Des Temps

Tag: Social Media

  • Soulja Boy's Superman Subversion

    “Crank That” content occupies 5 of the top 100 YouTube videos. Advertising and Academia have written great articles and case studies about the Soulja Boy phenomenon. Even Disney let copyrights slide to join the party. Yup, it’s a new media coup.

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    So…the line “Superman dat (h)o!” means? It aint just some nonsensical wordplay.

    Last fall there was a flurry in the blogosphere about the lyrical ‘translation’, but it didn’t go viral, so the song and the artist have not been outcast by corporate America.

    The song/dance has remixed past the point of authorial intent, so the fact that people age 6-66 are Cranking in the classroom and at halftime is not really a prob, just really funny. It’s another example of hip-hop subverting dominant linguistic paradigms while working within it. Like in 2003 how Dave Chappelle and Lil’ Jon had millions of Americans blindly saying Skeet Skeet. Or in the late 90’s when LL Cool J slipped a FUBU ad into the text of a Gap TV spot – LL says on camera “For Us, By Us, on the low”. It flew under the radar of both the client and the agency, whom I’m guessing just heard it as some cool urban lingo, not an encoded advert for their competition.

  • Black Nerds: a reprise

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    Editors Note: The below text is a follow-up to Raafi’s now-famous post about Black Nerds.
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    Over the past couple months I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching over exactly what the word “nerd” actually means and found myself in a sort of Potter Stewart limbo. After all, blogging about what it means to be a nerd isn’t very cool, but I digress. My fragmentary notion that the black nerd is an emerging presence in our culture that is under-recognized has provoked many sorts of reactions from the vituperative (I see you Tai) to the laudatory. In the process the link has found its way into blogs at USA Today, MIT, and Ebony/Jet. The New York Times called to say wassup and just this week I appeared coast-to-coast on Canadian radio. Did I mention that Clutch Magazine thinks I’m a black man to watch? (I’ll mention here, in passing, that the Beastie Boys once recorded a song entitled “Hey Ladies!”).

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  • Occam's Razor & MIT

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    MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference last weekend was a stunna. The crowd was an even split of industry and academia; each camp was curious about the other and left their kool-aid and navel-gazing at the door. The lodestone for this was that the panelists and the audience both asked “WHAT is the Future?” – not stated “This IS the Future!”

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    And it’s this compass of questioning that helps keep a mind sharp. Even though the event was at MIT, I noticed that a fair amount of people in attendance did not have PDAs (aka Silicon Handcuffs). Curious, I asked why, which lead to convos along these lines: Supposedly PDAs make us more efficient. But efficient at what? Actual creative thinking? Or just the new call and response pattern of email and TPS reports?

    Teasing out that thread – much of our techuse – AIM, PDA, Twitter – does not truly make us smarter. But it’s not the tech itself that’s dangerous, it’s our wonton use and the patterns formed in the name of progress. True progress is most often found by bucking patterns and remixing the norm. Without distance or a curious eye toward our techuse, soon we might have to stage South Korean style tech interventions for our USDA Millenials. Progress? jump-up.jpg

  • Cubicle Quaaludes

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    So I don’t do Facebook. And I quit Friendster. No MySpace for MHB, my LinkedIn is dusty and I aint the only one. They were cubicle quaaludes, never truly bolstered any business, friendships or romance. That said, I read about SNS habits and marketshare like an old man follows the ponies. To date, the thoroughbred of articles is this brilliant and controversial paper by Danah Boyd about the class divisions that are taking hold in Facebook vs. MySpace.

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    Boyd traces the roots of the division to the fact that:

    Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn’t that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the “cool” thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.

    Read it, hell print it out. It’s quite something.
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    shout out to fellow travelers who are deaccessioning.

  • Dinosaur Fight

    Of the 500+ folks who emailed RSVPs for the Autumn Apotheosis Party, there was only one address that stuck in my memory: Dinosaur.Fight@gmail.com.

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    Who was this person? And why did I automatically assume that s/he was awesome? In a landscape of literal email addresses, Dinosaur.Fight jumped off the screen, a fang bearing smiley face. It was like seeing a stranger enter the room in a stunning outfit – again, who is s/he? So I replied to the RSVP and asked after the etymology of the address. Talena replied “”it’s actually something I’ve thought about since the advent of this internet age, never wanted to be myname@someemailaddress.com.”

    Could having a unique address become a new way to create distinction in our now staid email identity?

    In Web 1.0, email addresses were often combos of initials + numbers, lots of ZZZZs too. This was reflective of the new ‘techo/cyber’ aspect of things, as if we were talking to HAL 9000. (My Hotmail was MHB718)

    In Web 2.0, the online space was no longer an ‘other’ or even ‘cyber’ – it was normal. And with it, we all got serious Gmail prefixes of firstname.lastname@, mirroring how we introduce ourselves in the flesh (Mine is MichaelHB). So click and brick have conflated.

    Avatars, IM handles, Blogger names, etc… are now the sandbox of funny names in the www. But email? Naw, that’s serious. Nobody uses an alternate ID to RSVP for a party, especially in their own industry. Well, Talena flipped our new norms and introduced herself as Dinosaur.Fight. And now I’m writing about and linking to her. It reminds of being a kid and seeing the first pink flamingo in our neighborhood. I had no idea who lived in that house, but was sure that they were pretty damn cool.

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  • Black Nerds: The Revolution No One Could Have Predicted

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    On a late weekend night, two days before the release of the much-anticipated Microsoft video game Halo 3, a group of 8-to-10 black nerds in their late teens walks down the Bowery, their conversation animated. The leader of the pack, his Ben Wallace afro in full bloom, turns to the others, “Master Chief is… the Jack Bauer of… the Halo universe!” The pack, each member clamoring to respond in the affirmative before the others, turns into a burger joint.

    The rise of the black nerd has been a blustery and uneven process characterized by large gains and deep swoons. Presaged by Clarence Gilyard Jr.’s portrayal of Theo, the computer ace who hacks into the building vault in the classic film Die Hard, the nerd who is possessed wholly of a black American masculinity is a specific character that enjoys a renaissance today even as the hip-hop world continues to project a cartoonishly grotesque opposite. The broadening media landscape, however, allows us greater access to the pulse of black America even as the mainstream media seems to be stuck on stupid infatuated with the images of black males that (used to) sell records.

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  • Dick Cheney is on your Facebook

    I See Yall

    A friend of ours keeps his online info to a minimum. If you watch this clip, you’ll learn about the powers that helped finance Facebook and might think twice before whiling by profiling. Also a tip of the cap to our NYC cabbies if they strike instead of getting GPS’d, tagged and bagged.

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    Learned about the black-ops from WAS