Ian M Rountree

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Life. Don't talk to me about life.

January 22, 2010 by Ian 7 Comments

Santa's Tombstone on Flickr
It's like reading Nietzche...

Before you read this, I need you to understand: I want you to help the people in Haiti. They’ve got so little, and we have so much capacity – as a culture – to do something wonderous about this situation following the earthquake. What follows is about the frustration I feel, hearing a few hundred times a day, that people across the sea need help, and how powerless it makes me feel, because there is nothing I can do, except this.

That said, let me tell you a bit about where the internet, technology, and especially socialized media – not exclusively social media as a concept – has totally fallen down for me in the last few days.

I have trouble grokking the trouble in Haiti. It’s just too big. There’s a gap between what we can assimilate easily and what happens around the world – clearly, humans haven’t evolved through mass media yet, and now we’re doing the hyperlocal thing? I can barely handle my own local stress.

You want to know what local stress is? It’s seeing kids on welfare walk into the store with stubs saying the government paid them this week alone twice what I make in a month, just for breathing and taking up space.

I know. It sounds harsh. I’m well aware that the vast majority of those in the government aid system are in terrible shape – disability payments are small, pension funds are a joke, psychological aid has been a total farce for years. Does this help me? No, sadly. It makes me angrier – not at the system, at these idiots, flaunting their money – no, not their money, my money, your money. YOUR money. Your MONEY. Buying cell phones and terrible looking clothes, beer, drugs, televisions, laptops. With. Our. Money.

It feels like theft. And you’re asking me to take the wide-angle view?

Lots of people have it worse off than I do. I have a roof over my head, food most days, a steady job and a family nearby who support me. It’s more than a lot of people can say. But still, the very idea that bankers are whining because the US government might (just might) split up their ivory towers into manageable ivory apartment buildings, and reading comments from business owners about coffee shop workers being the ones to blame for getting advanced on by people in authority over them – the concept falls outside of my realm of giving-a-shit. It’s too far away – I can’t make a connection with rich people getting richer at a slightly slower pace, or with teenagers making poor decisions and having their parents back them up, no matter how close the subject material might be to situations around me.

Mass media is all about broad connections. Making links between these people and those, this locale and yours, their situation of desperation and your moderate behaviour of hope and wonder. It’s about involving people in the lives of their counterparts, entirely on the basis of “There, But For the Grace of God Go I” – and it’s a crock.

Have you been paying attention to what gets reported, and how it’s changed over the last few decades? Crime is always up. Does this mean people are actually behaving worse, or could it be that more crime is being reported – even though the same amount of instances is going on? Similar to weather forecasting and climatic event modelling. There aren’t more volcanoes blowing up, we’re just hearing more often about the ones that do. We have no power to change these statistics, they can’t be manipulated beyond their recording.

So are these systems being abused more often lately? Are there more savvy teenagers declaring for welfare and living lives of opulent indolence while idiots like me work our asses off for a third of the money? I sincerely doubt it. But it sure is frustrating to notice this stuff more readily.

And if we’re more readily noticing everything – if the volume of instances of dis-ease we’re exposed to is rising so quickly, how are we supposed to accurately encompass the magnitude of an event like the earthquake in Haiti? How heavily on our hearts are images of hundreds of dead supposed to weigh, when not yet ten years ago, many of us spent hours glued to the television watching dozens of people hurl themselves out of the World Trade Centre as it fell apart around them – watching death and pure, mortal terror unfold live on network television?

Who am I supposed to be affected by more – someone I don’t know down the street getting screwed by the government, or myself getting screwed by those screwing the government?

What am I supposed to do about Haiti, when on a monthly basis I have to spend hours arranging my shopping days around bills, rent, groceries, and fussing over the odd half hour I get to myself without interference from the rest of the world?

Better yet. You’re living with all the same stresses I am, given the state of information media. How do YOU do it?

Photo by jurvetson.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: damn the man, douglas adams reference, haiti, ignore this, mss media, rant-alert, the system, theft, world trade center

Children's Games and Social Media

January 8, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Follow the Leader - FlickrI was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: apple, boneheaded-businesses, ecospheres, ecosystems, fanboys, google, internet, media, michael arrington, microsoft, news, pyramid schemes, rant-alert, social-networks, sociology, technology, the-web

The Horrible Trap of the Successful Writer.

December 22, 2009 by Ian 15 Comments

This post originated as a comment on Justin Kownacki’s post about Stephenie Meyer, Twilight and the Very Bleak Future of Culture. It got a bit bloated, so I thought I’d drop it here instead, because I feel the points are valid.

I’m frustrated that fame as a writer is so ephemeral. Seeing the “of the decade” lists come down, usually recalling only the last two years and claiming it represents the entire ten, is always a hassle for me – but there’s something to be said about Meyer’s fame.

Yes. Her books are formulaic. But they work; this means she’s either oblivious to her own skills as a businessperson, or is so masterful at marketing she ought to start a firm. Clearly, she has an understanding of the genre and how to communicate it the rest of us simply can’t grok. I don’t think you’re being elitist, I think people just lump “books” together and call it literature.

Is the Twilight series a set of decent fiction novels? Dunno, only watched the movies. As movie-fodder, they survive quite well, even if they do immediately suffer some problems I’ll riff on tomorrow.

Is it literature? Resounding no. Literature usually addresses cultural phenomenon, rather than becoming one. The problem Twilight is having is exactly what the Harry Potter series had; it’s a half-decent fiction series of semi-filling plane-ride worthy books idolized and beatified by its fan base.

That was the original comment I had intended to leave on Justin’s site. Courtesy got the better of me, as did a few ideas.

I watched New Moon last night for the first time, oddly before this riff began, and it made me a bit frustrated in and of itself. I’ve never read the Twilight books – I don’t intend to. Neither have I read Harry Potter, though I may eventually. Part of the reason for this is how I treat movies and books in general, and it’s part of why I was annoyed at New Moon not only as a movie, but as a potential book as well.

When authors publish their first works, a lot of it is tailored around being a possible stand-alone story. Even larger format works like the Wheel of Time, Harry Potter and, yes, Twilight, can and do stand aside as self-contained stories. They have to. What if you don’t earn out your advance? What if it doesn’t sell?

But then it does sell, and authors are left scrambling to make two, three, or ten more books work. What was geared to be a story now becomes a very strong prologue. This is especially annoying in trilogies, because the middle part – as New Moon is, as Matrix Reloaded was, as The Two Towers was – is pretty much guaranteed to be entirely filler. There’s no purpose, aside from levelling the page counts into acceptable levels, for most middle books. I’m aware I’m generalizing, but the looking at New Moon from the perspective of a writer expecting part three, it’s a lack-lustre long form prologue and build up to the final pages or scenes. It doesn’t help that the inevitable cliffhanger ruins any sense that there’s a proper ending.

This gets mitigated sometimes in longer running series. Wheel of Time, for example, famously steam rolls its page count on purpose. Robert Jordan was a hell of a writer, but even I gave up after nine books mostly because every book was just putting off the inevitable. When you can write an entire book explaining why the main character is slightly more or less happy on a day to day basis, you’ve got word-count gold. This is one of the reasons I love Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series so much; every one of the now ten books can be taken as a self-contained story within an overarching myth-arc.

What does any of this have to do with Stephanie Meyer? Simple: whether she knows it or not, she knows her business, which is selling books. The trouble with this is that the series she’s created have so effectively done their job that, in the absence of real commentary and lesson, the subject matter has become the substance, and the subject matter simply does not stand up under scrutiny.

The Cullens and their ilk are not vampires. I’m sorry, vampires do not sparkle. They can’t go out in the sunlight and just get prettier. Meyer’s interpretation of the entire genre worries me in part because I was a White Wolf geek back in the day, I come at gothic horror more from the realm of Poppy Z Brite rather than early Ann Rice like most people did. To say that seeing the vampire genre “warped” bothers me is a horrific understatement, but it’s the most adequate I can afford to make because, clearly, the books sell.

Anyone who wishes to get anywhere with words from their keyboards needs to respect it. Hate it all you want, but respect it.

As for culture? There will always be schism. If the meteoric rise of Stephanie Meyer can tell us anything, it’s how quickly superstar authors are forgotten. After all, the final Harry Potter book came out two years after Twilight was published. It broke swift-seller records. The movie isn’t even out yet. But who got on the list as author of the decade? Stephanie Meyer.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who can turn a dream into a book in three months, then go on to sell millions of copies globally. I can only hope that when my own efforts fruit, they’re so handsome.

But that doesn’t mean I have to force myself to think Fangirls and Fanboys are anything other than sheeple until they demonstrate some understanding of exactly why they like the object of their adoration just so much.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: authors, books, fiction, harry potter, justin kownacki, movies, rant-alert, robert jordan, stephenie meyer, times best sellers, twilight, wheel of time

Argue with me, dagnabbit!

December 14, 2009 by Ian 2 Comments

photo by Wonderlane
photo by Wonderlane

I’ve been hearing a lot about the idea that books on Amazon and other places with nothing but five star reviews don’t sell as well as books with mixed bag ratings. While this doesn’t surprise me entirely, I suddenly wish there was this kind of easy metric for blogs as well.

I read a lot of blogs. I also read a lot of comments for blogs – some of the most interesting stuff is in the comments, I’ve found most of the people I read through their comments on the sites of others. Some of them even comment here now and then, for which I am eternally grateful. They don’t always agree with me, but I like that. Why?

I’m a fan of opposing opinion. The vast majority of what I read in the comments of other blogs starts with sycophantic drivel and decomposes from there. One thing a lot of these commentators miss is that dissent, in many ways, proves you’re listening. Even if the lesson was unclear, or had less merit than as presented, distension and deconstruction, more than flat out disapproval, show that you give enough of a crap about what just got said that you’re willing to help improve it.

I wish I had more dissent here.

Why? Because I like to discuss things. Can’t say for certain if this puts me among the perpetual contrarians of the world, but I love tearing part a preconception and making sure the gears all fit together, especially if it’s mine. So I want you to argue with me. I want you to challenge what I say, because there’s no better way to prove you’re listening. I promise I’ll respond in kind. If you bring me value, I’ll try to add to it. If you flame me, I will mock you viciously.

Sound like a fair deal?

I await your scorn.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blogs, contrarian, feedback, internet, rant-alert

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