Henry Jenkins riffs on He-Man and other 80s-era action figures, offering a reading that starts out as largely charitable but ends up somewhere that’s actually quite beautiful:

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.

The impetus for Jenkins’s generational meditation (besides an impending deadline for a keynote) is this io9 piece on “The 10 Most Unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys,” which 1) I linked to a ways back on Twitter, and 2) is hilarious. Sample:

Stinkor was an evil skunk. How do we know he was evil? He has the suffix “-or” appended to his name. If his name was just “Stink,” he’d be kicking back in Castle Greyskull, pounding Schlitz with Man-At-Arms and scheduling baccarat night with Man-E-Faces.

This Ask MetaFilter thread is the most gripping thing I’ve read in a very long time. It begins:

A Russian friend of mine may be in a dangerous situation in Washington, DC.

My friend and former student K arrived in DC yesterday, along with a friend. She came over on some kind of travel exchange program put together by a Russian travel agency called ‘Aloha’. They paid about 3K for this program.

The program promised a job offer in advance, but didn’t deliver. They said they would send one via email, but failed there, too.

Her contact in the USA barely speaks English, doesn’t answer her calls but does answer mine. He has asked her and her friend to meet in NYC tonight around midnight, with promises of hostess work in a lounge. Yes, I know how horrific that sounds- that’s why I am working all possible angles here.

She is not going to NYC but I need some help handling and understanding how to handle this- I have a friend helping them with a cheap hotel for the night, but that’s all at the moment. I am presently driving to LA and could fly her and her friend to meet me there on Saturday, but couldn’t house them indefinitely. I will be monitoring this thread over the next hour.

The ~200 comments that follow are epic. A must-read.

Big ups to the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which feels very Snarkmarketian to me. The movie unfolds in three distinct chapters, slowly developing an aesthetic and an argument, and finally posing a provocative question, or a few.

The first third of the film uses the lens of aspiring documentarian Thierry Guerra to give us a tour d’horizon of the universe of street art. We hear from a diverse cross-section of street artists from Shepard Fairey to a mosaic artist known as Space Invader to Banksy himself, while we’re watching footage of people taking to rooftops and subway stations to decorate the urban landscape.

Then we delve into the story of Guerra himself – this dude who channels his obsessive impulse to film everything in his life into a thorough record of the street art movement, compiling thousands of hours of footage of artists on the make. For such an ephemeral art form, this archiving is invaluable. Prominent artists cheerfully accommodate Guerra and his omnipresent camera, despite the heightened visibility it brings to activities that might not be entirely licit.

Guerra’s profile rises as the world he’s documenting starts to become more and more celebrated by the mainstream art community, which introduces tension: Street art is almost by definition a critique of mainstream consumer values. The movement rests on this fundamentally anti-consumerist premise of reclaiming private property for public expression. A mural on the side of a building defies our notions of commerce; the canvas can’t easily be carted off and sold, right? So what happens when the art does become property, bought and sold like any other commodity, auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars at Sotheby’s, pursued by collectors?

The answer: Mr. Brainwash.

Guerra, realizing that his payday is not going to come in the form of a smash hit documentary, decides he’s going to cash in on his work a different way. By now, of course, he’s become a devoted observer of the process by which street artists accrue mountains of hype, use industrial production techniques to replicate their work on a massive scale, and make their subversive and ubiquitous art a sort of viral marketing campaign for their brand. So he takes the logical next step of turning this fundamentally anti-capitalist movement into the ultimate post-industrial capitalist phenom: developing an alter ego he calls “Mr. Brainwash,” who slickly deploys the street art system in a scheme to mint millions overnight.

(Side note: I say “slickly deploys,” but one of the facts the documentary makes hilariously clear is that Guerra is anything but slick. He’s this endearingly inarticulate, possibly kind of dimwitted, organization-challenged geek, basically. In other words, there’s no Evil Genius at work here. Or is there? This is one of the more fun implicit questions the film poses.)

Reviewing the film, a lot of critics have raised the question of whether this is all a monstrous hoax engineered by Banksy. The events in the film – including Mr. Brainwash’s LA art opening – are of course genuine, documented occurrences. But to what extent might Banksy have set up the rules of the game and forced the outcome? Lots of fun speculation to be had there.

If the documentary ended up simply asking “What is art?” it would have been a let-down. (Don’t get me wrong. It gets asked. Warhol comes up more than once.) A more interesting question is, “What is Thierry Guerra’s / Mr. Brainwash’s artistic masterwork?” Is it the footage? The anti-anti-capitalist art opening? The documentary itself, and the worlds it contains?

By the way, Mr. Brainwash lives.

The photos at The Big Picture are always stunning, but these pictures of Mount St. Helens are, I think, especially so. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an age of one ecological disaster after another, and then it’s always instructive to remember the sheer, uncanny, unearthly power of these things. (It helps to have a great Mirah song for your soundtrack.)

I love constellations. Therefore, I love this post from Liz Danzico. It’s got me thinking: Isn’t the spangling of stars in the sky just basically random noise onto which we’ve projected patterns and then stories? And if that’s been successful—and it toootally has—doesn’t it imply that you could do the same with just about any kind of random noise? What sort of weird wacky stuff could you spread across your desk to tell stories with?

IDEA

• Instead of endlessly moaning about the supposed lack of serendipity on the internet, why can’t we try new ways to automate it?

STORIES

• When I started college, you could watch Simpsons reruns for 90 minutes straight. The dorms picked up two different Fox channels that syndicated the show; one played it at 6 and 7, the other at 6 and 6:30. So if you were watching at 6, you could also pick which episode you wanted to watch. Sometimes, if both weren’t that interesting, or if you’d seen them recently, we’d just cut out for dinner and pick up the later episode. Usually, that wasn’t a problem; the Simpsons had been on for nine seasons, and nearly every episode was a classic.
• If The Simpsons didn’t work, you could watch Law & Order on A&E. Or Bravo. Or TNT. Or Lifetime. I may be misremembering all of the channels the show was on at once, but there’s a reason why people (like, say, writers on The Simpsons) would joke about watching 14 straight hours of Law & Order on basic cable. The show was on a lot. And again, it hadn’t been on for twenty years with multiple spinoffs yet. Not every episode was great, but every episode was classic Law & Order, usually better casual dramatic entertainment than 90% of what was on then, let alone now.
• If neither The Simpsons nor Law & Order were available, you could always watch The Shawshank Redemption. ALWAYS. I’ve seen this movie at least fifty times; I’ve probably seen it from-the-beginning, not-edited-for-TV once or twice.
• Have you ever noticed what PBS does during pledge season, at least every other year? They play Ken Burns’s The Civil War. Or some other crazy-ass, awesome, twenty-year-old documentary or costume drama series. And I watch it. Randomly, in pieces, over and over again.

IDEAS

• When people talk about serendipity, they’re not always talking about discovering something that’s totally brand-new. In fact, I’d hazard that they’re USUALLY talking about randomly unearthing something that’s comforting and familiar.
• This is ten times more true with television.
• But it’s true in other media, too. People like being able to browse through their own physical book and music collections, because you never know what might suddenly force itself upon you. The real anti-serendipitous edge to social networks like Facebook isn’t that they don’t introduce us to anyone new; it’s that they eliminate the unexpected meeting-up with a friend or former classmate. You don’t get to catch up because you’ve never fully lost touch.

PITCH

• You actually can’t watch really old episodes of The Simpsons or Law & Order online. They have the new shows on Hulu and NBC.com and whatnot, but the syndication is a completely different deal. This saddens me.
• Watching a syndicated Simpsons or Law & Order rerun isn’t actually random. It’s chance, which is different. Why not make it actually random?
• This is Showroulette. You pick a show — let’s say that every show’s gotta have enough episodes to be in syndication, and only the backlist shows are available. Save the new ones for your running-show website — and you get a random episode.
• This is the genius part, at least for me. Say you don’t like the episode you got. (I mean, sometimes Law & Order kinda stunk.) You can change it out for a different show, also picked at random. But every time you switch, you’ve got to watch an ad.
• There are ads for the act breaks, too. Here, though, you can switch to a different episode without starting over – kinda like flipping the channel.

Come on! Tell me you wouldn’t try this! Tell me that 10% of you wouldn’t become obsessed with it.

Tell me there’s a better way to sell ads for older shows in syndication. Tell me there’s a better way to make a little more money off of long-running TV series without cannibalizing DVD sales. Tell me why this wouldn’t actually be better for most casual TV-watching (i.e., 90% of TV-watching) than any other online TV.

Tell me it wouldn’t be better to spin to a random episode of Soap or Hill Street Blues or Star Trek or The Bernie Mac Show than some random dude or chick or cat who might not even want to chat with you.

But mostly I want you to tell me ways to make this idea better. Or bigger. Or, just, more.

File under “weird congruences”: the market for English professors collapsed with the investment banks. Two secondary markets staffed by Ivy League liberal arts high-achievers whose accomplishments looked great on paper but didn’t necessarily really know how to make anything. (NB: I don’t necessarily believe this, but let’s entertain it as an idea.)

Here’s Caleb Crain:

Every historical period has its predominant economic metaphors, and they seep into its culture. Not long ago, I had coffee with an undergraduate who reported that he had just read Derrida and Lacan on Poe and was excited by the idea that criticism might be the new literature. Twenty years ago, when I read Derrida and Lacan on Poe, my professors teased me the same exciting possibility. It occurs to me now that the idea is about as old as, and has certain structural parallels to, the notion that finance is the new manufacturing. Like criticism over literature, finance traditionally supervised manufacturing yet was thought to be parasitic upon it and less “creative” than it. And then at some moment, often specified on Michael Lewis’s authority as the 1980s, finance began to have the reputation of requiring more intellectual acumen than manufacturing and to attract the brighter and more modish talents. Similarly (though hard numbers are very hard to come by), academic criticism started to pay better than the creation of literature—certainly it offered more stability and social prestige. For a young American to ignore the economic signaling and go into manufacturing or literature rather than finance or criticism, he would have to be either idealist or dunderheaded.

And here’s Ezra Klein, interviewing a friend from Harvard:

What did you study at Harvard?

I focused on history and government and political philosophy.

And why did Goldman Sachs think that would be good training for investment banking?

Why Goldman thought I’d be good for investment banking is a very fair question. There are a lot of Harvard people at Goldman and they’ve put a lot of effort into recruiting from the school. They really try to attract liberal arts backgrounds. They say this stuff isn’t so complicated, that you’ll pick it up as you go along, that it’s all about teamwork, that they have training programs. That being said, it would be very hard to get a full-time job there without a previous summer internship.

How did you end up going to Goldman, though? Presumably, as a social sciences major, you hadn’t meant to head into the financial sector.

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy. One thing is the internship program. It’s your junior year, it’s January or February, and you interview for internships. If all goes well, it’s sort of a summer-long interview. And if that goes well, you have an offer by September of your senior year, and that’s very appealing. It makes your senior year more relaxed, you can focus on your thesis, you can drink more. You just don’t have to worry about getting a job.

And separate from that, I think it’s about squelching anxiety in general. It checks the job box. And it’s a low-risk opportunity. It’s a two-year program with a great salary and the promise to get these skills that should be able to transfer to a variety of other areas. The idea is that once you pass the test at Goldman, you can do anything. You learn Excel, you learn valuation, you learn how to survive intense hours and a high-pressure environment. So it seems like a good way to launch your career. That’s very appealing for those of us at Harvard who were not in pre-professional majors.

It all torques the whole what-are-you-going-to-do-with-your-degree question in a new, more sinister direction. Let’s say you’re an Ivy League English major. Ten-to-twenty years ago, you would have gone to work in academia, publishing, or I-banking. (Maybe, maybe, the nonprofit sector — as Klein’s interviewee points out, Teach for America recruiters play on Ivy Leaguers’ anxieties in much the same way the Goldman recruiters did.)

Crain adds a weird allegory about islanders trading shells, which is too complex to summarize here, but comes off weirdly like a story about student-loan debt. Or maybe that’s just me.

Here’s more material on rethinking reading and attention.

James Bridle looks at Allen Lane’s 20th-century innovations with Penguin paperbacks and intuits a new axiom:

The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one.

Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it.

Publishers know very little about the habits and practices of their readers, and they impinge on this time very little, leaving much of the work to the retailers and distributors.

Amazon and Apple understand experience design, and they know more about our customers than we do; readers’ experience with our product is mediated and controlled by forces beyond ours.

Okay — this is a place to start. But there’s one problematic conclusion that Bridle pretty quickly draws from this. I wouldn’t toss it out, but I’d want to heavily qualify it. It’s the transformation from time as a condition of experience to something that determines value.

For example: Bridle says that readers don’t value what publishers do because all of the time involved in editing, formatting, marketing, etc., is invisible to the reader when they encounter the final product. Maybe. But making that time/labor visible CAN’T just mean brusquely insisting that publishers really are important and that they really do do valuable work. It needs to mean something like finding new ways for readers to engage with that work, and making that time meaningful as THEIR time.

In short, it means that writers and producers of reading material probably ought to consider taking themselves a little less seriously and readers and reading a little more seriously. Let’s actually BUILD that body of knowledge about readers and their practices — let’s even start by looking at TIME as a key determinant, especially as we move from print to digital reading — and try to offer a better, more tailored yet more variable range of experiences accordingly.

In that spirit, Alain Pierrot starts by thinking about this problem of how much of our time we give different texts, and offers a concrete idea for gathering and incorporating that data. (He’s building off an Information Architects post about an iPad project that incorporates Average Reading Time, or ART, into its interface! Brilliant!)

Can I read the next chapter of this essay, study or novel before I’m called to board the plane, before my train comes to the station, or should I pick a shorter magazine article or a short story from Ether Books, etc.?

On a more professional field, can I spare the time to read the full version of the report, or should I restrain to the executive summary, plus the most relevant divisions of the report before the meeting?

Or in academic situations, what amount of reading time should I plan to spend on the textbook, on the recommended readings and extra relevant titles before I sit term/final examinations?…

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to leverage all the occasions where digital texts are chunked in relevant spans to store their ART into metadata, made available to apps that would sort timewise what I’m proposed to read? Social media and relevant storage solutions might host measured ARTs at convenience.

XML structured editing affords many solutions for identifying the relevant sections of texts, and storing their length, timewise. I would love to see the feature embedded into a next version of ePub, or at least recommended as best practice.

Would that make sense for Google Books, Amazon, iBooks, publishers, librarians?

And this definitely dovetails with Amazon offering readers its most-highlighted passages. What do people pay attention to? And how long do they pay attention to it?

Reading Bridle — which is very smart, but seems to fall back on an assumption that publishers already know everything they need to know, they just aren’t doing what they need to do — and then reading the IA post — which is quite deliberately playing around with a bunch of different ideas, treating the digital text as a wide-open idea — even though they’re both about trying to pull off this very difficult move from space to time — illustrates how much is changing right now.

If I had to guess, I’d say, bet on the software guys to figure this out first. Even if publishers and booksellers have a better brick-and-mortar position, software is just plain faster. From space, to time.