Tuesday, January 7, 2003

What I'm Reading Now I'll give both books a thumb's up recommendation. The longer one reads quicker than the shorter one, but oddly, since intuition led me to them in Borders (something Amazon hasn't figured out how to do yet because I always fuck with the database), there is a serendipity in how the themes of these books reflect each other. Or maybe I just got a thing for uncatagorizable iconoclasts, eh? Read this one last weekend in a single sitting: The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk: Why I refused to testify against the Clintons & what I learned in jail by Susan McDougal with Pat Harris. Intro by the fairly newly outspoken Helen Thomas (speak it girl! those were a lot of years of keeping quiet, so it is catchup time!). I was scanning this one in Borders, mostly looking to see if anybody I know from Arkansas was mentioned. 4 hours later and halfway through the book, I knew I had to buy it. Very eye-opening on Ken Starr and the OIC--that stuff will blow your mind. I didn't expect this, but the best part is her experiences in prison. Despite the cliche' of this kind of "making lemonade" approach, which is totally predictable, I have to say I came away feeling that this woman was born to face this particular life trial that would lead her to prison. I usually don't go with religious/karma stuff at this level because that is just too easy, too obvious. The easy answer seems like a ploy and it usually is. I don't know what to tell you except maybe I'm a sucker, because despite my predisposition to discount this kind of a story, I came away totally believing that the purpose of this woman's life, what she was MEANT to do, involved finding and meeting those women in prison. More power to her. The other book is Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens. Again, a surprisingly easy read. I was actually prepared for something more scholarly and wonky, sort of like The Orwellian Moment, a book I worked on for the University of Arkansas Press. I was rolling on the floor when Hitchens took on Raymond Williams (that part was so wonderful!), and I'm still not finished, but I am loving this book. I think what Hitchens intended is what I'm feeling right now, a welcome relief from the false dilemma fallacies that dominate US political thought right now thanks to the Bush adm, all this "If you're not with us, your against us" bullshit. It is so oppressive and obnoxious on listservs especially, with all these newly empowered conservative but pitifully bad rhetors. Hitchens lays out the conflicts on the right and left that would leave Orwell out of the overly polarized rhetoric. He didn't exactly side with either the right or the left, but Orwell remains as he always was, whether shooting an elephant or down and out in Paris and London, one of my very favorite people. What a fun read this book is! Miasma 9:59:02 PM    Comment [] That MIT Virtual Pet Project is a great source! Tom mentions it at the end below. I'd found it about a week ago. A tremendous resource on some of the more disturbing emotional (as opposed to capitalist consumer conditioning of children) aspects of virtual pets. I've started to suspect that the emotional-Turing kind of stuff may be where the real dangers lie in this terrifically fun pre-Sims world. Miasma Neopetopia?. A while back, I expressed a mixture of curiosity and consternation at the vividness with which my daughter has taken to the lively goings on at Neopets.com. Today at CNN Headline News, Christine Boese returns from Neopets to tell a tale: The NeoPets site and all its basic services are free, yet the California-based company makes a lot of money, more than $15 million a year, through advertising. You won't see a banner ad on the site. It relies on "immersive advertising," like product placement in movies. Many of the objects and places in Neopia are branded commercial products. You can "buy" these virtual products with your Neopoints for your NeoPet. Other products earn you points. This product conditioning at first scared me. It seemed like deep layers of brainwashing. Sneaky ads seem worse than blatant ones, especially for kids. Playing on the site myself, I became less concerned. It didn't get on my nerves as much as I expected, mostly because the site is so rich, I had a lot to do that had nothing to do with ads. The site, with its claimed audience of 40 million kids worldwide, is well known to marketers. Ad Age cites Neopets as an authoritative source of kid demographics. And Financial Times looks at its use of immersive advertising: the site's revenue model depends on its ability to market successfully to children. Whether NeoPets' audience is aware of it or not, the post-campaign results show that it is strongly influenced by the advertising messages seen on the site. Neopets also has an Asian audience. As this article from the Singapore Straits Times suggests, it is a powerful emulator of commercial activities. Neopets demonstrates that a genial website can reach into what moves a kid - from the social interaction of the act of trading to the personal modes of desire known as amor habendi, accumulative impulse, and greed. That this succeeds is not surprising. That no other model seems to have succeeded equally well - a site that would emulate, say, the exploration of a world beyond the commercial sphere, a form of value other than monetary units, a mode of interaction other than buying and selling - says a lot about the recursive algorithm we call capitalistic desire. I might be more comfortable if Neopets.com were more open about its business and disclosure operations. (You can't even get a press kit without giving them full contact info.) Here are Neopets' privacy policy, safety tips page, and terms of use. Update: Steve Himmer points me to MIT's Virtual Pet Project, which is collecting stories about virtual and robotic pets. The project is run by Sherry Turkle, and invites contributions from virtual pet owners of all ages. (Thanks Steve.) [Tom Matrullo's Stuff] 8:50:05 PM    Comment [] Tom Matrullo on Bush Adm Fudging Unemployment Numbers Bush murders number, economy improves. The incremental fictionalization of the economy took a significant step forward in December, thanks to Bush's decision to murder a significant economic statistic, according to the SF Chronicle: The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies. The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health. ... You had to look pretty hard just to learn that the mass-layoffs stat had been scotched. No announcement was made by the Labor Department, and no prominent mention of the change was posted at the department's Web site. In fact, news of the program's termination came only in the form of a single paragraph buried deep within a press release issued on Christmas Eve about November's mass layoffs. Most major media appear to have missed this story. The disappearing of information is a worthy niche - a "beat" that has yet to be invented. Anyone want to hire me to cover it? Your thoughts welcome. [Tom Matrullo's Stuff] 8:44:29 PM    Comment [] William Gibson's new book and his weblog "weblog" [Daypop Top 40] 8:28:22 PM    Comment []

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