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iEverything

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Have you noticed how many products have come around over the last few years sporting a tiny “i” before their names? Well, if you know not what I speak of, think iPod, iPhone, iPad, iGoogle, iMAX, etc. And these are only a few of the best known. A quick Google search returns over a thousand product names that follow the pattern of a noun preceded by an “i” that is almost isolated in its stately lower-caseness.

iEverything

Internet! Yes. That seems to be the obvious word that justifies the fame of our little “i”. That seems to be the expression the letter seeks to contract, to simplify. And the trend just goes beyond: iWater, iFood, iHouse, iCity, iTaxes, iGlasses… It’s as if, in this abstract universe that is the internet, all human creation needed to be reborn, rethought, reconsidered, to become lighter, to become iMmaterial.

The “i” initiates and hides behind its challenging and friendly humility. It wants us not to notice it and so it stands humbly ahead of what we already know — while surreptitiously changing the entire genetics of the object. This is the new life of post-internet objects. A new life, its sins washed away by the “i” — the insignia that identifies objects that have been converted to the cult of the ultimate god of objects: the World Wide Web. The object unobjectified.

Objects which operate under different laws of physics. Free of weight, free of volume, free of time. That is to say, ticking to a different time.  And all this is identified by our dearest little “i” — which is but the center of our vowels. The anthropomorphic letter that rises up to the global network heavens. But what does it want to tell us, other than "internet”?

Well… the “i” is a lonely letter. As lonely as I. The self-effacing I, that positions itself as an individual, that acknowledges its individuality, its independence. It is isolated, but adds itself to the object in order to become.

Perhaps the letter “i” has been the greatest gift the digital age has offered us: a way to restate, in a subtly stark manner, that we stand small, internet and all.

© João Cavalcanti 2010

Posted in Americas, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors, Making Sense, Technology | 6 Comments »

Whose line is it?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

One would have thought that plagiarism is a serious business.   Certainly in literature.   This spring (2010) we learn from the German press, the leading publisher Ullstein and the young female author of the book Axolotl Roadkill, that plagiarism may actually be an important emerging code.  Especially in literature.

Whose line is it anyway

In this novel a 16-year old aspiring author, Helene Hegemann, writes about drugs & sex like a 38-year old nightlife junky and is instantly proclaimed the new literary star of Germany.  Bestseller listing follows.   Unfortunately, it turns out that most of her book is copied, often word for word, from many people, but most of it from the blogger Airens.  No credits, no footnote references, unequivocally plagiarised.

This sort of thing (apparent literary fraud) used to mean the end of the road. But not for everybody. Not for Tony Blair in the notorious ’Dodgy Dossier’ on Weapons of Mass Destruction, for example, used in UK to persuade Parliament to support the invasion of Iraq. And now not for Helene Hegemann.

Helene Hegemann, reportedly, is not only unrepentant but apparently proud.   She tells us we live in a word-of-mouth society where any content is everybody’s content. Therefore, content is about proliferation of information and re-shuffling of ideas, not about authorship or ownership.

Without diving into any unnecessary discussion around the ’art of intellectual referencing’ – either old (Shakespeare from numerous sources, Goethe copying Shakespeare, the phenomenon termed in German Weltmitschriften’, in English ’minutes of the world’) or more recent (music & song sampling, postmodern quotation as stock-in-trade of film, theatre and ad direction) –  the fact appears to remain: Helene Hegemann copied large chunks of prose from an internet author and sold that content at a premium.

How does she get away with this?

• The book industry wants to sell books – free content on the internet does not help that endeavour (unless it can be repackaged and sold at a price).

• The Über-author is a learned concept in mainstream popular culture since ist inception with scratching in the 1980s.

• It’s one of the dilemmas of the web itself, where thoughtlessness is more than tolerated, sometimes celebrated – and perceived worthlessness can be the result.

Bottom line: Axolotl Roadkill looks like a case of daylight robbery. But then Helene Hegemann is not legal age, yet. So a moral license for pupils and students to download their school assignments from online sources? Or symptomatic of much larger economic issues around counterfeiting, piracy and intellectual property guaranteed to keep the lawyers busy, perplexing the world of information commerce and the new creative classes for at least a few years yet?

© Oliver Litten 2010

Posted in Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Technology | No Comments »