Hippo Dignity

I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site  and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site.  But that’s only to be expected.

(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks.  Discuss.)

Ten years ago today, the first episode of a not particularly promising TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on a second-rate network. We all know how that worked out.

Buffy had a tremendous influence on pop culture, is an acknowledged inspiration for shows ranging from Alias to Grey’s Anatomy, and perhaps most importantly for me at the time, it had a young, strong, capable heroine who could doubt, fear, and even resent her true self, but was no less heroic for it. She was a fully-realized, three-dimensional, action hero. It’s still all too rare to see a female character like that on TV, and in fact the chipping away of the character of Buffy herself in the last two years of the show’s run suggests how hard it still is to create and maintain a strong female lead in a mainstream media production.

What was also important for me, as I started to realize that academic life wasn’t the right path for me, was how rich an interpretative text the show could be. The writing was smart, and funny, and full of dense references outside itself and within its own universe, in ways that I could sink my critical teeth into. (Insert your own vampire joke here, please.) I think in some ways both Buffy and Buffy helped me walk away from who I thought I was going to be, and I’m better for it. (Plus, of course, my blog name’s a quote from the show.)

One of the things I think about more now than I did when it was on the air is the extent to which Buffy the Vampire Slayer assumes a certain media-culture literacy shared between its viewers and its characters. Which is to say, it’s a sci-fi/fantasy/horror show whose characters are also fans of sci-fi/fantasy/horror shows.

It took a full 30 years of TV before television shows started showing us families sitting around watching TV on The Simpsons and Roseanne. Joss Whedon, a former Roseanne writer, gave us Buffy, trying to convince Giles of supernatural goings-on, exclaiming “I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me!” I don’t think this is necessarily better, or worse, than what came before, but a sign of the maturity of the form.

It also serves as a sort of dog-whistle to the fans of the genre, signaling that the people behind a given show share your references and your tastes, and won’t let you down. It can be a crutch for poor writing — have the character recognize the similarity of his or her predicament to the plot of the movie you’re ripping off — but it can also be a way to enrich the plot experience for the viewer, by having the character recognize the same genre cliche she has, and route around it.

I hope that Buffy’s truest lasting contribution won’t be just this self-awareness, but the vision that especially in the first seasons it held out — you can get through almost anything with friends, a good mentor, and the willingness to occasionally, when necessary, plunge a stake into Evil’s heart. After that, of course, there’s the prom.

One advantage of having worked in several different fields is that you know the same old bullshit when you see it.

Jason Kottke pointed out that web conferences still aren’t getting any more diverse, despite the regular rounds of discussion/debate on the topic, and sure enough, started another round of discussion/debate.

It’s so striking to see the same rationalizations come up in different forms in different fields: why don’t we bring in more women to speak/write? Because there aren’t more A-list women speakers/writers in our field. How would women become A-list speakers/writers? Um… by speaking at conferences/publishing with us, of course. But they aren’t as interested as guys in those technical topics, and anyway, we just wouldn’t feel comfortable going out and finding people who are… different from us.

Anil Dash has a smart, smart rundown on why the Old Boy’s Club is a mug’s game in the end: go read it, and save me the time trying to make the basic case that the blinders of privilege will leave you in the end just as sightless as a sharp stick in the eye.

Ironically, I’ll end this by noting I’ve just received my first invitation to speak at a conference - one on industrial design, not web technology. If all goes well, look for me at the IDSA North Eastern District Conference in late April.

Now that it’s safely over, and Jason can’t drive out here to cause trouble, I can report that my talk to the Usability Professionals Association, “Information Architecture Meets Industrial Design: Working Collaboratively Across Disciplines” was very well-received, and more fun to write than I’d expected.  I talked about my experience working on the IQ/MAX turret, a specialized phone for financial traders.

It was a presentation.  It was written in Keynote.  And yet I keep calling it a “paper.”  Old habits are very strong indeed.

I’ll be giving a revised version of the same paper talk at the IA Summit next month, so, should you be really interested in information design, come on down — I’m speaking on Monday morning, late enough that I’ll be fully caffienated, but not so late (I hope) that people will be ready to leave.

Me, today in a meeting: “Il n’ya pas de hors-interface.”

So this is me testing out a new service called IMified, which allows you to access a whole bunch of web services (Backpack, Google Calendar) and your blogs from an IM service. It makes a lot of sense — I spend more and more time in chat windows, with friends, co-workers, even clients, and I’m nowhere near this service’s target market — but let’s face it, the text entry box of iChat isn’t exactly conducive to long deep thoughts. On the other hand, it gets one off one’s ass to post. We’ll have to see how this works out.

(ETA: No paragraph breaks, it doesn’t seem like, and I had to come to the Wordpress interface to add tags.  Still, an interesting 1.0.  Check it out)

Walking into the office this morning, I said, “Is that –”

“Gas, yes, you smell gas,” said one of my coworkers, passing me in the hall. “The whole city reeks.”

Oh.

Well, between the unexplained smell in New York, and the unexplained bird deaths shutting down Austin, the quote of the day is clearly this one, from DeLillo, via the ever mot-juste-y Caleb Crain:

“It doesn’t cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before.”

“What does it cause?”

“Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.”

“Déjà vu?”

“It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That’s not all. They’re not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore.”

“What are they calling it?”

He looked at me carefully.

“The airbone toxic event.”

Happy New Year, everyone!

From IM this morning.

maura: Top Searches:
1. Saddam Execution Video
2. Saddam
3. Saddam Hussein
4. Saddam Video
5. Saddam Execution
6. Miss Nevada

maura: oh, america.

Speaking of audience/creator feedback loops, my friend Shana TiVo-blogged the John Stamos gay-marriage TV movie Wedding Wars for Planet Out last night. It’s delightful and funny, and much faster than watching the whole thing yourself.

9:49: I OFFICIALLY LOVE THIS MOVIE. Sean Maher: “What are you doing? You’re not political. You don’t even watch the news!” And as soon as Stamos turns to correct him, Maher says, “Anderson Cooper doesn’t count!”

It’s living in the future early-00’s stylee to push ‘pause’ on your TiVo, fire up iChat on your wireless laptop, and tell your oldest friend that her most famous relation is tonight’s guest on the Colbert Report. By this point, that’s almost passé.

But it’s living in the future mid-decade-wise to see Colbert on the show issue a “White Christmas” Beatles/Christmas song mashup challenge to his audience, announce that the results will be posted to the Internet, and say “Dangermouse, I know you’re watching.” And this the same day as I read the New York Times coverage of Conan O’Brien’s Horny Manatee site:

“We couldn’t have done this two years ago, three years ago,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience.”

This sort of user-generated content feedback loop with mainstream media is the sort of thing we nerds have been evangelizing for since, oh, a lot longer than two years ago. Not just evangelizing, trying to sell the idea and the tools to make it happen to major networks and other content providers, if you’re a digital media design consultant of some sort: I don’t want to even think about how many times I’ve cited Dangermouse myself in meetings. So it’s weird and delightful to see everything you predicted start to come true, even if it’s happening in ways you didn’t predict.

Though, actually, I think this is the way it had to happen. Both of my examples are comedy shows — by their nature anarchic, irreverent, and bricolage-friendly — with strong central performers who can push through something they want to do. Those are much more likely sites for innovation than corporate headquarters, and because it’s a Colbert project, or a Conan one, if it fails, it gives their bosses some space and deniability. Innovation from below rather than above; really, who could have seen that one coming? But still, Stephen — if you want to talk about some awesome ideas about the future of media, well, you know where to find me.