Tag: New Media

  • NBC New York: The Alice Bond Bag

    notes from ave A underground
    notes from ave A underground

    NBC New York has got the scoop about the Alice Bond bag.
    Let the hunt begin!

  • Race, Ethnicty & New Media Symposium

    westside, talk it out.

    MHB will be presenting his American-Muslim Consumer research at the Texas A&M Race and Ethnic Studies Institute conference on April 30th.

  • The Zeitgeist, Paradox, and That Weezy

    Google released it’s Zeitgeist report this week: its most searched terms. Sarah Palin and Obama both made the top ten in the overall global and US lists and were among the top three people searched in the US. Number four in that category? Lil Wayne.

    Both the most popular people and most popular searches were heavy on the pop and politics. More esoteric searches such as the “what is” category produced three of the all-time favorites: what is love (1), life (2), art (10), as well as a few head-scratchers: scientology (6), 3g (9), java (3).

    Separately, in the top 10 most viewed online videos of the year, eight of the ten were label-produced music videos. The other two: Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, and Obama’s speech on race — a near 40 minute tour de force that has clocked in more than 40 million views. (Palin’s own 8 min. tour de force was the third most viewed video with 56m).

    Parsing the web-centric upheaval in our industries has become the anxiety-ridden hobby du jour as the mainstream media and alternatives struggle to come up with working business models while the titans wobble. Yet one cannot deny that we are seeing more content than ever; more outlets, more providers. All of this places a greater burden on the individual to craft patterns for consuming media. The hope is that what one eventually consumes will be better suited to one’s tastes, but I smell a paradox of choice. Of course, I want my MTV (online, thanks) too.

    So, what’s your strategy?

    Me, I’ll waffle between smarty design talk and brooklyn girls:



    the fader stays part of the new music strategy. (song: Charles Hamilton).
    Further reading on our preferences from NYT mag.

  • Brooklyn We Go Hard

    Love this new vid, made by Evan Roth, one of the originals from Graffiti Research Lab. And, uh, anyone else think Jay cribbed that voice-buckle from Wayne?

    link from Michael Karnjanaprakorn

  • Ad Age: Multicultural Markets

    yoyoyo amigo? STFU.
    yoyoyo amigo? STFU.

    Ad Age published an essay by MHB about how social media will help get advertising past tired cliches when attempting to engage multicultural marktes. TBD when SMH will slowdown.

  • Contemporary Muslim Consumer Cultures

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    MHB was just invited to speak in Berlin at the upcoming Contemporary Muslim Consumer Cultures conference. He’ll being presenting his research about how American-Muslim identity politics are linked to advertising, pop and new media. $170B demo that’s still ignored by brands + agencies. Give a shout if you wanna learn more.

  • All You See Is Crime in the City

    All You See Is Crime in the City

    Evan of G.R.L. holding one of tags from the lab's collection.

    Sip, sip.

    At its root, hip-hop has always mixed tech and middle-finger D.I.Y. with open-source. It’s why there are so many different “purple drank” recipes on the web and the raison d’être of the Urban Dictionary. Enter the Graffiti Research Lab — one of the more novel embodiments of all three of these things, but with the backing of the art establishment.

    You might have missed the last time when G.R.L. got the MoMa invite, or thought that since the words “F— You Snobs,” appeared in their presentation sometime after a phallus that they’d fail to get another. But the fusion of tech, open-source, and street art is just too compelling a concoction to turn down and thus the G.R.L.’s DVD will make its New York premier at MoMa in two weeks. There is, to be sure, an alluring tight rope that separates the worlds of the graf (anti) establishment and the places where the film has shown — places like Sundance. Many of the graf writers in attendance in the video below obscure their faces even as the bubbly swirls around them — probably as much for affect as for security, but the point is inescapable.


    G.R.L. @ M.o.M.A. from fi5e on Vimeo.

    In speaking with Evan, one of the founders, nearly two years ago, he mentioned that one of the difficult parts in getting started was in convincing many of the graf writers that he wasn’t out to arrest them. But in graffiti as in hip-hop, being more visible or “up” trumps being obscure (I’m sure Shepard Fairey and Marc Ecko would agree). It follows, then, that the party video is set to Jay-Z and not the Artifacts. Let’s just hope they swerve the right drinks at the after-party.

    Ah, what the hell. Artifacts from back in the day:

    xmR2lBmhQfQ

    True to their D.I.Y. roots, the G.R.L. has made a torrent of their dvd available here.
    ——
    UPDATES
    4/21/08: NYPost says that NYC graf is on the rise.