Boycott Douglas Coupland--Or Not

Here's another opportunity to use social media to get something right. Douglas Coupland recently taped a YouTube promotion for an upcoming book. In the promotion, he blatantly rips off an idea from ZeFrank's The Show called "The Earth Sandwich." Now, ZeFrank isn't necessarily the first person to generate the idea of an Earth sandwich, but Coupland uses locations and terms almost word for word from ZeFrank's project, videos, and user-comments. On his blog, ZeFrank admits that Coupland does give a small attribution in the video, but also explains that Coupland emailed him about using the project in his book. ZeFrank requested a footnote accreditation. He did not receive it. Seriously. Boo. You can find Coupland's video on ZeFrank's site.

To be honest, I hadn't heard of Douglas Coupland before today. And I know that any amount of controversy this generates will only serve to provide him attention. So, don't think of an asshole here. Seriously. Don't even think of that asshole Douglas Coupland. Go watch ZeFrank to help prevent any such thinking.

Old meets New - Ze Frank on Time.com

I've been enjoying Ze Frank's new posts over at Time.com. You should too.

He's got two up that I could find, this one on the Iranian election and this one on "Black and White."

As if the interactivity of The Show wasn't enough to make me love Ze Frank, now we have a commentary on the implicit repressive impulse of seeing the world in black and white. Cause, hey, sophistic rhetoric feeds off of grey.

A Disgusting Amount of Cute

If you are up for it, I offer My Milk Toof. Its good, wholesome, clean, and, yes, cute. Thanks to ZeFrank for posting the link. Speaking of ZeFrank, he recently did a presentation at Webstock on The Show, worth a watch if you were into the project. I liked how he discussed the impact of working with people rather than working with texts or information.

Visual Metaphor: Walmart as a Disease

As if the choice of green was innocuous. In the previous century, when I was a snobbish New Englander, Walmart was an unholy place--a store chocking the life out of small, friendly businesses and full of the kind of people that hindered social progress.

Now, as a snobby, academic Floridian, I take Rowan to Walmart for fun. And for cheap coffee (they sell the Starbucks for like 6 bucks).

Anyway, go watch FlowingData's map of Walmart's growth. Via ZeFrank.

ZeFrank interview

Just found a Cecil Vortex interview with ZeFrank shortly before The Show ended February 2007. In addition to gems such as "morphological synthesis" (an inventive approach) and an interesting discussion of how audience provides generative boundaries benefitical to the creative process, he offers this conclusion:

With The Show project, I've also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we're entering into. You've got so many people that are making things now, whether it's emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What's really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who's gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that's being produced right now. And I think it's the wrong thing to look at. It's actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world -- that's the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.

Amen.

This dynamic he mentions is to me the McLuhan or the Ong factor: the idea that the communicative media we use influence perception, thought, and expression. Medium is not invisible (though I don't go quite as far as to say that it is the message--its more murky than that. It influences the message. My argument is that when people engage in communicative media that connects them to more people, well, they'll start noticing those people differently. More positively? Perhaps. But I think an appreciation of difference has to be cultivated.