Dilettantes: an underserved market segment

Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:

• The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
• Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
• I have no idea what I’m watching.

I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.

With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.

Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.

What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.

(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)

Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?

But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.

Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.

• How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
• Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
• What the hell is going on in figure skating?

Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.

Am I the only one?

Stowaway Data: Datachondria at 50 Posts

Time for a recap of sorts as we hit our 50th post. We’ve written a great deal about books, but also about other media from film and album cover art right through to the humble business card. With more than six months under the bridge, a number of themes have emerged.

Human relationships in the 20th century were, in delicate and subtle ways, managed in part by the values we grafted onto objects produced and distributed by traditional — industrial — processes. These personal metadata were ‘stowaways’. We didn’t necessarily mean to tell people about ourselves by reading Infinite Jest on the subway — but glances were stolen and judgments were made nonetheless.

These communications were essential to enable some basic interactions. Flirting. Dating. Partying. Business networking. With these incidental transmission channels closing down as we consume content in new ways, we’re going to have to renegotiate, collectively, experimentally, how we communicate. Cultural objects — business cards, book covers, shared music experiences — no longer function in the same way. What does it mean for our relationships? Will we, now, be bowling together — or bowling aloner?

And so we’ve been thinking and writing about the conversations we are now beginning to have — about how to converse.

• How are new friends supposed to judge the prospects of our relationship when we don’t have CDs displayed in the living room?
• Is it rude to withhold the password to your wifi network from your dinner guests?
• Why are smartphones still more or less phone-shaped?
• How will you know who to hit on when you can’t see what anyone’s reading on their Kindle?
• Are boomers and MP3-raised kids going to lose their hearing at the same time? How will this impact music production techniques?
• How does commentary and criticism work when we’re being sold to by algorithms that can operate profitably without coercing us to consume in common?
• Is Twitter an appropriate reference check for a job interview? A classified ad?
• Does Last.fm herald the end of the musical “guilty pleasure”?
• Is it rude to tweet what you wouldn’t say out loud?
• What would music look like if we could classify it as we really experienced it?
• What can pedometers tell us about how we will read in the future?
• If you could interlink books, music, film, photographs, and the world around you, would you ever leave the house?

Along the way, we’ve written about everything from the perils and pleasures of filter failure, the transformative effects of audiobooks, and how Twitter dissolves cognitive dissonance. Along with much, much more.

We’ve also made at least two Lebowski references. This seems shockingly low. We promise to redress over the next 50 posts. Thanks for sticking with us.

Cover Art You Can Tell Your Friends About

It’s nice to see HarperCollins UK foregrounding the gorgeous Richard Bravery cover designs for Michael Chabon’s backlist by at least making large versions available for download. As we’ve discussed before, there are some fabulous opportunities available for content distributors who understand how the packaging of their product engages in an ongoing dialogue with the content — and that there are more and more opportunities for exactly these exchanges with social media and digital distribution. Content mediators — publishers, marketers, retailers, distributors — who understand how to enrich and enable those dialogues are going to reach more people than those who do not. Making cover art available for download and sharing is the very least that they should be doing.

Great also to see these attractive designs getting some love.

While there are now more book cover blogs than you can shake a stick at, The Art of the Title Sequence is another wonderful resource, foregrounding an art form which is too often seen as purely functional.

More Video Essays by Matt Zoller Seitz

Some more superb Matt Zoller Seitz links, on Benjamin Button (be sure to view the video version), the follow shot, and Steve McQueen.

Here’s why this kind of work is important. Criticism can help you live your life:

By stripping away the political context that made Gump a pop culture hot potato, Button isolates and magnifies the story’s emotional appeal: the sense that, no matter how strongly we believe in the notion that each person is the captain of his or her own ship, the unfortunate fact is that most of us are passengers on this voyage. When we wish to change course, it’s difficult, often impossible to get the captain’s attention, and even if we manage to do so, the vessel is so enormous, and so beholden to the wishes of everyone else on board, that altering its course even infinitesimally is often beyond the realm of possibility. Button is entirely about this sense of life: the realization that we’re quite small and powerless in the great scheme of things, and the most sensible response to this realization is to try to be as caring and decent as we can and appreciate the life we’ve got.

Wes Anderson, Metadata, and Susan Sontag on Filter Failure

Interpretation is Like So Industrial Age

I’ve been thinking recently about Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation, which seems today both entirely uncontroversial and extraordinarily ahead of its time. Published in 1964, the piece suggests that our standard approach to criticism — interpretation — focuses too narrowly on the idea of extracting a meaning from a work of art. This approach, Sontag argues, under-privileges the sensory experience that exposure to art allows us (and indeed requires from us).

In Sontag’s formulation, criticism’s job should instead be to

make works of art — and, by analogy, our own experience — more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

The thrust of the essay is that an intellectual revolution in criticism is required; Sontag’s insouciant self-assurance that she is the smartest person in the room is the only thing that keeps it from becoming a polemic. But her essay seems so non-controversial today because it would become a mainstay of Postmodernism 101 reading lists. The central point itself — the rebellion, at least, against artificial division between content and form — lacks any sort of bite now.

Filter Failure Goes Two Ways

But it seems so visionary and ahead of its time because it touches on the problem of ‘information overload’. In 1964 the techniques of industrial mass production had been applied to art for long enough to begin changing popular culture in radical ways. But the surfeit of information that she describes is even more characteristic of digital distribution than it was of the narrow period in which Sontag was writing.

Sontag argues that in an age of cultural over-production, the approach to criticism she recommends is necessary because of the volume of sensory input to which we are exposed:

Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life — its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

In short, criticism should help our filters, not by constraining our inputs but by widening our ability to process them.

An Erotics of Art — Brought to You by iMovie

That leads to the second way in which the essay seems so ahead of its time: adoption of the approach it recommends is so dependent on tools which have only recently become widely available. Criticism that explores the sensory richness of the work it describes needs to be able to interact directly — concurrently with — the work itself. It needs to be available within and during the experience — not outside and alongside it.

Sontag called for “acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art… essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.”

Matt Zoller Seitz’s superb series of essays on the influences and style of Wes Anderson seem to me to epitomize exactly that approach. It’s curious that the Moving Image Source have laid out the text of the essays more prominently, because it’s really in the video accompaniment (available for each installment by clicking the small ‘video’ thumbnail below the image on the right) that the approach shines. And does so in a way that suggests the promise of the kind of ‘segmented metadata’ that we have outlined here in the past.

The essays are supple, thrilling explorations of the surface of Anderson’s work; they augment the pleasure that can be derived from viewing them. In a very real sense, they use technology — in this case, presumably, some relatively widely-available video editing software — to enrich the place of art in our lives.

Superb work, fascinating viewing. Highly recommended. And good for you. Who are you to argue with Susan Sontag?