Comments

I have to write this fast so please excuse any grammatical errors.

The AVClub is revamping their commenting functionality. I think this is a good idea. I've observed an interesting commenting phenomenon on AVClub: basically they always start out irrelevant or leet-y (firsties are quite popular). Then the conversation organically returns to the article that everyone's commenting on. Finally, it returns to irrelevant internet memes.

Anyway, one of the proposed changes is requiring a registration in order to comment. This is good for a number of reasons, like filtering riff-raff, building a solid core of readers, and making comments more transparent.

And I'm envious of this functionality. At times, I wish this was present in "real-life". Imagine having the ability to stop someone from making a completely asinine comment before they say it to you because they're not registered. "Sorry, you need to register an account with me before you can make a comment." This person would need to provide their full name, email address, age, etc before saying something to me.

I think life would drastically improve if this were the case. Maybe not though. Just a thought.

I heard it on a commercial

This is probably the worst thing that could happen to a musician or a band. Your dream has come true and your band is picking up speed. You get a record deal. Music videos are made. And then you get the offer to have one of your songs featured in a commercial. Depending on who the commercial is for, the money could be quite enticing. However, this is a double-edged sword. If your song is featured in a commercial, it will reach a much wider audience and get you more listeners, more ticket-buyers. But the song will also forever (for at least for a while) be associated with the product or company. And for some reason, this really affects me. I hate hearing bands I like in commercials. It ruins it for me. And I feel like it ruins the band as well.

This song by Freelance Whales was recently featured in a Starbucks commercial. Sure, the band now has a lot more fans, but at what cost? They're the Starbucks band. They're music will be associated with terrible corporate nonsense. Starbucks uses the song to give itself some authenticity, a trait held sacred by the indie music community and completely misunderstood by corporations. Hell, I still think about Volkswagon every time I listen to "Pink Moon" by Nick Drake and that commercial came out about ten years ago.

I know some music communities feel my pain for for a different reason. When the first trailer for the film Sucker Punch came out, it featured "Panic Switch" by Silversun Pickups which was relatively unknown at the time. In the comments section for the YouTube video of the trailer, there are a lot of responses from users flaming others for liking song just because of the trailer. These devout fans believe that enjoying a band requires some kind of rite of passage, either by seeing them in concert, scouring the internet for them and happening across them, or some other alternative discovery method.

And it's important to note that these bands aren't corporate shills. Freelance Whales didn't sell out because they're song is in a Starbucks commercial. They deserved to be paid for their work like anyone else but their identity might be in trouble.

IA Education in the US

Wurman's vision of information architecture has not come to fruition. This could have been because his vision was made in the 1970s and he couldn't predict the socio-technical innovations that have come to pass since then (i.e., the Internet). His vision of IA was backed by a elements of traditional architecture and graphic design. Those elements are still visible in today's notion of information architecture (wayfinding, information design) but as time passed, the field has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Now, concepts from library science, computer science, graphic design, cognitive science, and psychology are at the core of information architecture.

Yet despite the interdisciplinary-ness of IA, it is almost exclusively taught in library science programs. University of Baltimore and Kent State offer master's programs in information architecture, but they are the only two of which I am aware. More often than not, library schools are offering courses and programs in information architecture. Why is that? Information architects generally work in environments like ad agencies or creative firms yet are educated in libraries. It doesn't connect. Geologists aren't educated in music halls. Why should information architects be educated in libraries?

Information architecture is an obscure field, at least from my own experience from talking about it with friends and family. I've only met a few people who are familiar with the term; most people requires some kind of explanation. This doesn't bother me but perhaps if IA was taught in more visible departments (computer science, fine arts, psychology, etc), it would be a more pervasive and understood field.

The Ever-Popular Cloud

What would happen if I wrote the next great American novel on Blogger? Do I own the rights to it? Or does Google (who owns Blogger)? All the information I've published on Blogger goes to Google servers in remote and secret locations. What would stop them from taking my novel and publishing it and reaping the benefits? This is a problem with cloud computing. My information and content "goes up into the cloud" but I don't own "the cloud". The cloud is a property of Google and they let me use it. Cloud computing is extraordinarily convenient. If I need something on another computer, I can just email it to myself and bam, I can download it whenever I want, where ever I am, as long as there is a computer with Web access.

The cloud is addicting. That is something we say all the time: "I'm addicted to [insert technology or digital product]." But I don't think we really are, not like the addiction of drugs which can fundamentally change our biology (although, this may be true of technology as well). I think technology gives the illusion of agency; it makes us feel like we're in control. And we like that. But we're not in control. Google owns this blog. They own every word of it, despite the fact that my name is on the blog and I write everything and I can open it and write whenever I want. This is not my blog. None of the photos on my Facebook account are mine; none of my tweets are mine. However, I do control my online portfolio, mitchmalone.net. I own the server, I own the domain. But I don't think that's why I control it. There must be more to it.

The truly disheartening notion about this lack of agency is how companies can shape us while we use their products. We use Facebook because we like to connect and share things with our friends. Facebook claims that is what it is there for. Have you ever wondered why there is no "dislike" button? I think it's because Facebook is a marketing tool more so than a social networking site. Facebook doesn't want to lose advertising dollars because 90,000 users dislike Coca-Cola. Again, we claim we have control over the digital products we use but I'm convinced we have less than we think. All 500 million users of Facebook could sign a petition to add a dislike button, but it will never happen; Facebook would fail as a business if that happened.

We are distracted by an illusion of control, a notion that we are connecting and sharing with friends, when really we are simply a big focus group, supplying organizations with galaxies of information to help them sell more shit to us.

TV Bachelor

I'm watching the new season of The Bachelor which features Brad Womack, a dude who didn't fall in love via game show three years ago. You see this is Brad's second attempt on the show. During season 11, Brad let the last two remaining girls go and he left alone. He says that he went home and became a broken man. He asks, "How could I not have found somebody?" Indeed. How could it be that on a game show designed to surround one guy with 12 or so gorgeous, nearly infallible women, all of whom are automatically in love with him from the start, and he doesn't get to, you know, have one of them? It's a shame.

Brad Womack isn't really a bad guy. I'm sure he does have issues with commitment (as about 99% of American males do). I'm sure he really does want to find someone, to fall in love, and to self-actualize. This show is just another example of reality TV reshaping the entire human landscape that makes up the contestants. I mean, there is a shot where Womack is talking about how his stoicism and manly physique are a facade and the B-Roll cuts to him flexing his pecks while walking shirtless through a park!

Here's another weird thing about reality TV: no one ever acknowledges the fact that they are on a reality TV show, at least not anything overt. When the girls see Brad, they are shocked. One even slaps him. They question if he's really changed, if he's ready to commit. But what none of them ask is, "Why would you let him back on the show? Why did you choose him as the next Bachelor?" And that's a fair question but those 4th wall-breakers are strictly forbidden. No one would ask that because the answer would invariably be horrible.

Ironically, one contestant, a recent divorcee, is discussing her distaste for the dating scene because "everyone plays games". You realize you're going on a game show, yes? The show is manipulating in the best way: it manipulates the audience and the contestants, especially the psychological mindjob on Brad. I mean here's a guy who couldn't decide on true love on a game show, goes to therapy for three years, and then the show gets him back for more. I'm wondering how much they paid off his therapist so he would endorse the decision to return to the show.

The Best Response

At the end of Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman, there is a Book Club section that invites readers to come up with the best responses to some embarrassing, illegal, or career-ending crises. So here are my best responses.

The best response to being caught shoplifting

"No, I did not pay for these and I don't plan to. I suppose that makes me a bad person in this modern society that everyone lives in, but I disagree. I mean take a look around, we're living in a completely mediated world that is entirely removed from any type of natural process. Coupled with this fake world is the pressure to buy stuff. Copious amounts of stuff, most of which we don't need. Like what I stole. I mean think about what makes someone successful; it's all material possessions. A house, money, a BMW, sharp suits, watches, jewelry, hard-wood floors, brass cufflinks, 3D HDTVs the size of a wall, ivory elephant tusks, Brinks Home Security, private security, six airbags, first-class tickets, Apple devices, filet mignon, Criterion collection DVDs, and you know stuff like that. It's all bullshit. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of living in this kind of world with these values. So yeah, I took it. But I did it as a form of nonviolent protest against a world that is actively trying to oppress me and I don't think, you know, you should report this."

The best response to forgetting your best friend's birthday

"First off, I understand if you're upset. I'm your best friend; I know you. And it was a pretty crappy thing to do, to forget your day of birth. But I think we have a great opportunity. We have the opportunity to take this unpleasant moment and turn it into a moment of growth. A moment of growth for our relationship. You know, you tie a rope around a tree and, you know, it becomes a part of the tree, er...Okay, I'm not sure if that really applies to this but I think that analogy kind of works. Anyway, listen, you can get mad that I forgot or we can both concede to being human and grow. I think that would be the best thing in the world for both of us right now."

The best response to hidden video footage featuring employees of an independent franchise of your restaurant chain spitting and defiling food for customers. 

"It's appalling. It's a shame. I mean, honestly, this is a perfect example of just one of the pitfalls of capitalism. It's in a kind of a roundabout way but this is what happens when we just try to make as much money as possible. I mean, it's their store, for all intents and purposes, not ours. But because our name's on the front and on the menus, we now have to defend an entire corporation because some knuckleheads want to spit in people's food for kicks. Although, I can't complain because if these kinds of things didn't happen, we wouldn't need a PR department and I'd be out of a job. But again, it's just capitalism gone wrong. Since they are their own enterprise that uses our products and signage, we have to clean up the messes. But we can't monitor them, so we just have to hope that they care as much as we do about the service, the product, and the customers. And by "we" I mean corporate." 

Failure in Household Appliances

The image on the left is a depleted air-freshener I found in my friend's bathroom. It's the kind that you plug in and set to release a puff of fragrance at a regular interval. This model had five frequencies but I found the thing to be really confusing. Had it been full, I might have been able to test it but it was empty and so I was just left with elusive knowledge in the world, as Donald Norman would say.

The image may be a bit difficult to see on some screens but the "interface" of the thing has a right-turning mechanism set with the numbers one through five that I'm assuming is used to set the frequency of release. But above is a 'minus' and 'plus' sign with a gradient symbol that increases in slope as it approaches the plus side. The desired frequency is then placed at the notch above and below the turning mechanism. The confusing part though is that the numbers in the turning mechanism start at five and go down. So you immediately see that the five is above the minus and the four is above the plus. Well that doesn't make any sense. Does that mean that five is the lowest setting? Or does five refer to the time (possibly in minutes?) that the frequency is set? If that's true then this device might make more sense because at one puff every minute is more than one puff every five minutes. Still, it leaves the user with something to think about before using it.

If we removed the turning mechanism (which I'm assuming is disk-shaped) and flattened it out so the numbers didn't wrap around, the numbers descend from five to one but the minus to plus signs don't match up. It just doesn't make sense.

A rendering of the unwrapped turning mechanism.
This device implies that five is less than one.

But maybe this design flaw isn't as big a deal as I'm making it out to be. It's not that it's just an air-freshener. It's not that it only costs maybe $4. It's that (at least when it's full) you have a degree of flexibility in failure. If I misuse the air-freshener, nothing bad will happen, even if I fail to operate it fifty times. Of course it wouldn't take me that long, but there are no consequences to misusing it or it not figuring it out. And I'd probably figure it out within five tries, as it doesn't have a tremendous amount of options. But this safe rate of failure isn't so for everything. Brakes on a car must be easier to understand and use than, say, the radio or air-conditioning/heating. If you misuse the brakes, or can't figure them out, it could spell your death. If you misuse the air-conditioning, you'll just be hot for a while. And chances are, you'll figure it out minutes later. 

In short, some devices might irritate us, but it's not a big deal if they do. Others however, need to make sense the instant you see it, or the consequences could be dire.