Orit Gat has an essay on art criticism written from a parallel universe to the one blog readers inhabit.
In the Gat universe (simplifying the argument greatly) you have two main types of opinion-dispensers: print critics, who may or may not have special, professionalized wisdom and perception but who do, probably, deserve to be paid, and the great unwashed of tweeters and YouTube commenters out there typing first, thinking later, and likely not deserving to be paid. What's missing is the middle ground of nerdy amateurs writing in depth, mostly out of love, without being beholden to editorial guidance from for-profit gatekeepers. This nerd group flourished in the blogosphere (2000 - 2007) and still exists in force on the internet, with sites that are "visited," found via search, or aggregated in RSS readers. Gat doesn't mention them, in fact doesn't use the word "blog" once in her essay. Again, the simplified version of her argument is "you paid for criticism in the print era and you better be prepared to pay again in the app era, and we'll all be better for it." Am not sure why Rhizome keeps publishing these anti-democratic articles. Perhaps it's all the VC sponsorship.
computers-R-stupid
treat the pusher, not the addict
It's amusing in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of way to watch hundreds of New Yorkers walking around on sidewalks holding their phones, checking them constantly. A few years ago everyone was toting water bottles -- you see less of those now because people need their phone hands.
Facebook + Phone has proven to be amazing catnip for humans. An unbeatable combination that took screen addiction out of the office and home and into the streets.
This phenomenon has hit Europe hard as well. The magazine EXBERLINER.com tried to get theorist Evgeny Morozov to talk about "internet addiction" but he was more interested in who is specifically benefiting from this phone crack:
I have little problem with the "addicts" part; it's the "internet" in "internet addicts" that I find troubling. A major part of my own critique of contemporary digital discourse is the way in which it barely registers any alternatives to the way in which Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have colonised our lives, presenting themselves as the only game in town when it comes to connectivity. They are also tied to a particular business model – advertising – and it's this model which results in these sites being as addictive as they are. If they don't get you hooked and you visit them rarely, you are a money-losing unit for them. So when I speak critically of "internet addiction," I am simply cautioning people not to medicalise a socio-economic problem. The right answer here clearly is not to develop more drugs to fix our addiction, but to question how we should run our communication services – perhaps, disconnecting them from the current advertising model altogether.
There is chicken-egg problem, though: if everyone has a phone and checks it constantly, who is going to agitate for change?
social media monopolies - you can live without them, you can't kill them
Good critique of "social media monopolies" by Geert Lovink and Korinna Patelis, posed as a series of rhetorical questions, e.g.:
Social media offer us the virtual worlds we use every day. From Facebook's 'like' button to blogs’ user interface, these tools empower and delimit our interactions. How do we theorize the plethora of social media features? Are they to be understood as mere technical functions, cultural texts, signifiers, affordances, or all these at once? In what ways do design and functionalities influence the content and expressions produced? And how can we map and critique this influence? What are the cultural assumptions embedded in the design of social media sites and what type of users or communities do they produce?
or
Artistic practice provides an important analytical site in the context of the proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to deconstruct the familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and critique these media. Is there such a thing as a social 'web aesthetics'? It is one thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for their primitive and bland interface designs. How can we imagine the social in different ways? And how can we design and implement new interfaces to provide more creative freedom to cater to our multiple identities? Also, what is the scope of interventions with social media, such as, for example, the 'dislike button' add-on for Facebook? And what practices are really needed? Isn’t it time, for example, for a Facebook ‘identity correction’?
Am less interested in the purpose of these questions, which seems ultimately to study the feasibility of an academy-based Facebook.
No harm in considering alternatives, though, to what Dave Winer calls the "corporate blog silos."
As for those "artistic" questions, many of them have been mulled over here and elsewhere. Generally our ilk doesn't worry about bland interfaces--they've been called defaults and we actually like 'em. A dislike button for Facebook is trivial poop--a bit like scrawling a caricature of a guard on a prison wall, fine if it makes you feel better.
Touchscreen Aesthetics
In his essay A Case Study on the Influence of Gestural Computing, Nicholas O’Brien discusses a car commercial that incorporates touch screen gestures characteristic of an iPhone or iPad user: The hand of an otherwise unseen consumer enters the video frame to change the movement and point of view of your standard slick sports utility vehicle montage: swoop -- the SUV drives through western landscapes! point -- it sits proudly in the carport!
I took the ad mostly as a cross-promotion for Apple and Land Rover. It shows you the twin magics of driving a gas guzzler with that new car smell as well as the abracadabra gestures of surfing with an iPhone. To interpret any larger meaning in the commercial one must first accept that Apple's gestures have achieved total market penetration and are the new norm for general purpose computer navigation.
I offer as a counter-argument this curmudgeonly essay about the poor design of tablets and touchscreens and how their main best uses are as toys. The author is talking about the iPad, not the iPhone but the complaints about covering your work area with your hands seem applicable to both:
A Google Image search turns up [a] quite typical picture of a [medieval] scribe practicing his art. You'll notice that the scribe's desk contains two levels, where the topmost level holds an exemplar document and the bottom holds the document that he's actually working on. The scribe in the picture could be a copyist who's making a copy of the exemplar, or he could be a writer who's using the top copy as a source or reference. Either way, his basic work setup is the same as my modern monitor plus keyboard setup, in that it's vertically split into two planes, with the top plane being used for display and the bottom plane being used for input.
The key here is that the scribe's hands aren't in the way of his display, and neither are mine when I work at my desktop or laptop. My hands rest on a keyboard, comfortably out of sight and out of mind.
With a tablet, in contrast, my rather large hands end up covering some portion of the display as I try to manipulate it. In general, it's less optimal to have an output area that also doubles as an input area. This is why the mouse and keyboard will be with us for decades hence -- because they let you keep your hands away from what you're trying to focus on.
My ultimate point here, and the reason I started with an image of a scribe, is that this separation of our productive workspace into display and input planes has been with us since the dawn of writing, and is likely to stay with us as long as being productive involves making text and pictures. It's a fundamental reality of knowledge work, and it means that multitouch tablets will continue to be novelty/entertainment items.
I wouldn't offer such a confident prediction about the longevity of the "mouse and keyboard"; Nicholas O'Brien is obviously past them and many children growing up with phones will never feel comfortable splitting the output and input area. [For that matter artists have worked in their output area since the dawn of painting.] And none of this is to challenge O'Brien's critique of the ad:
To a certain extent [it] also highlights an impatience that consumers have developed as a result of the instantaneous gratification that the web engenders through [search results] filtration...* The fictitious browser that pages through the landscape seems as though they are never quite satisfied with the context their Land Rover occupies, or even what it should exactly be used best for. That permanent unsettled fidgeting seems emblematic of -- or at least closely tied to -- how gestural computing has influenced our behaviors online.
*O'Brien is referencing a TED talk [YouTube] about how Google is now tailoring your searches to what it thinks you might want to find.
Whatever practical value the "unsettled fidgeting" of the phone user may have, we have Apple to thank for at least providing us with a visual metaphor for consumer discontent. Swoop, collapse, let's move on.
Sketch of the Balkanized Web
"Dark" sites (private, not searchable by bots) vs public sites
Subscription-only sites vs freely available sites
Related to above: the "logged-in" web vs what you see without a login (first pages, etc)
Facebook vs non-Facebook (one-stop shopping vs free range grazing)
Universally readable websites vs content viewable only on certain types of browser, e.g. "not viewable in Internet Explorer"
"Fast lane" transmission for crappy TV shows vs everybody else (coming soon to a non-neutral environment near you)
Dialup vs broadband (speed determines content)
Mobile web vs deskbound web
Apple web vs non-Apple web*
Scammers/spammers/crooks vs the innocent
*Update: Was asked on twitter "What does this even mean?" Answer: censored apps and onerous licensing on "sexy" hardware vs non-users of that hardware
Update 2: Some Apple users assume Windows users have the same unquestioning brand loyalty as they do. My twitter interlocutor used the phrase "your beloved Windows"--hilarious. This person actually reads my blog. The same person accused me of fanboy trolling as a linkbait strategy--like I need Apple zealots reading me. And played the age card - nasty. That suggested a new Balkan category: "old ppl web" vs "falling into manholes while texting" web. And finally, this person noted logical fallacies in the above writing, prompting a reminder that the post is called "sketch of the balkanized web," not "logical, non-contentious categories for easy assimilation."