The project analyzes the lyrics of over 40,000 songs for metaphors, similes, cultural references, phrases, memes and socio-political ideas. For each, it registers a date and a geographical location. Hemphill has raised more than $8,000 in funding for the project on Kickstarter, from 349 people. The idea is so that important questions can be answered, like who was the first to mention “haters,” or which is the most popular champagne/sneakers/porn star to rap about? The database can also be used to determine the answers to more complex questions, such as which rapper has the smartest songs, or which city spawns the most monosyllabic rap?

Hemphill has put together a video to illustrate more about the project:

I would balk at this situation, if a recent conversation wasn’t still echoing through my head. A friend admitted that he felt like he was actually better friends with another friend online than off. He pointed out that offline they didn’t exchange more than two words, while online they would joke, and chat like best buddies. The same later friend admitted that he was more comfortable texting than using most other communication mediums. The possibility of texted-across-the- table conversations might not be so difficult to fathom after all.

Texting has become almost second nature for me. I’ve gotten to the point where I will send a text before I pick up the phone. It pisses me off that my mom won’t get texting capabilities on her phone, since sometimes I just want to send her a one or two line message, rather than having an entire conversation. But, what will I remember when she’s not around to talk in the dreaded far off future? The one-line text I sent her? Or the conversation we had while she was walking down the beach, breathlessly describing the sunset and giggling about everything and nothing. Energies are impossible to convey on a tiny screen.

Here is an example of the texting language from A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Next 2 myn. No mOr Ar/lyt

Cn u stp it?

Tryd

cn u  move?

Stuk

nyc, Lulu wrote, which confused Alex at first: the sarcasm seemed unlike her. Then he realized that she wasn’t saying “nice.” She was saying “New York City.”

Of course, I must also admit that—like a million other folks–I’ve become addicted to Facebook over the past few months. I will admit–and this is painful but true–that I check Facebook going on five times a day or more—and that’s without having a “smartphone.” I can’t imagine if I had a hot little Ipod touch burning holes in my pocket, allowing me instant access anytime I fancy it.

No, I do my obsessive social network checking (don’t even get me started on Twitter) by actually logging onto the good, old fashioned computer, booting up and checking my page first thing, last thing, and even in between, and in between the in betweens. Hell, I’m going to take a break from writing this paragraph to check my Facebook page, just to make sure no one has posted a new link to an old soul song, or some political rant, or maybe an update about the weather in their particular area. I am fully addicted to the social network (though I have yet to see the movie about the beginnings of Facebook starring my beloved “JT” otherwise known as Justin Timberlake as the infamous Sean Parker of Napster fame).

William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, makes me feel better about my urge to constantly check for updates. He explains that the constant drive back to the screen may be the result of “evolutionary programming,” since the human brain is wired to detect and respond to new stimuli. Back in the stone-age days, this ability protected us from the threat of predators in a dangerous world. Of course, the chances of a wooly mammoth trying to eat us for dinner now is nigh impossible, but our brains are still wired in the same way.

“Today the stimuli we receive from our environment are different—instead of wild animals lurking in the trees, we’re on alert for ringtones and new messages—but the biochemical effect is hypothetically the same. When your mobile lights up with a new call, you get, in the words of one scientist, a “dopamine squirt,”says Powers.

Dopamine squirt is a good way to put it. And puts a name to the need to constantly see what’s going on in the world of social networks. It’s just so easy to feel connected, but are we really connected? Powers argues that we need to make a conscious effort to create distance from screen time, through digital sabbaticals, and even nature jaunts away from the crowd. And we may have reached a crucial point in our technological development, where this becomes essential. Because what is next? Texting across the table rather than talking? I can’t get this scene from Egan’s novel out of my head, and for good reason.

Dandizette
What brought about the women’s programming classes?

CHICKPEA:
It in part resulted from a conversation between me and Yossarian – this was after a dissident island radio show (that I’m a part of). We were sitting in the London Action Resource Centre with electronica blaring in the background and cans of red stripe in hand. At some stage in a long conversation I admitted to Yossarian that I wanted to learn programming but that I had some concerns – like where to start, and how I was alienated by the (often quite) macho vibe that surrounds male-dominated techie situations – and the realisation that all the programmers I know are guys and that in the radical social movements in which I get involved a large majority if not ALL of the people involved in the geeky/techie stuff are guys. That’s all a bit shit IMHO.

Yossarian responded by talking about his experience in teaching programming, and also talked about his experience with the macho attitudes in these classroom settings – and expressed an interest in teaching a womyn-only class. And then the moment of “let’s just fuckin do it!” came out of that.
Several crazy summer months went by and then the class started in mid-October and totally kicks ass.

YOSSARIAN:
It’s been cool to get back to geek teaching – I’ve taught a bit before but not for a long time. Since programming is mainly a male-dominated profession and the overwhelming majority of geeks I deal with in my day job as a programmer are men, I thought it’d be interesting to just get into a different environment. It’s been a good learning opportunity for me.

I was particularly interested in trying to figure out what it is that makes programming such a male-dominated profession, whether it’s general sexism, something going on with the educational system, or a general lack of interest in the subject on the part of women. The answers are not totally clear to me, but one thing we can say is that the level of interest in learning about computers has been overwhelming – with no advertising or outreach at all we had six women willing to haul themselves to a Brixton squat every Monday night for three hours, dual-boot their shiny new computers with Linux, learn about how computers and networks function, and start learning to program.
As an anarchist, I’ve got a responsibility to try and challenge privilege and power in society where I find it, so it was also in some ways a political duty for me to address the sexism that keeps women out of technical professions and social movement tech in particular; and teaching women to geek out seemed to me to be a better response than giving boy geeks a lecture about sexism.

Lastly, as someone who does a lot of coding for political projects, I’ve got a lot of work to do, so the opportunity to train up some new programming talent is hopefully going to work out in my favour – I am hoping to get some useful code out of the crew if they’re interested in working on some projects we’ve already got going!

Dandizette
Why did you decide on Ruby? How have the sessions gone so far?

CHICKPEA:
Sessions have been great, really entertaining and interesting. I really feel like my little universe is expanding every week, that there are possibilities being opened like doors everywhere…the realisation that I can learn the skills to make things for myself (DIY or die!) – which has been the case with other areas but so far hasn’t extended much into the world of how computers work…until now! And that is incredibly empowering. Yossarian makes a point of talking about how things can be used, what functionality certain things have, which is also motivating.

YOSSARIAN:
Ruby or Python seemed like a natural choice, since they’re both expressive, object-oriented, interpreted languages with good standard libraries and what I think are good programming cultures. The obvious question is, “why not PHP?”. PHP is easy to install and use but there’s a lot of shitty code and too many sloppy attitudes for my liking – I find it difficult to take seriously a language which uses a backslash as a namespace separator, for example. For me that design choice is symbolic of a whole set of PHP stupidities which I just couldn’t in good conscience pass on to a group of people who could potentially become good programmers.

Java, C, or C++ require too much messing around with the programming environment to be useful in a once-a-week class – they’re often used in university courses which get thousands of applicants to “weed out the dumb students”, but the goal of this class wasn’t to take 1000 applicants and turn them into 10 units of cubicle-fodder, it was to get a bunch of people together so they could find out whether they would enjoy programming.
So far the classes have gone pretty well, we’ve gone through the basics of object-oriented programming, Ruby, HTTP requests, DNS, html, css, request routing, database tables and fields, and object-relational mapping (all this in six classes!). I don’t think anybody in the class could stand on their own feet yet and just attack a project by themselves, but I think at this point we are ready to maybe switch formats and move from a sort of traditional teacher-student setup to more of a people-hanging-out-working-on-a-project-together setup. We’ll see how it goes.

Dandizette
What’s the setup for the group? Have you hosted these kind of sessions before?

CHICKPEA:
Setup? Monday nights, 7pm, the Library House (a social centre in Camberwell) – we have use a room (which comes complete with tea, a heater, a projector, a big table, lots of chairs) – we sit around with our laptops and geek it up.

Yossarian plugs into the projector so we see his desktop and mainly leads the class but we’re always talking to each other, asking questions, cracking jokes, helping each other out…all class participants, besides Yossarian, are womyn and this is the only stipulation to get involved at this stage.

YOSSARIAN:
Everybody showed up on Monday night at 7, installed Linux on their computers in the first class, and then it was a whirlwind tour of web application building, mostly with me talking while using an LCD projector and madly dashing around helping people to get their programs running. So far we’ve had six classes; like I said above, I think that if we continue in the new year the format will change somewhat. It was the first time we tried anything like this so I’ll be more prepared next time – this one was pretty rough in terms of lack of planning or anticipating problems, if there is a next set of classes I’ll have some ready-made lesson plans and example programs, so it’d be a lot smoother.

Dandizette
Are there plans to run more of these or similar projects you’re involved in?

CHICKPEA:
Heck yea – I hope so! I hope that after this session of classes ends we can all pick up again in the new year, providing people have time/energy/capacity to do so. What form the class will take will probably depend on the people interested…

YOSSARIAN:
It’s unclear at this point what’s going to happen; a friend of mine has been really interested in how things are going and would like to do a similar class focused on server administration (he’s a sysadmin geek). I could easily consider doing another beginner’s class for women if there was interest.

There has also been a lot of interest in the project in both Hacktionlab and London Indymedia circles; one of the inspirations for the class actually came from the training programs run by Brasil Indymedia when they needed a new crop of geeks to run their network infrastructure a few years ago – they educated a whole lot of women, who now run quite a bit of the tech infrastructure for brasil.indymedia.org.

Part one in a series on net neutrality and how it affects us all. Part two will examine Congress’ take on the issue, as well as the Presidential candidates positions.

As ISP’s quietly begin monitoring and barring certain types of web traffic, and some start to experiment with pay-by-the-bandwidth systems, the net neutrality fracas is going mainstream.

Google has been a strong proponent for net neutrality, as the company has plenty of its own vested interests–they don’t want to pay out of their pockets to have their pages delivered to you quickly. There are plenty of caveats when you align with a huge corporation like Google, but in cases like this it’s useful to have that sort of lobbying and legal power on the side of free speech.

Boing Boing reported this past weekend that Google is developing a net neutrality detector, by which users can find out if their ISP is barring–or slowing down–some of their traffic without telling their consumers, allowing us to be informed customers and citizens.

To date, the debate has remained largely within the realm of tech activists and lawyers. There are plenty of reasons why everyone should care about its implications. It’s instructive to examine, in laymans terms, what exactly net neutrality is and why everyone, from the tech-savvy, at-risk-youth (to paraphrase Dan Savage) to their grandparents should care.

This explanation of “net neutrality 101″ from media activist group Save the Internet serves as a useful introduction to the concept:

When we log onto the Internet, we take lots of things for granted. We assume that we’ll be able to access whatever Web site we want, whenever we want to go there. We assume that we can use any feature we like — watching online video, listening to podcasts, searching, emailing, and instant messaging — anytime we choose. We assume that we can attach devices like wireless routers, game controllers, or extra hard drives to make our online experience better.

What makes all these assumptions possible is “Network Neutrality,” the guiding principle that ensures the Internet remains free and unrestricted. Net Neutrality prevents the companies that control the wires bringing you the Internet from discriminating against content based on its ownership or source. But that could all change.

The biggest cable and telephone companies would like to charge money for smooth access to Web sites, speed to run applications, and permission to plug in devices. These network giants believe they should be able to charge Web site operators, application providers, and device manufacturers for the right to use the network. Those who don’t make a deal and pay up will experience discrimination: Their sites won’t load as quickly, their applications and devices won’t work as well. Without legal protection, consumers could find that a network operator has blocked the Web site of a competitor, or slowed it down so much that it’s unusable.

The network owners say they want a “tiered” Internet. If you pay to get in the top tier, your site and your service will run fast. If you don’t, you’ll be in the slow lane.

It’s difficult to get people engaged with this sort of technical, abstract concern, particularly when there are so many other urgent issues requiring attention–the environment, the endless wars on terror. Still, net neutrality is far from a minor issue, and the result of this debate has many implications on our freedom to discuss and pass on this sort of news in accessible way.

For example, consider the media shutdown in Kenya in November. For days, Kenyan bloggers were the only people able to report news and photos from the region. This is a prime example of essential reporting for our era. But in a non-network-neutral environment, this sort of on-the-ground reporting would be demoted in priority to clear up bandwidth for branded advertising ‘experiences’ and big money-funded, social network detritus.

Let’s not let the Internet become the new network TV or Clear Channel’d radio system, where only rich conglomerates can broadcast to the masses, where independent media is run through a strangling bandwidth sieve. It’s far too easy to accept something as being the status quo once it becomes policy–indeed, many scoff at media activists who dare to remind us that the FCC’s stated mission is to protect equal access to the airwaves we own.

It can be hard to get on the soapbox to defend a media largely associated with cheap porn and LOLcats. but let’s not forget this important innovation in egalitarian media must be defended at all costs. Net neutrality is more than confusing tech-speak. It’s a battle for the only vestige of free media. The Internet may be shit, but it’s the only media outlet we still own.

Part one in a series on net neutrality and how it affects us all. Part two will examine Congress’ take on the issue, as well as the Presidential candidates positions.

“Best as I can recall, the first time I ever even saw a web site was in 1995, when I was visiting my friend Ed Borges’s Manhattan apartment. He had a laptop and a dial-up connection, which made things crawl. But I remember being absolutely stunned/excited by what I was looking at.

At that point I was a staff writer at The Village Voice in New York (I almost exclusively covered organized crime, with a little political corruption tossed in). I didn’t have an e-mail account and was, obviously, not tech savvy. I can remember, years earlier, discovering that there was a fax machine hidden in the Voice’s Xerox room (complete with those old rolls of thermal paper). Anyway, after figuring out how to use it, I remember thinking there would never be any better way to transmit documents, information, etc.

It wasn’t long after watching Ed bounce from site to site on his laptop that I thought it might be fun to have a web site of my own. Just something that would amount to a side project to my regular reporting gig, not something that would compete with my Voice work (I needed to keep my job, of course). If I had decided a few years earlier to do such a side project, I probably would have started a ‘zine.

It took more than a year of planning before we got The Smoking Gun online in April 1997 (“we” being myself, my friend Danny Green, an NYC reporter, and my wife Barbara Glauber, a graphic designer). At the time, we had no idea whatsoever that the site would end up getting fairly big, that it would be the vehicle through which all my journalism is delivered, or that our little site-which was headquartered for years in the Bastone/Glauber living room-would regularly break all kinds of newsy, funny, bizarre stories.

Frankly, I’m still a little shocked as we close in on our 11th birthday.

I’m no visionary, so I’d be lying if I said that I anticipated the impact that the Internet would have on journalism-or the speed with which it would radically alter the industry. But I will say that I got an inkling of the net’s reach within the first 24 hours our site went live (April 17, 1997). At the Voice, I could work three months on an investigative piece and if it generated some reader calls and a few letters to the editor (and I mean letters, the ones with stamps), I’d think that was pretty decent. Well, the e-mails that immediately started flowing into TSG were amazing-people offered up suggestions, kudos, requests, some criticism, etc. That conversation-which has never ceased–was revelatory and incredibly welcome.

We ran the site for three years when companies began approaching us to see if we’d consider selling it (we never had a business plan, didn’t try to sell advertising, and paid costs out of our own pocket). It was an idea we embraced because a) it’s always nice getting paid, and b) we would finally have the chance to run the site full time (I was still at the Voice) and see what it could turn into.

As for why online vs. print, well, I’m not going to surprise anyone here: for a site that aims to break news on various topics (celebrity, politics, crime, sports, etc.), the immediacy and reach is unmatched. And I jumped at the opportunity to do everything online because, at the time, not a lot of journalists were doing it, so it seemed like a good chance to jump in and try and get a foothold, establish a rep as a place that delivers original, interesting reporting, a place that doesn’t just run AP stories or riff on the work of others. And for someone who spent the early part of his career working for a publication with a weekly deadline, it has been incredibly exciting to be part of an online scrum where-for us, at least-being second really doesn’t cut it.”

For me, it was with a little thing called Summoner Geeks (originally known as Dungeons & Dragons).  Dan Harmon wrote the script back in 1995 when we recorded it with our comedy troupe Dead Alewives.  It was a shockingly accurate depiction of what it’s like playing Dungeons & Dragons where we had guys in a room playing an intense battle and then you hear a guy off in the kitchen yelling “Where’s the Mountain Dew? Where’re the Cheetos?”  Really nerdy and funny.  It got a lot of airplay on the Dr. Demento Show, which, for me, you know, I grew up listening to Dr. Demento.  When Dr. Demento released the sketch on a “best of” compilation that year, that was my first “Now we’ve made it!” moment.

Summoner was a first person shooter, and our sketch was later released as an easter egg on the game.  It was animated with characters from the video game acting out our sketch with our voices.  It got leaked to ifilms.com (now known as spike.com) and that was our first internet success, our first viral thing.  Since then you can find it on YouTube.  The interesting thing about it today is that there are a huge amount of people reenacting that sketch.  Type in “summoner geeks” and you’ll find video after video after video.  I watched them as they were posted but I gave up after awhile, there were just so many videos related to it.  Its kind of funny because we did that thing back in ’95 and it still resonates.

In 1998, we were selling Scud books through a website, that was back toward the end of the run.  After that we did Heat Vision & Jack (right after Summoner Geeks went viral; once it became easy for people to upload stuff online and pass videos around).  Then I did this short called Robot Bastard!, which turned into another viral video.  It was this sci-fi space opera where everything is made out of cardboard, painted bright colors, with robots shooting zombies.  Silly and stupid.  Aintitcool.com reviewed it and it blew out of the water from there. Around that time, right after Heat Vision & Jack went nowhere, Dan and I were writing screenplays, trying to get TV shows off the ground and we were really frustrated with the business.  We were creating property, coming up with scripts and doing a pretty good job.  We had some good ideas, you know?  But whoever you’re working for, jobs shift, all of a sudden the person up top who was championing for you is replaced with someone new and your idea that you worked and slaved for goes on the shelf.  This happened again and again and again, ideas that never got shown.

This is when Final Cut and DV cameras become affordable and Dan and I started shooting these little movies just to make each other laugh.  And we’d have challenges: “Don’t spend time or money and we watch them tonight!”  And everyone would run around all over town and make cardboard space helmets and wrap up in tin foil and then we’d meet up and show it to each other.  It started as five people in my living room, then expanded to thirty people in my living room, then we rented space and a projector for a hundred people, then we started showing it at Cinespace, where we get sometimes 400 people on a Sunday night to watch these shows.  It was Harmon’s idea that if we’re going to do this, we should get serious and have a website.  Our idea was that everybody’s doing DV film festivals, you know, these little “Show your video! Show your sketch!” but we wanted to do something different.  Instead of this being a film festival, lets run it like a network.  We don’t want shorts; we want series…we want properties with series potential.  So you pitch it to the audience and the audience votes if they want to see more.  That was basically the idea and it really kind of took off: audience participation with control, the excitement of competition with friends, everyone trying to outdo one another (not only in terms of craftsmanship but in comedy, in storytelling, in editing).  When living in LA, and its really hard to get anywhere with your idea, come to us!  Yeah, its not big and expensive looking, but at least it exists somewhere.  There’s no money involved, you’re doing it for the joy of doing it.  A lot of careers have started because of Channel101.

It’s all about creating your own luck because people are very narrow-viewed in this industry.  If you’re a writer, it’s impossible to be a director.  If you’re an actor, then the assumption is you can’t be a writer.  You have to show them what you can do.  And that’s what was great for me because I was a screenwriter for ten years constantly wanting to direct but all of a sudden it was like “Screw it! I’ll grab a camera and let them come to me.”  That’s why I’m directing on The Sarah Silverman Program, it’s because of what I did on Channel 101.  Channel 101 was the best film school I could ever have because I learned from doing.  It was probably the most important thing I did for my career.  (And it got a lot of my friends active.  They started showing themselves on camera, proving they can…and now they’ve got agents and deals and they’re getting shows.)

In the beginning, though, the only thing I was seeing the internet for was emails. I was so technophobic at the time. The idea of actually putting together a website was so daunting for me, I just figured that’s never going to be in my world.  Now positing a video is so easy, its on the internet and anyone in the world can look at it.

I go to the Channel 101 screenings every month, I star in a couple episodes, but as far as shooting and writing, I haven’t been able to in a while.  I’m directing on Sarah’s show, doing the comic book and trying to get a feature career moving…its sad because with Channel 101 you just do whatever you want.  You find out whether it’s working or not by doing it, instead of having so many people saying “No” to you.  To me, I’m just like, “Just let me do it. Let me grab the camera and let me do it.”  But because of this industry and all the money involved, there are still people that need to know without a shadow of a doubt exactly what you’re doing.  With Channel 101 you pick up the camera and simply say “Let’s shoot something today.”

I’ve merged what I learned from the internet with how I work on television.  I just got out of a meeting for The Sarah Silverman Program and there’re certain things I’m doing on the show going “Look, I’m just going to do it on the weekend, I’ll grab a camera and do it myself.”  I don’t want it on the schedule because its just going to screw everything up.  I need to be able to be in that Channel 101 mode and I say that, that’s my word: Channel 101 mode.  It simply means just grabbing the camera and doing it.  Its got to have that look and if we get everybody else involved it’ll look too slick.  Sometimes it needs to be a little rough.  Though it is a blurred line. As far as what I prefer, of course I prefer not being told what to do but at the same time when you get boundaries it forces you to not necessarily use your first idea.  Sometimes when first ideas are shot down you think harder and then you think even harder and come up with a better idea.  Though it can be the same way with low budget: we can’t afford the scope of what you’re thinking and you have to be more creative.

I don’t think we’re at a point where internet shows can compete with TV.  Right now, the reason Channel 101 exists is to showcase people who are not getting a platform to show off what they can do.  We’ve got some people from Wisconsin who did Chad Vader.  Its big, the first short got something like five million hits.  Its probably the biggest thing that’s come out of Channel 101.  And these guys live in Madison, they shoot videos, send them our way to show at the screenings, they get put up on the net and they go viral.  And people are asking if they’re going to move out here, to LA.  But these guys ask “Why? We live at home. Its cheaper here, we live here and do what we want.” and that’s totally possible in today’s world.  I think that’s great, that’s really cool.  The only downside I see is you’re working super hard to get noticed and you’re not getting paid.  But you can parlay that exposure into something else.  Justin Roiland, who did House of Cosbys, he got two network deals with Fox and Cartoon Network.  Now he’s a hot guy in town. Andy Samberg is from the group Lonely Island.  They were making The’Bu, one of our longest running shows, and had to stop because [Samberg] got picked by Saturday Night Live.  And J.D. Ryznar (creator of Yacht Rock) is working on a film with Jason Lee.  In a lot of ways we’re like the new Groundlings, the new Second City.  Come to us for the new hot talent: actors, directors, screenwriters, you name it.

Eventually your desktop will be in the living room and you’ll be watching stuff like YouTube and Channel 101 as easily as anything on cable.  I would love it if Channel 101 could become the anti-viral video clip site.  There’s a lot of viral stuff but its pretty much one-joke premises: a cat sounds like its speaking or a guy with nunchucks hitting himself in the head.  What we offer is stories and characters and little mini shows that hopefully can one day compete with storytelling in TV networks and cable.  That’s the hope, the dream.

Visit Channel 101: watch new episodes, catch up on old favorites, or submit your own.

The final two installments of Scud: The Disposable Assassin are coming out in April and May, and keep an eye out in June for the complete collection from Image Comics.

The Sarah Silverman Program returns to Comedy Central this October.

To find out what Rob Schrab is up to next, visit him here.

Jobs and Wozniak Legos by Podbrix

You can

What makes this cosmopolitan so discerning within the global marketplace?

“I select what to review the same way I choose whether or not I will wear my Etruscan cape: margaritomancy,” he explains. “I take a pearl and place it in a bowl of macadamia oil. I spend a few moments listening to Bruce Hornsby or Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and thus relaxed the pearl begins to broadcast essential truths from Shakti, or as I call her, My Lady Soul. When it’s over I will retrieve the pearl by sucking it out with a straw. If anyone is uncomfortable with this method – and you will swallow the first 5 or 6 until you perfect it, or choose thinner straws – I recommend drinking the oil, then picking up the pearl. Do not pinch it too energetically, or it will greasily project across the room and chip your porcelains.”

Though he has declined several honorary degrees, Mister Quickly holds a BA in Egyptology from the Asia Theological Association and an MA in Rhetoric from the Distance Learning Council of Europe. He now divides his time between hotels across North America while periodically returning to the family home in Victoria, BC Canada “to cook and relax.” In this special installment of The Origins of Our Communication, Mister Quickly took time from his quest for “the perfect flavour to firmly establish the luscious hydrozoa’s clumsy hold in the culinary world” to talk to us about the Internet and the remarkable relationship that brought him here:
I was first introduced to the internet as a penpal of actor James Coburn. We were acquainted through a service that coordinated penpals by interest. I signed up based upon my love of porcelain as an unexplored artistic medium, eager to find soulmates who were as inspired by its potential. I was assigned James Coburn, and a heartfelt correspondence quickly luxuriated. Each letter James wrote would be signed in elegant calligraphic curls “Cobu”, accompanied by five mustard seeds, a sliver of licorice root, and a dried butterfly wing. Often he would send me carvings he had made in soapstone of his spirit animal, the otter. He had immaculate style.

After some time our correspondence had moved from porcelain onto film. Cobu, as close friends would call him, told me he was interested in adapting one of the classic board games for film. Adept at recognizing talent, Cobu knew I had the lyricism and intelligence to guide such a transformation, from board game to cinematic marvel. We began with Snakes and Ladders, for which I developed a treatment involving a richly imagined fantasy world not unlike Willow, but with ladders. Stirred by its artistry, Cobu asked me what I could come up with for other board games. He added the cryptic line “Do you have ICQ? We should continue over ICQ.” I was in the process of envisioning a treatment for Connect Four, with a sort of Logan’s Run meets Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict feel, but in a world where everything is stacked vertically, including sidewalks and strip malls, yet I was distracted by this statement. I assumed ICQ referred to International Comet Quarterly, a periodical I had read only 6 times. I sent two letters, one to International Comet Quarterly and the second to James Coburn. Because each letter was written with homemade cochineal ink, my forearms ached. I had manned the beetle-press all morning to extract enough writing fluid.

The next letter I received, sent in March of 2002, was written in very clumsy blank verse that regularly broke metre. Ordinarily bad metre causes me to sweat and dwell upon whether or not the subsequent itching is caused by scalp mites, but in this case I was too fascinated with the letter’s paradigm shifting content. James Coburn was describing the internet[1]. Within the next two weeks I rapidly acquainted myself with this technology, becoming as fluent in it as I am in Sanskrit. The most immediate change in life was the ability to transpose my reviews from recreation centre bulletin boards onto internet ones, though I do miss being able to scent my reviews with bergamot. But with the internet I was also able to order vast quantities of delicious lavender seeds. It felt only a matter of time before I became editor of Vanity Fair or Atlantic Monthly, positions I have since declined in spirit in order to focus on my paradoxical novel, Transparent Opacity: The Daytime of Afternoon Night[2].

Previously in The Origins of Our Communication series.

This sense has stuck with me for days, driving me to ask myself and others: Has there ever been a time during which adults gazed at their own navels and and tried to recapture their youth as the Internet era?

Pundits on the right and left decry the infantalization of a certain generational range. Conservatives point to a “special snowflake” syndrome, arguing that adults in their 20s and 30s have never known strife or difficulties and as a result are ill-prepared for the responsibilities of adulthood. Critics of capitalism bemoan the infantalization of the market economy, of the primacy placed on short-term wants and acquisitions over savings and planning for the future.

In many cases, I’d chalk both arguments up to stock generation-gap panic.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if our fascination with toys and childhood does suggest a maturity gap. A lack of a sense of responsibility. A refusal to come to terms with decreased possibility, a feeling that we are entitled to the world. A delusion, perhaps, that comes from middle-class upbringings, from joining the perpetually underemployed postgrad intellectual class, from social and familial safety nets. A delusion validated by our thirst for iPhones and Wii’s, Heath Ledger death gossip and Lost spoilers. An economic luxury and intellectual dilettantism whose days may be numbered if the economy continues on this path.

Yet all the same, and while I am fully aware of the absurdity of this statement, while looking at the Lego retrospectives on Monday, I was gripped by a real sense of loss, an immutable sense of something that I would never be able to hold again. A loss of possibility and wonder that seemed implicit in those worlds my friends and I would build and share as a child. This sense is nothing new–people felt the resonance all the same in 1941 when Charles Foster Kane uttered “Rosebud”.

After all, that sense of loss is what growing older is all about. Coming to terms with the fact that possibilities are not as wide open as they once might have seemed,

This is the process of maturing. Only refracted through the recursive nostalgia of Legos, presented in day-glow vibrancy by the Internet. So Lego is our Rosebud. Is that so wrong? Are we unprepared for the responsibilities of adulthood, or merely basking in a redundantly stored wash of nostalgic memories enabled by the technologies of our age?

In September of 2005, Metafilter member Paul K. (or PK) of Sydney, Australia, began BibliOdyssey a blogger account of visual materia obscura. “I most enjoyed finding primary source material that had significance in terms of history,” PK explains. “I would track exhibitions and announcements about repository holdings and I suppose I got to the stage where I thought that I may as well corral all this info in one spot.” Finding his material in “off-the-beaten-path digital cloisters,” PK’s proclivity towards research is the backbone of the BibliOdyssey gallery, where his summaries provide the often fascinating and rich histories behind the astounding illustrations. Illustrations are “a kind of bait to learning,” he tells Is > Than. “[I have] belief in the web as having great educational opportunities.”

For the first installment of The Origins of Our Communication, PK traces the roots of an odyssey that, for him, began over twenty years ago:

Note:

There are three significant episodes of connectivity that stand out in my mind.

The first is about 1986/7 when I was working in a hospital emergency department and the newest toy at the time was a dumb terminal that connected to the pathology lab. It meant that we got the blood tests automagically on a computer screen in real time which also removed the risk of mistakes that come from playing phone tag and listening/writing under pressure. We could print the results out and add them to the patient charts. This was a big thing both for the work quality at the hospital but I remember thinking at the time that it was only the start of something, although I didn’t know what.

In the early 90s I finished a medical science degree and because I lived opposite the university, I was able to go and spend a couple of weeks on their computers which I had neglected during my studies. It was the internet, if only an early version – I don’t remember too much about the content; I do remember reading a lot of plain text. I was blown away, even then, by the amount of information that you could find – I do remember Lycos search portal was the place of pace back then. There was also the manic chatting on telnet bulletin board services (bbs).

In 1998/9 I moved into an apartment with a Russian computer programmer who had his own website and spent hours and hours at home on the internet. I couldn’t ask him enough questions and he wasn’t prepared to let me use his computer as often as I wanted so naturally I got my own pc (433 MHz chip I think) and learned to touch-type playing trivia games on mirc. I’ve been wired and addicted ever since.

Visit BibliOdyssey.

For more on the evolution of BibliOdyssey, read Elatia Harris’ in-depth interview with PK on 3QuarksDaily.

To purchase the BibliOdyssey book, click here.

A little history on Plays For Sure via Wikipedia for the 99.9% of the world that doesn’t closely follow developments in DRM:

Microsoft Plays For Sure was a certification given by Microsoft to portable devices and content services that had been tested against several hundred compatibility and performance requirements. Plays For Sure certification was required for portable media players, network-attached digital media receivers, and media-enabled mobile phones seeking the “Designed for Windows Vista Premium” logo. “Plays For Sure” no longer exists. “It is now Certified for Windows Vista.”

The most commonly referenced requirements include the ability to play files encoded in Windows Media Audio or Windows Media Video format with Windows Media DRM digital rights management, used by Windows Media Player versions 10 and 11.

Zune is also Certified for Windows Vista, but it is important to note that former “Plays for Sure” music does not play on a Zune (even though both are “Certified for Windows Vista”).

When Microsoft introduced the Zune, they opted to create an DRM format incompatible with the DRM scheme they had launched only a year earlier, locking out Plays For Sure users and guaranteeing that the technology would no longer be a Microsoft priority. Considering that the format was rarely adopted except by also-ran hardware makers and that Microsoft is quietly putting the format to bed, it’s likely to be yet another dead-yet-locked format within a couple of years. Anyone who bought audio via Plays For Sure services were largely hosed by the introduction of the Zune, though I imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find any of those folks–though I’m sure they do exist, and have become just more victims in the recording industry’s campaign to punish any individual who still has the temerity to pay for music nowadays.

The thing that’s a shame here is that the handful of users who were drawn in by the brand endorsement implicitly made by Microsoft’s name are individuals who have likely never bought audio online and, now they have been burned, are far more likely to find other sources. A few of those folks will become new converts to file-sharing, or just say the hell to with buying audio online. (I’m becoming one of those people–though I consume tons and tons of music, if I can’t find an affordable way to purchase a particular album I want, DRM-free, online within five clicks, I don’t even bother with the file sharing sites. I just put on another episode of This American Life or RadioLab downloaded for free from NPR.)

With the move towards non-DRM distribution models among even major labels in this past year, there’s a sense that the DRM battle has been won, but we should know better than that. The Amazon mp3 thing is a power play to attempt to gain leverage against Apple’s hegemony of the market. The industry still “hearts” the subscription model Rick Rubin rhapsodized earlier in the year, which all but demands software or hardware-locked digital media content. (Bear in mind that the current progenitors of the subscription model, Rhapsody and Napster 2.0, are barely gasping for breath, though the music industry and the tech industry show an absolutely stunning lack of capacity to learn from previous failures.)

Meanwhile, instances such as Plays For Sure display once again not only why DRM is bad for music “consumers” (and musicians) but also marks yet another ignominious move by big music/big tech to punish the minority who still want to pay for audio recordings. Basic economics demands that you charge what the market will bear for a product people want. Initiatives such as Plays For Sure (and the RIAA lawsuits, and the doomed war with Apple, and countless other dunderheaded moves) demonstrates big music/big tech charging more than what the market will bear for products that nobody wants. At least the dinosaurs didn’t drive themselves to extinction.

Pumpkins, originally uploaded by officialthisamericanlife.

I listened to a fascinating episode of This American Life this past weekend about different modes of mapping–in the show delineated by the five senses in a discussion of the many different roles that maps play and the many things they can communicate.

The most interesting speaker was Denis Wood, a cartographer who believes that maps in aggregate can create a form of narrative and has been mapping different elements of his community of Boylan Heights, NC, for decades–the city pipes, which houses have received the most coverage in the local paper, and even the map above, of the jack o’ lanterns in the neighborhood. Over time, Wood has discovered fascinating pieces of synchronicity between the maps of seemingly disparate objects and concepts. As the TAL site notes, “In short, he’s creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life.”

It’s a fascinating thought–how do we map our communities and, indeed, our entire lives? What is revealed when you remove the streets from a map and instead map other elements? This episode, recorded a decade ago, poses a great number of questions about the nature of maps as a way of communicating not only practical information but also abstract concepts and even narratives. It seems to me, in this time of Google Maps mashups and geotagging, that there is a collective move towards expressing all sorts of disparate ideas via maps, but most examples I’ve seen are primarily ways of communicating practical information. What are some fascinating ways you can think of that maps (or map mashups) are being used to convey ideas or narratives with the current technology?

Listen to This American Life’s “Maps” Episode

The bad? Like Firefox, with which I am quickly losing all patience, the software feels like you’re navigating an Abrams Tank: it’s slow, cludgy, and prone to crashes. Like Firefox, you love all the functionality, but can’t help feeling like you could be doing everything you want to be doing much quicker if the code was a ton leaner. Firefox’s unresponsiveness has been driving me increasingly to Safari (even the buggy XP version), which is quick and clean despite far less functionality (the lack of del.icio.us plugin and Gchat support has always been a big dealbreaker for me with Safari.) All the same, Firefox’s behemoth system footprint on both my PC and Mac is growing all the more frustrating, and the thought of using an audio program that somehow is built on Firefox and is even less responsive makes it a tough sell for now.

I have a lot of hope for Songbird–it’s the kick in the ass iTunes desperately needs. iTunes was innovative in its simplicity and usability in its first three or four iterations, but has only grown more maddeningly slow and weighed down by unwanted features. What Songbird needs to do is tighten its code up a ton, and focus on the two things people want: an intuitive audio database for their mp3 collection, and a way to surf audio online, within the same application. Cut out the dross, make it fast and responsive, and the developers will have an open-source iTunes killer on their hands.

Check out Songbird

In relaunching Punk Planet.com last year, I dove head-first into the Open Source Software Movement–a growing legion of programmers and developers committed to creating shared software free to download and powerful as all hell. It’s a concept cribbed straight out of punk rock. In this day and age of big-budget punk, Open Source Software offers a lot of object lessons in how to do things right (once again).

1. There’s power in numbers. Stop going it alone. Realize that there’s other people out there who can help pick up where you leave off. It’s hard to take on a project (I.E. big as running a show space or a zine by yourself.) Ask for help.

2. Stop hoarding your knowledge. If you’ve learned something, share what you know with those who don’t. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time someone wants to start a record label. Remember the Simple Machines flyer about starting a label? We need that back again.

3. Don’t be afraid of updates. With how people listen to music undergoing a massive reinvention, I find more and more people in the underground clinging to the physicality of records and CDs. They’re beautiful, yes, but they’re going away. Historically, we’re at about “ways of listening to music v6.3.” Don’t be afraid of 7.0.

4. Share and share alike. This leads from #2, but seems like it’s worth its own line. Sharing knowledge is a two-way street. Once you’ve figure something out, it’s on you to pass that information along.

5. Communities are powerful. Maybe this seems obvious in this day and age of 5000–name “friends” lists on MySpace. but those aren’t real communities, they’re just lists. Why not start forming communities of label owners? Of touring bands’? This can be localized, or electronic. Either way, they’re communities that would learn and influence each other (GigPosters.com is a perfect example of a working community like this).

6. Be agile. Part of why Open Source has emerged as something other than a hobby for braniacs is because the lumbering giants of software–the Microsofts etc–can no longer adapt quickly enough to new things. Remember when punk was able to adapt so quickly that it was basically able to create new things from whole cloth? Let’s go back to that.

7. Don’t worry about scaling until you need to. We’ve reached a point in the underground where seemingly every band burdens themselves with a publicist, a booking agent, a label and a crate’s worth of press releases before they’ve even played a show. That’s a burden on everyone involved. Don’t worry about having the trappings of larger bands until you become those larger bands (and even then, question whether you need them anyway).

8. There’s room for everyone. Getting stuck in a rut of concepts and tightly hewn-genres is never good for any culture–just look at the hippies, folks. Allowing new ideas in is the only way to continue to grow punk rock. New ideas-new music, new art, new writing, new whatever–beget new ideas. Closing yourself off from them promises that you’lI be stuck in a singular moment in time forever.

9. Borrowing ideas is different than stealing them. Ideas, when put out there, are meant to be borrowed, rewritten, turned on their head, improved upon, and re-injected into the community for further re-use. Punk Planet was a perfect example of taking a pre-existing template and turning it into something new, and something others can grow their ideas from.

10. Money isn’t everything. Tattoo that one backwards on your forehead so you see it every morning when you’re brushing your teeth. Sure. projects cost money, and everyone would love to not work their shit job, but we’re long past those requirements when record labels buy Hummers to do their promotion and bands are signed solely for their income potential.

This piece was originally published in Punk Planet#77.

The only way I see these social networks as having any kind of lasting impact, the sort that could develop a legitimate social-networking media buffet with the credibility of a legitimized old-media powerhouse, is if the networks currently at the top (and the major ones to emerge) strive for some sort of shared standards of interoperability among platforms. Which I know sounds somewhat insane–imagine asking Digg, Myspace and Facebook to all work nice together. But the history of emergent technologies on the web suggests that some interoperability is essential for people’s long-term satisfaction with the basic functions of the site. Email is a killer app because anyone with email can email anyone else with an email account. The web works because of open standards (despite Microsoft’s best efforts otherwise.) RSS is a revolutionary because it’s compatible across platforms, web browsers and devices–in fact, most of Facebook’s value to me comes in its ability to easily integrate RSS feeds I choose, a functionality Myspace lacks–and makes it seem incredibly out of date.

In this sense, I think what a successful and sustainable social media will have to share is some sort of open standard, where people can a least share a login, or profile information, or blend feeds from one network into another seamlessly. I doubt the biggies of today would try such a thing–too convinced they can somehow transform the sharing of web ephemera into a Google-level success–but it could be a very plausible model for whatever platforms will inevitably take their place.