Infographics scare tactics

Saw two slick short videos on infosthetics today. Both use quickly moving 3D motion graphics with text and symbols in a red/black/white color scheme narrated in a British accent with an ominous tone to warn us of vague, yet omnipresent threats we are fairly powerless to do anything about. One threat (click “Projects”, then “What Barry Says”) is the military-industrial complex and its ongoing hijack of US foreign policy since the end of WW2 to ensure that there is a need for there products all the time. It was created by Knife Party’s Simon Robson. The other threat is Google. Confused? Google may have started out on the up and up, but (according to the German filmmakers Ozan Halici & Jürgen Mayer, who credit “What Barry Says” with inspiring them) Google can’t be as profitable and pervasive as it claims to be without breaking its own first rule of operating: “Don’t be evil.” With its tendrils in genetic research as well as the accumulation and mining of all public data (digital and analog), it’s true aim, according to the film, is to create full profiles of every human for the use of governments and corporations. Facts, the filmmakers claim, are backed up in David A. Wise’s The Google Story.

Relative ease

News of the community-created art and culture retrospective THE RADICAL ARCHITECTURE OF LITTLE MAGAZINES 196X-197X gets me to wondering why there doesn’t seem to be more community-created art and culture going on today. These people communicated almost exclusively by post, and have nearly a decade of independent periodicals, and influence on mainstream ones, to show for it. With [insert laundry list of latest technologies] all at our disposal, how come there aren’t 11,000 chapters of the Anarchic Congress of Knitters, Solderers & Burlesque Dancers for Urban Pretzel Hurling? I’ll get to my hypothesis now: Does the decline in effort required to build networked collaborative communities directly affect the will do create and maintain them?

I think yes, but I could be all wrong. Maybe there are tons of these things happening — way more than there ever were in the 60s and 70s — but that the cacophony of irrelevant media has grown by the same factor. But I don’t think so. Wouldn’t YouTube, MySpace, and iTunes be drowning in their propaganda? Wouldn’t there be hilarious recruitment videos spoofing (jeez, what’s left to spoof anymore!?) Peter Francis Geraci and Video Professor being emailed back and forth across the globe?

There are plenty individuals (and even small teams) — real or manufactured — producing coherent units of whatever they want to make (i.e., blogs, podcasts, magazines, collectible figurines for hipster adults). Whether they are people or personae, they all seem to be looking out for one thing and that’s, of course, money.

“No shit, Sherlock,” you say. OK, I’ve answered my own question. Money is important, and people find all ways to make it to survive. What I am lamenting may or may not have ever existed: Authenticity. Not necessarily defined as an outcome not influenced by money, but wouldn’t that be nice breather?

It is possible to gaze upon a thing for the first time and be struck like a guitar chord, the veracity of the thing resonating within you deeper than you knew possible. Later in life you may look again upon the same thing and feel only embarrassment at your former proneness to hyperbole… Where was I? So maybe it has all been done before and that authenticity is yet another subjective quality a thing can have for one person and not another (or any other?).

To me, authenticity means effort and earnestness. Two things I have expended little of on any one endeavor. To be good at a thing means putting effort into it and being earnest about that effort. It also means being able to focus on that one thing for as long as it takes… (See “Furthermore…” in next column for explanation)

Bad idea of the month

It does not look good for a country to sell the parts for a jet fighter it is decommissioning on the international weapons market if demand for those parts is greatest in a country that the first country is threatening to take military action against.

Enough with the Obama-worship!

Do you love Barack Obama? Do you tell everyone you know that Barack Obama is going to be our next President? Do you think Barack Obama is more Clintonian than Bill Clinton (or Hillary for that matter)? Do you think Obama might even be something…”more“?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, the media has probably whipped your blood into a boil about Joe Biden’s candid remarks about Barack Obama. Therefore you may be suffering from what is now known as political-correctness hypersensitivity disorder. PCHD is treatable. The first step to curing PCHD is taking a good look in the mirror and saying, “I will not fear being called a racist for using terminology in describing a black person that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if applied to a white person.” If symptoms persist tune in to Comedy Central for a bit of Chappelle’s Show and have a laugh or two at your own expense.

OK. Maybe I protest too much. Perhaps there was some vestige of racism behind Biden’s off-the-cuff remarks that I don’t want to acknowledge. That said, I like both Obama and Biden as candidates for president, but I am not optimistic about either. Put them together and you actually might have the perfect candidate. Unfortunately, it seems that this country’s political landscape (not so much a red and blue patchwork, as a quilt of varying purples) is such that John McCain could campaign exclusively via YouTube and beat them both soundly. What Dems need is a subtle mix of Gandhi and Rambo to win. Or Paul Newman.

Happy Feb 2

aka Groundhog Day.