Interview #3: Interview with Redness aka Chan:

Redness (Chan) is someone I respect online. For her combination of strong sense of justice, no nonsense attitude and fairly decent insights.

I wondered a little more about what she likes though. I have often asked her what she thought about particular things like goings on or advice on how to tackle a social problem.

I thought, why not switch it up and ask her, a bit about her.
Without further ado, here we go:


[Me]: So... what first got you interested in art?

[C]: What got me interested in Art?
Well, I come from a pretty artistic family in one area of art or another, and was surrounded by artistic people all of my life. My grandfather was a blues guitarist, and growing up going to church with him and my grandmother introduced me to other very talented singers and musicians in the gospel world.

My father is a potter and a painter, and we always had people who were artists coming by to talk art and use the kiln for their pottery, so I certainly got influenced listening to these people talk. I've also been blessed enough to have gone to one of our more diverse music festivals here and been able to meet some pretty fantastic musicians and been able to spend time and talk with people like BB King, Ani Difranco, Guy Davis, Spirit of the West.

Being bombarded with information pretty much from all these people certainly made my interest in the arts peak and made me want to explore it myself.

[Me]: Hey Chan, what are some of your favorite authors?
[C]: Douglas Coupland, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Golden, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut,Chuck Palahniuk off the top of my head.

[Me]: How do you feel about the direction video games seem to be taking?
[C]: Sorry I didnt get you the last question, honestly that's kind of a heavy one for me, and I could possibly write something equivalent to an essay on that. lol.

The wisdom of not crowds:

I don't find social search that useful.

Friends don't need to all have similar interests. That makes it useful for them to be a target demographic to market things to however...

Our unique individual different interests from the rest of our friends might clutter up the "relevancy" of social search results. We sometimes keep those differing interests to ourselves as it is awkward and problematic at times to reveal all interests to everyone at all times.

And if it is in an autonomous format, then it will be annoying to be receiving posts from people that are about things you yourself are not interested in. I see this as accelerating clique-ish behavior in a negative outcome.
In a more positive outcome perhaps people may finally mature enough to realize... well, they probably won't mature enough to understand and accept that everyone has several different things they are interested in that are not all the same as each other in order to be a complex and non-one dimensional human being. This feels like a bit of a step backwards.


I mean the heck do I know. I refuse to use major social networking platforms on purpose because I relish obscure, arcane, esoteric things and like there being a combination of amature, professional, mainstream and underground channels to obtain information from. Maybe jamming it all into one or a few giant mainstream channels and forcing it all to assimilate into something for mainstream people isn't a bad thing.

I mean, we'll still be able to look up things we ourselves are trying to look up, right?

Okay then:

So far I've talked a great deal about the things I do not much like about our culture, about society, about the media and about branding.

What I do like is science.

I like nature. I like going outside and looking for animals. I like to pause and look at plants and rocks.

I very much like to make and do things.

The ability and capacity for mankind to be creative and clever has resulted in most of the things consumers like to use and most of the good things we use to make civilization possible. It also takes a good deal of effort and hard work. But more than that it requires thinking and concentrating rather than being consistently bombarded by conflicting directions...

Take away lesson:

Okay I actively stay off and don't join most large social networking sites for a couple reasons.

One is... I've watched too many breaking up couples put each other's dirty laundry out in public for the whole social circle to look at.

Same with former friends.

Also, if it's a big enough website and popular enough... all of your relatives, your entire family and everybody you ever went to school with, including the people you dislike, are on it.

I can see most of those people in person or offline. Online should be different sometimes, I think.

Your boss, your teachers, your coworkers, they all use it too. No escape. I feel that life needs things to be compartmentalized sometimes.
You should not have everything always have such a huge pond ripple butterfly effect.

That you are getting engaged to someone to me that would be something important. I wouldn't make it be an impersonal status message all willy nilly. I'd craft a letter, with that person then we'd run a bunch of copies off, or settle on a layout we liked, and email it to an agreed upon list of friends and people.

For the dignity of the people with whom you are intimate with, if you respect the relationship, why in the hell are you updating random people on the internet each time you are having sex???

To rub it in people's noses I suppose. To go, aren't I a cool guy/gal, I get to get lucky... sort of defeats the personal nature of such a thing. In my opinion.
Nothing is deep and personal, if you are spreading it around like so much prepackaged manure...

There are people on the sites I go to, who no we aren't on each others' friends lists, but we talk regularly and they've given me decent leads to good information that sped up my research, links to good decent software & we talk about deeper stuff, than some of my "fans" on places. Where we barely ever talk, there's just something that the person liked about my drawing or my writing. I don't dislike "fans" but it is not nearly so personal as people you can talk to about things.
Or listen to them talk about things but with some give and some take. I try to engage those people on those lists sometimes once in awhile. Some find that a turnoff and unfriend. You want to have a "friend" online, but without the baggage of conversation, thinking or trying to seek a common ground.

On the other hand, some of the people who are "fans" have also provided actual support sort of in various ways over the years. People who tell me hey, your ideas aren't crap, don't give up, do keep working on things. Or the occasional brutally honest person who goes "here, this is what you are doing wrong, and that's why it's pissing people off" but isn't doing it to be a douche or make you upset, and actually does suggest some stuff to try instead or point you in the right direction.

And no, that doesn't mean stop doing the things that you are good at, or being interested in the things you are interested in because yes, there are some people who will choose to dislike you based on the certainty you have with knowing what you like and don't and even just that you enjoy what you do for a living. Don't ask me why, but those make a very strange portion of haters.

Now as I sit here and watch, as every single online website attempts to milk social media for all that it's worth and "tap into this new hot thing" as more and more sites integrate the social media into it to try and "bring our information in a relevant way to the people who like to use those" I am understandably a bit frustrated. Who gave them permission to bastardize the quality of information and decided the users of this or that, call it social web 2.0+, were the golden standard and everybody else deserves neglect &/or abuse?

It is not a bad thing to go looking around for interesting things online. I suppose they want the Internet to be a bit more like television but with less control. I am going to wake up one day to find I cannot search for something but based on a list gathered of things I am interested in and the types of people I have talked to, and the kinds and number of other clubs and websites I have registered to, I am supposed to be interested in some things (with highly belligerent targeted advertising) that are only on that list. The whole human element of me deciding what it is I am to be interested in has been usurped from autonomous control to control... by some sort of automaton. Ironic.

I don't want everything to be decided for me particularly what kind of information I am supposed to be interested in. That is the biggest philosophical insult to an inquiring mind in a way. Supremely limiting, especially since the target demographic sampled from tends to be airheads, then you get this self feeding repeat loop which downregulates quality and insists you shall like the same stupid things as large chunks of everybody else, due to a "wisdom of crowds."

I hand pick myself, my friends and I ... we hand pick things we thought were interesting and email them to each other or link them in a chat room. I refuse to do part in the great game and let a piggybacking parasitical other trend hunter somehow get capital or profit off of what is in that regard sort of a transient intellectual property though never technically belonging to any of the entities involved but with negligible benefit to the people who they are observing. This is sort of an aggressive lazy way of milking everybody else's quintessence for personal profit, no?*

Now I do appreciate a clever ad though.
why are we taking the gold of the Internet... and just serving it up on a hot steaming silver platter to the very basest users?
Call me old fashioned but I'm more interested in websites that have cool stuff on them or have really good quality information than in how popular a website is or how many people like it on a social news aggregator.

I would much rather build friendships and such myself, be they traditional or long distance. So you can take all this sorting and categorizing of people as the lazy man's way out which everybody trumpets and shove it.

Being willing to actually think does get lonely sometimes though.
But it isn't about following the trends so that other people like you. To me, this has become such an over encompassing part of our lives it has reduced the depth of people's personalities.

They don't like you for you, they like you for your stuff!
Anything that can't be marketed we are trained to deride or chastize as useless. Useless for whom though?

What our country needs right now are some makers, doers and thinkers.

I look for depth, look hard, try to find meaning only to watch as what was once good gets mangled beyond recognition into something not quite as good but somehow cleverly pitched as being better than the original so that people who are lazier can pretend at competency while attacking those who spent time and effort training to become skilled or knowledgeable in something.

*Who actually likes "auto-suggestion" of contacts?
What the hell was everybody thinking???

Also, as pages get cluttered with comment space that puts priority emphasis on users of social network sites rating how cool or dumb they think something is... I wonder if this will have a negative trade off that reduces the opportunity to allow people to decide for themselves whether they like/dislike a video clip, an online game, an article, etc. I suppose those who are most easily influenced by the crowd would be influenced by that sort of thing anyway but it is a bit of an annoyance.

Internal and external figurative battlefields?:

There is a war going on within our culture and in people's day to day lives.
I am not talking so much of a massive horrible conspiracy of that kind you see done up on eclectic web pages which utilize many many moving .gifs and have strange fonts as I am about one which I choose to frame in terms of competing factors and details in the internal and external environment. Some of these include the cultural landscape, psychological mindscape, and physiological needs.

We fight external distractions, and seek meaning. We have portions of our subconscious being a prick. Getting in the way. Giving you a hard time about overcoming fears, doing the right thing, reminding you of things you're trying not to remember, and pestering you with reminders about emotional desires.

We also have eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom and mortality to take into account.

Common Sense

Common sense is really neither. Oh there is a such thing as common sense... Sort of. Common sense: When you stick your finger on a hot stove you get burned. That is common sense. When you are trying to justify your social/political/economic/religious views common sense flies out the window. It's not that anything is wrong, or that everything is wrong with any views. What IS true is that these things are not in the realm of common sense. Common sense really is for simple things. More complex ideas cannot be explained or justified using common sense. In almost any case you have several competing forces at work. "Unemployment is caused by laziness" whether you believe this or not, is not common sense. "_____________ (insert party here) are all ____________." Is not common sense. And any statement that "anyone who says __________ lacks common sense" is certainly not sensical. Lets everybody on both sides admit it. The world is full of complex issues, and we may not always see eye to eye. Common sense has nothing to do with it.

Guide for newbs:

Welcome to the Internet.

Within the first few minutes you will probably find yourself being dragged into an argument by a short tempered mud-flinging person,

have your presumed lack of an intelligence level belittled by strangers,

and even have some creepy thing of an indiscernable gender (& ill-defined age) try to accost you a bit, either flirtatiously or in a domineering manner.

That's the sorta bad part.

The good part is:
There's a lot of really neat sh*t out there to look at and read.

And even free crud to do stuff with.

The bad part of that is:
Some of the free crud has viruses or spyware tucked inside.
>.<

The good part is:
There's a crap load of people to reach out to.

The bad part is:

A decent chunk of them are jerks who you probably would want to have nothing to do with or deal with as little as possible.

The good part is:
There's alot of jokes and it can help you be funnier.

The bad part is: some of the things cost money...
Or are mean and at other people's expense.

The good part is:
You can find a supplier for something obscure from your childhood or to complete your lifetime's work collecting whatever particular thing or other...

The bad part is: It may be for an exorbitant sum and you have to check the retailers' credibility.