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Kuleshov effect and remix culture

One of the weirdest things about December and May is that my brain is always so full of academic concepts that they somehow manage to get integrated into many conversations. At the Creative Commons party, i found myself talking to lawyers about the Kuleshov effect and its relevance to remix culture. Or more accurately, the problems that emerge because of it…

Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker. Because of the political climate of Russia, he was left without access to actual film. Instead, he constructed films by splicing film and telling his story in a collage-esque manner. In addition to his style of film, he’s known for something called the Kuleshov Experiment. In this experiment, an image of a man’s face is shown juxtapositioned with various other images immediately following. Viewers thought that the man’s emotion changed even though it is exactly the same shot.

This creates an interesting dilemma for remix culture. What happens when an artist’s construction is repurposed to convey something different than intended? Does an artist have control over the context in which their material is used? How might this affect how people are willing to distribute their material?

social norms are not behind other points of regulation

In weaving a response to me, Joi connected my arguments with Wendy Seltzer’s commentary on the norms of publicity.

In reading her argument, i found that i take issue with some of her assumptions so i’m putting them here for discussion.

We early adopters know how referer logs work… We know how to write .htaccess files, or at least whom to ask for something similar, if we want better (though still not total) privacy. We’ve internalized the norm that conduct not marked private is public.

There is no doubt in my mind that the self-referential “A-List” blogger knows this and WANTS their conduct to be public, but there is a second form of early adopter that is getting swept away by the blogging phenomenon. Live Journalers and other pseudo-private bloggers were also part of this. Many of them do not know how to work an .htaccess file or even manage the LJ Friends lists. Over and over again, i run into people who are outright shocked that their material is on Google. For them, their website is not public; Google is public. And they don’t understand how their private ramblings ended up on Google.

As technologists, we have a tendency to mock this population, arguing that it’s their own fault for being stupid. Well, this is foolish. The technology is not being devised by them or for them. They are getting swept away by decisions in many ways propagated by the A-List blogger-esque community that WANTS to be public, seen and heard. Furthermore, when they do realize things are public, they often don’t care so long as it doesn’t affect them locally. This is not because they are stupid but because the mass populous does not fear Big Brother and that is their conception of why they should care about privacy. In many ways, us technologists do a disservice to the population when we ask them to rebel against these technologies because of how institutions might treat them. They WANT to sell their data for the chance of winning a Porsche. They WANT the Easy Pass because they don’t think that the government cares; they’re law-abiding, right? People care about local vulnerability… things that will affect them personally. That’s what Garfinkel and others have noticed that people perk up when their identity is stolen or when their boss finds out about their digital behavior. People don’t think about how the technology is evolving because it’s not evolving in a direction that meets their needs. Thus, it is unfathomable.

I wondered at first if privacy tensions would ease as more people became more technically sophisticated, but I’m inclined to think that gaps in understanding will just move with the tech, and social norms will follow still further behind.

I think it is quite dangerous to believe that social norms are “falling behind.” Social norms aren’t behind; they’re baffled at the direction in which things are going. They’re pushing for a different direction and they aren’t being heard. People are using technology to meet their needs, but they are not prepared for how the architecture is pulling them in a different direction.

Arguing that social norms can fall behind suggests that there is a hierarchy to the four points of regulation. Those points are valuable in discussion because they provide tensions. Social norms pull in different directions than the market, the law or the technology. This does not mean that it is behind. Quite often, social norms leapfrog everyone else. For example, social norms pushed Napster into creating an architecture that challenged the market and the law. It wasn’t that the market was behind, but that it was pulling in a different direction and with a new tension, things need to be worked out.

Thus, rather than thinking about how social norms are behind, i truly believe that we should be understanding why social norms are pulling in a different direction. What does this say about the population being served by the technology?

competition vs. collaboration: events, people & ideas

An old lover of mine once told me that there are people who talk about events, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas. Combine this with collaboration vs. competition and here is another set of axes along which we can consider bloggers.

A friend of mine conveyed a story to me of an incident when he and another pundit blogger were talking about a concept. Suddenly, they both had a look in their eyes, read clearly by each other as a battle cry to see who could blog about it first. Time and trackbacks are the classic weapons used by pundit idea bloggers. They want to get their ideas out there, validated and linked to. The pundit blogger is competing for attention, for validation, for uniqueness.

The sociable blogger talking about life is not in a race against time or for greater trackbacks. S/he knows that there are a million different perspectives, all of which are valuable. There is no one truth, only opinions. What makes an event or a person or an idea more valuable in this community is that variety of different opinions on the matter, the variety of different perspectives. Together, as a community, this brings life to something.

There are two different ways to talk about events, people and ideas and you see this played out by bloggers. Some events are discussed because each parrt of the community wants to bring life to their perspective on the matter. Nowhere is this more true than something that affects everyone differently. Take 9/11. Everyone blogged/journaled about it, each with their own voice. What was powerful was to get a fleshed out view of the event from so many different perspectives. Some events are published in competition. How many bloggers do you know who speak of a private event to prove that they were there, to draw attention to their status?

There are a variety of reasons for which bloggers talk about people. Bloggers show their respect and adoration through links to other people (or their ideas). Bloggers compete with others through similar mechanisms. In some cases, bloggers mock others to prove their self-importance, to increase their stature. The list can go on and is awefully similar to RL. Just as we name-drop in RL, we name drop on blogs.

Then there are ideas…. Blogs are a public forum. For some, they are a publishing forum. As such, people want their ideas to be unique and first. For others, it is a space to flesh out ideas and thus they put their ideas out there to be discussed, improved upon and dissected. Others put their ideas out there to help shape other known theories. The latter two approaches are collaborative while the first is very much competitive.

Anyhow, cross collaboration vs. competition with events, people and ideas and you have an interesting lens through which to consider different blog posts. Of course, most bloggers cannot be simply labeled as competitive or collaborative, but a combination of both. Still, there are trends, and this helps explain some blogging habits.

inappropriate blogging

As i meet more and more of the uber-bloggers, i continue to get more horrified as they play out their catty games in a public forum. It’s one thing to critique a product, an idea, someone’s politics and philosophies. It’s another thing to pull up private matters into a public forum or to mock people’s struggles to overcome their own self-defeating habits. What’s worse is that i watch bloggers write this material to elevate their own position in the eyes of the person they are mocking. So counterproductive and insulting.

I’ve been trying to tease apart the difference between LJ folks and the uber bloggers (particularly those who blog about people, not simply ideas/links). At first, i thought it had to do with content, but the more i think about it, the more i think it has to do with audience. At this point, i expect journalers to talk about their STDs, their cheating, their love life and all other made-for-Jerry-Springer content. But i expected public bloggers who make a name out of blogging to be a bit more sophisticated. Unfortunately, their content is often just as catty, only its self-importance tries to make it seem otherwise. The bloggers want the whole world to see their opinion of other bloggers… so that the hierarchy is created publicly. Thus, rather than just creating personal content for friends, the bloggers are going for others’ public throats.

Erg. I’m a bit too cranky from reading my RSS feed this morning. Of course, here i am, feeding into the flurry by talking about what i observed in a meta-fashion. I just don’t feel right directly pointing at people. But seriously, if you read this and you write about other people, think about it for a moment. Get out of the “this is truth” mentality and really question how others might read what you just said. Is it really necessary to lambast people’s personal shit on a blog meant for the world to see? It makes me cringe and it’s not even about me!