Category: ideas

“‘On March 2, 2003, at 4:12 p.m., I disappeared,’ the journal begins. ‘My name is Isabella V. I’m twenty-something, and I am an international fugitive.'” Sound scintillating? It’s the first entry in a fascinating weblog purportedly written by a European heiress fleeing her wealthy and (apparently) powerful family. At this point, the blog is looking an awful lot like a hoax, but that’s really not the point. In an era when news, fiction, entertainment, ‘reality TV,’ and advertising all blur together in disturbing fashion, Isabella’s story is a sign of the synergistic times.

Time was, people aspired to consuming high art. Now they apologise for it. Or at least feel like they need to defend it. Peter Plagens says the turnaround is no mystery. “As for high art’s problem, it’s simple, but with complex fallout. High art is elitist. Only a relatively few people have the educated taste for it, the patience to enjoy it and, frankly, the ability to get it. We live, however, in a passionately egalitarian society, most of whose members absolutely resent the idea that Mr. Fairfax Van Richbuckets has, when he goes to the opera, a better esthetic experience than Mr. Harry Twelvepack does when he springs for a couple of Bon Jovi tickets. (Of course, Harry doesn’t have much regard for his kid sister’s taste for Justin Timberlake, and she can’t understand her younger cousin’s jones for that new Hilary Duff movie. Hierarchies are everywhere.) Connoisseurship on any but a micro level (‘Man, that’s a great Clint Black T-shirt—must be six colors in the silkscreen for it) is practically a dirty word these days, and I’d be surprised if the word ‘vulgar’ is uttered pejoratively more than twice a year in the United States outside of a Tipper Gore tea party.”

“Fears that globalization is imposing a deadening cultural uniformity are as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Mickey Mouse. Europeans and Latin Americans, left-wingers and right, rich and poor — all of them dread that local cultures and national identities are dissolving into a crass all-American consumerism. That cultural imperialism is said to impose American values as well as products, promote the commercial at the expense of the authentic, and substitute shallow gratification for deeper satisfaction. If critics of globalization were less obsessed with ‘Coca-colonization,’ they might notice a rich feast of cultural mixing that belies fears about Americanized uniformity.”

“These days, any film for which a studio’s marketing department has sufficiently high commercial expectations is issued on DVD in a ‘special’ or ‘limited’ or ‘collector’s’ edition that makes an Arden Shakespeare look skimpy by comparison. The contemporary desire for interactivity in the experience of art derives, obviously, from the heady sense of control over information to which we’ve become accustomed as users of computers. The problem with applying that model to works of art is that in order to get anything out of them, you have to accept that the artist, not you, is in control of this particular package of ‘information.’ And that’s the paradox of movies on DVD: the digital format tries to make interactive what is certainly the least interactive, most controlling art form in human history.”

Westerners have always been fascinated by “writing systems of East Asia. “Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are ‘syllabaries,’ in which each character corresponds to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (called a morpheme). By contrast, alphabetic systems rely on letters that by themselves are pure abstractions: a single letter represents neither a syllable of sound nor a morpheme. While alphabets tend to be small, syllabaries can be quite large: there are more than 50,000 Chinese characters, though most people can get by with knowing about 5,000. But a better understanding of Asian writing systems has not stopped Western experts from making grand claims about their virtues and limitations.”

“Looting seems about as psychologically complicated as, ‘Hey, outta my way – I saw it first!’ Yet the sociologists who study crowd behavior say that looting is commonly misunderstood. ‘Looting is not just lawlessness. It’s not that looting is a good thing. But there’s a logic to it. You get a sense, from what people loot and destroy, of which things they think are illegitimate. The things left standing are the parts of society that people feel some solidarity with’.”

“The computer game industry is a bit like the early days of opera: Composers are exploring untested ways of combining music, story, and visual spectacle. Fifty years ago, avant-gardists like Earle Brown and John Cage were leaving the ordering of musical events up to the players. Now this once-arcane technique is being used by game composers for far more commercial purposes. Composers call it ‘branching music’ — musical themes or tags linked to specific game events, designed so that any tag can lead un- jarringly to or from any other tag, creating a continuous flow, whatever the player’s choices.”

Cultural studies have yielded a great deal of understanding about the behaviors of those around us. “In this pervasive view, key aspects of life can best be understood by exploring the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of a culture and (in some formulations especially) the language in which they are expressed. Recently, however, the fascination with culture seems to be waning: Historians, for example, are conducting symposiums and editing volumes about “what comes next,” and erstwhile culturalists are publicly bemoaning the decline of interest in relevant theory. Aside from demonstrating that humanists are not immune to faddism, the transition invites some comment about the state of cultural research more generally.”

“Five years after it was enacted, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is living up to critics’ worst fears. The antipiracy law has become a broad legal cudgel that’s wielded against legitimate reapplications of intellectual property, from mix CDs to off-brand toner cartridges. Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) has written the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act (HR 107), which would make it legal to, among other things, create an archival copy of a CD or DVD. Good fix for a bad law – but why not just blow up the DMCA instead?”