Meanwhile #005
This week: sooner or later everything turns into television.
The outlaw Instagrammers of New York City.
“There has long been a subculture of so-called ‘urban explorers’ who have made a game of accessing off-limits places. But Deas and the other Instagrammers distinguish themselves from these mostly older, more cerebral trespassers. ‘They'll go to the top of the bridge and touch it and be like, Wow, this architecture!,’ Deas says, a little dismissively. Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. But the outlaw Instagrammers are better-positioned to thrive in post-Giuliani, post-Facebook New York than old-school graffiti writers: transgressive enough to be cool, but innocuous enough to amass a huge following without getting hunted down by the NYPD.”
The Future of the Future, JG Ballard's 1977 essay for Vogue, successfully predicted the now.
“Far more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene, above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man — the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star … All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate starring role.”
All the feels – on the morphology of reaction GIFs.
“Once a reaction has been identified, codified into an emoticon or emotion GIF, and then widely used and shared, it can often start to develop a morphological short form in language as users make more fluid reference to it in text. Based on the shared understanding of these terms within a speech community these phrases could become lexicalized into compounds. This appears to be happening with ‘facepalm’ and its fellow gestural neologisms, which has gone from a shorthand phrase such as ‘*face palm*’(which literally describes the gesture and might be appended to text), to the compound ‘face-palm’ (sometimes fully lexicalized into a single word ‘facepalm’) which may be used metaphorically as part of the utterance. … These compounds can gain traction outside the subculture from which it originated, and might also jump from the sphere of the written word into spoken language. These new gestural compounds such as face-palm, head-desk, side-eye, table-flip can already be observed in mainstream news publications in productive noun and verb forms.”
Soon or later, all of this appears on Portlandia.
“Each tech sketch serves as a kind of worst-case scenario for all the products and services that touch our lives. The owners of a feminist bookstore attempt to confront a negative Yelp reviewer in real life. A sharing economy startup implodes spectacularly. Patton Oswalt plays a man who becomes famous for his witty Evite responses. The city buys a 3D printer, as if this might be the answer to all civic problems — ‘Portland is finally a world-class city!’”
Back in 1995, Eye asked: should you be on the internet?
“Most new users find themselves initially addicted, forget that they are paying for a phone call and sometimes even forget that they have commitments in the real world. This reveals the immaturity of the technology. We don’t use the telephone because it is there, and are rarely even aware of it as a technology at all. When we are able to say the same about the internet, then it will have become truly useful.”
That is all.