Rave: The miralce of the internet, a.k.a. my friends in the black box

Thanks, Carole, for the topic and the title

A long time ago I wrote a post about how the internet is cool, because it is the mother of random creativity.

There is another reason why the internet is cool: because it can facilitate friendships. There are two ways that this plays out -- existing friendships, and new friendships.

The internet facilitiates existing friendships by allowing lighter and lighter weight communication. The teens of today are using email very little, and instead prefer their social networks. Email is lighter weight paper letters (or telephone), and IM is lighter weight than email. All of this means it is easier to keep in touch with people you have met off-line.

Using the internet that way isn't what this post is about, though. This post is about meeting wonderful people online, and becoming friends with them there. There has been a lot written about the negative aspects of meeting people online -- the marriage break-ups, the stalkers, that sort of thing -- but hardly anything about good experiences of meeting people online.

I personally have made a number of friends online, on a shared-interest community. I was lucky to find a place where genuine people congregate, and I have made a lot of friends there. These people are kind and caring; I rely on them for support and I enjoy interacting with them on an almost daily basis. Most of them I have never met in person, though when I have had the opportunity I have gone out of my way to do so.

continues in the next post

Rant: Just because they are quirky doesn't make them good

You know, I am really sick of all the poxy little gits who launch themselves on the internet, sing in funny accents, and then are lapped up by the public because they are 'quirky'.

Sandi Thom (debatably) launched herself on the internet, and went international with an interesting, fresh song that got a lot of airplay, and which I like very much. However, her next song was pretty boring, and she hasn't crossed my event horizon since. Having said that, I am glad she made it, because that one song was worth it; so the criticisms made here are not levelled at her.

Sandi Thom isn't really crap, though. Really crap are the Arctic Monkeys, who (so far as I can tell) are only famous for launching themselves on the internet. Their music is samey, and was never that interesting in the first place.

Even more crap are The Kooks, who, while they didn't launch themselves on the internet seem to have won international fame for singing boring songs in a cockney accent. As far as I am concerned singing in an accent hasn't made anyone cool since the Proclaimers, and they only pulled it off because they could actually perform a couple of decent songs reasonably well.

My pet peeve, among this group of accent-laden internet superstars, though, is Lily Allen. She can't sing, people! Her voice is even worse than Bob Dylan, Billy Corgan, and nails down a chalkboard put together. Her songs are repetitive and boring, and to me her accent sounds decidedly fake. And yet somehow she made it into the Triple J top 100 five friggin' times, despite being the worst kind of trashy pop.

These people might be marginally quirky if they weren't all the same, but they aren't interesting enough to be worthwhile.

Rant: And we wonder why we have trouble getting chicks to do computer science?

I was talking to one of my supervisors a couple of days ago, and she was telling me how something as simple as a programming competition had turned a kid's life around. This kid is a teenager, very, very bright, and interested in computers. Here in good old kiwiland, tall poppies tend to get their heads cut off unless they are sportspeople or religious weirdos (or both), so this kid was having a pretty rugged time of it at school, especially because computers are his thing, because you know, computers are geeky. This kid was suicidal, until he did a programming competition and met other kids like himself -- coming out of the closet now means admitting you like computers, apparently. Nonetheless, this child is, in fact, a boy. Because more than 90% of the people who are interested in doing a degree in computing in New Zealand are boys, if our first year is anything to go by.

There are lots of reasons as to why this might be, including, but not limited to:

• The lack of games on the computer that appeal to girls (with 'The Sims' and some of the new PlayStation titles things are changing, slowly)
• Maths and computing teachers generally being male
• A lack of visible female role models -- we hear about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but only rarely about Helen Greiner and Grace Hopper
• The bad attitude of some male computing instructors and students toward their female students/colleagues.

I firmly believe, though, that advertising plays a role in all this. There are four companies in New Zealand who advertise internet provision on the television. One is run by a woman, but has lame ads with her looking dowdy and using a loaf of bread as an analogy (this service also has the least uptake, I might add). One uses no people at all, graphics only. These two advertise less than the other two, though, and are not as high profile.

The third company plays on a local cultural legend, where the North Island of New Zealand was fished up by a young man sitting in the canoe that is the South Island. In this advertisement, a young caucasian lad hauls New York, Paris and London from the sea on a length of rope, "harnessing technology". Would it have been so harmful to use an image of a young girl drawing her friends closer and tying the lines of communication? I guess so.

This ad is far from the most offensive to my geeky sensibilities, however. The local telecommunication giant advertises their ISP arm, "Xtra" with a team of stereotypical geeks called the xtra-ordinaries. These guys are a team of socially inept geeks that not only contribute to the suicidal tendencies of the young man mentioned above, but leave or role model or room for a young woman to see herself as part of the technology industry.


These guys are being promoted as the image of ocmputing by the major national carrier in the telecommunications industry. They magically appear in bedrooms at night, they drive around in a clapped out van, and they have nerdy names for each other. I'm fairly confident in my own person and in my choice of a career in computing, and these guys make me a little embarrassed to be associated with the profession. What hope do I have of doing the part of my job that is encouraging young women to take up a career in computing when this is the image they, their peers, and their parents see on TV every night?

As a partially publicly funded national carrier, I would hope that this doesn't last too long, and that Telecom is asked to at least make a hot-but-nerdy-girl xtra-ordinary too. We're short if IT professionals in this country, and having one girl xtra-ordinary could make life easier for everyone who might want to pursue a career in computing. No doubt, however, Telecom thinks that poking fun at geeks is inordinately clever, and the series of ads will continue for years.

Rave: The web as the mother of random creativity

The web really is the source and birthplace of some weird acts of creation. And the more bizarre the acts, the funnier I usually find them. Without the web aid its easy-publish technologies, it is likely these things that have become popular culture may never have happened; for me at least, that would have meant a little less laughter.

The first example of funny meets bizarre that was born on the web that I would like to share is All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Someone created this little video out of some weird text and speech in a Japanese video game, and a whole lot of hard work in Phtotoshop, and it spread around the web like wildfire. Why did they create it? Who knows. I guess the obvious answer is too much time on their hands. But even for something where a person has too much time on their hands that is a lot of work. Whatever the reason behind it, it captured the imagination of a whole lot of people. And as far as I can tell, apart from the t-shirt sales, which may or may not be making enough money to cover web-serving costs, the people who created this have not made any money from it. Nonetheless, this is a little piece of flash that had the whole world going, even if just for a few days. And it is tremendously funny.

The next thing that is funny, creative, and more than just a little random is the specifically web-designed flash technology End of the World. I don't know who sees the world this way (and in the current political climate, it would most likely be somewhere in the Middle East that the US started a war with), but it is damn funny. Somehow, having a web to put it on inspired this random act of creativity that has gone on to make any number of people smile. Not only that, it shows an inherent understanding of something researchers took a long time to come to terms with -- users hate to wait. Even the load screen is designed to both warn and entertain "Sorry, long load time.... STFU already!". Whoever created this deserves a medal.

The most recent (and perhaps the most attention grabbing) act of random creativity, though is the Crazy Frog. Love the crazy frog or hate him (and we definitely know it is a him just by seeing the video, unlike real frogs) on first viewing, it is hilarious. The frog and his moped noises were created by a pair of crazy Swedes and put on the net for fun. Jamster picked up on it, and created the ringtone that is the first ever ringtone to go to number one. And if you don't think the Crazy Frog is funny, think about how funny it is that someone is making a fortune out of it -- people will pay for this stuff. It's just a shame that the Crazy Frog's parents are not the ones making the money.

So, here are just three examples of web-based culture that have swept the world as crazes (All Your Base made it into the Google Zeitgeist for February 2001, the Crazy Frog for May 2005), made people laugh, made people angry, made money for people, and sent a ringtone to number one on the UK charts (even beating out Coldplay, much to my surprise and pleasure). The web is offering the creative among us (well, and even the plain broring like me) the opportunity for instant, near-free publication. Is it a good thing? Who knows. But these things are funny, and my life is better for them. It should be the slogan for the web "try and find something funny that makes your life better today"., or better yet "create something for someone to enjoy today". Now if only Google can solve the indexing problem...