Deus Ex Machinatio

Binary Thinking

Y'all should hop on over to see what Christ Dena has to say about the pervasive binary thinking we're seeing online with increasing frequency of late. 

It's an excellent point. I know everything I've ever done, no matter how good or how bad, is an aggregate of much smaller successes and failures. But the problem is even bigger than just assessing creative work; it's endemic to political discourse, too, to the detriment of... well... pretty much everybody. 

Anyway, click on over and give Christy some love. She's earned it.

Yatta!

If my finger is right on the pulse of this here web-o-nets, there's an awful lot of low morale and high stress going around right now. So I thought I'd do my part to spread a little good cheer around the internets Japanese-style, just in time for the weekend.

   

Oh, you're welcome.

Madame Zee and the Shorty Awards

I would never in a million years have expected this, but my own Madame Zee is up for a Shorty Award in the #entertainment category! The Shorty Awards are, as they describe it, honoring "the world's top Twitterers." As of this writing, Madame ranked in the 13th place with eight votes. 

Madame has no hope of bringing the award home, of course -- heavens, the top-ranked contender has more nominations than Madame even has followers at all. But it is delightful that anybody could think of her this way. 

And maybe -- maybe -- if a few of you have it in your hearts to nominate her, perhaps she can make it into the top 10, if only briefly? 

Of course, while you've got your nominating engine started, why not give a second to honor Jay Bushman for his fantastic Twitter story, The Good Captain? 

Good karma all around, duckling. Very fortuitous indeed. 

Update: Quick and easy voting guide... Click through for exact instructions on what to Tweet to nominate Madame Zee and Jay Bushman. Please note nominations from private accounts don't count.

How Many Licks DOES It Take? A Challenge!

Let's let the owl explain:

And thus was the challenge issued. You can't let a statement like that go unanswered, can you? I set out with my daughter to do a trial run, but her result -- 614 licks -- is merely one lonely, unscientific anecdote. (I didn't manage to actually count at all. Oops!)

There have been a few valiant efforts to find the truth of this matter, but none have achieved anything like a conclusive sample size, and have omitted factors that might be key to finding your PTPLE (Personal Tootsie Pop Licking Estimate), such as tongue width and Tootsie Pop flavor. Even if I were to lobby every friend I have to conduct this experiment, few would follow through, and I would wind up with paltry tens of data points, if that.

But we live in an era of phenomenal crowdsourcing and collaboration. There is no reason we can't all get together to create a conclusive formula establishing the PTPLE. And so, one and all, I invite you to conduct your own one-person Tootsie Pop experiments and record the results in our Google Spreadsheet.

Soon, thanks to all of you, the world will finally know... how many licks DOES it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

Digital Storytelling Brings Kids Together

This isn't what usually springs to mind when I think about digital storytelling, but it certainly caught my attention. There's a storytelling program going on right now connecting high school kids in Aspen, Colorado, and Oakland, California:

Using MP3 files transferred via the website Words.Sound.Life, which bills itself as “the social network for digital media learning,” students at Oasis High School, an alternative school in the Oakland District, recently shared personal stories with students at Rifle High School.

...

Now the students will convert each other's stories into both written work and art projects — and in the process, learn about art and writing.

So we have teens coming together via technology to share life experiences and collaborate on different creative ways of conveying their personal stories. I love this to pieces, because it widens kids' horizons by exposing them to people with vastly different life experiences; it fuels that idea that everyone has a story to tell; and it encourages kids to dabble their fingers in making stuff.

In an era when practically all we hear about education is that students are mainly being taught to excel at taking standardized tests, this is quite a breath of fresh air.

Chrome's EULA: Pretty Much Just Evil

All the cool kids are excited over the release of Chrome, Google's new web browser. I expressed some dubious concern over allowing Google that kind of access to my digital habits and information.

Turns out I had reason to be concerned. Look at this gem in the Chrome EULA:

1

1. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

To deconstruct this a little, if I'd written this post, or any blog post, or Voices, via Chrome... Google would have a perpetual copyright to it. Riiiiiiigggght.

Don't be evil, Google, remember? Your own motto?

Is Today Fired?

Have you ever hated a day so much you wished you could have it clean out its desk and escorted out the door by security? Good news -- now you can! Join in the fun at Is Today Fired? and vote on the HR fate of your day.

And now, for a few special, magical days, yours truly is guest-hosting there. Come on over and join in the fun!

Gravitation

From the same digital artist that brought us Passage, Jason Rohrer, we now have Gravitation. This pixel art game is a thought-provoking way to spend eight minutes. I played the game before I read the creator's statement, and to me, it brought on a really powerful period of somber reflection about my creative life and the joy it brings me, compared to the joys and responsibilities I have as a parent.

I don't talk much here about my personal life, but I will admit that I often feel like an awful failure, both as a writer and as a mother, because there is no possible way to devote all of my time, focus and energy to both of these things at once. There just isn't enough of me to do all of the things I feel motivated and obligated to do. But despite the stark physical impossibility, I feel like I should still be able to find a way to pull it all off. Ah, the prisons we build for ourselves out of dreams and expectations.

Back to Gravitation: As it turns out, my own very personal interpretation of the game isn't far from what the creator had in mind. Though it's actually intended as a representation of bipolar disorder, I think the scope of it can be applied very broadly to creative life in general. From the creator's statement:

One night, while lying in bed, the idea hit me: I needed to make a game about this process that I was going through. About success, and creative leaps, and mania, and mood cycles, and the aftermath.

I think this will really resonate for a lot of us.

I bring this link to you via Making Light, one of my most favorite blogs on the whole internet. Check it out.

In Defense of Hannah Montana for the DS

Via Wonderland, I found my way to a few stats about girl gamers this morning.

Lots of good observation here, though I find myself strangely compelled to defend the Hannah Montana video game and its ilk. I'm not sure why; maybe just because I'm argumentative and haven't had any caffeine yet today?

Let's face it, Hannah Montana is popular; skinning games with popular entertainment tie-ins is an old practice. Pretty much every major entertainment franchise has its games, from the Matrix to Star Wars to Avatar: The Last Airbender to X-Men to Ben 10 to Kim Possible... you get the picture. It keeps happening because it moves games off the shelves.

And here's where I get to the part that's bothering me. (Note that I'm extrapolating from what the author of my linked post said -- I haven't actually played either one of these games, and I don't know if she has either. So I'm arguing against myself, here, and not against her.) The suggestion that a Hannah Montana game (and in the past, Mary Kate and Ashley games) is an inferior game on the grounds that it's skinned with a theme popular with the tween-girl demographic is a pretty big assumption. And it's an unfair, sexist assumption, too.

First, even if you just don't buy into the popular franchise the game ties into, that doesn't mean the game is bad. Maybe it's just not your cup of tea. And even for a phenomenal franchise, if the underlying structure of the game is flawed, the game still sucks (E.T., anyone?).

Worse, the idea that a game built upon a wildly popular girls' franchise must be a pretty weak game? That's exactly the sort of thinking that creates that "oh, but girls don't play games" construct in the first place. Girls DO like Hannah Montana. If you make a Hannah Montana game, some girls will play it, and bing! you have some more girl gamers. Isn't that the whole idea? Why do we have to provide girls, not just with games that appeal to them, but games that have some sort of moral authority, too? The game is selling, so it does actually have that appeal. What's wrong with that? Why is it OK for a boy to want to play Spider-Man and it's not OK for a girl to want to play Hannah Montana?

I'm not saying the Hannah Montana game is objectively fantastic, mind you, or that game developers can't or shouldn't do better. Franchise games often feel like they're phoned in, whether they're aimed at girls or no. And Hannah Montana does have the token girl-game element where you can design outfits and unlock Hannah's wardrobe... but it's not a game revolving entirely around shopping and fashion, which is the real problem with the games-for-girls space.

Oh, and... if any of you have played the Hannah Montana game... let me know what you think, 'k?

O Marshall, Where Art Thou?

I recently discovered that my Aunt Jill was, in her own words, "a lowly Philosophy/Anthropology student" who "had the good fortune to be at St. Mike's when McLuhan taught in the English Dept. there. He cast a very long shadow and we all benefited greatly from his imagination, vision and eccentricity."

I asked her what he was like, and what she thought good old Mr. McLuhan would have made of YouTube, and she responded first:

Um... er... he was a pontificating old fart. I say that with the utmost respect, I want you to know haha. He was deep into his "Catholic years" so everything was about his faith-- which is why he was at St. Michael's rather than a more "accessible" college at the University of Toronto. He refused to teach at any institution that wasn't Catholic. I was there because they accepted me. Oh well.

He was about a hundred and eight at the time-- a venerable teacher still, but he wasn't all that "with it" any more.

That said, he was a remarkable teacher, had the most amazing mind. U of T was just full of forward-thinking creative-thinking types at the time and McLuhan was Yoda so everything was electric from a thought perspective. And absolutely ever-y-thing was processed through the McLuhan filter.

Youtube? Well, I bet he'd say: "Toldya so..." or "The plan progresses as expected" or something like that. He warned us.

And then, a couple of days later, followed herself up in three posts:

Hi, well I've been thinking about my flip "old fart" comment re: McLuhan & feeling kind of crappy because he was amazing. By the time I got to U of T he was pretty disillusioned. He felt disrespected by his colleagues and felt that nobody was paying attention. It was at that time that he talked a lot about the "unconsciousness" of the public.

He hadn't exactly given up but was certainly not as enthusiastic as he'd been. I think the brain tumour thingy must have changed him substantially as well.

I have come to understand that most of my perception about communication and social progress has been shaped by McLuhan, however. Not that I don't have my own ideas, but I really see now that I was a Marshall Sponge.

***

I also wanted to address your question about Youtube because it actually is a serious question. I think he would have been horrified on one level. I remember he said that when you're on TV you're no longer a real person-- you become, in effect, a disembodied image. He asked this question: how is one to establish identity when one is a disembodied image"?

McLuhan saw a huge spiritual disconnect that was fostered by consumerism & technology dependence. Two things he said: "You start out a consumer & you end up consumed" and (in the context of machines being tools) "How will your tool reverse on you when it's pushed to its outer limit?"

***

Okay, final post (you got me started on one of my favourite subjects-- communication): The thing for McLuhan was degree. He believed that we have never really controlled technology-- that it has always controlled/driven/directed us.

He said: "A pervasive medium is always beyond reception". He felt that electronic media actually prevent the absorption of information. I think he might have liked (& possibly agreed with) "The Matrix" as a poetic representation of current reality.

He believed that all things are connected & that that is the "evil" inherent in pervasive technology-- once we plug in to it we become disconnected.

I think he might have found Youtube yet another means to distract us from actually exercising liberty by providing the illusion of it. We are not awake, we merely think we are (and are soooo encouraged to believe that).

I thought this all bore redistributing to all of you net-native folks, in no small part because I really, really want to talk about this stuff. These issues are pretty well the deep existential questions of our day. Is a friend on the internet a friend in a real, meaningful, human sense? People you have on IM? Blog commenters? People you watch on YouTube? Where's the overlap between real, human community and internet community... and where isn't there an overlap? Does the internet encourage shallow, untethered interactions? Does it encourage investment in distant/nonthreatening/idealized relationships as a method of escape from geopresent stresses? ...Is all of that good or bad?

What does it mean to be human anymore, anyway? Does anyone besides me get the idea that we're in the process of reinventing ourselves as a species?

But here's the thing that makes me shake my head and wonder if any of us knows what the heck we're talking about. My Aunt Jill is an amazing, warm person, she's brilliant, and I'm absolutely thrilled to have her in my life. But my uncle (the guy who makes Aunt Jill related to me) passed away when I was small, we've never lived in the same place, never spent holidays together, and have in general been strangers to one another -- until fairly recently, when we became friends on FaceBook. This entire deep, thinky topic came into existence there, on my wall, on FaceBook. There's a great personal connection and a meaningful conversation that likely would never have come about any other way. So is McLuhan wrong?

And at the same time, I've been taking up Internet shabbats on the weekends. Why? To feel more connected to my immediate life and family, because my attention and my connections have become so very diffuse. And I hate that. So... McLuhan is right then... right?

Damn. I remember studying McLuhan in my Journalism courses in college; I think I wasn't ready for him yet.

One more thing; when I asked if I could repost this stuff (naturally including attribution), my aunt very modestly insisted, "The ideas are all pure McLuhan." Then she directed me to a source she got a couple of these quotes from: "a 2002 National Film Board of Canada documentary called McLuhan's Wake that has so much incredible archival film footage it's mind-boggling! All the stuff I grew up with-- local Toronto TV talk shows & interviews, which really do reflect what I remember of his talks & lectures. He was a typically single-minded genius guru."

So, yeah, if you're looking for me, you know where to find me.