Distraction Culture

Is too much interaction possible?

Researching the idea of bluetooth dating, I came across this piece. Ignore the awful word "proximal" (what are technology thinkers doing to English?) and look at what Mark Granovetter (a man who has been a leader in thinking about social networks) says about the idea (of bluetooth dating).....

“Some worry that as these   technologies become more common, people will become overloaded with networking requests and start to ignore them.”   And Cameron Marlowe, a social networks researcher also at MIT warns that it would be a constant distraction. “You wouldn’t want to switch it off just in case.”

Indeed.

Distraction Live

Picture Carnaby Street yesterday - an unseasonably cold June day, pissing with rain. Standing on a corner is a man dressed as the devil, replete with black stubby horns, a tail and red face and tights. He has a stand with painted flames and the legend "Devil Brollies". He shouts "free umbrellas" at soggy passers by. A few incautiously take them, and of course walk off and open them up to shelter from the rain. The joke is that each one has a word written in large white letters on the black canopy, obvious only if you are behind the owner who is ignorant of it. The first says ANUS, the next TWAT, the third I see is ARSE. Of course - there's the bloke with the video capturing all this, presumably for TV. It occurred to me that no-one stops to look at a man with a large video camera these days. We're all at it, making content. Years ago, they'd have had to hide the cameraman in a van. Now he's just part of the street furniture because the whole world is a theatre of content.

Damn, I wish I'd been quicker with the camera phone.

The politics of media

Adbusters (Culture Jammers) is an interesting organisation worth taking a look at. It's a branch of the anti-globalisation movement who are particularly annoyed by advertising and branding, and take action over it - a sort of Naomi Klein Red Brigade. Some of the ideas are great. Some of the thinking woolly. Typical of the output is here where the subject is Media Environmentalism, a phrase I especially like as it is close to what Distraction Culture is about - but then it's partially spoiled with a "they are trying to manipulate us" approach - personally I just don't subscribe to conspiracy theories like this. The truth we face is caused by all our actions, not just a few wicked and manipulative companies.