The Wikipedia Game

Andrew Keen hates Wikipedia. Actually, he uses the word "loathe" when asked about the website on The Colbert Report. He has a point to hate it. There are no editors, there are no gatekeepers. There is no reason for me to believe that Wikipedia's plot synopsis of Faulkner's "The Bear" is accurate. It does seem a little odd that Spider-Man's Wikipedia page is roughly the same size of Calvin Coolidge's. Though all of this might be true, Wikipedia has become an indispensable tool for every day information gathering. And fun.

There's a game I like to play with my friends called "The Wikipedia Game." You pick a random article by clicking on "random article." Then in a new tab/window, you pick another random article, again by clicking "random article." The point of the game is to get from the second random article to the first random article only by clicking hyperlinks within the article that lead to other Wikipedia articles.

EXAMPLE?

Destination article: "Odrowąż, Lesser Poland Voivodeship."
Start article: "Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin."

Here's the route I took:

Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin (start!)
Washington D.C.
United States
Invasion of Poland
Second Polish Republic
Administrative division of Second Polish Republic
Gmina
List of Polish Gminas
Gmina Czarny Dunajec
(and finally,)
Odrowąż, Lesser Poland Voivodeship.

You can check my work, if you want. It's all there. You can win either by getting their first, or by getting there in the least amount of pages. This has to be decided on before you play (duh). There's some strategy involved, but I'll leave you to figure that shit out for yourself. You'll never get anywhere if you don't work for it.

Fun game, right?

But, like all things, if you stop to think about it for a second, it becomes much more peculiar. The first chapter of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death talks about media as a metaphor. "In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself," he says.

If we take this to be true, then that means the Wikipedia game has an idea embedded in it that goes beyond its function (wasting time). Why is Wikipedia such an indispensable tool for information? Because it contains an open and free public source of a lot of information. The game requires you to skim through information to get you to links that will take you to another source of information which you then skim in order to get to more information. You don't actually absorb any of the information you look at, but rather, you simply use it as a tool to get wherever you need to be.

The game is a highly condensed metaphor to how we live our lives today. Quick and easy access in order to get to our destination, be it Odrowąż or the end of a paper for school. If you boil it down even further, Wikipedia is information, and the Wikipedia game is a past time. If you look at all of our Wikipedia usage as a more disjointed version of the game, then information becomes a pastime.

Huh.

Panda Bear and the Unabomber

Chuck Klosterman ends one of the sections of his essay "Fail" with the lines, "We do not have the freedom to think whatever we want. We don't. And until we accept that, it's useless to think about anything else." Why is Klosterman being such a Debbie Downer? Because he's right. And we're fucked.

Or rather Ted Kaczynski's right. Klosterman's "Fail" is something of an explication of and a reaction to Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future. Kaczynski, more commonly known as the "Unabomber," wrote Industrial Society and Its Future as a tract against technology. He begins it with the statement "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," and then sent bombs to people's houses and lost all credibility. It's doubtful if he ever had any sanity.


Not a bad looking fella!

But that's not really the point. In "Fail," Klosterman comes to terms with the fact that Kaczynski might actually be right in bemoaning society for blindly accepting all of technology with open arms. And then he writes "I love the Internet. I love the Internet," after previously stating how much he loves reading and rereading about fucking Animal Collective. That's actually a good jumping off point, so let's do that.

I wouldn't call myself an Animal Collective fan. I've listened to Merriweather Post Pavillion a couple times, and I really dig a lot of the earlier tracks on the album. There's that song "My Girls" which has that catchy-as-the-clap hook that goes "I don't mean to seem like I care about material things/ like a social status/ I just want/ four walls and adobe slats/ for my girls/ Ooooh! oooh!" But other than that, I've never heard Strawberry Jam, nor have I heard neither Panda Bear nor Avey Tare's solo stuff. I think Avey Tare might have actually put out some Animal Collective shoes a while ago.

See that? I just listed off two members, an album, and a piece of merchandise for a band I'M NOT EVEN A FUCKING FAN OF. This isn't an attempt stroking my indie-rock dick or anything like that. Quite the opposite. It's almost disgusting. I don't want to know about Animal Collective shoes. I don't like the fact that I know that there's a third member to the band and that I'm going to look up his name (if I already haven't). I don't know if I very much want to talk about a guy who calls himself PANDA BEAR as if he were an important part of my life. That's about as cool as saying "Axl Rose and Slash changed my life!"


This isn't me, I swear. My phone doesn't get Twitter updates.

My knowledge of Animal Collective is unnatural. I've never seen them live. I've only listened to them casually. My physical interaction (seeing/listening) with the group is scant at best, as is my intellectual interaction (comprehension/understanding of their art) with them. So why? Because, according to Kaczynski, "technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom." To explain this, Kaczynski uses the example of cars and Klosterman uses the example of an air condition. I'm not that big of a thinker, so I'm going to use Twitter. I'm a fan of a handful of the bands that get a lot of press on sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, etc. Free. I used to go directly to these sites every morning and scroll around seeing if anything I was interested in was being written about, looking for key words like "Hold Steady," or "Japandroids." Free. I had to scroll a lot because there's a lot of pictures and stuff. Carpal Tunnel's no joke. When I got a Twitter, I realized I could subscribe to their news feeds and only scroll a little to see what was up. Online publications have gotten a knack for writing a whole story in 140 characters minus a bit.ly link, so when an update from one of those sites pops up, I'll probably read the whole thing. So when Avey Tare designs some new fucking shoes for Animal Collective I'm going to hear about it three or four different times. Unfree.

I'll concede that it's not as perfect of an analogy as Kaczynski's, but I also won't mail you a bomb.

So why not disable my Twitter account? Because I love Twitter. I love Twitter because I do appreciate those news feeds. I love Twitter as an exercise in terse prose. I love Twitter because I can witness Louis C.K. getting drunk and calling Sarah Palin a cunt. Klosterman's own Twitter account is pretty interesting. I've willingly acquiesced into an arm, or probably more like a finger, of the media hegemony because it made me feel good when the lead singer of Les Savy Fav replied to a tweet I tweeted at him. I would rather be assaulted with rave reviews about Panda Bear's solo album than be free enough to look for information for myself. It's bad but I need it. I can't quit anytime I want. But I do yearn for something more. Or is it something less?

Just give me four walls and adobe slats and maybe I can make something of this.

Post-print Culture and the Ease of Procrastination

I've been sitting here, in front of my computer, trying to write this blog post for about two hours now. Maybe even more, I'm not sure. Why so long? Media and my experience with it isn't that hard of a subject to crank out 500 words or so about. But it's the fact that I've been sitting in front of my computer trying to write this which is the reason it's taking so long.

I originally planned to write my first post for this blog about a recent interview GQ with Steve Albini, a legendary producer and strident promoter of the DIY ethic. I was probably going to comment about the subversive culture of, well, subversive culture, and why it's the best, and everyone should follow Albini's point-of-view when it comes to most things. It's a pretty great interview, too. When asked "how would you describe your fashion?," he replied:

"I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function."

That quote, in it of itself, has enough substance to write dozens of papers for a class rooted in the pitfalls of mainstream media.

So I got to thinking, and brainstorming, and plotting out my points, until I decided to read up on Albini. I've listened to some of the stuff he's done, both as a producer and as a musician, so he's not a foreign figure to me. I read his Wikipedia page, a page I've visited countless times before. I cracked open my copy of Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, and reread the chapter on Big Black (Albini's first band), and then I decided to look up some interviews about him on YouTube. And that's what I've spent two hours doing. I watched some ten-minute documentary some kid made about him, telling me things I've already known from reading the Azzerrad book. I watched Albini talk about The Ramones. I spent around 45 minutes watching this Japanese band called Nirf record with him in his studio. You know what that's called? A fucking waste of time (though I must say, it was captivating to watch a producing legend do his thing).

But then I got hungry. I've got a bag of baby potatoes on my counter and a couple cornish hens in my freezer. I took a detour from my "research," and looked up a couple different recipes on how to cook roasted baby potatoes and watched this ENTIRE EPISODE of Good Eats dedicated to cornish hens.



And then I returned and watched Steve Albini tell a couple knock-knock jokes on YouTube.

Even if I only tallied up the Nirf videos and the episode of Good Eats, that's somewhere within the range of 1 hour and 5 minutes I spent watching bullshit. And I don't even own a TV.

What I am is a product of the post-print culture that Postman talks about in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Even beyond that, I'm a product of the Internet culture that Nicholas Carr wrote about in an article for The Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

It's self-inflicted ADD brought upon by the ease of access we all have to information. I assume that I am not alone in my attitudes towards productivity. I think that those in my generation with even the strictest of work ethics still have a hard time concentrating on one task, especially if that task involves being on the computer. Why is it so hard for me to buckle down and do a simple blog post? Because it's so easy for me to not do it. It's not that I don't like the assignment. I'd gladly take any chance I could to talk about myself. But it's a lot easier to just sit back and watch other people say things on a screen.

At the end of the day, do I regret watching that episode of Good Eats? Not really. I now know how I'm going to make dinner. Do I regret watching those Steve Albini videos? Not so much, as they provided insight to a figure whom I admire greatly. But maybe I'll be singing a different tune when I'm up at three studying for a midterm because it took me three hours to do a blog post.