Category Archives: Culture: new media

Hsiao p’in

What’s a hsiao p’in, you ask? In China in the 1500’s, a number of writers began to write short prose pieces that were casual, spontaneous, informal. Reacting in part against the longer, cool, formal writing of the preceding century, they developed a shorter, warmer, individualistic style of prose writing. For subject matter, they wrote about their travels, they wrote about paintings and literature, they wrote little character sketches and breif biographies, and they wrote many pieces that are essentially personal-sounding letters meant to be read by a wider audience.

Sounds a lot like some people who write blogs. Last month in this blog, I said I tend to write for this blog as if I were writing a letter to someone. I’ve also done a little travel writing for this blog, and I do write about arts and culture. Maybe what I’m doing is a kind of Western hsiao p’in.

Nor is this kind of writing limited to blogs. My sister Jean, a writer, has been working with her husband Dick, a photographer, on exhibits that combine Dick’s photographs with short prose pieces by Jean–not unlike Chinese colophons for paintings. Gary Snyder, know for his poetry, has published a number of books of short prose pieces, some of which read like hsiao p’in — maybe intentionally so, since Snyder is well-read in Far Eastern prose and poetry.

I know I’m tired of overly ambitious long novels. I’m also tired of overly ambitious contemporary American poetry, which mostly sounds overly mannered to me. I like reading (and writing) informal, unconventional, short prose. Not that I want to call this a trend. Nor do I want to have a trendy name for it. Let’s just read these things, and write this way, and leave it at that.

For more on Chinese hsiao p’in, I’ve been reading Vignettes form the Late Ming: A Hsiao-p’in anthology, trans. intro. Yang Ye, University of Washington, Seattle, 1999.

So that’s what we’re doing here…

As I noted on November 9, Seth Goodin is my favorite marketing guru at the moment, and now I’ve started reading his blog. In a post from November 30 titled “Welcome to the Hobby Economy,” Goodin tells us why he keeps a blog:

Economists don’t know what to do about it.

It’s hard to measure, hard to quantify and a little odd to explain.

More and more people are spending more and more time (and money) on pursuits that have no payoff other than satisfaction.

“Why should you have a blog?” they ask. “How are you going to make any money?”…

Of course, economists don’t really worry about this. They understand perfectly well that economics is able to easily explain that human beings pursue things that satisfy them.

“Hobby economy” sounds a little pejorative. Still, I think it’s a good concept that could also be applied to religion. Most human beings pursue religion because it satisfies them. You don’t have to make money at it. I happen to make money doing religion (although if I went back to sales, I could make a lot more money than I do now), but I do things like keep this blog, which brings in no money at all.

When we think about marketing religion, all too often we only think about hiring an ad agency and developing a major media campaign. That’s thinking of religion in terms of the business model of marketing. If we start thinking about religion in terms of the hobby economy, how would we do marketing? We’d invite people to join the regular meetings of our hobby group. We’d do things like keep a blog to promote our hobby, or have conferences to entice new people into our hobby. Any time anyone asked about our hobby we’d talk about it with passion and enthusiasm.

Not that we should abandon the ad agencies and the major media campaigns. Not that religion really fits into the “hobby economy” model. But it’s getting me thinking about marketing in new ways….

For “dog people”

Some of us are cat people, and like LitterBox Cam. But I know some of you out there are dog people. For you, the place to go might be the Daily Oliver, with daily pictures of Oliver the Weimeraner. Best part of this blog: the comments from dog lovers around the world.

Comparisons with William Wegman’s photography may seem inevitable, but are not really warranted. It’s a blog, not postmodernly ironic fine art photography.

However, differences between the Daily Oliver and LitterBox Cam might reveal some differences between dog lovers and cat lovers. Dog lovers want lots of interaction with other dog lovers, so dog lover Web sites allow comments. Cat lovers are more individualistic and don’t even notice the absence of a comment feature. The cat lovers have a Web site where you can click on the Web cam image to create a small remote window that you can place in a corner of your screen, where the cats can come and go as they please while you do your work on the computer. The dog lovers have a Web site that only comes when you call it. Yes, I have pushed this far enough, so I will stop.

Panda cam

Yup, the National Zoo in Washington DC now has a PandaCam video feed on their Web site. They’re getting so much traffic, visits are limited to 15 minutes, and even at that it took us two tries to get access to PandaCam. That’s OK, though, because while you wait they have entertaining daily written updates you can read that tell what Tai, the baby panda, is up to today.

Best baby panda photo, however, is at today’s story on Tai at BBC News. Click on the photo to enlarge it, so you can see Tai’s expression. Way too cute. And, well, life-affirming.

The cultural impact of rootkits

Turns out, the problems with Dad’s fastest computer is an evil rootkit in the Windows partition. He’s not sure if the rootkit came from one of Sony-BMG’s CDs, with their ill-conceived rootkit designed to stop people from copying the CDs. But wherever Dad’s rootkit came from, it made me want to learn more about rootkits and related malware so I can protect the computers I use — and if you don’t care about the gory details, you can skip to the cultural commentary in the last paragraph of this post.

First, Dad pointed out that if you run a recent version of Windows on your computer, you can protect yourself from rootkits fairly simply. Set up a domain user account, and do just about everything from that user account, because when you’re logged in as a user account Windows will prompt you for an administrator password most times when there is an attempt to modify operating system files. (Fortunately, the Windows machines at church are already set up that way.)

But even if you’ve set up your computer that way, you have no reason to be smug. As Larry Selzer points out in a column over at eWeek, any computer user can get prompted to enter their administrator password at the behest of malware because…

…normal users will probably see this situation as similar to all the other times they installed software. Every now and then they need to provide these credentials and they’ll just do it this time too….

…so we’ll just have to be even more suspicious, er, careful.

Second, what to do about my Mac? Mac users are not quite as safe from rootkit-type malware as we’d like to think, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog. And Adam over at the blog “Emergent Chaos”, writes:

…while the default user is in the “admin” group, the admin group is not extremely powerful…. Often, to install software, you need to type your password. That’s because the admin group is not powerful enough for some important install types. Usually. For some install types. Not other times. And that ‘not other times’ will be the path that attackers use. It’s the path that you use dragging apps from a dmg (disk image) to /Applications.

So I’m making sure I use the Mac only from within a user account, unless absolutely necessary. And I’m trying to remember to never, never, never type in that administrator password unless I really know why I’m being prompted for it. And I’ll just have to be even more suspicious, er, careful.

For now, Dad is running his infected computer primarily using the Linux partition, since he has to meet a deadline using the software in that partition. Eventually he will have to completely erase the hard drive, and re-install operating systems in both partitions, along with all his applications and data files. We talked about safe computing, and Dad’s future strategy will be to use an older, slower computer (with no critical files on its hard drive) to access email and the Web; the fast computer will be reserved for his research and consulting work.

To my mind, this whole Sony rootkit debacle raises an interesting cultural point. I have had to learn way more about rootkits than I wanted to know. Computers are still not the mainstream, foolproof consumer goods the manufacturers would have us believe. You still have to be something of a geek to use them — and you have to be willing and able to hire a real geek on a regular basis to take care of the really bad problems. In short, in spite of the fact that something over half of U.S. households have a computer, computers are nowhere near as mainstream as telephones or TVs (I mean, have you ever heard of a telephone geek, or a TV geek?), and seem unlikely to become that mainstream for some time to come.

Just for fun

I’m a big fan of Free Range Studios. They’re the folks who created two of my favorite online videos, Meatrix and (Grocery) Store Wars. Now Emma M. sends me links to a two online animations created by Free Range Studios. Neither one of these is as well-conceived as the first two videos, but they’re still fun and worth a quick look….

Victoria’s Dirty Secret

Conan the Barbarian vs. Kindergarten Cop

Maybe it’s like this:

Now there are many different kinds of blogs, and they are written for many different purposes. But I’ve been thinking that this blog is more like writing letters than it is like any other literary genre.

Twenty years ago, when the Internet was barely heard of and I was still using a Wang word processor and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I wrote lots and lots of letters. Long letters that went on for pages and pages, that I wrote by hand or typed. Letters in which I wrote about philosophy and daily minutiae and books I’d read and art (I was kind of an art student) and the state of society and God knows what else. Long, rambling letters that received long, rambling, fascinating, intricate replies from a far-flung network of friends and acquaintances.

Blogging, at least my kind of blogging, feels a lot like letter-writing used to feel: long rambling missives going out to a far-flung network of friends and acquaintances (and complete strangers, who don’t feel like strangers) about religion and philosophy and Big Ideas and art and culture and yes those little things that happen to me day-to-day that really aren’t worth writing about but somehow seem to capture a drop of the essence of life.

The most fun I’ve yet had blogging was this past summer when my older sister and I drove from her house in Indiana here to eastern Massachusetts, and we both wrote daily in our blogs about the things that happened to us along the way, knowing that our family and friends would read what we’d written, and then reading each other’s blog and talking about what we had written while we were driving and then stopping somwhere and writing some more. Our blogs were not online journals. Not journals, because we wrote knowing that other people would read each post as we wrote it; not journals, but more like letters, the kind of letters that you would read yourself, and then lend to friends or read out loud to your family; that kind of letter.

So if anyone ever says to you, Letter-writing is a dying no a dead art — you can look wise and say, Ah that may be true and may be not. And you can think of blogs you might know that are like letters only better because you can immediately jot your thoughts and feelings right there on the blog-letter, and then go back to your own blog-letter and write a long, rambling, intensely personal and interesting reply that will be read and re-read and passed on to a widening circle of friends and acquaintances and complete strangers who suddenly are no strangers any longer; and so the conversation goes on.

Digital citizens

BBC online news has been doing a good series of articles on “digital citizens.” The articles touch on people who are creating interesting internet content, including a podcaster, a blogger, a do-it-yourself DJ, an online activist, and a movie maker who created a 40 minutes Star Wars fan flick now available on mirror sites.

Today’s article is about United States teenagers online. A recent study finds that 52% of U.S. teens between the ages of 12 and 17 have blogs, and around a third create and share their own music or artwork online. As for the teen bloggers, BBC News claims that “while debates around blogging in the adult online world centre around citizen reporting and journalism, teenage bloggers are much more concerned about using them to maintain and form relationships with peers.”

Along with being a good series of articles, BBC New provides lots of links to blogs, podcasts, and other online content. Worth reading for anyone who’s watching online trends.

Cat karma?…

Mina, the cat for whom we’re catsitting, walked in just now and settled down to nibble some kibbles. Without thinking about it, her presence prompted me to check out one of my favorite Web sites, LitterboxCam, which as you might guess is a Web cam that shows two litterboxes and some dishes with kibble and water. While I visit LitterboxCam frequently, I have never actually seen one of the cats who live there. All I’ve ever seen is, well, litterboxes and kibble dishes.

Mina must have good cat karma, because as she sat here nibbling away, I was stunned to see that the image on LitterboxCam actually showed a cat, a grayish Siamese (presumably Marco Polo,) sitting and eating kibble! And as I type this, Mina meows loudly for attention — and there’s another cat on LitterboxCam (Twain, the blond Coon cat)!

Good grief. Two cats on LitterboxCam in four minutes — and wait, Twain is back! Three sightings in five minutes. Unbelievable. Thank you, Mina.

But Mina just walked out of the kitchen, so I’m sure that will be the end of the LitterboxCam sightings for the rest of the evening.

The sad thing is, I think this is the most exciting thing that has happened to me all week.

Later note: Oh–my–God! Mina came back in, I’m scritching her head and she’s purring madly, and sure enough… two cats appear on LitterboxCam! –Twain and a black-and-white cat…. the black-and-white cat has been there now for five whole minutes! Mina, you have total cat karma.