Living Without The Internet

Adrian Shaughnessy from Design Observer
08.03.06 |

I’ve just done what tens of thousands of Brits do every summer: I’ve spent the past two weeks holidaying in rural France. This annual British invasion of our near neighbour is, ostensibly, a search for good weather, unspoilt countryside and sophisticated cuisine. In truth, we go because we’re in thrall to the escapist and somewhat reactionary notion that life in France — and specifically rural France — is more civilised than life in our over-crowded, crime-ravaged little island. But as I sat in my isolated retreat, with the scent of lavender drifting in through the open windows, something was gnawing at me.

For the first time in three or four years, I was living without the internet, and it was unnerving to discover the degree to which I’d become net dependent.

I’d packed my laptop, but because it wasn’t plugged into the giant pulsating brain of the world wide web, it felt dead — a portal to nothing. Emails didn’t ping up. I wasn’t able to log onto the half dozen websites I visit daily (sometimes hourly). I wasn’t able to chase down facts, wasn’t able to idly waste time drifting in and out of the more arcane corners of the net. I felt disconnected: my life-support system had been turned off.

When television replaced print (the medium of individualism) to become the great mass medium of the 20th century, McLuhan’s vision of the global village looked as if it had become a permanent reality. Yet compared to the internet, television is a poor creator of communities. The notion of "water cooler television" already seems remote: a folk memory. Television has become the medium of consumption, and despite the presence of countless micro-channels catering to micro-interests, television only wants one sort of viewers: consumers.

The consequence of this is that the TV audience is voting with its feet. A recent report in The Guardian noted that “in the US, primetime viewing of broadcast networks sunk to the lowest level in ratings history: 20.8 million on average.” Here in Britain, "the telly" is shrill with the sound of channels begging us to “phone in,” “send texts,” “press the red button,” “tell us what you think.” This faux interactivity is an increasingly desperate attempt to lure us away from the internet. It’s the death rattle of an empire that sees its supremacy slipping away.

The internet is different. It allows anyone with access to a computer and a telephone line to retain a sense of personal volition. And there are enough people with computers hooked up to the web for the internet to have become an alternative — a threat even — to conventional media. How else do we explain Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace? How else do we explain television’s nervous aping of the interactivity of the internet?

Of course, just like television, the internet has also been colonized by commercialism. Yet often with surprisingly beneficial results, as the new book The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand by Chris Anderson shows. And anyway, we can easily bypass the commercial hucksterism of the net and glide effortlessly toward the two great shining jewels in the internet crown: unlimited information and a sense of “personal” community: put another way, toward communities of our own making.

When I’m deprived of the internet, I’m hampered in my professional life as a designer and occasional writer, and in my personal life as an info junkie. The internet has not lessened my fondness for books — hunting down information in print media in fact remains one of life’s great joys. But it’s quicker on the internet, and you’ve got more options. Sure, you have to be wary of dud information, and data is more likely to be inaccurate on the internet than it is in book form. But you learn to check and cross-reference. You learn to be wary. It’s all part of the fun.

The idea of the internet as a source of community, however, is less easy to evaluate. Deprived of my internet connection in France, I felt doubly disconnected. I could see that I was surrounded by a community — one that was surprisingly attractive, homogeneous and resilient. But I wasn’t part of it. I was courteously admitted to it when I ate in one of the local restaurants, or when I chatted with the stallholders at the local market, but that was about it. A more gregarious person than me might have joined in the lively bar culture that thrives in even the smallest villages. But with my poor French language skills I was content to remain an outsider — an admiring observer.

Back home in London I don’t feel any great sense of community, either. I barely know my neighbours (a feature common to metropolitan dwellers), and I only experience the tug of community in my work, where I feel a tribal bond with other designers.

The “community” that I find on the internet — and which I missed so keenly in France —– is the communality of shared enthusiasms for marginalised subjects. It might be a "community" of only a few dozen people clustered around subject matter incapable of maintaining a foothold in the world of bricks and mortar. I’m talking about sites, blogs and forums created by enthusiastic individuals and groups with little or no regard for the commercial potential of their activities. I’m talking about minority subjects that, without the internet, simply will not survive. These are the sorts of subjects and connections that, if I’m deprived of them for even a couple of weeks, make me feel twitchy and disconnected. Unplugging is no longer an option.
08.03.06

E-mail to Eirik Fossan:

Hei Eirik,

Ble plutselig opptatt i rommet ved siden av.

Takk for innput. Jeg tenkte jeg muligens skulle gi deg en litt mer inngående forklaring på hvilken type magasin jeg ser på og bruke litt hypertextualitet for å vise deg hvilket research grunnlag jeg har foreløpig. Jeg tenker dette kan være nyttig for min egen del for å prøve å forklare for meg selv like mye som for deg hva det er jeg er ute etter å lage.
Jeg har hovedsakelig sett på magasiner som interesserer meg innenfor kunst, design (hovedsakelig grafisk design og illustrasjon) og livstil her kommer en liten liste:

• Arkitip
• Lodown
• Tokion
• Tokion
• Emigre
• eye
• dot dot dot
• BUTT
• adrenalin som ser ut som det har forsvunnet, ihvertfall fra nettet.
• Refill

Dette er en ufullstendig liste og noen av de nevnte magasinene har jeg heller ikke studert så nøye.

Når det gjelder web har jeg sett litt på det som eksisterer av magasiner på nettet. Samt forum/blogger og multimedia muligheter på nettet.

• pingmag
• This is a magazine
• magnuminmotion
• youtube
• underskog
• vidvox vj forum
• EWF
• Magwerk

I tillegg til dette kommer endel litterære magasiner som jeg bare såvidt har tittet på, men ikke har noe særlig forhold til ettersom de ikke har appellert til meg i, visuell forstand, på en slik måte at jeg noen gang har kjøpt ellr ønsket å bruke tid på det.

Derfor er ideen min om et magasin som både innholder en litterær tyngde og en sterk visuell appell. Jeg mener at vår generasjon som har fått populærkultur inn med morsmelken samtidig som vi higer etter en intellektuell kapital gjennom utdannelse og samfunns engasjement. Vi har ikke noe problem med å være både naiv og oppslukt i populærkulturelle fenomener og elementer som tegneserier, musikk, tv-programmer, sneakers, stickers, grafitti, etc og samtidig lese Bourdieu, Lyotard, Nitche, og Hamsun eller gå på "høykulturelle" eventer som filharmoniske konserter og kunstutstillinger.

Når det gjelder det endelige produktet som skal komme ut av masteroppgaven min ønsker jeg at det er papirutgaven jeg bruker mest tid på hva gjelder design. Ettersom min kjærlighet for det taktile og printtekniske står så mye sterkere enn det som skjer på skjermen. Men når det kommer til et stykke er det sannsyneligvis nettet som vinner i tid jeg bruker på de forskjellige mediene i konsum.

Siden jeg er inne på TID, og det var jo noe også du nevnte i ditt innspill, så er det en av hoved nøkkelordene i forbindelse med oppgaven min har jeg kommet frem til.
Den tiden en bruker på et papir magasin er ofte større enn det man bruker på et nett magasin, nå er jo det selfølgelig mulig det har med den formen endel nettmagasiner blir presentert i. Det har en lengre levetid i sin fysiske form, (eller hvordan skal jeg prøve å forklare denne her da). Når du først har et magasin kan du spare på det å ta det frem og se på bildene og lese artiklene mange år etterpå. Du har også noe fysisk du kan klippe i etc. Du vil gjerne bygge opp en atmosfære rundt deg selv når du skal sette deg ned å kose deg med favoritt magasinet ditt.

Jeg har i forbindelse med TID som et viktig aspekt også tenkt at dette bør videre underbygges i et papir magasin av flere årsaker. I nyhetsverdi vil alltid det raskeste mediet vinne, i dette tilfellet nettet (også i de fleste andre tilfeller). Og jeg mener da at det bør være et poeng å ikke ha noe særlig nyhetsverdi i papirmagasinet for å gi det en lengre levetid, og heller legge det som ligger innenfor et kortere tidsperspektiv i webutgaven.

Nå er jeg på vei til falle litt av i forklaringen min her. Det begynner å bli seint og hode er slitent. Hadde noen flere tanker om tid her, men de datt litt ut.

Ideen til webdelen av magasinet er å bygge opp under kvalitetene som ligger på nettet med nettopp hypertextualitet, interaktivitet(blog,forum) og multimedia.

Altså, det jeg ønsker er vel å underbygge de forskjellige mediene sine kvaliteter for å fremheve budskapet. Som må være å formidle historier og tanker som stimulerer til videre tenking, men også ren stimulans gjennom bare å være, tilbake til dette med høykultur/populærkultur naiv/intellektuell. Det blir litt som barne TV som kan sees på av barn på en måte og voksne på en annen. Altså ut ifra ens egne referanser uten å være snobbete.

Ja dette får være nok for idag. Håper du fatter litt mer om hva det er jeg tenker. Det var ihvertfall en bra øvelse for meg å prøve å forklare. Det gjenstår endel gjennom arbeidelse her. Jeg må jo også få understreke at du ikke behøver å bruke noe særlig tid på dette her, men om du har lyst til å kaste litt ball og komme noen innspill er jeg helt klart åpen og glad for det.

Jeg har ikke vært noe særlig fornøyd med den veilederen jeg har hatt her på skolen, så jdet har ikke blitt så mange veileder møter. Nå har jeg ordnet noen utenfor skolen som skal hjelpe meg og tenker jeg skal prøve å få noen møter med Hallvor Bodin som jeg tror kan være en bra person å diskutere litt med. Det er på dette tidspunktet når oppgaven begynner å materialisere seg i ord at det går ann å få innspill fra andre og diskutere ideene.

Takk så mye for din oppmerksomhet, håper jeg ikke har kjedet deg ;)

Ernst

Marshall McLuhan and the Global Village

“The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.”

When Marshall McLuhan spoke of the global village, he clearly had the web of electronic networks that encircle the world in mind. Certainly, instant communication on a world- wide basis is transforming society. As far as the electronic media are concerned, we are increasingly dealing with a world without frontiers. The amazing technological revolution with which McLuhan was so fascinated has not stood still. The advance of the technological revolution and its impact on the global village of the future can be seen from a variety of perspectives.

Radical Traditionalists

I read this article in print, an American graphic design magazine at the school library and thought it was nice to post it here on my blog.



The newest publishers from Los Angeles are transforming the very format of the art magazine—with paintbrushes, 3D glasses, and limited-edition porn-star air fresheners.

By Jami Attenberg

In Hollywood, you’re nobody unless your job description is a multi-hyphenate. A mere actor’s got nothing on an actor-writer-producer-director-swimsuit model. So it’s no surprise that Los Angeles artists use the same strategies. It’s not enough to be a painter; you must have your own brand of shoes. Being a photographer is great, but what about that T-shirt line?

In recent years, multidisciplinary L.A. artists have acquired a new job title traditionally associated with New York: magazine editor. People like Scott Andrew Snyder (art director), Brendan Fowler (musician), Ed Templeton (photographer), Aaron Rose (gallery owner), Shepard Fairey (street artist), and Dustin Beatty (teacher) have been publishing magazines that cover similar territory—a mélange of street- and urban-influenced underground art, clothing, and music—for clued-in cool kids who prize nothing so much as authenticity.

They champion musicians like Ian MacKaye, Grandmaster Flash, and Lee Ving; streetwear brands like Alife and Supreme; and graffiti artists by the squad-car loads. (The scene was codified last February in an exhibition entitled “Beautiful Losers” at the Orange County Musuem of Art.) But what these upstart editors—who remain friends, colleagues, and rivals—publish isn’t as interesting as how they present it. By transforming their products into collectible objects, they follow their interests and buff their own street cred at the same time.

Snyder, a former art director of the snowboard company Joyride, founded the Hollywood-based bimonthly Arkitip (pronounced “archetype”) in 1999 as a hand-stapled zine. Influenced in part by New York’s Visionaire, he expanded its range and goals to feature a dizzying array of hip artists—Ryan McGinness, Patrick Rocha, Eduardo Recife—who are presumably intrigued by its constant design evolution. (The page size and packaging change every year.) It’s the least designed of any of its L.A. brethren, with plenty of white space to let the work speak for itself. Snyder allows his artists considerable artistic freedom: The “installations”—six to eight pages of original art—appear without commentary and are introduced only by a brief interview.

Arkitip arrives encased in an elaborate plastic wrapper that contains small items—vinyl artist Kaws designed eight full-color trading cards for a 2001 issue; graffiti artist Todd James (REAS) created a porn-star air freshener for an issue in 2005—rendering every edition a collector’s item. Snyder, who publishes 1000 individually numbered copies of each issue, acts more as a curator than an editor. “I could never afford a Thomas Campbell painting or a Barry McGee piece,” he says. “But I could afford a $30 magazine, and in that way, it allows art fans of all economic backgrounds and ages to contribute to and be a part of the art world.”

The editors of ANP Quarterly would rather its readers disassemble each issue and tack the pages on the wall. Founded in 2005 by Fowler, Templeton, and Rose (also a contributing editor of Arkitip), the free magazine has a circulation of 20,000 and is distributed nationally in trendy boutiques, bookstores, and galleries. ANP, based in Costa Mesa, is funded by RVCA, a clothing line, but carries no advertising. (“I feel like we’re in a fortunate position,” Fowler says, “to be able to lose money.”) The first issue, a 48-page, 11"-by-17" paean to the connection between art and community, wasn’t even stapled together. “We wanted it to be a really intense object, to transcend the idea of a magazine,” Fowler says. “You can cut it up, you can hang up the pages, you can make stuff out of it. It’s like a gift.”

Each issue is packed with gifts: 16 revelatory pages on the late artist Margaret Kilgallen; 18 pages of original art from hus-band-and-wife team Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson; and 12 pages on Raymond Pettibon, offset by a four-page photo spread of the adorable attendees of the Rock & Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon. Each issue includes a “Work in Progress,” a portfolio of drawings from artists like Matt Leines and Os Gemeos that detail the evolution of a piece of art. Copies of the magazine disappear so fast that they routinely make the rounds on eBay, to the editors’ great distress. “It’s important to us that it’s not rare or exclusive at all,” Fowler says. “That’s critical. It should be accessible to anybody.”

Less a collector’s item than Arkitip or ANP Quarterly is Long Beach–based Anthem, which Dustin Beatty founded in 2002 to cover street art in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York in the mold of British style books The Face and I-D. Early on, Beatty gave space to people like Fairey and Templeton, but he soon tired of focusing exclusively on art. “The street art and urban culture magazine market, at this point, is so saturated, so vacuous, and so unbelievably trite and boring to me, I can’t deal with it,” he says. Besides, “You can’t really make money off of an art magazine.” So Anthem turned to fashion, where Hedi Slimane, Comme des Garçons, and Jean Paul Gaultier share space with a cover story on designer-director Mike Mills in a 2005 issue. Last spring, an issue themed “This is How We Do it” analyzed the business end of creativity, publishing interviews with director Michel Gondry and comic artist Dan Clowes.

Like ANP, Anthem favors clean, minimal design, rich full-page photos, and the occasional novelty typeface. Perfect bound and glossy like an underground version of Vogue, the magazine acts as a filter for Beatty’s and co-publisher Andreas Herr’s interests, rather than as a medium to showcase their artistic instincts. “We’re merely there to convey information,” Beatty says. It’s a mission opposite that of street artist Shepard Fairey (See Books, p. 106), the proprietor of Obey Giant Art, and Roger Gastman, editor of the defunct graffiti magazine While You Were Sleeping, who founded their sumptuous quarterly Swindle in 2004.

In Swindle, Fairey and Gastman capture key cultural moments from the past and present. A 2005 issue pairs a reflection on the life of L.A. gangsta rap pioneer Eazy-E with 12 pages of militant street art in Northern Ireland. The aged visages of Billy Idol and Steve Jones grimace on a more recent issue’s hot-pink-and-yellow cover; inside, Malcom McLaren muses on the cultural influences of his life next to a charming history of Davy Rothbart’s Found magazine.

Based in downtown Los Angeles and published under the moniker The New Traditionalists, Swindle is a stunning work of editorial design. The young staff of Fairey’s Studio Number One attacks each issue with greedy enthusiasm, creating an experimental playground of type and color. Swindle’s refined street-art aesthetic plays as big a role as the subject matter, down to the headlines, which look like stencils or hand-drawn letterforms and hark back to Fairey’s own street style. And the magazine’s hardcover binding encourages readers to display it proudly on a shelf. “We want something that people will keep, like a book,” Fairey says. “We don’t want them to throw it away after the pages get dog-eared.”

Fairey straddles the line between making art and making money by including enough fashion content to attract advertisers. “There is a tremendous pressure to have fashion, because that’s what [advertisers] think will help their brand,” he says. “We try to do it with as much merit as we can. If it gets to the point where we can’t sell enough ads putting out the magazine the way we want to, with the content we want to, I don’t want to do it.”

Swindle’s peers mostly toe that line, although Anthem has the most transparent business plan of the four. Arkitip, with zero fashion content, is flush with fashion advertising, and Snyder is expanding its commercial empire, offering limited-edition prints, posters, T-shirts, and even a painfully hip bag (splatter-painted with pastel colors) on its website. Even though Arkitip functions like a printed art gallery, it’s ANP Quarterly, unfettered with ads, typical magazine trappings, or promotional salesmanship from its patron RVCA, that truly feels like a piece of art. Of course, this result is much easier to achieve with complete financial backing.

At the heart of these artist-editors’ endeavors is the desire to communicate what they think is cool. And they face the same problems as artists anywhere—be it New York or Tokyo—which may be why they see their magazines as global, not local. Beatty doesn’t regard Anthem as a Los Angeles magazine; its fashion photography is shot in New York, Paris, and London. And although Fairey acknowledges that the glut of multi-hyphenated art-television-music-film types makes Los Angeles an easier place to work, Swindle also has a global perspective. Still, these editors seem to keep their eyes on a bigger prize, whether it’s money, credibility, or media immortality. And that might make their magazines more about L.A. than they’re willing to admit.

Wikis

My preliminary project for this master was about community and the power of networking. I put up a Forum where I posted all the different aspects connected to this where one of the themes I went in to was Wikis.
Wikis is an very interesting model here´s the description from Wikipedia.org, an online encyclopedia, the biggest and most known wiki.:
A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː][1]) is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content.[2] A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites, the first wiki (WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s.[3][4] Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.[5] Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is one of the best known wikis.[4]

Open-source wikis (such as Wikipedia) have been criticized for their reliability: certain individuals may maliciously introduce false or misleading content.[4] Proponents rely on their community of users who can catch malicious content and correct it. Wikis in general make a basic assumption of the goodness of people.[4]

Read more...

The Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth Catalog was a sizeable catalog published twice a year from 1968 to 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Its purposes were to provide education and "access to tools" in order that the reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested." According to Apple Computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs, the Catalog was a conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine.

The Catalog's development and marketing were driven by an energetic group of founders, primarily Stewart Brand(whose family was also involved with the project). Its outsize pages measured 11x14 inches (28x36 cm). Later editions were more than an inch thick. Its earliest editions were published by the Portola Institute, headed by Richard Raymond. In 1972, the catalog won the National Book Award, the first time a catalog had ever won such an award.[citation needed]


Steward Brand

Brand's publishing efforts were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology (as a field of study and an influence) to the emerging human awareness and to the future of humankind.

The Catalogs disseminated many of the ideas now associated with the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those of the counterculture and environmental movements. Later editions, plus descendant publications edited by Brand, circulated many innovative ideas during the 1970s-1990s.

A page from the catalog

This information is taken from Wikipedia. Here´s the rest of it