Inspired by: Crate&Barrel
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A Treatise on the Systemic Sanitization of Visual Form on the Internet, in Over 140 Characters.
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Notes written about this inspiration
"We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn't have a meaning in itself." -Wim Crowel, on the Helvetica typeface.
When I found this website it was like walking into a dream.
Links that lead to unexpected abundances in information about one person, another to somewhere totally different with groups of people conversing, another leading my Firefox to a spontaneous, unrecoverable, crash. Like a dream, more beauty than logic, but promising that its own mysterious system lies somewhere beneath what is reasoned. People who are distant, yet close. And then, all of a sudden, gone, stolen by some haughty imp within this tin box, envious of my glee.
I'm sure the diligent developers might balk at what I would seem to point out, the bugs they say, but isn't a crawling ant remarkable? In a society where we idolize perfect form, messiness has become a dirty word. Form becomes the least that function requires, simplicity sells Apple computers and Gap jeans, psychological hygiene is a must, and site like Flickr, Twitter, and Tumblr pare down any element that might tax or confuse their users. Apparently vowels made that list. And as we spend innumerable hours in therapy organizing our thoughts and memories into neat manageable boxes-- sold in exactly three colors and two patterns at Ikea, matching-- our daily habits are likewise sanitized.
Yet I cannot claim any immunity to the siren song of a maintained lifestyle, or the illusion, delusion, that the excellence in the entirety of my life will somehow be most efficiently maximized if adequately controlled, recorded, contained and if only I did it in Helvetica. Because nothing I can say to anyone with my mouth is real or agreed to unless its later codified in body of an email. And God forbid I meet anyone I couldn't friend on the Facebook; the panic I would feel at not being able to know their favorite quote from their favorite book would permeate my days. It has become a near universal compulsion. I need it, and on my Blackberry in 3G speeds.
This religion that content can be separated from function is a hoax; anyone who has seen the Book of Kells can bear witness to that. I think it's an unquenchable human desire to be original-- to reaffirm our comfortable selves as special unique snowflakes, but within the confines of the available functional forms of convention, true expression of self is stifling. Of the 140 available, I choose the prettiest, cleanest, most unique template for my Tumblr blog-- unique because only three thousand other users selected it as opposed to the typical thirteen thousand. My chosen template, sublimely elegant, is better than what I could have ever done, done by someone I assume ever better than I. My my, this blog looks awfully like the Crate&Barrel logo. How synergistic.
Back in the day, though I'm too young to use that phrase straight-faced, when I was a wee tiny tot pointing and clicking my way through that realm still new and unexplored, teenagers discovering their bodies for the first time, Kerouac's road before the Walmarts, things were that nostalgically-better. Flashing HTML text and visitor counters are the bell bottoms and Motown of my generation. Even though the 16 bit rainbow scintillation is more a source of seizure than artistry, it left me with a unreproducible sense of excitement. (Now the only sense of excitement I have is surfing the porn sites-- the rush of adrenaline that comes at the possibility of having accidentally downloaded spy-ware during an uncontrollable surge of pop ups.) Even though it was neither elegant nor shared among thousands to millions of other users, every step in a site's construction was difficult, and every word's design made with consideration, however visually ugly the outcome. It was a world where fan shrines to TV shows or long ranting essays about politics existed as people's homepages instead of resumes or links to cookie-cutter profiles on social networking sites; with such a small viewership, people wrote what they wanted to say, not what they wanted other people to hear. In some ways, there was no content, only form.
And now we are expected not only to produce content with no form, but to do so in 140 characters. In all honesty, no one besides Hemingway can write anything worth a damn in 140 characters-- who's baby shoes were they, after all?-- and quickly, too quickly, very quickly, we'll leave a human legacy of enough shortened messages to fill a thousand novels but still have nothing at all. The content driven, less content and more drive, a machine running on the gasoline of thought, is burning out its admittedly low quality petrol, the information made for consumption today but not for tomorrow.
Or, even the alternative to the mainstream, or the mainstream alternative, turns out to be cats with large bold letters on the bottom in Arial Black, that dastardly arch-nemesis of Helvetica, so dastardly! with its god-forsaken slanted t's, rebel. Encoded messages in some ironic language, an unspoken joke between such self admittedly clever people (but they'll never admit it) until the joke is forgotten some years from now and all that is left is a furry creature and a confusing parable. "I believe Mummy and Daddy, back in the day, loved their kittehs and their Sans Serif fonts."
The search for the unusual, even the obscene, especially the obscene, becomes the massive ingestion contest with challengers poised to find the new ridiculous. To be among the first elite to chant in unison, how special this is, this fat man singing, these flashing clips that look like they were made in the 80s but... aren't. The wonderful of the terrible, then viral, unique for it's million views tick tick on the bottom, and replicated in almost exact facsimile, copies more original for their ability to retain as much of the original in its originality. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Soon enough, the regurgitating armies of the Web 2.0 will find this treatise, soon enough, and there will nothing in this place but a brief note, soon enough, in less than 140 characters (soon) about the disappointing quality of the iced decaf soy lattes at one Starbucks (enough!) on the corner versus another, or that other, and be sure that there will be a shortened link of directional gibberish leading you somewhere but no- where?
When I found this website it was like walking into a dream.
Links that lead to unexpected abundances in information about one person, another to somewhere totally different with groups of people conversing, another leading my Firefox to a spontaneous, unrecoverable, crash. Like a dream, more beauty than logic, but promising that its own mysterious system lies somewhere beneath what is reasoned. People who are distant, yet close. And then, all of a sudden, gone, stolen by some haughty imp within this tin box, envious of my glee.
I'm sure the diligent developers might balk at what I would seem to point out, the bugs they say, but isn't a crawling ant remarkable? In a society where we idolize perfect form, messiness has become a dirty word. Form becomes the least that function requires, simplicity sells Apple computers and Gap jeans, psychological hygiene is a must, and site like Flickr, Twitter, and Tumblr pare down any element that might tax or confuse their users. Apparently vowels made that list. And as we spend innumerable hours in therapy organizing our thoughts and memories into neat manageable boxes-- sold in exactly three colors and two patterns at Ikea, matching-- our daily habits are likewise sanitized.
Yet I cannot claim any immunity to the siren song of a maintained lifestyle, or the illusion, delusion, that the excellence in the entirety of my life will somehow be most efficiently maximized if adequately controlled, recorded, contained and if only I did it in Helvetica. Because nothing I can say to anyone with my mouth is real or agreed to unless its later codified in body of an email. And God forbid I meet anyone I couldn't friend on the Facebook; the panic I would feel at not being able to know their favorite quote from their favorite book would permeate my days. It has become a near universal compulsion. I need it, and on my Blackberry in 3G speeds.
This religion that content can be separated from function is a hoax; anyone who has seen the Book of Kells can bear witness to that. I think it's an unquenchable human desire to be original-- to reaffirm our comfortable selves as special unique snowflakes, but within the confines of the available functional forms of convention, true expression of self is stifling. Of the 140 available, I choose the prettiest, cleanest, most unique template for my Tumblr blog-- unique because only three thousand other users selected it as opposed to the typical thirteen thousand. My chosen template, sublimely elegant, is better than what I could have ever done, done by someone I assume ever better than I. My my, this blog looks awfully like the Crate&Barrel logo. How synergistic.
Back in the day, though I'm too young to use that phrase straight-faced, when I was a wee tiny tot pointing and clicking my way through that realm still new and unexplored, teenagers discovering their bodies for the first time, Kerouac's road before the Walmarts, things were that nostalgically-better. Flashing HTML text and visitor counters are the bell bottoms and Motown of my generation. Even though the 16 bit rainbow scintillation is more a source of seizure than artistry, it left me with a unreproducible sense of excitement. (Now the only sense of excitement I have is surfing the porn sites-- the rush of adrenaline that comes at the possibility of having accidentally downloaded spy-ware during an uncontrollable surge of pop ups.) Even though it was neither elegant nor shared among thousands to millions of other users, every step in a site's construction was difficult, and every word's design made with consideration, however visually ugly the outcome. It was a world where fan shrines to TV shows or long ranting essays about politics existed as people's homepages instead of resumes or links to cookie-cutter profiles on social networking sites; with such a small viewership, people wrote what they wanted to say, not what they wanted other people to hear. In some ways, there was no content, only form.
And now we are expected not only to produce content with no form, but to do so in 140 characters. In all honesty, no one besides Hemingway can write anything worth a damn in 140 characters-- who's baby shoes were they, after all?-- and quickly, too quickly, very quickly, we'll leave a human legacy of enough shortened messages to fill a thousand novels but still have nothing at all. The content driven, less content and more drive, a machine running on the gasoline of thought, is burning out its admittedly low quality petrol, the information made for consumption today but not for tomorrow.
Or, even the alternative to the mainstream, or the mainstream alternative, turns out to be cats with large bold letters on the bottom in Arial Black, that dastardly arch-nemesis of Helvetica, so dastardly! with its god-forsaken slanted t's, rebel. Encoded messages in some ironic language, an unspoken joke between such self admittedly clever people (but they'll never admit it) until the joke is forgotten some years from now and all that is left is a furry creature and a confusing parable. "I believe Mummy and Daddy, back in the day, loved their kittehs and their Sans Serif fonts."
The search for the unusual, even the obscene, especially the obscene, becomes the massive ingestion contest with challengers poised to find the new ridiculous. To be among the first elite to chant in unison, how special this is, this fat man singing, these flashing clips that look like they were made in the 80s but... aren't. The wonderful of the terrible, then viral, unique for it's million views tick tick on the bottom, and replicated in almost exact facsimile, copies more original for their ability to retain as much of the original in its originality. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Soon enough, the regurgitating armies of the Web 2.0 will find this treatise, soon enough, and there will nothing in this place but a brief note, soon enough, in less than 140 characters (soon) about the disappointing quality of the iced decaf soy lattes at one Starbucks (enough!) on the corner versus another, or that other, and be sure that there will be a shortened link of directional gibberish leading you somewhere but no- where?
Inspired by:Social Networking, James Joyce, Crate&Barrel, Lacan
A friend of mine has a creative writing and dream log based social network, and I wrote this essay one very late night (or is it one very early morning?) to play around with it a little. I had really nothing that I was interested in writing about, so I figured I would simply write about what I had before my very nose: social networks, and the internet.
It's a piece of prose for prose's sake. There's less meaning really as much as structure and form. But then, that's what it's about too, isn't it?
It's a piece of prose for prose's sake. There's less meaning really as much as structure and form. But then, that's what it's about too, isn't it?
