The agony of empathy

My wife and I were in New York recently, and as part of our week-long whirlwind of art, artisanal donuts and culture, we went to see School of Seven Bells play live.

As is now the case, not quite half the audience spent a considerable amount of time taking photos or shooting video of the concert with their smartphones. I'm old enough to remember a pre-cellphone era when cameras were banned from concert venues, along with any kind of audio recording devices. The only people allowed to snap were professional photographers. Normal chumps like myself had to rely on their memories of the event. This is why we oldsters hang onto ticket stubs -- although those are slowly disappearing as well.

A year ago, I would have been truly annoyed at the Japanese woman (call her Mary) beside me who spent almost the entire concert taking photographs. Mary had a very expensive camera (not smartphone) with a heavy-duty lens, but due to her height (she was quite short) she had to keep putting the camera above her head and snap blindly. This was somewhat distracting and also somewhat confounding to me.

But it was no longer annoying, because I now try to tap into my empathy reserves. Thanks in part to my five-month stint at the CFC's Media Lab last year, coupled with my new employer's focus on design thinking, I'm trying to do a better job observing how people act in a given situation. I then try to figure out why they are acting the way they are. From this, I try to think of ways to augment or shape that natural behaviour in new and interesting ways.

From my point of view, it's agonizing to realize that Mary's defining experience of attending the concert was getting the perfect photograph. She might not have been as "in the moment" as I was, but what she wanted from the concert was something very different than I did, and I need to be comfortable with that fact. Her perfect photograph will serve as the anchor point for a particular memory.

It is tempting to try and argue that there is only one proper way to experience a concert. I certainly had this thought when I saw The XX two years ago at the Phoenix. Along with the smartphone photo bugs, there were a surprising number of people texting their friends or sharing their reactions on social media. Personally I would find this disruptive as all hell, but to the texters and the tweeters, the concert would have less value and meaning if it wasn't shared with others. My experience and their experience of that same concert was certainly very different, but it's tricky to get into a debate about which approach is quote-unquote better.

Getting back to empathy, one goal might be to find a way to further enhance the experience of those who like to take photos during concerts, without this detracting from those who decide to not obsessively document the show. After the concert, my wife and I brainstormed some ideas. For example, in the near future you might be able to instantly send your concert photos to a public cloud service that projects those images on a screen behind the band, moments after the photo is taken. Or the band could assemble a stop-motion video for each song they play live using the various photos taken at a show -- they could even take advantage of time-stamping and other metadata embedded in each photo to accomplish this. And since the various photos would all be taken with different cameras, different filters and from different angles and parts of the room, you'd get a unique, kaleidoscopic, crowd-sourced visual document of the concert.

Those who chose not to take photos could visit the band's website the next day and compare their experience with the photographic jigsaw. This would be great, since there was one very talented guy taking some amazing photos with his smartphone. I'd love to see those.

Empathy is not an easy thing to deploy, but it can take you in interesting new directions. What's important to me, however, is that you can still insert critical judgement into this process. It might be delayed or deferred, but not every new development is necessarily better.

And yes, I took a few photos. Three actually. For whatever reason I'm still not comfortable snapping constantly during a concert. Here's the best of the bunch.

Instagram is eating its own tail

A few weeks ago I wrote my first post for Nurun’s Digital for Real Life blog. I piggybacked on a great article published last year by Nathan Jurgenson and used it to argue that Instagram's popularity might actually cause its demise (as opposed to the recent Facebook acquisition).

What no one seems to be talking about is that Instagram’s continued popularity, not its merger with Facebook, might be the biggest threat to its long-term success. In a long and thoughtful essay published last year at TheSocietyPages.org, Nathan Jurgenson, a PhD. student at the University of Maryland took a careful look at what he calls “faux vintage” photography. […] For Instagram, the challenge is figuring out what happens when their users, through their own enjoyment of the service, drain the last traces of authenticity from it. Printstagr.am, a new service that “develops” your Instagram photos into t-shirts, stickers, posters and minibooks might help turn the tide, as it turns purely digital artifacts into permanent physical keepsakes.

You can read the entire post here.

13 ways of looking at selling out

Okay, the title is a bit of lie. This post is actually three ways people have debated the notion of selling out in the last few years. I've put them here for easy reference for those looking to write a trend piece. Plus here is a picture of a blackbird for those who got the reference.

The first is a historical perspective: 

I still believe it’s crucial for a young band to make smart decisions when partnering a song with a product. Because that’s what it is. You are marrying something precious you made to a product.

The second is a reminder that yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as selling out:

My response? The New Yorker, Slate and Open Culture are being trendy. They're wearing brogues and short tight trousers and playing double keyboards in the indie band of intellectuality. They're being fashionably unstodgy by jumping on the bandwagon of saying selling out no longer exists.

The third is the argument that your artistic development does not occur in a vacuum, which means that selling out is not a victimless crime:

The sellout law also draws attention to the fact that when a band sells their music, they’re also selling something that’s not entirely theirs. They’re profiting from not just their individual work, but the communal work of the anti-profit punk community – the bands that influenced them and the people that provided feedback. 

Here is a drawing of a stapler. Goodnight.

Dery defeated by the internet

It seems likely that Dery is aware that, in the contemporary context, he’s “doing it wrong.” But rather than adjust to the milieu tonally, he often becomes overtly defensive and tries to establish that he still gets it by dumping in huffy long-hyphenated-string-of-words adjectives plus what he takes to be relevant cultural references to an imagined straw-man audience. That strategy in itself feels dated, a holdover from the time when the Quentin Tarantino approach to discourse was ascendent and writers tried to bully readers with the unexpected breadth of their allusions. Riddling readers with references, in that cultural moment, conveyed a gangsterish toughness rather than pretension. But the reactive immediacy of online cultural critique, and the ease of information access, has depleted that tactic’s sting. You don’t drop a reference and leave people feeling dumb anymore; instead you link a reference and everyone can feel smart. Or instead, there are increasingly customized “trending topics” that everyone in a niche responds to, which earns one more attention and cultural capital than trying to invoke something unusual and obscure.

-- Rob Horning works his magic

Romanticizing the urban pioneer

After nearly two years of looking, my wife and I bought a house in November of last year. We wanted to live in a specific neighbourhood (The Junction Triangle) and we wanted a basement that I could stand up in (a tough ask, since I'm six foot five). Also we didn't want to buy a total piece of crap. Hence, it took us almost two years to find a house. And I will be the first one to admit that we were lucky -- although we were also smart enough to act immediately on our good luck when the right house finally appeared.

Since we had been looking for so long, it was impossible not to notice that prices were steadily (and in some cases exponentially) increasing in the neighbourhood. The rail path, plus a few new restaurants/amenities in the area helped push up property prices. Plus it's on the subway line, and it was clear the neighbourhood was on the upswing.

Of course if I had a time machine, I'd want to buy a house in the area back in 2006 or so, back when Yasi's Place first opened. You know, back when the neighbourhood was more edgy and thus less expensive.

That was, until last Saturday evening, when our next door neighbours (literally, we live in a semi-detached) invited us over for drinks. A few other couples who live across the street joined us and we had some wine/beer and talked about our block. Everyone but us had purchased their house at least four or five years ago. And it turns out that it wasn't all roses and sunshine back then. The usual palette of drugs and prostitution, along with assorted other random craziness.

I really would like to say that this sort of urban pioneering lifestyle appeals to me, especially given how much less my neighbours paid for their houses. But it's only in retrospect that this kind of endurance contest is worthwhile. The city of Toronto doesn't send you a letter in the mail saying "Congratulations! Your home is in a somewhat sketchy area, but we guarantee it will improve by 2009 or we'll cheerfully refund your money." There is a price to be paid for navigating these type of pioneer frustrations.

All of this is a fancy way of restating something I heard fairly often while we were looking for a house -- there are no bargains or magic deals in real estate. The market does a fairly good job of figuring out what houses are worth. It's just sometimes you have to pay in less obvious ways.

Art is like a silkscreen - each work almost the same

“Despite art’s reputation for distinctiveness and originality, its value is established not by the narcissism of small differences but by the megalomania of sameness.”

-- “On the Market” in N+1 #13, Alice Gregory

The dystopic potential of gamification

Although there is a certain utopian appeal to McGonigal’s “games for change” model, I worry about the dystopic potential of gamification. Instead of just bombarding us with jingles, corporations will be able to inject their messages directly into our minds with ads disguised as games. Gamification seeks to turn the world into one giant chore chart covered with achievement stickers — the kind of thing parents design for their children — though it raises the potentially terrifying question of who the parents are. This, I fear, is the dystopian future of stupid games: amoral corporations hiring teams of behavioral psychologists to laser-target our addiction cycles for profit.

-- Sam Anderson writing in the New York Times Magazine

Get PhysiDigital with me at NXNEi this June (and save!)

I'll be speaking at NXNEi this June (2012), giving a talk entitled Let's Get PhysiDigital: How to Convert Online Memories Into Offline Artifacts. To quote the write-up on the NXNEi site:

Now that social media has become a black box recorder for countless emotionally significant moments, artists and brands are searching for ways to turn our digital milestones into physical keepsakes. The results include a .poster of your Tumblr followers, a book filled with your favorite Tweets and a unique origami shape built around the content of your favourite text message. But what is driving this newfound interest in physicality? Is it a reaction against the ephemeral nature of digital communication or simply the result of the online world bleeding into the offline? Drawing on my experience as co-creator of txt2hold and tweet2hold, I will explore how fleeting digital communications like texts and tweets can be converted into permanent memory objects. While locating the sometimes fragile intersection between the online and offline world requires careful research, the creative opportunities are numerous for those willing to get PhysiDigital.

If you are looking for an incentive to attend, here is a discount code good for 10% off: NXNEiRocks

Don't say I never give you nothing. Visit nxne.com for more info on the festival.

When in doubt, quote yourself

In November of 1999, Mike Usinger, writing in Saturday Night ("Call him Nardwuar") noted that: 

“But what's really made Nardwuar infamous is that, like those who read America's leading white-trash tabloid, he has an enquiring mind and he wants to know. With his high-pitched voice -- which doesn't sound so much like nails on a chalkboard as a chalkboard being dragged though a nail factory -- he's become North America's pre-eminent guerrilla journalist...”

Almost 13 years later, Usinger was interviewed for a Feb 21, 2012 RRJ profile of Nardwuar by Sara Harowitz: 

As [Mike] Usinger says, “Most of us don’t have the balls to dress up in a plaid tam and speak in a voice that sounds like a nail factory being dragged across a chalkboard.”

Given that I can't remember what I ate for breakfast last week, Usinger clearly has an incredible memory.

Welcome to NYC 1YL

I'll be blogging with a bit more frequency again in order to tone and condition my writing muscles. Shorter posts, but more often. The world needs a few more Bigge Ideas. Or Bigge Snark.

I'll start with my concept for a new Toronto restaurant called NYC 1YL. That's short for New York City One Year Later. It's a simple idea -- every month or so, the restaurant will switch up and serve whatever food and cocktails were popular in Manhattan exactly one year previous. Decor will also change accordingly.

Shockingly, since Toronto is at least 12-18 months behind Manhattan when it comes to food and drink (witness the painful delay between the pre-prohibition cocktail craze in New York and its appearance here) NYC 1YL will probably manage to stay ahead of the curve.