Media Mandible

A friend of mine recently tweeted this entertaining video on how to talk to racists:

The key takeaway is the importance of focusing on actions rather than thoughts. You don’t call someone a racist, because that’s a statement about their soul that’s impossible to prove. Instead, you call out their provably racist words or actions.

It occurred to me while watching that video that the idea of presuming, or aspiring to, a safe moral separation from one’s words or actions is a very white idea. (Isn’t it?) In my more or less liberal whiteness, I sometimes feel complicit in the oppression of people whom I have not oppressed. (Or have I? By profiting from globalization? By working in advertising? By volunteering at the co-op? Who knows? It’s a complicatied world.)

The sanctity of the voting booth. I’ve heard many people say recently that many so-called liberal white people would vote for McCain in the privacy of the booth, admitting only to themselves and the machine that they can’t bear the thought of a black president. But one colleague of mine asserted the opposite: People are more progressive than they act; they want a black president but can’t bring themselves to admit it out loud; in the sanctity of the voting booth, they will reveal their best possible selves.

I’d like to propose a third hypothesis. For white people who, for whatever reason, find themselves caught between history and the future, the voting booth is a confessional. Pulling those few levers we’re given access to is a statistically insignificant act. You never know for sure if your vote is counted. You never know for sure if your friends and loved ones voted the way they claim. Hell, you could be a brain in a vat and it’s all a joke… except your vote, because that experience was already private. It was a reflexive indicator from you, back to yourself, of who you are.

My friend ame has written a great post about Thoreau’s views on voting, which were basically this: Don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s a moral act. It’s an intellectual act; abstract and somewhat masturbatory, too easy and too far removed from the world of real, physical people, their problems and choices, to be meaningful. Vote, he said, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ve made yourself a better person by doing so. You are still who you are. Your life is still your life. You are still complicit. There is no escape.

And yet, I submit that, tonight, a sea change is coming about in part because many private people, separately, went into little curtain-lined booths and took the easiest possible action, the pulling of a lever from the right to the left, in order to convince themselves that they are made of better stuff than they actually are.

My little contribution to wepc, FM’s latest project.

The main distinction between eastern and western thought is the focus on the individual versus the universe as a whole. In the west, you can be a very good person, a virtuous and selfless person, but the focus is still on what kind of individual you are, what kind of individual you choose to be. In the east, it’s more about recognizing the fact that your status as an individual is an illusion.

Blogging is not just public diary-keeping. It is a broadcast of one’s self into the ether. The fact that blogs are not physically written on paper is not just a convenience; it is a symbol that (more…)

A couple of days ago, I changed my Facebook status to “Michael doesn’t even like you; accepting your friend request was just easier.” This was actually an exaggeration. Although I am Facebook-friends with some people whom I don’t actually consider friends, there isn’t anyone I’ve friended who I actually dislike.

Nevertheless, someone I consider an actual friend un-friended me as a result. She went on to tell me in an email that she found my Facebook updates “negative” and that she preferred not to get them.

There might be something profound in here somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.

Choi Jin-sil, a South Korean movie star, allegedly killed herself recently out of humiliation after widespread online criticism of her single-mother lifestyle. Widespread public anger over Choi’s death is giving support to the government’s plan to crack down on the web, putting it under “martial law.” (Martial law? No http requests after 7pm, perhaps?)

The NY Times article doesn’t explore another possibility, which has got to leap out at anyone who watches movies and/or doesn’t trust their own government. The life of a single celebrity might have seemed insignifant next to the government’s need to gain traction on its censorship initiative. It’s much easier to crack down on public speech when public speech is on your side.

Ben Kunz has a nice post on Thought Gadgets about how much we reveal about who we are on Twitter, and how easily that information can be exploited by future employers, friends, clients, and brands looking for information and opinions about their products.

What’s interesting to me (and I’m sure Ben has thought about this too) is the comprehensive, one-on-one, tip-of-the-long-tail targeted advertising that is bound to come about through Twitter and similar services.

In days of yore (i.e. this morning), companies like MRI would actually pay members of the public to participate in exhaustive surveys, to be completed partly on paper and partly in person, in order to supply a massive pool of demographic, psychographic, and purchase data that could be used to target advertising.

But Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps will eventually remove the necessity for all that. For a while, the online user dealt with a simple tradeoff: get free content, but accept that you’re going to see ads.

Now there’s something else going on: (more…)

Here’s a video of my various failed attempts to download Firefox 3, despite all indicators that it should be easy.

It’s worth mentioning that, most likely, this was a web caching issue. It wasn’t just my local cache, though, because I IMd a friend across town before I made this video, and he too saw the FF2 pages. Also, the map page was showing “downloads” rather than “pledges,” even while the other pages were still showing FF2 as the main download.

It may have been as simple as someone at Mozilla forgetting to clear their cache, or perhaps they cleared it too late in the day, and the message didn’t propogate to the edge servers near me until later than it should have. This is not a horrible thing, and a few minutes after I posted the video, I started to see the correct pages in my browser. (I’m typing this addendum in Firefox 3.)

My frustration at not getting FF3 as soon as it was promised came only out of the fact that I was so eager for it. Now that it’s here, I’m happy. (The download numbers still trouble me a bit, though.)

Emotiv is coming out with a gaming headset that reads the wearer’s mind. In the game, you levitate boulders just by willing them to move. But here’s the part that really caught my attention:

The system doesn’t just lift boulders. It can also detect some of a player’s facial expressions and emotional responses: smile, frown or wink, for instance, and an avatar on screen can do so, too. Grow bored during a battle, and the system can detect ennui and supply a few dragons, or change the music.

Imagine the implications for in-game targeted advertising. If the system can tell, based on the user’s brain waves, whether she’s interested in the game, then it’s not a big step to tell whether she’s interested in the integrated ad. Or, for that matter, whether she’s angered/frightened/excited/moved/aroused by it.

The ad could then change based on the user’s reaction. But more interesting still: the advertiser could pay based on the user’s reaction! Cost per reaction! Cost per arousal! Cost per bathos-lasting-longer-than-two-point-six-seconds!

Do you agree? How far can we take this thing?

image: A poster for the movie Brainstorm, which featured a brain-interface device that looks almost exactly like Emotiv’s.

One of Media Mandible’s countless readers wrote in with helpful feedback suggesting that I use a “more inside” feature to break up the posts a bit, to avoid the “sea of text” feeling. Fortunately, the Wordpress text editor comes with a button that does this for you (”Insert More tag”).

As you can see (scroll down), it does make the blog appear more readable. What’s interesting, though, is that it actually makes each entry take longer to read. Now you have to click to get the rest of the article. Previously, you didn’t.

This is exactly the way that (effective) interactive advertising works. Instead of giving you the hard, obvious sell up front (”Click here and get $5 off now!”), a good banner will give you a soft sell on something that’s less of a commitment, and more entertaining (”Mouse over the box to see what’s inside!”). If the stakes are low, and your curiosity is aroused, (more…)

This house ad is displayed at the New York Sports Club on 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s the first thing you see as you walk in, just at the top of a flight of steps.

Presumably, the placement is for prospective members. You struggle with yourself, decide to take the plunge, and go in the door, ready to deal with obnoxious intake people trained to hard-sell you on a personal training package. Will you make it all the way up the steps, you fat wannabe?

Of course you will. Don’t you want to ___ better?

Speaking as someone who has been a member for a long time, though, I find it obnoxious, condescending, and needlessly coy. And I have to imagine that some of the women who see it find it creepy. That guy looks like Bizarro Joey.

photo by miconian