Mark Wahl Frivolous Blog

Lightness war

The phrase lightness war (or lightness race) refers to the art industry's tendency to paint, color and print art at progressively increasing levels of lightness to create an image that stands out from others. This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the art industry, particularly in galleries and in pictures distributed as giclée and as Sofa-sized art. In the case of gallery prints, the war stems from artists' and distributors' desires to create pictures that seem as bright as possible or brighter than pictures from competing artists.^[1]

However, as the maximum brightness of a picture is dependent on its illumination, the overall lightness can only be increased by reducing the dynamic range. This is done by making the darker areas brighter while the brightest peak shades are either destroyed or severely diminished.

Example

"The initial idea for the ______________ came from a dream I had .........................(type of media)......................... ________ years ago. I was in _____________ and had bought a book (number)......................(distant town)..................... called "Dreaming of _______________________". The book talked .......................(celebrity)............................... about the great number of people in that country who dream that ................................................................. they are with ________________________. I dreamed that I ....................(celebrity).................................. walked into ___________________, and there ________ sat, ________ ............(famous location)..............(he/she)......(gerund) or ___________. As I approached, ________ looked up at me and ...(gerund)......................(he/she)........................ said, "___________! You're like a ___________ in a _____________!" .......(your name)................(first noun).....(second noun). Then of course, I awoke. I realized that "___________ in a ...........................................(first noun).......... _____________" sounded familiar to me. Eventually I decided that (second noun).................................................... it was biblical, and I found it in the book of _____________. From ..............................................(book of bible)..... it grew into a _______________, and I started lifting things from ...............(type of media).................................... the book of __________________." ............(book of bible).......................................

"Magic street skate Mystery street skate Take a little ride Let me be your guide Through the street skate paradise. Juju street skate Voodoo street skate Take a little fall. Spend a splendid night Where there's never hills or walls. It's a natural, natural, natural desire. Roll on actual, actual, actual plastic tires. Let the street skate set your soul on fire, fire, fire, fire. You'll be hypnotized, And you'll be demonized, But you'll be paralyzed, So you can victimize. You're facinating, captivating, losing your mind When we cast the street skate light on you. Holy street skate Sacred street skate Take a little chance, Get into a trance, And join me in the street skate dance."

In an earlier post on anti-utopian social networking, I outlined a scenario in which An anti-utopian social networking site is a social networking site that has developed a flaw that "spoils" it, and one flaw could be the misapplication of undercover/viral marketing strategies.

Another problem which could be a flaw in social networking is hyperreality, a term used by the theorists Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco. One possible definition of hyperreal could be made in contrast to what is "real":

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal...which is entirely in simulation. (Jean Baudrillard)

1. Just because you're not a celebrity doesn't mean millions of people couldn't be watching your every move.

One impact is the sense an individual would have from "always being viewed". In part, social networking services give anyone with Internet connectivity the ability to share minutae of their life with others, regardless of boundaries of time or distance. Everyone is encouraged to self-publish: blog their life, update their status on Twitter, write about their feelings in specialized feeling-recording Facebook or MySpace apps, upload their family photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube. Not only do people enjoy uploading, people enjoy watching. Without LiveJournal/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr/MySpace/YouTube, would those same authors write in their diaries, show their snapshots to friends at parties, etc? To some, the magnification available from publishing to these services must offer an appeal, but with it often comes a cost to the participants: both the authors, and the viewers searching for the "real" in self-generated content. Jean Baudrillard wrote in the section "The End of the Panopticon" of Simulations, concerning a TV documentary capturing an "actual typical American family":

"It is again to this ideology of the lived experience, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity, that the American TV-verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971 refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting. 300 hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, ups and downs - in brief, a "raw" historical document, and the "best thing ever on television, comparable, at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during the shooting: a crisis flared up, the Louds went their separate ways, etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there.
More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there". An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true, nor false: but utopian. The "as if we weren't there" is equivalent to "as if you were there". It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, much more than the "perverse" pleasure of prying. In this "truth" experiment, it is neither a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but of a kind of thrill of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time..."

The popularity of these social networking services gives millions of people around the world the ability to simultaneously 'drop in' on any randomly-chosen individual in a way that never would be physically possible before. The BBC reports that footage of a teenage kid swinging a golf ball retriever, not intended to be shown to anyone, has been viewed 900 million times, making the victim a "worldwide object of ridicule": It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class.

As people are objects in social networking services, these services are designed to make it easy for the users to find other people they know, and learn more about them. Chris Ceppi writes about the people search engine Spock and the New New Transparency that

Spock automates the retrieval of those bits - if your age is published on LinkedIn, MySpace, a random online bio, or any other number of sources that Spock sorts and surfaces - then it will be front and center on Spock.

Also, many social networking sites encourage users to add comments about each other. Gossiping is a natural human activity, that now is magnified through technology to allow the gossip to be available on a vast scale. As a result, individuals find that they are not in control of their story as commentary aggregates and swirls around and about them. Pamela Dingle wrote in her blog post "The Dating Mashup (or my Facebook Adventure)":

Why wouldn't someone from some other part of my life or history cruise through and add his own dating history into that photo thread? Heck, maybe my husband will chime in, he's on Facebook too. If there was enough interest, I do believe that an entire timeline could be constructed, and what could I do? I could scream and freak out and have the photo removed I'm sure. But such anti-social behaviour would become the object of discussion in turn. When you protest, people assume you are afraid of something :). Taken separately, nobody's dating history is secret - but peer-to-peer publishing of cumulative results makes me feel vulnerable to the same phenomena occurring around some other, less innocent set of facts.

Bob Blakley has discussed this in his blog post "On the Absurity of Owning One's Identity", and the fear of computer systems and organizations conspiring behind one's back is based on real concerns, as shown in an article earlier this year by Liz Pulliam Weston in MSN Money entitled "Insurers keep a secret history of your home" discusses the ChoicePoint Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE) database:

Jan and Kevin Garder of Bremerton, Wash., discovered this the hard way. The Garders thought they were doing the right thing when they told their insurance company, State Farm, about some minor water damage caused by a rainstorm last year. The couple, who say they had been with their insurer for 30 years without filing a claim, ultimately decided not to file one this time, either. That didn't stop State Farm from dropping them as customers, they say. Not only that, but they say State Farm also shared the damage information with the CLUE database. When the Garders applied for coverage elsewhere, the other insurers cited State Farm's damage report as the reason they wouldn't write a policy, Jan Garder said.

Here, as the information flow paths in social networking services are based on one's "friends", "coworkers" and other more nebulous relationships, this time, it's personal.

Thus one flaw of social networking might be that it provides anyone with the ability to drill into the details (facts, opinions, speculations, connections real or implied) of another's life, and to the target, the sense that this could occur at any time and come from anywhere.

The former, taken to extremes, can be anti-social behavior. It is not necessary to know everything about a person to be their friend/coworker/neighbor, and conversely knowing everything of a person's biography does not make them one's friend, as I mentioned in the example of the King of Comedy.

2. The Replica replacing the real

The second flaw might be that the unreal world of online interaction might come to affect real-world interaction.

Internet users are conditions to not accept certain people as real. There are not hundreds of rich widows in Nigeria seeking help in moving their fortunes; it is a variant of the Spanish prisoner scam:

Fellow says him and his sister, wealthy refugees, left a fortune in the home country. He got out, girl and the money stuck in Spain. Here is her most beautiful portrait. And he needs money to get her and the fortune out. Man who supplies the money gets the fortune and the girl. Oldest con in the world.

On the face of it, as Pamela Dingle noted in "Breaking the TOS before you even start", the terms of service of various social networking sites require the user to provide 'true' information. Some sites would delete "fake" profiles for non-real persons, as a 2003 article in SF Weekly states

Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life ... abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures -- often images ripped off the Web -- violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun ruthlessly deleting fakesters and plans to eventually eradicate them completely from the site.

Yet if there is commercial value in having certain "non-person" characters present, then those are allowed, as a 2004 article in Wired states

"What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion," Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. "We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or 'fan' profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends."

Social networking services can further be subverted with characters that have no existence outside of the services themselves. An Internet celebrity may not necessarily be a "real" person or even a "real" (pre-existing) character, as in the example of lonelygirl15:

To further the initial illusion that Bree was a real girl, a MySpace page was set up for her and she began meaningfully corresponding with many of her fans. Several fans of lonelygirl15's video posts began to wonder if Bree was, in fact, a real person or if the posts were part of a teaser campaign for a television show or an upcoming movie (similar to the viral marketing used to hype The Blair Witch Project). Others felt that the blog might be part of an alternate reality game.

If all one sees are replicas, does it become harder to recognize the real? For an extreme example, in the movie Galaxy Quest, an alien civilization, the Thermians, has intercepted Earth's TV transmissions from the 1960-1970s. Yet their mental models are different and they do not 'get' that the television shows are sometimes fictional. They believe Gilligan, the Skipper, "and the rest" really were stranded on an island. They also believe that the episodes they receive of the sci-fi show "Galaxy Quest" were "historical documents" describing the adventures in space of the crew of the NSEA Protector, a thinly-veiled Starship Enterprise. Using their advanced technology, the Thermians transport the actor Jason Nesmith, who portrayed the captain of the Protector, to an actual interstellar spaceship they have constructed with the appearance of the Protector from these "historical documents". Jason Nesmith, having of course never seen an actual spaceship, doesn't recognize it as being 'real', believing it to be only a fan's reconstruction:

This is great. Usually it's just cardboard walls in a garage.

The second impact of social networking is that 'unreal' statements made on the Internet about interpersonal relationships might replace the 'real' statements: the vocabulary of the software becomes a "Newspeak" that reframes the participants' expressions. Suppose the term friend is used to mean any connection: people who are interested in me, people who have a pretty picture on their home page, people who I was at the same school at, people whose friends I know, etc. Can changes such as these affect people's behavior?

In an article in last month's New Scientist on "The rise of cyberbullying" several contributing factors are cited, including the typical scapegoat of anonymity, the magnification of attacks from the wide distribution possible online, the 24x7 connected lifecycle of the participants, and

The lack of face-to-face contact might tempt bullies to new levels of cruelty. "On the playground, seeing the stress and pain of the victim face-to-face can act as an inhibitor to some degree," explains Carr. "In cyberspace, where there is no visual contact, you get more extreme behaviour." Kowalski says the effect is unique to computer-mediated communication. "There is a distancing of the self and immediacy in response that we don't have in any other form of communication," she says. "On the computer, it's like it's not really you."

Furthermore, unlike traditional online games (e.g., Nethack) where people play behind personas defined by the game, game-like interactions embedded in social networking services have such no layer of isolation: the players are playing "as themselves".

The article also notes that 2000 abuse reports are filed each day in Second Life, and that

"It's adults hassling other adults," says Thomas Chesney of the University of Nottingham, UK, who has encountered pushing, swearing and shooting there. Chesney and colleagues recently set up an office in Second Life where they interviewed more than 100 inhabitants about bullying. Chesney says that because many people come to Second Life with a background in gaming, they bring preconceived notions of violence and aggression with them. "They're playing games like World of Warcraft - where the aim is to kill everybody - and they take that attitude into Second Life," he says. "It's a bit depressing that we haven't progressed beyond hassling one other, but not surprising given all we know about workplace bullying."

First, some background.

Tupperware parties, undercover marketing and viral marketing

The party plan is a marketing technique developed by Brownie Wise in the early 1950s, initially for selling Tupperware (tm) plastic storage containers.

The 1995 documentary Tupperware!, on the history and impact on Tupperware in American culture, provides a basic description of how the parties start. The documentary includes excerpts from a party plan short training film; quoting from the transcript,

Woman 1: I've heard a little about this kind of party, but I've often wondered how it works.

Woman 2: Well here's the idea. All you have to do is invite about twelve or fifteen of your friends to drop over some afternoon or evening for a party. And I'll help you put it on. Tell them we'll have lots of fun.

Woman 1: And then I suppose you take orders from the guests?

Woman 2: Yes, but no high-pressure selling. None of your friends will be embarrassed into buying.

A goal of the plan was that anyone (but typically women) could become a participant in this business as a party host or hostess. The background FAQ for the film discusses some of the advantages of the model: low barrier to entry, and leverages existing and emerging interpersonal connections:

Through all these changes [brought on by WWII], women retained important social networks, keeping up with other women through their churches, neighborhoods, and families. Female relatives still provided most child-care for absent mothers. These were the same sort of female networks that had shaped the 19th century anti-slavery and suffrage movements, contributed to the union movement of the early 20th century, and enabled women to move from country to city during the war. These connections would, in turn, be critical to Brownie Wise's marketing strategies, as she built the Tupperware home party business on top of relationships created at church socials and back-fence friendships. (emphasis added)

(from PBS)

A sales brochure illustrated how the scope of selling can grow beyond immediate friends:

Betty: Everyone needs and wants Tupperware. And don't forget your beauty operator, your milk man, your grocer, butcher, service station attendant, your doctor... in other words, everybody you see every day.

Ann: What about the P.T.A.? I know some people there.

Betty: Exactly! You're getting the idea. In other words, wherever you go, you will meet people who are prospects for Tupperware parties.

Participating in a Tupperware party is a 'voluntary' experience, driven by the participant's interest and sense of social obligation. And the product demonstration and order-taking is an evident and 'fun' part of such a party. Everyone there knows that selling is occurring.

By contrast, in undercover marketing, the goal of the marketer is to inform the potential customer without the potential customer being aware they are being targeted. The 1998 movie The Truman Show takes this to extremes, as an analysis from Transparency at transparencynow.com by Ken Sanes suggests

Since the television program that is [Truman Burbank's] life plays nonstop, without commercial interruption, it has to makes money through product placement. Advertisements are not-so-seamlessly woven into dialogue and scenes, turning Truman's life into a continuous commercial, as well as a form of entertainment...

Taking the point one or two steps further, we can say that the media would have us live inside a world of fiction that is the most glorious commercial ever devised, for a system in which life, sales, and entertainment are interfused. "Product placement" and testimonials for this emerging system of entertainment-marketing capitalism are being seamlessly woven into our lives.

Look what I got for you at the checkout. It's a Chef's Pal. It's a dicer, grater, peeler all in one. Never needs sharpening. Dishwasher safe.

In viral marketing, the potential customer and the current customer are enlisted to pass on the marketing message they've received. The prospect caught up in viral marketing may be aware and actively want to "spread the word", might be a carrier who is unaware of how they are being used, or might be aware of their participation in the activity and not be able to do something about it.

An example of the third category of viral marketing is a public emailing service that automatically attaches ads to outgoing messages. Hotmail, one of the earliest uses of viral marketing on the Internet, is discussed in the 2001 paper "Applying Quantitative Marketing Techniques to the Internet" by Alan Montgomery of CMU:

An alternative promotional campaign was suggested by one of Hotmail's venture capitalists, who advocated placing an advertising message, "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail," with a hyperlink back to Hotmail at the bottom of every outgoing e-mail. The recipient would know that the e-mail message came via Hotmail and its use would be an implicit endorsement of the service. The more e-mail messages a Hotmail subscriber sent, the more advertising would be distributed. Every recipient would become a potential new subscriber. Initially the founders were against this type of promotion, thinking that their users would be repelled by any advertising, but they had few other advertising options.

One reason for the success marketing campaign is that it was the only one of its kind, as Ellen Neuborne wrote in her 2001 BusinessWeek article " Viral Marketing Alert!":

My inbox occupies an ever-bigger slice of my hard drive. If viral marketers have their way, in addition to my daily dose of e-mails from companies pitching junk, I'll get another pile passed on by friends. It'll be cute once, maybe twice. But there's a viral traffic jam lurking just a few clicks down the Information Highway. Even good friends can be as annoying as marketers if they bombard me too much. Companies think viral marketing will cut through the clutter, but if they come en masse, they'll be the clutter.

Utopia as a goal for social networking

There is a long tradition of attempts to create utopia social experiements, particularly in the United States. Typically these involve communal living of unrelated individuals and some form of central governance and control over societal behaviors, and many of these attempts have failed. Robert C. Ellickson wrote in 2001 in the draft "The law and economics of the household" that

The enduring appeal of utopian alternatives to the conventional household hints that humans have an evolved psychological yearning for a return to the conditions of the hunter-gatherer band. Like a sweet tooth, this yearning can prompt maladaptive decision-making under contemporary conditions. (p. 32)

One persistent example alternative household structure "design pattern" he cites is the "group quarters":

Examples are dormitories, fraternities and sororities, and abodes for members of religious orders. Group quarters exploit efficiencies of scale in the production of food, shelter, and social activities, but at the price of major sacrifices in autonomy and privacy. A consensual group quarters thus disproportionately attracts those who are young and impecunious. (p. 33)

It is possible to consider social networking web sites as being "utopian", for example in that many

encourages individuals to join in and invite their friends,
share commonalities with the "group quarters" design pattern,
encourages participants to make connections with ever-larger sets of individuals, adding them to the participants "friends",
promise an environment where all the participant's needs are met, and
have as a focus entertainment or pleasure.

Marketing in social networking

Marketing techniques used in social networking sites seem to follow party plan, undercover and viral marketing strategies.

For one example of marketing in social networking, Google Gmail includes advertisements in the display of a page alongside emails being read, and targets these advertisements based on the content of the email. Google says that By offering Gmail users relevant ads and information related to the content of their messages, we aim to offer users a better webmail experience. For example, if you and your friends are planning a vacation, you may want to see news items or travel ads about the destination you're considering.

Furthermore Google goes out of their way to stress, in a apology page for Gmail ads, that people actually want these advertisements:

Many people have found that the search-related ads on Google.com can be valuable--not merely a necessary evil, but a welcome feature. We believe that users will also find Gmail's ads and related pages to be helpful, because the information reflects their interests. In fact, we have already received positive feedback from Gmail users about the quality and usefulness of our ads and related pages.

For another example, in Facebook there is an ad region consistently on the left side of every page, below the link to the home page and links to applications:

And Facebook also interpolates ads in the middle of a 'news story' about a subject's friends:

It is interesting to note that the icon for this "news item" is a megaphone (to suggest that amplification to reach a wide audience is necessary), and unlike every other interesting news story about friends, the item has a "Share" button to permit the subject to send it to their friends or add it to their profile. There's no obvious indication of why a participant might want to include an ad for a credit score in their profile when they are not permitted to include in their profile non-advertising news items about their friends, such as a notice of a birthday or a party, or significant life events such as marriages or job changes.

Anti-utopian social networking

The Wikipedia article on dystopias mentions a distinction between an anti-utopia and a dystopia, that is derived from a 1998 Random House article on the word "dystopia":

...for example, dystopia is used to mean 'a horrible place', while anti-utopia is used to mean 'a place or society intended to be utopian but that has been perverted and is now horrible'.

An anti-utopian social networking site would have some flaw that "spoils" it, and one flaw could be the misapplication of these marketing strategies.

This flaw might arise from a mismatch of expectations between the operators and participants of the social networking service, in particular where the operators see it as vehicle for selling advertisements, and the participants have goals unrelated to being marketed to.

For example, a cognitive disconnect in the real world would occur when a group of friends engaged in a ordinary discussion in one of their houses realize that they have been brought into a Tupperware party without realizing it, when the hostess starts bringing up topics of conversation concering food storage options and demonstrating various plastic containers.

In an anti-utopian social networking site, participants might feel "trapped" by incessant, annoying, or unnerving marketing, without a vehicle for escape or subversion. While the site operators might argue that no one is forced to be part of the social networking site, this is not always in practice true, due to factors discussed in the earlier post "Modelling the effects of interoperability", or scenarios such as: a corporation holding a training course in a virtual reality environment, or a university relying upon a social networking site to disseminate news to its students.

Mir/Shuttle Kid's T-Shirt 100% Cotton: the Mir space station and the Space Shuttle.
International Space Station Kid's Hooded Sweatshirt Cotton/Polyester Fleece: the ISS under construction.
Mars Sample Return Infant Bodysuit 100% Cotton Infant Creeper: a future Mars rover and sample return mission.
Mars Sample Return + Rover Infant T-Shirt 100% Cotton Infant T-Shirt: a future Mars rover and sample return mission.
Probe Bib 100% Cotton: painting of descending Huygens probe

the book is published and becomes a bestseller;	it's turned into a performance,

but the media frenzy (captured in the text itself)	causes the story to unravel.

All of this blog's posts by date

Lightness war

Example

Mir/Shuttle
Kid's T-Shirt

International Space Station
Kid's Hooded Sweatshirt

Mars Sample Return
Infant Bodysuit

Mars Sample Return + Rover
Infant T-Shirt