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It’s easy to take for granted what the invention of the telephone has brought to courtship and human relationships. Getting a phone number from a member of the opposite sex is such a crucial first step in the dating process; how did we ever date without them?

And how will the Internet change this? Obviously the exchange of email addresses is taking on a status similar to that of the phone number exchange, but I truly believe that the Internet will affect the very way we meet people. Why go to a bar and hope to find someone interesting enough to ask for a phone number? Why not flip through profiles and web pages of people so that you can move quickly past their physical exteriors to get some idea of who they really are? Sure there’s the likelihood of subterfuge, but it will always be smaller than that of its outdoor counterpart. Assuming of course that you’re looking for a personality to match yours, and not just an attractive body.

Consider this. Jamie B started a profile at Nerve.com for her sister Amy (the twins mentioned in the June 16 entry), whom I then met and with whom I became good friends. I later got onto Orkut.com (wherein I met my other Jamie) and pulled in Jamie B, wherein she met her now-fiancee Charles. I’ve also made a few new friends via myspace.com. So it’s already happening. And it’s not just for hopeless nerds who never leave the house. Not anymore.

On the Fragmentation of Popular Culture

We now have an official zeitgeisty term for what the Internet brings to advertising/marketing and popular culture, The Long Tail. Where previously all forms of commercial creativity (be it movies, music, advertising, TV, etc.) were aimed at attracting the most people by appealing to the widest audience (the head), the Internet offers the ability to cater to the multifarious niche markets that pervade the periphery of our culture (the tail). In many ways, the traditional limitations of distribution can be done away with altogether: books need never go out of print, obscure movies need no longer gather dust (or get incinerated by savage evildoing behemoths). Ebay is the biggest example of Long Tail thinking – where else would you find a hideously rare Ibanez RB Jem? Only a few hundred were made and probably only a few hundred people would even care.

One of the biggest ramifications of this concept is the potential for breakdown in our popular culture. Not many people are old enough to remember the days before radio and television united us in a shared cultural experience[1]. Culture was previously more regionally derived[2]. Now, perhaps culture will be more individually determined. People with shared interests will be able to connect with each other more easily based on their own likes and dislikes. I’m seeing it even now as I have made new friends based entirely on our connection to this movie. I’m not saying pop culture will die out, but it will likely decline; a best case scenario would be that the stuff that survives will suck far less than the usual crap that’s handed out these days.

1) That statement sits somewhere between generous overstatement and hilarious irony.
2) For better or worse, this is probably why there are fewer barn dances these days.

More Socio-Existential Ramifications of Pac-Man

I just found this great quotation on myspace.com:

“Video games don’t ruin kids. If Pac-Man ruined us as kids, we would all be running around in darkened rooms, eating magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”

For those who may not get the joke, consider that the statement applies to the behavior of any persons involved in rave/dance club culture. It actually makes me wonder if video games didn’t predispose some of us to enjoying repetitive electronic music.

Why Chicks Don’t Rock Very Often

Once upon a blog entry dreary, I pondered weak and weary as to why girls aren’t as fanatically geeky about irrelevant minutiae and guitar whizbangery. Finally the Washington Post delivers an answer. Their article, “No Girls Allowed,” covers all the bases and talks to many expert sources (they even dug up The Great Kat, the single greatest Exception That Proves the Rule you’re likely to find). Best of all, they talked to your hero and mine, Camille Paglia. She had this to say:

“For an adolescent boy, your guitar speaks for you, it says what you can’t say in real life, it’s the pain you can’t express, it’s rage, hormones pumping. Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an intimate conversation. Boys can’t do that. The guitar for a boy speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can’t share, even with other members of the band. It’s a combination of rage and reserve and ego.”

Another aspect of it is that many boys start playing rock instruments to impress girls, while girls already have ways of impressing boys – namely, by being girls (already the most beautiful form Nature has devised), and the vast world of fashion available thereunto.

For the record, I started playing guitar to make weird noises. Perhaps in hope that I would find a weird girl impressed by them. So far it’s worked out a few times, actually. Still looking, though.

Casino Report and Smash II

I finally put a page together for Smash II. I’m not going to tell you what that means, so click the link and all will be explained.

Last weekend I went to a casino (that shall remain nameless) in Mississippi to see “Weird Al” Yankovic. Having never been to a casino of any kind, I was very curious to see up close this particular aspect of our culture.

The floor of the casino isn’t what James Bond movies had led me to believe. The slot machines outnumbered the tables by a wide margin. The atmosphere was disorienting, and not just because of the thousands of bright flashing lights and constant beeping sounds. I was struck by a malaise that I think stemmed from the fact that there was a completely inverted proportion of shiny machinery to individual enthusiasm on the part of the casino patrons. Most people sat on their stools, smoking their cigarettes and punching their buttons with near-clockwork regularity. An overwhelming sadness permeated the facility.

I saw a lot of people whom I perceived to be intensely lonely and lost. Some people were like myself and my friends; we had come to the casino for a day’s amusement. I had the strong suspicion however, that many more people in the house were lifers. These people seemed as though they had nothing else with which to fill up their lives but the desire to win unearned money.

My mind may have just been painted a grey shade that day, as my perceptions began to lighten a fair bit as the evening progressed. I started to notice that I was witnessing a startling diversity of human specimens. Every shape, size and shade of human being was represented. This diversity expanded exponentially as fans of “Weird Al” Yankovic arrived. This collision of demographics gave me what I believe to be the most accurate sampling of the American population I have ever witnessed.

I saw humanity in its most common, and thus least popular form.

Female Trainspotter Wanted

Why is it that, by and large, men are more fanatically geeky about things? Comic books, music, computers, Star Trek, mathematics…each demographic has a population whose female participants are far outnumbered by the males. Do we obsess more? I have no shortage of male guitar geek friends, but I have no female guitar geek friends. That are heterosexual anyway (congratulations, Trina – you’ll always be exceptional). I do have two or three women with whom I exchange album recommendations regularly, but I can’t really have in-depth conversations about irrelevant minutiae with them. And really, I guess irrelevant minutiae is what I’m talking about. Trainspotting.

For those who don’t know, trainspotting is a hobby of many Brits who wander around UK train stations and keep track of train serial numbers in an effort to catalog the trains. I would imagine there’s a certain romance to this, although it’s not something I think I would find appealing. However I certainly relate to the collection of useless data. So the term "trainspotting" gets applied to any brand of hobby where the participants are obssessed with something.

Oh the tiny joys of irrelevant minutiae. Band member names, album credits, Ibanez catalogs….my brain is host to inumerable bits of information that I’ll likely never use. Sadly, there’s not even a trivia game worth watching or playing to which I can apply my vast stores of obscure knowledge. I think I get it from my father, who can tell you just about every tune that ever made the record charts pre-1965.