Has there ever been anything more disappointing in the world of hip-hop than the spectacular musical decline of Mos Def? Though I think his acting is actually pretty solid, his debut Black on Both Sides is still one of the most astounding albums I’ve ever heard – while The New Danger and his other ventures have, to put it generously, been abysmal.

So, I’m feeling hopeful about the good things I’ve heard about the newest release from the MC. I’ve had Mos’ new disc, The Ecstatic, for a few weeks now, but haven’t had a chance to sit down and listen to the entire record. Still, the first few tracks are promising and full of energy, and this review on Moreintelligentlife seems to augur good things. My favourite track so far, “Auditorium”, featuring Slick Rick is below.

Also: while I was a bit gutted to find Mos Def on Stuff White People Like, it’s stuff like this that reminds one of his immense talent.

Internet superstar and all-round bundle of awesomeness Danah Boyd has a new post up about an experience she had at a conference in Italy, where she was sternly and publicly rebuked for ‘not paying attention’ during a lecture. Of course, while she was ‘goofing off’, Boyd also:

“had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.”

But while the piece starts out as what I suppose is a defence of techno-multitasking, it moves towards considering the effects of a persistent, accessible and ubiquitous network of information. On some level – and even the iPhone is starting to bring us towards this – ‘the network’ enables the creation of a kind of cyborg, one with constant access to both data and databases, computers and computing power. This future-fantastic world is underpinned by a constant backchannel of chatter, a subcutaneous, pre-conscious layer of speech that hovers and hums in the background while conversations happen over and above and around it. Right now, this is probably best exemplified by Twitter, and having seen how much it enlivens and enriches a conference, I can tell you this is far less scary than it sounds.

The other interesting thing here is what happens to knowledge, both in its application and value. It seems that a database approach to knowledege will become key: that ’smarts’ will now be about putting together knowledge that everyone else has access to in new, different, and newly usable ways, and I think it’s here that we might see a shift from the dominance of narrative to the primacy of the database.

The value of knowledge is an interesting question too. What will happen when knowledge is everywhere, accessible to everyone? A friend likes to argue that we’ll see a ‘return’ – but not – to a kind of oral culture. And that, I think, is about a good a guess as any I’ve heard.

In a video on Ideas Project, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, talks about whether the net can affect structures of authority. Some of it is the usual ‘expertise versus crowdsourcing’ discussion, but I think it’s still a good starting point for discussion. My thoughts follow the video clip.

1. In providing examples of what exactly is changing, Newmark’s first is advertising. Later, when he talks about things we can all do, the first thing he mentions is user review sites. It seems an interesting choice. After all, for all the high-flung rhetoric that many – including me – throw around about the democratising appeal of the web, a significant portion of user-interaction takes place in relation to consumer goods and the sites that discuss them. Primarily, this is because of ease and accessibility: user reviews and the like are a great entry-point for those who wish interact, help others and to see the collected effect of that aggregated content. At the same time, it does highlight that a dominant mode of Western web culture – and possibly more than just the West – is consumption and the display and discussion of that consumption. This both is and is not resistant to ‘traditional structures of authority’.
2. But this question of ease is also connected to the material and physical possibilities, and limits, of using the web to congregate and collaborate. Iran is the perfect example here, as even a thoroughly grassroots, crowdsourced reaction to repressive structures of authority can fail to impact those same structures when the power to beat, torture and shoot still lies with those who are in control. It must be said, however, that the effect of the representation of this resistance, as it filters both through the web and houses and coffee shops in Iran is, according to people like Zakaria, yet to come .
3. At the same time, this last point raises another issue. Traditional structures of authority work through a combination of material, top-down control – the police, the army, the schools etc. – and a more ideologically based, loosely-dispersed network that, rather than forcing people to do things, beckons them by asking them to identify with a particular ideal or set of goals. The contrast might best be characterised by the difference between, on the one hand, being forced to join a military organisation and, on the other, joining of your own accord because you feel that it is your patriotic duty, because you are good citizen and that your country is good etc etc. If that’s the case, then what happens when the web fragments channels that distribute information and those that function as ‘horizons of identification’ , i.e. provide a differing vision of what it means to be a citizen, to be a person etc. etc.
4. But I don’t mean this so much in the sense of ‘the government doesn’t control the airwaves, man’. Instead, what’s much more interesting to think about is what happens when ideas like individual citizenship, and the idea of national identities themselves – notions based on the constitutive relationship between a person and a singular structure of authority or identity – shift and change in relation to much broader horizon of possibilities. More simply, when half of your friends are from different countries, and half of your life is spent in a world where borders are much more murky (but still there) will it be as easy to identify as a national citizen, or someone of a particular ethnicity etc.? And then what happens to the idea or the state of the group or the government? Will the exercise of power, both in the repressive and affirmative modes, be as straightforward as it once was? And what happens when people’s interests aren’t limited to just one nation-state or one ideological sphere?
5. And I just realised why I banged out so many words. This is the actual question I’m asking: most discussion about authority and the web conceives of the exercise of power as an act of repression – “you cannot do this thing, we will not let you”. But there is also a long-established line of thinking, initiated by thinkers Althusser and Foucault, that suggests power works through affirmation, through encouraging particular behaviours and thoughts, through ‘creating individuals in its image’. How does a discussion about power and the web change if we think about authority in that way – rather than as the ogre who blocks you as you try to cross the bridge?

Alright, two songs. The first, “Pull My Heart Away” by Jack Penate, I wanted to link to for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s terribly catchy. As with a lot of pop, if you like it you might burn through it quickly, listening to it a lot and then discarding it shortly after – but for the first few listens, it’s an indulgent high. The second reason is that it’s from an album entitled Everything is New. Listen to the song and you’ll see why, for a number of reasons, that’s interesting.

The second is Bloc Party’s new single, which I hope gets better with more listens. For the time being though:  it blows. I find this especially frustrating because I have an special attachment for Bloc Party. For the half-year I lived in Edinburgh, their first disc was my soundtrack – it was energetic, angry, new and unabashedly self-righteous, and every time I listen to it, I remember walking through Morningside or down Princes St. I miss that Bloc Party.

I know, I know – you’re thinking “Nav, your entire blog is just self-indulgent, masturbatory nonsense”. But, dear reader, I’ll tell you why you’re wrong… because fuck you, that’s why! Ahem. Excuse me.

So, like everyone who does anything, lately I’ve been thinking about that thing I do: blogging, writing, twittering etc. I’ve recently found myself in the odd position of, on the one hand, really enjoying blogging for the first time in a while and, on the other, sorta’ frustrated that after 2 or 3 years of this I can’t seem to develop a larger audience.

So I just thought this post by Mark Evans, popular Canadian tech blogger (and co-founder of the Mesh Conference) was interesting and far less annoying than it’s title – “11 Reasons Why Blogs Still Matter” – would suggest. It’s neat and worth a quick skim for anyone who, like me, has occasionally found themselves wondering why the hell they keep doing this.

(P.S. No, don’t worry. You’re not about to be hit with a bunch of links on ‘the future of blogging’. I said I was feeling reflective – not stupid.)

Hey, remember Muxtape? If not, quickly: in its first incarnation, Mixtape was a muxtape service – no, wait, other way round – created by Justin Ouellette that was popular among tech-y bloggers and the Tumblr-sphere.  It got shut down by U.S. record labels before it had a chance to develop a business model but, after going on hiatus, it rose, all phoenix-like, to be a site for bands to preview and promote their work.

Reaction to the Muxtape’s reincarnation was muted at best. Most complained that if offered little in comparison to other sites: there were no bios, no videos, no links; just music. But why am I thinking about Muxtape today?

Well, there was a comment on The Awl yesterday about Lady GaGa that reminded me of my reactions to Muxtape’s rebirth. The connection is a bit circuitous, so bear with me. First, here’s the comment, in response to Alex Balk’s continued bewilderment at Lady GaGa’s entire shtick:

She’s a pop star who seems to be fully aware of the fact that being a pop star right now is all about image and also seems to be fully in control of that image, to the point where almost all we see of her is performance. In an age where you can find a ton of celebrities on Twitter being accessible and human, god help us, she’s an old-fashioned enigmatic famous person. And she’s managed this without becoming a sex symbol (sort of) and while displaying actual singing and songwriting talent.

So, wtf does this have to do with Muxtape? Well, I think Muxtape is the Lady GaGa of music services.

Lady GaGa effaces her ‘own, personal identity’ in order to promote the ‘unreal’ one, sidestepping the need to be ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ by embracing precisely the kind of falsity and image that others resist. This, I would say, characterises not just modern fame, but fame in general. Fame is about the projection of the image-of-a-person into the public space and into our consciousness. It’s about surface, it’s about ideas, it’s about desire – but what it’s not about is ‘an actual person’. It’s about what the image of that person means as a sign within a given cultural context. And once you’re okay with that, pop music is a fucking riot and pretty great.

Muxtape does something similar – but definitely not the same. It effaces image and brand almost entirely in favour of coloured blocks on a screen with text in them (and fine, a logo or photo or something). By maintaining this generally blank, neutral aesthetic, Muxtape, in a way that is far less naive than it sounds, is ‘about the music, man’.

After all, there is no attempt to produce an aura of a band, an image of something that has far more to do with the performance of identity than the performance of the music. To wit, Muxtape’s refusal to create an idea of a band (sorta’, almost) sidesteps the need for bands-as-brands. It’s not that escapes the kind of reductiveness or signifying of branding entirely; that would be too optimistic. But, consciously or not, it makes an effort, and that’s what I still think makes it kinda’ neat.

And so, both Muxtape and Lady GaGa erect a wall between a person or group of people and the representation of that identity in the public space. Lady GaGa embraces that representation to become the image, to her benefit. Muxtape effaces the representation in order to present the music with as little attachment to a culture of branding as possible.

You CanLit nerds are probably familiar with Seen Reading, a blog run by Julie Wilson that documents instances of people reading in public. For those who aren’t, here’s the most recent post. Sadly, it was announced today that the site is no longer going to be updated – but the news isn’t all bad. The reason Wilson is moving away from the blog is that she wants to put together some of her microfiction.

Seen Reading, in addition to listing these sightings of people buried in their books, also frames each entry with a little ‘microfiction’. Often just a sentence or so, it’s an imagining of not simply who that person is, but rather, some entirely oblique and fictional happening, conjured by the intersection of seeing that person, with that book, in that setting. It’s a lovely idea. I’m a big fan of highly compressed, dense short fiction. It’s for that reason that Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri are probably my favourite writers, as, using simple, bare prose, they can say more in a sentence than I can often say in a page.

But more generally, there’s something neat to the idea of microfiction at this point – and I’m not just saying that because of my pathetic attention span. Something I’ve been thinking for a while now – often in relation to Tumblr – is that given the unending glut of images and ideas we’re subjected to, sometimes, it is the fragment that stops you dead in your tracks. Rather than in the stretched stillness of reading a novel, the times I find myself suddenly overwhelmed or inexplicably choked up are those moments when, caught off-guard, I stumble across a photograph or quote on Tumblr that, for an infinitesimal moment, shifts the ground beneath me. In the shock of the oblique, I am profoundly moved. For ages now I’ve wanted to write a post called “Tumblr and the Ache of the Fragment” but have never gotten around to it – but then, maybe this small graf is enough to convey what I wanted to say.

Last night, when we should have been talking about post-structuralist theory, instead two of my closest friends and I drank beer, ate Indian food and watched, Scotch Mist, a film of  Radiohead in the studio that accompanied the release of In Raindbows. It was perfect. I was always late to the Radiohead buzz. Even though I was their target demographic – an over-educated Anglophile, self-involved and depressed – other than “Creep“, I didn’t really start listening to them until Kid A was released. It’s something that at times – like last night  – I occasionally regret. The video, which goes on for over 50 minutes, is stunningly good, and the music is both haunting and moving. If you have the time, highly recommended you watch the whole thing, but “House of Cards” is my fave and starts at 34:27.

This will likely be of interest to those of you have been on the web since, oh, the time of troubadours: Ivor Tossell, the web culture columnist for the Globe and Mail, has a great article and interview up with Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter. If your familiar with MeFi, I’m not sure you’ll learn anything new per se, but as with most of Tossell’s columns, there’s a thoughtful tone and understated style that makes it a pleasure to read. Plus, people on Metafilter itself are calling it one of the best articles they’ve read about the community, which is saying something.

(Also, not sure if I’m supposed to do this sorta’ thing, but disclosure blah blah BS: I work with Ivor occasionally, but was a fan of his long before I met him).

This isn’t exactly timely, but the following is a slightly modified version of a column that appeared in the May/June issue of THIS Magazine. I’m putting it up here because of my previous post on indie rock, a hastily put-together bit where I make the argument that while hipster elitism may be leaving indie rock, that kind of personal showmanship has now found a home on a web. That, ultimately, is the (belated) argument I make here about the rise of snark, but also the way it has seeped into mainstream culture as well.

You there: you seem like a pretty hip person. Why don’t you give me your best Boxxy impression? No? Okay, how about you tell me the latest the ‘Yo Dawg’ joke making the rounds? You don’t know that one, huh? Well, did you at least see the latest post on “This is Why You’re Fat”? Oh. You didn’t. Oh dear.

As much as it pains me to say, in the world of web geeks, you would be profoundly uncool. And while, as insults go, that may not be much of one, it does mean that as the web begins to develop a culture, it is also cultivating its own fashion. Much like the world of fashion itself, those who can follow the latest trends do, while those who cannot, languish by the wayside. And the catch is, as online culture leaks into the mainstream, it seems we’re all on the hook for staying current with it.

In order to be ‘a savvy web surfer’, one has to show off his or her command of the latest bits of buzz that float across the online horizon. And how does one find the latest fashion of the web? Here’s a tip: head to the geekiest, snarkiest corner of the internet you can find.

Whether it’s an obscure videogame forum or a popular site like Gizmodo or Jezebel, these concentrated bits of web culture will quickly teach you that staying current is of the utmost importance. Witness, for instance, the frighteningly fast rise and fall of ‘Boxxy’, a widely-mocked, hyperactive teenager prone to making babbling, semi-coherent videos. Like so many web fads before her, Boxxy was chewed up and spit out in a matter of weeks, and much of the discussion around her was simply about making fun of both her eagerness and obliviousness.

Or, take the captioned pictures of rapper Xzibit that begin with the phrase ‘Yo Dawg’ and go on to make absurd assertions of excess. Regardless of who they affect or offend – even Xzibit himself recently Twittered that those using the meme should “jump on something sharp” – web surfers who wish to remain in the loop must stay abreast of a torrent of trends.

Fashion has always been about the display of social and economic privilege. While the barriers to entry are lower for web fashion, its tone is disturbingly similar: not only does one require the time and savvy to stay on top of it all, you must also learn to express it with the condescending irony of the web-hipster. Find a discussion of blog “This is Why You’re Fat” – a catalogue of obscenely indulgent meals like ‘chicken-fried bacon’ – and you will also find a distinct tone of urban, classist disdain for the poor saps whom might actually eat such things.

If this all sounds like the dog-eat-dog world of high school, you’re probably right. If the web has become a virtual catwalk, then it’s not only where we display our knowledge, but also a place where we prove how much better than others we are. Like fashion itself, the internet has become an arena for showing off and, bit by bit, the egalitarian dreams with which the internet began give way to a culture of performance, derision and snark.

But lest we think this is limited to the nerdiness of the internet, just turn on the TV. If NBC’s 30 Rock has become the hipster sitcom of choice, then its success stems from the way it has so cleverly co-opted the rapid-fire pace of internet conversation, its droll irony and self-deprecation. Similarly, it seems no coincidence that Family Guy has usurped The Simpsons’ position in the zeitgeist, its love-them-or-hate-them segues and cuts, as the Associated Press’ Frazier Moore once described them, more like hyperlinks than traditional narrative. By linking themselves to the culture of the ‘net, these shows scream ‘contemporary’.

Indeed, having a working knowledge of web culture has become part of an increasingly popular geek chic, and web fashion is beginning to take its place alongside the MacBooks, lattes and lumber jackets of the urbane modern repertoire. In some ways, this can be great: Christian Lander’s blog “Stuff White People Like” generated a fruitful discussion on race that may not have happened otherwise.

But in other ways, it is more disturbing. If web fashion is spilling over into popular culture, then it also brings with it its inherent flaws. Perhaps the last thing North American culture needs is a further sense that we must constantly attempt to outdo each other. There is also the question of access: internet connections and time cost money; ironic wit often stems from being well-read. These things are not available to everyone, but only to those with the capacity to get them. Sadly, web fashion, like fashion itself, may work to heighten the parallel divisions between cool and uncool, haves and have-nots.

If the devil may have once worn wear Prada, sneering at your shoes from last year, he or she is now more likely sniping behind a keyboard, like a vulture searching for weakness, waiting to spread its wings so that others might see.