The Leisurely Historian…

Just like your friend who’s obsessively checking out his Facebook, squirrels are avid social networkers.

Perhaps the best part of the entire article is the definition of squirrel “kissing” as “oral contact that doesn’t lead to bickering.”

Also interesting (though less amusing):

Manno tested what would happen to the squirrel network if individuals were removed. Random removals didn’t disrupt the network much, but if more than 10 percent of the colony’s important members were taken out, the network fragmented, leaving it vulnerable to collapse.

If, as many have suggested, most people use internet Social Network Systems not to increase our base of friends (actual “networking”) but to suplement or complement existing social networks, can this be taken as a survival instinct? Is the social disconnect of the postmodern age, the breakdown of community and kinship ties, encouraging us to resort to SNS technology out of an instinctual desire to preserve and foster social systems as a method of self-preservation?

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Second item: this Newsweek article from 1995 insisting that the internet is mostly hype, and unlikely to change much of anything:

Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

As much as proponents of new technology get sucked into the same irrational enthusiasm that captured early proponents of the stereoscope, the motion picture, and countless other technologies, being too quick to poo-pooh the new technology can leave you sounding pretty unimaginative, even ten or fifteen years later.

Which is why I’m not giving up on flying cars.

I love ukulele orchestras.

The sound of a single uke can be sublimely beautiful or twee and plinking, it’s much more versatile than people give it credit for being. (It seems that Jake Shimabukuro’s helping to change that somewhat, although I still love the uke primarily as a rhythm instrument.)

The sound of a single uke can evoke a lot, and be pretty amazing. But there’s nothing in the world quite like the sound of, say, fifty ukuleles, playing as one. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are becoming minor Youtube celebrities, and I can see why. They’re a little stiff and droll for me, though. I have to say, I prefer the raw fun of The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra– who can be heard here in a rousing rendition of Outcast’s “Hey Ya.”

Well, a band that’s already been in pretty frequent rotation on my iTunes just came out with a new song featuring a ukulele orchestra. Needless to say, I’m jazzed.

The band is the Bastard Fairies, a group I often explain to my friends as “LA’s answer to the Dresden Dolls.” Like the Dresden Dolls, they’re a male-female two-piece, heavy on the theatricality, childlike music, and dark themes. But where Amanda Palmer is a bit of the waifish Victorian china doll, the Bastard Fairies’ singer, Yellow Thunder Woman, is the Native American answer to Betty Page. Where the Dolls seem to draw inspiration from Weimar Republic Caberets, the Fairies prefer punk rock, regressed to childhood. Nursery rhymes about sex, death, and beer.

What drew my attention to the Bastard Fairies wasn’t actually their music– it was their delivery system. These guys were ahead of Chris Anderson in the belief that the future of business is free.

The then-unsigned band elected to make their excellent debut album, Momento Mori, freely available for download, and then look for someone to distribute them. A lot of people, myself included, downloaded the album out of sheer curiosity. The album got picked up by Adrenaline Music, the download page went away, and the CD was released with additional tracks. It can be even be purchased now on Amazon. Go pick up a copy– it’s worth it.

Anyway, I’ve been listening a lot to this new uke orchestra Bastard Fairies track.

Allow me to introduce the Bastard Fairies’ cover of Melanie Safka’s “Brand New Key”, featuring the Uncle Lincoln Ukulele Club:

Links:

The Bastard Fairies’ Website
The Bastard Fairies’ Myspace
The Bastard Fairies on last.fm

I actually didn’t manage to log on to LiveJournal during the strike, rendering my refusal to participate moot.

What can I say? I was busy!

I’m tempted to write it off as a familial ethic with regard to strikes, claim that my father growing up in a coal mining town somehow made it impossible for me to cross a picket line– but that would be taking the easy route. The fact was, and is, that I just had a busy Friday. And as many times as I’ve been on LiveJournal sixteen times in one day, there’s just as many times that I’ve failed to participate, for a day, two days, a week.

Social networks, especially text-heavy ones like LJ, are semi-sporadic in terms of participation, even among the most addicted.

Which led me to thinking: the real problem with the kind of hybrid work stoppage/boycott that can be one’s only recourse in social networking systems has a real problem: the unavailability of a picket line.

I’d always thought of picket lines as a spectacular display on the part of the striking party, as a spectacle of solidarity and protest. But they serve a further function: they serve to create a way that those striking, those most committed to the action, can actually stand up and be counted. A picket line separates group action from a day of spiked absenteeism.

If numbers come from the LJ strike, if one were to numerically assess the efficacy of the action, I would show up as a participant, despite my desire to, if anything, participate despite, to not participate in the group action. Looking at my friends, I actually had a few friends who seem to be posting as a direct response to the action, posting somewhat low-content posts, posts they otherwise would not have made, just to stand up and be counted as non-participants. I frankly just didn’t have the time. I made a couple Twitter tweets, but other than that, I was basically just not able to take the time to be online on Friday. My feed reader was likewise neglected.

So– if one wants to effectively signal the power of a mass action in the virtual world, one needs to create a virtual picket line.

In the future, when people are boycott/striking a particular SNS in order to prove a point, it might be wise for them to create an online picket line, in addition. It could function as a sort of one-day-only petition, and users could sign using their usernames on whatever SNS is under scrutiny– this would provide the people in charge, who need to be able to gauge the power and efficacy of such a mass action in order to actually evaluate if it should be taken seriously, a data pool for comparison.

Just a thought, but I think it could be beneficial for digital organizing.

In my last post, you may recall, I called Facebook “shallow,” and said that it was “becoming more and more about snapshot statements, ‘pokes,’ and applications that let you know whether your friends would rather be vampires or ninjas.” Well, it’s nice to know that not only does someone else have the same frustration about the proliferation of applications at the expense of communication on that site, but feels so strongly about it that they decided to produce a music video about it: