I did a paper comparing two networks for Thinking About Networks. It was fun to write. I love this class.
I also uploaded a paper I wrote last semester for Red’s Class. It’s an interesting blast from the past. I can’t believe how much new stuff I’ve stuffed into my head since then.
A response to the rhetoric of weblog marketing… (plasticbag.org)
This is a great little rant from Tom Coates, the guy behind one of my favourite blogs.
My favourite bit is his description of people who go around shouting about how some new trend will be the end of the current order and then the path they go down from conference speaker to book deal to working for the companies they threatened.
For Clay’s class this week we read from Jane Abbate’s Inventing the Internet. It’s an interesting account of the early Internet and the personalities that helped to shape it. As with anything that gets really big (and I think I can safely say that the Internet is now “really big”) you often read accounts of the early days, when it was still all fresh and new and everybody knew each other. It’s kind of like hearing about the early rave scene – no matter how early you managed to find it, there was always somebody who was necking yokes listening to Orbital by a suburban roadside when you were still listening to heavy metal and sewing badges onto your clothes. Not that I ever did either thing, mind you.
Anyway it turns out that some guy helped make e-mail popular because he was in charge of budgets and he responded most quickly to people who contacted him that way. So the killer app was helped on its way by office brown nosing. Kind of as if people started giving one another massages at raves because their boss encouraged inter-employee fondling.
Two interesting links Clay gave us too (well for those who love to read about how by the time they came along the Internet wasn’t cool anymore):
Hobbes Internet Timeline
What Is the Internet?
I produce a news radio show on WNYU called Earshot.
This week’s episode was about the UN World Summit. I spoke to a blogger named Anup Shah.
For the first assignment I want to develop the idea that I worked on with the series of pictures I took for the first assignment. I took a series of 12 pictures during the course of my day. I didn’t appear in the pictures, but they represented things I would see as I went about that day. For the first project I want to use Morgan’s idea of doing the same thing with video – I want to shoot short 30 second to one minute scenes during a normal day. I will do them reasonably candidly – other than possibly using a clamp light to make sure the scene is lit, and positioning the camera so that something interesting is in view, I will just switch on the camera and record what is going on at a particular time during the day. I won’t appear in any of the shots, although other people will. I record sound, so that the viewer will “overhear” conversations.
My intention is to create a short piece of video that focuses on the ordinary parts of a particular day in a particular life.
For Persuasion this week we read the first half of Rushkoff’s Coercion: Why we listen to what “they” say. It’s a mighty fun read full of rhetorical tricks and little stories about mostly loathesome people doing vile things and then justifying it to themselves in ways that make them pathetic.
The bits about customer service and sales staff in shops reminded me of my few months working in a maternity shop in California and the things I was supposed to do. I was meant to greet everyone within 30 seconds of walking into a shop. The sinister side of making sure that a customer knows you know they are there never occurred to me before. I like to be acknowledged when I walk into a shop, but I do think that my feeling that it’s important to have someone say “hi” when you arrive started back then. I guess I was coerced.
The idea that customer service is the path of least resistance and is entirely about doing as little as possible to keep the customer happy while trying to get them to spend more money is one that’s very easy to believe. That said, I used to do all sorts of things in that maternity shop that I wasn’t meant to do, but that probably did increase sales and I only did them because I liked my regular customers, I like children, and I was bored. I used to play with their children while they shopped. I let the kids make a terrible mess throwing hangers and clothes about the store and drawing on till roll with pens from behind the counter. I used to walk crying babies up and down the shop, sometimes while their mothers had a sit down and bought nothing, sometimes they went to other shops. It was a bizarrely enjoyable job.
But no day was better than the day a man came in with his boyfriend looking to buy a maternity belly-supporting belt. Apparently he had a hernia, so I shouldn’t have found it so funny. But sod it, they thought it was pretty funny too. The herniated one was even walking around like a pregnant lady.
We also read The CIA’s Secret Manual on Interrogation. This is a bizarrely banal read. It talks about interrogation in a very matter-of-fact way that makes sense given how most of the tactics feature in every good episode of SVU. Munch and Ice T root around in some bins, Elliot and Olivia pull a Mutt and Jeff, a Nobody Loves You, and an All-Seeing Eye, and then the wrong guy goes to Attica and commits suicide.
My favourite technique described is the Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd where you ask someone a load of questions about “lofty topics” that they won’t know about and then hit them with some easy questions they might be able to answer. Apparently the lofty questions are things like the relation of the intelligence service to its government, but I prefer to think of them asking questions like “What is the relation of the mind to the soul?”, “Can a deed truly be considered good if it is done for pleasure?”, “What is beauty?” and refusing to believe the person when they say they don’t know the answer. It’s like a Monty Python sketch.
I’m also a fan of the Alice in Wonderland, where you confuse the subject by talking nonsense with weird intonation and asking bizarre questions that don’t make any sense. Basically it seems to involve playing with all of a persons expectations of spoken language and how it works. I can see that melting a person’s head pretty fast.
Finally we had to think of a rccent interaction where persuasion was involved. My example was of my recent experience in a supermarket where I foolishly admitted that I had a store card. I got this thing a year ago and I only agreed to get it because the person trying to get me to get it seemed so convinced that I was clearly some kind of reetard for not having one. I felt she must be such a simpleton not to realise why I wouldn’t want to fill in a bunch of forms to give a company a bunch of information about myself so that they could give me crappy discounts that wouldn’t anywhere near cover the loss of privacy. Anyway I felt bad for thinking that about her, so I signed up but never used the card. This time I admitted to having a card, why I’m not sure, but it was something in the repeated wondering questions that I wasn’t already a member of this wonderful club, so I admitted I was. The woman then wouldn’t let me go without trying to help me out by trying to find my details in the system, even though I told her I didn’t want her to.
It was a real testament to convincing your staff that they are helping their customers. This woman (and the one last year too) were so utterly convinced that I was missing out on a great thing by not having this stupid card that she went to great lengths to make sure I was getting my discount entitlements, even though I don’t want them.
So we had mixed results in the ratings in the first week of original programming in the Primetime game. Academia Erotica came last in its slot with only 16% of the audience and with 26% not watching. Ouch.
Coasting on the other hand did very well, getting 48% of the audience and winning its timeslot. Its competitors were admittedly rather weak. Still having a hit show did give us some bargaining power.
We managed to sell two news shows this week – Bobst Boy and The Illustrator. Coasting we sold to ABC as NBC weren’t offering us much for it.
Here are this week’s show summaries:
Coasting
Claire decides to keep quiet about Matthew’s underhanded dealings with Far-I Productions. In return she gets invited to a glamorous industry party. She gets some evil looks from her colleagues who weren’t so lucky. Beth invites herself, and the two head straight for the champagne cocktails. Later that evening she gets felt up by a coked-up Simon Cowell, who is not happy to take no for an answer and walks away with the threat to make things hard for her at work. But does he even know who she is? And who are the crazy couple hanging around with Matthew?
One liner:
Look what I found on my ass: Claire has a close encounter with Simon Cowell
The Illustrator
In the isolated coastal town of Omey, Massachussetts a man emerges from the sea late one Fall evening. He doesn’t speak. Or at least he won’t. He is carrying no identification. He gives no clue to his origin. It is not clear whether he is sane or crazy, intelligent or simple. He possesses a prodigious talent for drawing – perhaps he is an exiled artist? One man in the town agrees to shelter him until it can be determined whence he came. The townspeople are suspicious and hostile apart from his host and one young girl. Starring Jeremy [I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten that guy’s surname], and Dakota Fanning.
One liner:
A man with no history, a girl without suspicion, a town in trouble
Bobst Boy
The legend of Bobst Boy lives on in this mystery thriller series that
features the library hero fighting for his survival in his unusual
living circumstances and for answers to NYU’s biggest secrets.
Witness the innovative ways Bobst Boy, Steve Stanzak,, make
Greenwich’s most grotesque building Bobst Library home, while he finds
means to survive not paying dorm housing. But also join this young
Sherlock Holmes in his greater mission: to uncover NYU’s darkest and
deepest secrets through clues millions of books on the premise provide
him and to solve the student suicide mysteries of deceased students
whose unhappy ghosts he encounters, sometimes befriends and often
psychoanalyzes.
This week, watch Bobst Boy make a clever escape from library guards
with his backhanded knowledge of the library and help from his
depressed, but cunning phantom friends.
Now we’ll just have to see what the public likes. I’ll have to look at the ratings some more because they seem stranger in places. Sex-based shows did well on Wednesday but not later in the week. Perhaps the saturation just bored people.
Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back – New York Times
Interesting article in the New York Times about how Science Museums are training their staff to deal more effectively with Creationists who hector them.
