10 Membranes
12/05/2011
» Blog post - are enhanced ebooks dead?
“Having whipped themselves into a frenzy of excitement over enhanced ebooks, publishers seem to be taking a hard, cold shower of reaction at these amorphous and strange entities. At last month’s London Book Fair, Bloomsbury’s Evan Schnittman poured ice on the froth, claiming that enhanced ebooks were a fad that would never take off. Novels are novels, books are books, text is text, and that is what people want, not a bleeping plethora of quasi-pointless multimedia guff bolted on with a digital screwdriver to validate an over-exuberant RRP.”
O rly?
Link posted at 13:54
06/05/2011
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12/04/2011
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30/03/2011
Harlem, from Morningside Heights earlier today.
Photo posted at 08:01
11/03/2011
Link posted at 05:27
10/03/2011
The spectrum of user experience.
Photo posted at 17:49
The chimney of the India Mill in Darwen, near Blackburn in Lancashire. At the time of construction in the 1850s it was the largest and most expensive mill chimney in the country, towering, as it still does, over the local area. What impresses me about this structure is not only its bizarre gigantism, madly out of proportion to the mill itself and the town, but the care and curiosity in the design, and moreover the brash Victorian self confidence of the whole thing. This is the engineering, design and organisational bombast of a superpower.
Photo posted at 14:09
03/03/2011
» Mervyn King Admits Validity of the Concept of False Consciousness
Not in so many words, but effectively. Here is what he says: the City is responsible for the crash, and the ensuing bank bailouts; these, between them are responsible for the recession and the parlous government finances; these mainly effect people who had nothing to do with what caused them; he is surprised there isn’t more anger about this. How could this be? That hoary old Marxist nugget, false consciousness, basically seems about the only workable solution as to why the anaesthetized population of Britain refuses to adequately express anger at what amounts to a massive screwing over by the wealthy on everyone else. It is really, truly extraordinarily shocking when you think about it, but everyone has been drinking the free-market monetarist Kool Aid for so long that they cannot see their own interests, but rather endorse and collude with the minority interests that work against their own. What is fascinating is just how obvious this contradiction has become, underscoring how entrenched and immoveable an ideological strangehold the contemporary false consciousness is. We live in discourses of wealth and freedom that are quite clearly lies – the rich have gotten much richer over the past 30 years, everyone has seen income stagnate – yet people have, in that classic move pioneered by the American Dream, identified their interests with a faint possibility, an illusory carrot, rather than with what is really in their interests, to wit, a more rational distribution of wealth. The only other factor might be trends noted by the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Zygmunt Bauman. Bourdieu introduced the idea of precarization, the making precarious of people’s positions as a means of social control, expressed perhaps most perfectly in the shifting of power within labour relations in favour of capital. Bauman extends and expands this in his idea of liquid modernity, a place where relations of all kinds lose their fixity and become mobile. He argues that under modernity capital and labour were geographically embedded with one another; they always knew that settlements and accommodations had to be reached as they were not going away and would need an ongoing relationship to function at all. In liquid modernity this changes. Where labour remains tied to location, capital has become innately mobile, and uses the constant threat of withdrawal as a means of control, shattering the symmetry and destroying the necessary accord, and so stacking the cards entirely in its favour such that it can do as it pleases. The locationally grounded is trumped by the locationally loosed. Bauman was writing this in about 2000; what is incredible is quite how naked this process has become. It is the constant explicit threat: if you don’t like we what we are doing, or make any steps against us, we will leave. The divorce between the locationally tied masses and the elite mobility of capital is quite openly outlined, the gun of tax haven decamping is an ever present one held hard against the head of the populace. This is contemporary capitalism. Mervyn King is a Marxist sociologist.
Link posted at 14:58
02/03/2011
The Architecture of News International
The above picture is of the new Sky studios in Osterley. This is a £233 million state-of-the-art media production facility housing the principal operations of, BBC excepted, the major media powerhouse of the UK. What a building it is; not so much a building as a factory, a stylistic echoed in the other great fortress of News International, Wapping, a vast complex somewhere between a Soviet steel works and an oil tanker, beached amidst warehouse conversions and tenements. The building is of course resonant as the place that broke Fleet Street and the print unions.
The architecture of News International is one that squarely situates the media business as one of industrial, as opposed to post-industrial, mass production. These are not glass and steel palaces, light, open and democratic, not distributed presences, but brute, oppressively functional (unlike say the functionalism of Rogers and co) monoliths, de-contextualised, not so much designed as sat down by unthinking alliances of accountants and engineers, statements of shock and awe in power terms. Great factories are monuments to economic prowess - think the Salts Mill in Bradford, or the Ford and GM factories in Detroit, in their pomp the greatest centres of industrial production in the world, or the armouries of Krupp in the Ruhr, Magnitogorsk rising from the Russian plains or today we might think of the sprawling factory state of Foxconn in Shenzen, one plant alone encompassing up to 450k workers. Factories are nodes of raw economic output; News International does not produce content; it manufacturers it.
This building is one that fires the imagination. It is almost comically dystopian, futuristic, menacing; the sealed cube of an impenetrable global network of unparalleled influence and inscrutability. By design or not, News International has ended up with architecture that reveals how digitisation doesn’t change the industrial footprint of mass media to the extent we might expect, and also reveals the way in which the company, but probably not the employees, internalises its own mass, role and function, and also, and most wonderfully, plays into the hands of all who are suspicious of the Great Murdoch Empire.
Photo posted at 12:45
01/03/2011
Scribd Cribs. That is, Techcrunch TV meets Cribs in the Scribd offices. Not sure what to make of this.
Video posted at 17:32
