Sam Han | Eportfolio

After a fuss over a leak and then an official confirmation from Warp, Brian Eno has unveiled his next album, “Small Craft On a Small Sea.”

The launch page reveals far more about the packaging than the actual music (though I must say, the packaging is very pretty). But the album does focus on collaboration, working with returning artists Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams. Hopkins and Eno have worked together regularly, and that trio produced some wonderful sounds, recording with Peter Chilvers, for the soundtrack for “The Lovely Bones.” Abrahams’ original mention on his Web diary also described some of what’s to come:

It contains the fruits of several years of jams between the three of us. I’ve not heard anything quite like it — it sounds ‘live’ and ‘alien’ at the same time. Some things have been permitted to survive, which only Brian would have had the courage to let go, and it’s so much the better for it.

(Via tinymixtapes, which also lends the live video of the trio below.

The release also comes wrapped in some evocative artworks by Eno himself, including the dune image seen on the cover.

All in all, that seems there’s reason to look forward to the November 2 (November 15 UK) release date, as we get to hear the product of these three musical imaginations. Preorders, from digital to various collectors’ editions, start Wednesday of this week.

Details:
http://brian-eno.net/#headlines

And these three artists live:

Look how awesome the packaging is for Eno’s new album on Warp. He’s so cool.

“Strangers constantly ask about it,” Michael Hughes, a communications associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said of his iPad, which he uses to read a mix of novels and nonfiction. “It’s almost like having a new baby.” An iPad owner for four months, Mr. Hughes said people were much more likely to approach him now than when he toted a book. “People approach me and ask to see it, to touch it, how much I like it,” he said. “That rarely happens with dead-tree books.”

With the price of e-readers coming down, sales of the flyweight devices are rising. Last month, Amazon reported that so far this year, Kindle sales had tripled over last year’s. When Amazon cut Kindle’s price in June to $189 from $259, over the next month Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers.

Social mores surrounding the act of reading alone in public may be changing along with increased popularity. Suddenly, the lone, unapproachable reader at the corner table seems less alone. Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already plugged into a conversation somewhere, said Paul Levinson, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

“I think, historically, there has been a stigma attached to the bookworm, and that actually came from the not-untrue notion that, if you were reading, you weren’t socializing with other people,” Dr. Levinson said. “But the e-reader changes that also because e-readers are intrinsically connected to bigger systems.” For many, e-readers are today’s must-have accessory, eroding old notions of what being bookish might have meant. “Buying literature has become cool again,” he said.

Debra Jaliman, a dermatologist in Manhattan, said that she believed technology like her iPad, which she uses to read everything from newspapers to novels, had helped banish social stigmas about reading alone in public.

“There may once have been a slight stigma about people reading alone, but I think that it no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology,” she said. “We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone.”

Not everyone agrees that e-readers have made the people reading them more approachable. In fact, the opposite may be true in some cases. Jenny Block, a Dallas-based writer and sex columnist, said that she thought her Kindle was a stronger pre-emptive rebuff than a book. “I think the Kindle sends the imperative ‘I’m busy, please don’t disturb me’ message when you are traveling on a plane or eating in a restaurant or relaxing at a resort,” she said, adding that the last book she read on her Kindle was “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.”

“And that’s a good thing,” she said of the Kindle’s imperative. “It says, ‘I’m used to doing this, don’t pity me.’ ”

The Sociality of Objects. Also, s/o to Paul Levinson, Simon Vozick-Levinson’s (of EntertainmentWeekly.com) dad!

I realized I posted a response to the Web is Dead article without the original referent. How Baudrillard of me.

Yet evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology. New media predators rise up, but other media species typically adapt rather than perish. That is the message of both history and leading media theorists, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Television, for example, was seen as a threat to radio and movies, though both evolved and survived.

Still, if the evolutionary pattern remains intact, there are some fundamental differences in today’s media ecology, experts say.

Strip away the headline hyperbole of the “death of” predictions, they note, and what remains is mainly commentary on the impact of the accelerated pace of change and accumulated innovations in the Internet-era media and communications environment. A result has been a proliferation of digital media forms and fast-shifting patterns of media consumption.

So the evolutionary engine runs faster than ever before, opening the door to new and often unforeseen possibilities. “Change has changed qualitatively,” says Janet Sternberg, an assistant professor at Fordham University and president of the Media Ecology Association, a research organization.

Up, for example, sprout social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and others — that are hybrids of communication, media distribution and unvarnished self-expression. New versatile digital devices — whether iPhone or Android smartphones, iPod players and iPad tablets — nurture more innovation and experimentation.

Adaptations follow. College freshman don’t wear watches — cellphones are their timepieces — and seldom use e-mail, notes the Beloit College Mindset List, which was released last week. (The yearly list, created by two faculty members in 1998, is intended as a glimpse at the attitudes and behavior of new college students.) Instead of e-mail, young people prefer to communicate through social networks, or instant-messaging or cellphone text messages, to which their friends are more likely to reply quickly.

Americans are talking less on their cellphones. When they do talk, the conversations are shorter, according to industry data. Partly, this reflects the shift in use of cellphones more as mobile computers that communicate via written messages. But this also reflects a subtle shift in etiquette, experts say. People increasingly use text messages and e-mail to arrange telephone calls, which are reserved for more important, complicated dialogues. An unscheduled call from people other than family members, they say, is often regarded as a rude intrusion.

Broad swaths of the blogosphere lie fallow, abandoned. But again, this is a sign of adaptive behavior. Much of the communication on personal blogs, where people wrote and posted pictures of themselves, their children and their pets, was about “sociability” and has shifted to social networks like Facebook, says John Kelly, lead scientist at Morningside Analytics, a research firm. But professional blogs, meant for public consumption, and focused on subjects like politics, economics and news, are thriving, Mr. Kelly notes.

The spread of mobile media devices, whether smartphones or iPads or Nooks, has led to tailored software applications that make reading text and watching video easier on screens smaller than those on personal computers. So people are not viewing this mobile media through a Web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, a central point in the Wired “Web Is Dead” article. But the books, magazines and movies viewed on an iPad, for example, are downloaded over the Internet. Indeed, Wired added the headline declaration, “Long Live the Internet.” Similarly, the case for Facebook’s fall someday is that it is a cluttered Web creation when mobile devices demand sleek, simple designs.

Adaptive innovation and experimentation, experts say, is the rule in a period of rapid change that can be seen as the digital-age equivalent of the ferment after the introduction of the printing press. “We’re experiencing the biggest media petri dish in four centuries,” observes Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford University who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are next,” predicts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab. “Text is not going away, nor is reading. Paper is going away.”

Technology is by no means the only agent of change. Cultural tastes have a big influence, sometimes bringing quirky turns in the evolutionary dance. Record turntables and vinyl records did appear all but extinct — only to be revived by audiophiles, including D.J.’s who created new sounds and rhythms — the art of turntablism. Today, the analog devices are often linked to computers for editing and adding sound tracks, and many people mix tracks at home. Turntables have made a niche revival, and vinyl record sales have increased 62 percent over the last decade to 2.4 million last year, reports Nielsen, a market research firm.

“No one would have predicted that — the unexpected happens,” says Lisa Gitelman, a media historian at New York University. “When we look at how media evolves, it is clear there is no single arrow forward.”

Radio is a classic evolutionary survivor. In the 1930s and 1940s, radio was the entertainment hearth of American households, as depicted in the Woody Allen film “Radio Days.” By the 1950s, television wrested that role from radio. But the older media adapted by moving to shorter programming formats and becoming the background music and chat while people ride in cars and do other things at home. Later, digital satellite distribution breathed new life and diversity into radio offerings, by allowing almost unlimited channels.

“Radio is a supple and durable technology that has outlived quite a few predictions of its demise,” says John Staudenmaier, editor of the journal Technology and Culture, who regards podcasts as the long-lived medium’s latest incarnation. “It’s the country cousin of radio, still the transmission of audio only,” he says.

Movies, too, have proved remarkably resilient. The television threat in the 1950s set off Hollywood’s early, brief foray into 3-D (only recently revived). Movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 “Dial M for Murder” were shot in 3-D, though the latter played in most theaters as a conventional film. Yet the ultimate solution for Hollywood back then was not a technical gimmick, but a richer art form, though one assisted by wide-screen, vivid-color technologies like Cinerama and CinemaScope. Studios began turning out fewer films, but ones intended to give viewers a more vibrant, immersive experience than television could offer — movies like “Ben-Hur” in 1959 and “How the West Was Won” in 1962.

Today, traditional media companies face the adaptive challenge posed by the Internet. That challenge is not just the technology itself, but how it has altered people’s habits of media consumption. Multitasking, in the sense of truly being able to focus on more than one cognitively taxing task at a time, may well be a myth, experts say. But it does seem to be an accurate description of people’s behavior — watching television, while surfing the Internet or answering text messages. “Consumers are getting much more adept at engaging two or three forms of media at a time,” says Steve Hasker, head of Nielsen’s media unit.

Attention spans evolve and shorten, as even the most skilled media jugglers can attest. “I love the iPad,” admits Mr. Negroponte, “but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through.” And people, every bit as much as technology, shape the churning media ecology.

And the “Web is Dead” reckoning continues…

Working on that Web 2.0 book right now and I’ve decided to write about this hilarious TV commercial for Tandy computers.

Free association: This computer somewhat reminds me of the computer that Eddie Murphy’s character has in Trading Places in the office that was previously held by Dan Akroyd’s character before…well…they traded places. I kind of imagine Eddie looking up prices to oranges and pork bellies on this thing.

Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor in the department of media, culture and communication at New York University, said Foursquare taps into our urge to win when we are placed in a competitive environment, especially in front of our peers.

“It’s about perfecting the craft of game play,” Mr. Galloway said. “Foursquare turns spaces into a game, and part of its allure is the gamelike aspect.”

“And,” he added, “it’s fun!”

Biggups to Alex. He’s like the smartest dude ever.

In my last apartment, I had close to zero cell phone service. I feel their pain but come on, you got to fix the building!

Google’s attempt to bring its Street View service to Germany has met with strong opposition. Given the country’s history, the opposition feeds off many Germans’ wariness of encroachments upon their privacy—a wariness that Jeff Jarvis has called “something nearing a cultural obsession.” In this vein, a leading newspaper commented that “Google knows more about you and me than the KGB, Stasi or Gestapo ever dreamed of.” Not least among those opposing the Californian internet giant’s service are the German churches. Several Protestant churches have registered concerns, including the largest of the Landeskirchen, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover.

The churches raise a number of critical issues with Google’s service, which, once implemented, will make the cityscapes of 20 German cities available on the web. Aside from general concerns about privacy, an official of the Evangelical Church in Baden remarked that public space must not be commercialized. A council member of the same southwest German church summarized the theological motivation for resisting Street View: “The world belongs to God, not Google.”

While positioning themselves as defenders of privacy against Google, the churches will not be making use of the option to have their church buildings removed from the service’s panoramic images. “The church has an interest in its church buildings being visible as public institutions,” a church official remarked (my emphasis).

This raises interesting questions about the place of religion in Germany’s secular society. It also provides an interesting case study for the ways in which digital technologies potentially amplify what José Casanova captured with his notion of “public religion.” The churches become defenders of a certain notion of the public by pushing back against the ubiquitous application of technology and  insisting on theological grounds that the public should not become colonized by private commercial interests (“God, not Google”). At the same time, however, they can insert themselves into the public and gain visibility in new ways by embracing Google’s technological production of an urban public.

In a remarkable essay on Street View, Jon Raffman writes: “A street view image can give us a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.” In Google’s framing of the public, the significance of different areas of human experience is (at least partially) up for grabs. This situation accords religious actors the opportunity of (re-)claiming public space. But how far can this claim go? Rafman writes, “In the past, religion and ideologies often provided a framework to order our experience; now, Google has laid an imperial claim to organize information for us.”

Perhaps Google has pulled off the ultimate god-trick, as Donna Haraway put it. The gaze of its cameras is the neutral gaze “seeing everything from nowhere.” Perhaps, then, in a sense, the world does belong to Google, not God.

Tags: church, digital technologies, Germany, Google, public religions, public sphere, technology

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Literally what an entire chapter of my dissertation is on.

The average Briton spends almost half of their waking life using media and communications, data suggests.

The statistics from regulator Ofcom indicate that people in the UK spend seven hours a day watching TV, surfing the net and using their mobile phones.

However, it is argued that the average person actually squeezes in the equivalent of nearly nine hours of media and communications by multi-tasking on several devices.

Rory Cellan-Jones reports.

I wonder what the stats are for the US.

“The media is changing everything,” Abu Haiba told me. “Television, the Internet, Facebook. We have to think faster, move faster. Time flies! 4Shbab is part of that change. It’s more than music. We have 25,000 members in the 4Shbab Forum. We get 3,000 S.M.S. a day from viewers. I have fans in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq — you name it. We think of it as a new kind of preaching for the ‘rebound generation.'”