Archive | Culture

25 November 2008 ~ 4 Comments

The global cultural ghetto

Books Culture Music

The Criterion Collection —the preeminent distributor of classic films on DVD—launched a beautiful new website recently. Among its many features, it allows you to watch films online for $5… but only if you live in North America. This is incredibly frustrating! All these amazing movies, available instantly… not!

If you live in or near a major metropolitan area (or near a university) in the US or Canada, you probably already have some way to watch Au Revoir Les Enfants or The Thief of Baghdad. Those of us living in cultural backwaters can’t enjoy such luxuries. The Panama City metro area (where I am) has more than a million inhabitants, but our sole access to decent cinema consists of a single Blockbuster store with a few shelves of the usual suspects: a bit of Fellini, some Kurosawa, some Hitchcock, etc. We have no art house theaters, only mall cineplexes blasting the latest superhero fluff. And as poor as our movie selection is, it’s still much broader than the music available: basically if you don’t like merengue, plena, or 1980s discount-rack soft rock you’re shit out of luck.

Why is Criterion shutting me out? For that matter, why can’t I legally buy MP3s or movies from Amazon’s online store, when I can order from them a slab of plastic containing the same bits and have it shipped to me, using up resources and crapping on the environment? Perhaps the argument is that not many people here are interested in this stuff. True enough, but so what? How much more can it cost these companies to open these digital distribution channels? Is it more than it costs to install and maintain the filters that keep people like me from becoming customers?

The internet was supposed to level the playing field for those of us that live in culturally isolated regions. But now that technology has matured to the point where cultural artifacts—music, movies, TV shows, and books—can be purchased, distributed, and experienced online, companies are doing their damnedest to maintain the old structures intact. The net result: global access to culture is constrained to a bizarro long tail, a ghetto defined by corporate lawyers and accountants.

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15 March 2008 ~ 0 Comments

Future Perfect

Culture

I travel the world vicariously through Jan Chipcase.

Jan Chipcase - Seattle 0077

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25 September 2006 ~ 0 Comments

Architecture as Cultural and Location Grounding

Culture Design Globalization

Le Corbusier SmThomas Vander Wal has been traveling a lot, and he’s finding that the local architecture can have important effects on his feelings of connectedness.

This is interesting to me because one of the hallmarks of the much maligned International Style of architecture is a trans-national vocabulary that is rooted more in fantasies about the machine age rather than in local context. Much of the design work we do online follows similar rules that hint at a global style (or styles), and results in a homogeneousness that is meant to convey “that we, too, can design like North Americans”. Here’s an example: an article by a Russian developer that proposes a categorization of different web UI styles, all based on designs for sites for US-based companies, presumably for replication by other designers.

Perhaps more culturally-aware design can help bring a feeling of rootedness to websites, much like culturally-aware architecture can for cities. How should we approach this, when we’re being sold on the notion of “global commerce online”?

22 September 2006 ~ Comments Off

OneWebDay

Culture Design Random Notes

Wow, what a great idea: a day devoted to celebrating the web, modeled after earth day.

I remember the first time I saw the web, about 12 years ago. There’d been articles in the new magazines about this amazing web thing that was happening in the US, and I was incredibly anxious to get into it. I’d seen the Internet at the university, but only email and Gopher; this web thing seemed to be a completely different ballgame. Much more intuitive. Graphical. Interactive, in a way that far surpassed the other Internet services. And, most important: democratic—I could not only navigate it; I could easily be a player too.
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When I finally sat in front of a web browser and started navigating “for real” (as opposed to fantasizing about it in the glossies) everything around me—my day-to-day life, my professional ambitions, my relationship with other people—got sucked into a strange white light, a limbo where nothing else mattered except my brain, my eyes, the screen before me, and the telephone line that was now connecting me to millions of people far, far away. It was immanence. I remember thinking: “this is what other people would refer to as a religious experience”. And also: “this is how the first person who saw a book felt”.

I was sure of one thing: this thing was completely new; I hadn’t seen or experienced anything like it before. It was the library of Babel, a university, a crowded convention hall. It was a game parlor, it was saucy and wild, it was a trip back to my childhood. And it was in my room.

It was the summation of all that I felt was important, and I knew my life was forever changed. On the spot I decided to give up my career as an architect (“brick and mortar”) to devote my professional life to this medium. That first day I surfed the web for about 48 hours straight, leaving the computer to take care of basic meatspace needs.

I’ve never looked back.

So thank you to Tim Berners-Lee and all the other people responsible for creating the web. Let’s remember what it was like before the web existed; let us not take it for granted. And above all, let’s do our part to make sure that our little corners of the web add value, beauty, and intelligence to the world.

06 September 2006 ~ Comments Off

China Design

Culture Design Globalization

China DesignAn interesting project hosted by the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (KHB), tasks students from diverse disciplines with producing designs for another culture, in this case China.

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