain female quality to it that has always appealed to me (perhaps also given that my mom was a Bell operator for most of the 60s) and I like the way the circles around the profiled face suggest the world. The brand just worked for me aesthetically.

Others that I've liked over the years are Sesame Street, Apple, Alienware, Turtles, Target, Molson Canadian and Toronto Star. Oh and of course also eBay and Google.

Brands I've disliked have included IBM, Dell, MuchMusic, Sega, Yahoo and CoorsLite.

I've never thought much about these brands themselves, beyond their association to the companies. But branding has become part of what I've found myself paying more attention to of late, especially as it relates to Second Life and to academics. And I'm realizing that what I call a brand, others call a logo, based on those I know who make it their business to know these things (like my pal Greg). A brand is more. It it the entire ensemble of feelings, associations, colours and experiences that are associated with a company, as often expressed and embodied in their brand. While I can't argue that this distinction isn't true, I do hold onto the idea for me that the logo is the brand and the brand is the logo.

In SL, I'm seeing a whole spate of new brands emerging and old ones converging. And perhaps what is interesting is what is being branded. If, as this article suggests, branding is about tying us emotionally to the companies who provide us our things, so that we have a feeling of easy familiarity and liking for that company, then what happens when emotions themselves (vis-a-vis avatar customizations and mods) get branded? Do you start to say "Look, my ability to smile is brought to you by Acme Grins Inc."?

And for academics, what happens when their brand changes? A friend of mine is splitting up with her husband. When they married, she took his name. Now that they're apart, she's got to decide if she is going to keep his name, given she's started doing presentations and the like under that name and so is starting to get known. Or does she go back to her maiden name?

Certainly suggests that people's names act as brands too and that for academics, it is perhaps their more crucial brand, more important even than the university institutional brand that they associate themselves with while at a given institution.

And with the sheer number of brands out there, identity has become not so much a case of subtly defining who we are vis-a-vis internal and external ideas "comme tel", but rather choosing a polyglot melange of brands that seem to speak to us and about us, to ourselves and to others.

This is the deepening of consumer mass culture that had so started to frighten the Frankfurt School theorists in the 30s and it is inescapable. The question remains then whether we need to rethink our concepts of authentic identity and core self in light of the way branding is now, simply, us. Period.

Theorizing consumption

According to the Economist, the work of Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Hall and Lyotard are all directly related to the retailing trends of today.

Is that the sound of rumbling earth and rolling bones I hear?

Paper productivity

Okay just finished submitting paper #2 of the semester, a cultural studies paper exploring the reality effect of the Oprah show. This follows on the heels of the political economy paper I finished this weekend, analyzing the political economy of Second Life.

That leaves me one more paper to go. I have to write a proposal by Saturday then a paper by January 3rd. Yep, you read that right... I'll be writing over the holidays *sigh*.

But that last paper should be quite fun. I'm arguing that the code of digital worlds like Second Life has its own agency and is implicated in a power struggle over the colonizing humans. I'll be using Latour, Deleuze (via a few texts, most notably Delanda), Virilio, Heidegger [pdf], Kroker and Bhabha. Because it is a philosophy paper, it doesn't need to be extensively researched and cited. The idea is more to tease out possible meanings and interpretations using things we've read in this class (TechnoPolitics). So that means I get to do a lot of slightly flowery stream of digital consciousness style writing, aping Kroker and Adorno somewhat. Should be fun, in a truly geeky way.

If only I didn't have to to it over the holidays though.

Stuttering in Second Life

I finally managed to find a way to take a snapshot of myself in Second Life. Here I am, at the Tropics Casino main bar:

Dead place, but I don't mind too much because I'm already incredibly frustrated with the stuttering performance I get while in-world. Whether it's my 2 year old Dell laptop that's the problem or its latency issues between myself and the SL servers, it has been painful to try to interact inworld for longer than five minutes per visit. Though today I made my first SL friend and managed to stay unlagged long enough to trade social niceties and add her my list.

I'm thinking I'll have to be sourcing a new PC early next year...

Ultimate postmodern implement?

Swiss Army knives fascinate me. Eschewing the notion of tool specialization that has made the fortune of kitchen gadget companies the world over, the Swiss Army company seems to believe that they can pack any tool a human might possibly need into one portable implement. And they do their best to try to manifest this belief into their legendary Swiss Army Knife.

I own a classic Swiss Army knife, given to me as a conference tchotke years ago at MacWorld. My knife is a basic one, with a knife and a nail file on one side, a Philips screwdriver and a tiny pair of scissors on the other, and a small plastic toothpick that I am wont to play with bemusedly, every time I find the knife ensemble again after losing it for the n'th time.

The only thing really missing for me in my own knife is a spoon and fork. Putting much more than that into the piece would be overkill and would make it hard to carry. Right?

Apparently not. Enter the ultimate postmodern implement, the Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife v1.0 (yes they actually version it).

Conjuring up images of brawny Australians saying "THIS is a knife!", the Wenger is in an implement category all on its own. It says, "to heck with all your modernist ultra-specialization bureaucratic claptrap.... when a guy needs a tool, he needs it now and I've got it for him, right here". All 85 of them.

For $1200.

Ultimate postmodern tool or ultimate he-man status toy? And more importantly, how do you carry that thing in a pocket?

There's the question, isn't it?

Mylo = reskinned PSP?

After I posted yesterday about the cool mobile comm. gadget I'd found and drooled over, I started clicking around to other companies that I figured might have some cool gadgets.

I came across the Sony Mylo. Similar in form factor to the one catching my interest yesterday, what particularly struck me about the Sony is the way in which shape evokes the general shape and hand feel of the PSP. Makes me wonder if, similar to the way car manufacturers use the same basic chassis and then just build on top, if Sony has done the same thing.

Christmas gift dreams

I have a cell phone. It's good, it does the job. But I'm enough of a gadget geek to drool over this little beauty, given how much of my cell time is spent texting.

Studying Second Life

I'm getting deeply interested in studying Second Life. I'm watching for stories and blogposts, I've signed up for Google News Alerts and yes I'm also now Sashay Talon in-world.

Discovering SL has been a bit of a renaissance mission for me. So much of what is going on in SL is what I was arguing for back in the early 90s, when I was deeply embroiled in the FirstClass vs. Lotus Notes smackdown. It's a revival of the idea of a pervasive rich community that is run by a company who encourages member content and customization.

True, Linden Lab isn't the idealistic community-serviced minded corporation Magic was back in the day. It didn't start as a Macintosh hobbyist's passion in his basement. SL is the result of a well funded business venture that seems determined to find ways to breathe new life into the old eyeballs-&-dollars "audience as commodity" business approach.

But the whole business side of SL is something that isn't getting covered much. Instead, journalists seem to be focusing once again on the hoary idea of Second Life not being life, per se. The zombie disocurse "it's digital so it's not real" is still lurching around in the media coverage around Second Life, as I read in a long feature article in this past weekend's Toronto Star.

Wouldn't it be so much better to be covering the encroachment of the out-world tropes, metaphors and business strategies into this digital Second Life world? Given how much of what is happening in SL may be strongly determing the way we all interact digitally in 5-10 years, shouldn't media coverage be truly focused on that?

I'm going to add a Second Life section to my customized Google News page and keep an eye on this. I'm also going to go Google Magic and FirstClass and see if any of the old crowd is still out there, keeping the flame alive.

Physics of superheroes

I've started paying attention to ways in which professors teach material that otherwise seems dry, boring and "old school". I may well soon be teaching (or at least ta-ing) a methods course (I hope) so this new awareness seems prudent.

And now that I understand what James Kakalios is up to, with his Superheroes approach to elementary physics, I'm wondering how to do the same thing using online digital worlds a la WoW and SL.

Another book to add to the Christmas list then!

Politics of proteins vs bytes

A key theme in two of the three papers I'm in the midst of writing to fulfill my end-of-semester obligations in my classes involve the notion of the politics of struggle between protein-based life and byte-based life. The idea of protein as a metaphor for the experiences lived outside of digital space is one I'm playing with as an appropriate counterpart to byte-based life.

I'm wondering how to bring one of my new favourite theorists, Bruno Latour, into it all. Especially given he says stuff like this (from his book Politics of Nature):

"By refusing to tie politics to humans, subjects or freedom, and to tie science to objects, nature or necessity, we have discovered the work common to politics and to the sciences alike: Stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable and to make them speak" (89)

So if this is the work of politics now, how does that apply to byte-based life? And what kind of agency does it give to non-human digital actors? And how do non-human digital actors speek? What are their speech acts?

Play action

Was re-reading bits of Hans Joas' Creativity of Action tonight. Found this:

Playful action is thus defined as that action which does not allow itself to be bound by the distinction between dream and reality, between internal and external reality. [p.166]

Curious....by this definition, is Second Life social interaction actually play?