How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Mainstream since the 50s, but rarely used since the early 80s craze, 3D is now expected of every major movie these days.
Why? You can’t download 3d glasses, let alone an IMAX theater. It’s the staging of an event, a singular experience. Something that cannot be so easily replicated at home.
Likewise, in 2008, I wrote a post How to Frame the Internet, calling for the staging of events online:
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented… Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
Twitter often takes this role. For the past few years, I make a point of watching the State of the Union as it airs, rather than later on in the evening, at a time more convenient to my schedule. Only then can I keep up with the tweets and status updates from friends and bloggers I follow.
In terms of segmenting information, I’m very enthusiastic about the iPad. One aspect in particular is intriguing, and it is the very aspect that annoys Gizmodo so much: No Multitasking.
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
- Gizmodo, 8 Things That Suck About the iPad
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.
It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. Also in 2008, I wrote about how I feel the iPhone (and now the iPad) could gradually kill off some of the more inane youtube comments. From the post Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments:
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading… A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
Previously:
“[Female] fans always knew that Kirk was low on the list of fuckable officers on the Enterprise.” I’ve avoided this meme, because I’d hate for it to undermine the huge female interest in the new Star Trek film…but….it’s undeniable–Spock is hot. Like, I-just had-a-really-great-dream-last-night hot. I’m not talking about Zachary Quinto, the actor. No, it’s Quinto as Spock, the hair, the lisp, the..logic. More from FlickFilosopher: “if there’s something particularly genius — and particularly geeky — about Abrams’ Star Trek, it’s that it acknowledges Spock’s sex appeal for smart women not as subtext but as overt text.” (More from i09 and EW.) If women ruled Hollywood there would be an all-Vulcan spinoff film immediately lined up with pointy ears for Adrian Brody, Ryan Gosling, and every other actor who looks like he’s read a book in the last three months. Previously: In Favor of the Sensitive Superhero
Just when you thought you couldn’t love the President Elect more, you read he’s got a collection of Conan and Spiderman comics. He’s read all the Harry Potter books with Malia and Sasha dressed up as the Corpse Bride for Halloween. He joked about a belt buckle Michelle Obama wore, “The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!” (Metafilter is convinced he actually said the correct “dilithium crystals,” and the reporter heard it wrong.) Last month, he greeted Leonard Nimoy with the Vulcan hand signal. Henry Jenkins points out James T. Kirk was consciously modeled after JFK and the series was really the first to show a harmonious multiracial community, things a young Obama probably picked up on. There are rumors on this post at Tor about him attending Comic Con! Maybe he’ll host a Whitehouse Battlestar Galactica marathon. Still, our most science fiction president remains Ronald Reagan for his great contribution to preemptive measures against alien invasion.
WMMNA goes to freshfacedandwildeyed in London and finds Steve Schofield’s wonderful series of photographs of English Stars Wars and Star Trek cosplayers in their homes.
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