Despite the fact that video games, online communities, sound design, theater, and the classical arts are what I spent four years studying at Parsons School of Design, rarely do I touch the subject on Megalongcat.  But having a best friend who is a “game critic” I’ve decided to make an end of the year gaming post encompassing everything about video gaming in my life this year.  I’ve grown up on video games.  From the NES to my Playstation 3, I’ve never spend any part of my life without a gaming system.  In 2008, despite the so called great games that came out, I barely felt the inclination to play any games at all unless I was completely bored.  This year however, I couldn’t resist the gaming fire in my soul that burned for a challenge, amazing plot, great dialogue, and all around good fun.  So in chronological order I present to you the list of video games I actually took the time to play in 2009.

Final Fantasy IX

-The game didn’t come out this year, a lot on my list didn’t.  But of all of the Final Fantasy games, starting from Final Fantasy 1, it’s the only one I find with replay value worth my time.  Great dialogue, character’s aren’t based on snippets of emotions pieced together in 8, 10, 12, and 13 (my issues with them will come at a later time).  All in all, it was a solid RPG worth the replay and I loved every minute of it.

Wipeout HD

-Ever played Jet Motto? If not you shouldn’t have ever deserved to own the original playstation.  Wipeout HD was a graphic rush that required just the right amount of reflexive skill that high paced racing video games should have.  It was a sweet blend of Kinetica, Bumper cars, and Grand Turismo all rolled up nicely into a 250mph blur.  The game also offered a great feature of taking HD screenshots at any point during a match. A feature I wish was offered in every game now.  It’s a simple game, but fun at it’s core and twenty bucks it was a steal.

Crimson Gem Saga

-Best dialogue I’ve seen in a JRPG in ages.  It’s funny, full of witty humour and amazing characters.  I wish more of my friends had listened to me when I talked about how great the game was.

Resident Evil 5

As an African American, I was told the game was racist.  As an African American, I’m also privy to the knowledge that most of the world is racist so why would I expect anything better from a video game.  Completely ignoring the racism comments from my friends about the game, I played it and loved it.  Co-Op games are hard to do.  So hard that every seems to be retarded when making them on PS3 and Xbox360.  RE5 was the first co-op of the year where me and my best friend could truly enjoy an experience where we had to help each other.  I pick some games solely for Co-op play, and this was one of them and well worth the money.

Uncharted 2

The hype about the game being the best thing since sliced bread this year was a complete lie, but that didn’t stop me from enjoy the gameplay.  Yes, the gameplay. The dialogue was alright, the graphics were great if you never took a lighting animation class and want to nitpick at the exposure levels on each character’s eyes.  But once you get past all the little mistakes, the game is completely solid as well as it’s multiplayer platform. The story makes sense, the gameplay matches the story as it unfolds, and it’s fun.

Tekken 6

Fighting games anyone?  Tekken 6, easily the worst Tekken since 4, is still a fun game no matter how you cut it.  The new characters actually have different move sets instead of simply being based off older character models and the fact that they incoporated air combos into the command list is a big step up from old Tekken games where you had to figure it out on your own

Borderlands

Best gaming intro if the year, as well as the best co-op experience (moreso than Resident evil 5).  The characters are hilarious, dialogue is great. Bad guy’s actually run when you shoot them because they don’t want to die.  The game is completely wonky in both gameplay and story which meshes well and doesn’t ever make you feel like there’s an awkward disconnect between playing the game and understanding the story.  It was, and still is a fun game with plenty of content.

Demon’s Souls

“It’s just God of War with different tactics” Is easily the worst way to describe the best gaming experience of the year.  Demon’s Souls is the only PS3 game this year that took gamers out of their Devil May Cry comfort zone and dragged them to the chopping block.   Its difficulty level forces a gamer to explore every possibility and playstyle imaginable to survive.  The game is not for the light of heart or mediocre gamers and that’s why I couldn’t resist playing it.

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I understand when you’re in design school, or you’re just coming out (school just let out for the summer not too long ago) you want to work but you find most positions at design studios, corporate firms, and other venues filled with hard working (theoretically) designers. So what do you do? You freelance. After a while of making a break here or there freelancing you start talking to other freelancers to help your self-started business get off the ground. A couple of jobs later you’ve completely forgotten that your original goal and you’re perfectly content working your own hours. I know a lot of great designers who are freelancers, but I know even more horrible freelance designers who ruin the market for real ones. I’ve freelanced and worked for businesses along with studios and firms and still find that freelancing is not it for me and here’s why:

1. Medical Benefits
I’m not sure about freelancers out there, but in the US, Health Insurance and Dental Insurance are pretty expensive and hard to come by at an affordable rate. To be a freelancer, you have to be organized; sadly most people aren’t and taking care of their health insurance properly is something most freelancers probably forget here in the states. Sticking with a business or firm allows you the alleviation of this by having it simply as part of your benefits package for working with them. There’s nothing worse than paying for a broken ankle right out of your pocket.

2. Learning from Peers
Freelancers learn from other freelancers; they rarely learn from people in the industry who are attached to a firm because people like that tend to keep the secrets of their trade to themselves out of fear of losing their position to someone else. However, when you’re a designer working at a firm with other designers, they teach you quickly and efficiently to make sure that you’re a valuable member of the team. Teamwork is important, one of the most fundamental skills of being a human being, but it becomes hard to develop when you work alone and never stay attached to a business for too long.

3. Growth/Advancement
The best thing about being a freelancer is that you’re the boss. The worst thing about being a freelancer is that you’re only the boss of yourself. Ever wanted to run a corporation or have a higher position than just “the guy that designed this”? Attaching yourself to a business allows for growth and advancement. I started off with one firm as a logo designer and ended up as their assistant director for marketing. What’s nice is that people in and outside of the business start to know your name, and the harder you work, because you’re part of a company you’ll be noticed and have the ability to rise in rank. Freelancing means once you’re done with the project you’re done. They might contact you again for more work, but it will always be the same thing for the most part.

4. Stock
Most freelancers don’t care about it, and they probably don’t understand it. With the economic recession still in force here in the states and around the world most people wouldn’t think having stock at this time is even a good idea. Wrong. Now is a great time to have stock as well to buy up other stock while it’s dirt cheap. Having stock in a company that’s doing well, and keeping track of your stock will not only be great for when you leave the company (sell the stock and get rich anyone?) but it teachers you how to manage it.

5. Resources
As a freelancer, there’s no doubt you’ve accrued a large amount of contacts through your years of working for various businesses. But as valuable as these contacts are, the likelihood of them sending you work from other businesses are close to none. Businesses provide great resources such as laptops, desktops, art supplies, and printing costs for you as long as you’re doing your job well. These resources are great perks when you realize you can go to your boss and say: “I need a new Mac Intel Laptop to do this work right”, and they give it to you to keep.

Working from home is great, but working in an office on strict hours trains you to be diligent and efficient with your time instead of thinking: “Oh I can just do this at night and sleep in”. It’s common knowledge that if you don’t get anything thing done by 12pm in the afternoon, nothing’s going to get done at all.

So what are your thoughts on freelancing as opposed to working directly for a firm or business? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

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For those of you following me on Twitter, you’ll notice that late one night around 2am I started freaking out. My normally calm, methodical, and placid personality was shattered when I found that four of my websites (two blogs, one of which being Megalongcat) and two personal websites were completely down with no reason as to why. Whenever I attempted to access my websites I merely recieved Google’s lovely text saying “Oops, this website doesn’t appear to exist.” I immediately ran over to Dreamhost Status to find that nothing was wrong with my server and after “account testing” I found that the only error my sites had was that they took over 5 seconds to load. This of course was presumebly due to them not “existing”. I then took my plight to Twitter and was directed again to DreamhostStatus by @markhauge. After a little more freaking out he sent me a message saying my websites were indeed working leaving me wondering if I had merely imagined all of my problems.

Soon thereafter Dreamhost sent me a personal email detailing the events that had transpired. Below is the email:

Hello,

Thank you for hanging in there, Frederick!

Sorry for the issues that you have been expereincing with your webpages.
Unfortunately there was am issue with one of the packages that we were
running some apache modules with, and a little misconfiguration ended up
taking the apache offline. An administrator was contacted regarding this
matter and we have since been able to get everything back in order. Your
domains are back online now, and we will continue to monitor the hosting
environment.

Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns. We’ll be
happy to help!

Thanks!
Samuel

I hate you Dreamhost for not warning me of this ahead of time. I love you dreamhost for taking care of the problem in record time and making me, reluctantly, a very grateful customer for your services.

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So something happened in Twitter the other day that gave me a good chuckle. I sent out a question posed as such:

 
I expected that with all of the people on twitter, especially since the fact that the majority of the people on my list are tech-heads/geeks/designers/programmers that someone w
ould have either had experience with the HTC Diamond / Touch Pro or would at least have been able to point me in the right direction. Yet the only reponse I was met with was:

The rest of the dialogue afterwards is irrelevant, but it got me thinking. “Fred you sexy beast, why don’t you want a trendy iPhone?”. So let’s talk about why as a designer I make a conscious, ethical, and well informed decision to back my reasoning behind why I refuse to get Apple’s smartphone.

Note: I have nothing against Apple products, I think Mac computer’s are wonderful for graphic design work and movie editing. I prefer PC’s for 3d animation, programming, gaming, & personal customization. Both products have their specific uses. The product isn’t the issue here, it’s the brand.

1. Androgynous.

I’m a man. Despite the mockery I’ve made of hipsters and designers alike with my avatar photo I don’t wear tight skinny jeans, have real thick rimmed black glasses and I hate my coffee black and above $1. The iPhone’s smooth, slick, and minimalistic design is completely devoid of being associated with either gender. Despite it’s rounded edges it doesn’t cater towards the female market nor does large viewing screen it’s abundance of technology/applications cater towards the technical male crowd. The iPhone successfully breaks down gender barriers and is in essence a phone for men and women alike between the ages of 17 and 35. This is excellent since it’s exactly what Apple wanted. But I want a phone that looks like a man. You might think of this as chaunvistic, egotistical, etc but I disagree; I want a phone that doesn’t associate me with people wearing androgynous American Apparel clothing or movement restricting clothing.

2. The White Hand of God.

I don’t take anything personally, you could call me any racial epithet you wanted and I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash, I probably even have more racial jokes about my ethnic background than anyone on the planet. With that said, let’s talk about Apple’s White Hand of God.  Below is one of the apple backed advertisement’s for the iPhone:

I only need one picture to point something out.  If you go back and look at all of Apple’s advertising for it’s product’s you’ll notice they employ the white hand of god as their central motif when releasing new products.  You’re probably quick to call bullshit; to which I would suggest you stop freelancing, take a course on signage/semotics/advertisements/sociology and then take another look at their advertising methods.  Even so, this isn’t what bother’s me.  It’s the fact that Apple had the nerve when coming under fire for not advertising to other ethniticies to use this ad:

They even had the nerve to use this slogan with it “A little video for everyone.” (2007) used to market the third generation iPod nano”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_Inc._slogans)

When did Apple get this smug with their branding and advertising methods?  I swore on that day that the iPod would never enter my household.  I mean really, the “White Hand of God” offering “A little video for everyone” and using the black ipod nano?  If you think I’m stretching it, I once again point you towards graduate level courses in semoitics.  Apple has an amazing marketing team, they completely understand what they did.  I know they don’t have racist intentions, but they’re distinctly not marketing to me and as such I will not endorse their iPods and iPhones. (Computers are a different story, I need them to edit in Final Cut).

3. Steve Job’s War on Buttons.

My last reason is more of an awkward quirk.  This whole thing about no button’s that Apple has is compltely beyond me.  There’s a reason keyboards have buttons that make noises, there’s a reason that cell phones have buttons that make noises.  It’s completely uncessary but phone designers go OUT OF THEIR WAY to make sure that when you hit a button it makes a noise.  Why?!  It’s because people like to know they’re doing something.  The act of pushing a button and hearing a noise means that their physical action caused a reaction.  And though it might seem simple and illogical that something like this is necessary, quickly remind yourself that human beings are by nature slightly illogical.  I like buttons.  Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the gamer’s generation.

As a final note: Don’t be a flame troll. =]

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1. The job’s payout is too good to resist
2. You’re fresh out of college / freelancing and are willing to take any project, large or small.
3. You’ve done something like it before on a personal/smaller scale.
4. You think taking on a big project will make you a better designer.

While these may be valid reasons, they all seem to fall short when a design is truly faced with a project they knew little to nothing about.  The steps to avoid getting into this sort of situation are just as simple as the alluring reasons above:

1. Write down a list of your skills and rate them on a scale of your choosing.
2. Know your design process, how long it takes you to complete a project, etc.
3. Understand your limitations.
4. Know that you can fail at any given moment.

Try as we might, the above reasons aren’t enough to stop designers from taking on projects they shouldn’t, so there are ways to get around this if you’re ever in the situation:

1. ASK FOR HELP.  A good designer always has a pool of EDUCATED peers to ask for advice.  Worst case scenario is you have to bring them in on the project and pay them part of your cut.  But this prevents you from looking bad in your client’s eyes and you might establish a relationship with an other designer to form a team.
2. HONESTY – Tell your client that you can’t complete the project and offer them a list of other designers that can.  If you’re going to bow out of a project at least leave them with options as to what to do without you.
3. READ – As tempting as it is to just Google “How to design this and that” and get a bunch of search results to blog tutorials on designing various things, go out and get a real book published by actual designers who have been in the field and are accredited for their methodology and skills.  

What do you guys think is the proper way to handle a situation like this: What do you do as a designer when you can’t handle the project you’re already contracted to?

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Name: Aaron Irizarry

Website: http://www.thisisaaronslife.com

What does he hate about other designers?:

Unwillingness to share their tips and knowledge, we are a community, we should be willing to help others just like someone has helped us along.

Name: Eric Swain

Website: http://www.thegamecritique.com

What does he hate about other designers?:

Hate is a strong word, but I dislike when designers experiment with changing with practices that have become standard without the basic understanding of why theose practices became standard. Experimentation for the sake of learning is one thing, but then they tout out finished products with these changes and call it innovative when its really just broken.

Name: Brian Hoff

Website: http://www.thedesigncubicle.com

What does he hate about other designers?:

There’s really nothing that I can say I hate about other designers, but what I do dislike is individuals that “own” a copy of Photoshop and all of a sudden they are designers. Design must be learned and understood. It’s about communicating a message and problem solving, not applying a few fancy effects in Photoshop and calling it a design.

Name: Meroko

Website: N/A

What does She hate about other designers?:

Hmm..maybe not hate, but I’m jealous that it seems like all the designers I know already know how to use the web/design websites effectively and I come from a print background, so I am way behind. I’m working on that for 2009 though. Watch out!

Name: JAC

Website: N/A

What does She hate about other designers?:

preconceptions, arrogance, and ignorance. 

1–most people are narrow-minded and are set to think that the way they perceive the world is right (the only way and reason). or, whatever they learned if they went to school for it, or learned from other people (art masters or not) is the first and foremost reason. granted, people go around living with the various accumulated knowledge that they acquired throughout their lives so far, but many are not open into seeing things in other ways or perspectives (tipping the balance of design they don’t understand as inferior works, if it doesn’t fall into their end of the scale [which would be the "superior"]).

2–going along with the first peev, arrogance is a folly. to truly appreciate and understand the concepts behind design or art for that matter, requires one to be completely accepting of any ideas that may come through. it has been a great debate to whether function is more important than form, but in the end, the style and technique of the final product are the essence of the result. i hate it when people say they could’ve done things better, especially when they have a completely different style. their ways of thinking of the concept may be the same, but the outcome will be visually different. none can be better than the other if they are in different genres. some people don’t get this… others that are worse, THINK they can do better when they don’t have the skills to, or don’t produce (so no one ever knows if they really could have done better or not. usually, these people under the arrogance umbrella are talkers, non-action-takers.

3–finally, “ignorance is bliss?” well, maybe sometimes in LIFE. but in design, one really doesn’t want to be. politics, worldly events, even weather all have their own narratives when they get tied into a piece. research is one of the foremost things that is required when a project is started. essays are like this too. the process must start out with a concept, followed and backed by actual facts, which could either be transformed or used to express the piece. satires (like the new yorker covers) are popular because although the art is in poor taste, they are always up-to-date, based on reality, but share a mocking fantasy that the masses can understand right away (if they weren’t ignorant).

many people are different. i’m just pointing out the people that fall under these categories, because they are marked permanently on my bad / avoid-or-else-will-be-pissy-for-the-rest-of-the-day list for the reasons described above. even the best designers can fall under these. i try not to judge, since i don’t know the history of people’s lives, but if it is blatant, well…AVOID. waste of time.

Name: Angie Bowen

Website: http://arbent.net

What does She hate about other designers?:

I really don’t hate anything about other designers. The design community has some of the friendliest and most helpful people I’ve ever met

Name: Marnie B

Website: http://www.marnieb.com

What does She hate about other designers?:

Egos, in some cases. But I think most of all I hate those that devalue the work we do. Ie. Charging $80 for a logo design that’s worth $600 or $200 for a website design

Name: Emily Veras

Website: http://hcggd.com

What does She hate about other designers?:

I really dont hate something in particular about any designer because designers are well in fact , people. I can say that as designers we are very competitive as well as judgmental as we should be in some cases and what pushes us to not only become better people but designers as well.

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(It’s great and productive to have -some- of these things, but God help you if you think it entitles you to some sort of designer title).

1. Black Rimmed Glasses. – I know for a fact they don’t give you a new perspective on design.
2. Being a Hipster. – Normally assosciated with some sort of art and design background.  False.  Designers don’t spend money to look like they don’t have money.  Money is meant for Adobe.
3. Owning The White Hand of God Products (iPhone, Macs, etc). – If you don’t get the White Hand of God Reference you’ve never taken a semiotics class and shouldn’t be designing anything.
4. 3/4 Black and White Myspace Headshots that make you look better than you really are. – The picture says enough. Not even Photoshop could make this girl look ‘artsy’.
5. Drinking Lattes or any form of cafinated hot drink that doesn’t start with “Cof” and end with “ee”.  - $1 for coffee or $4 for a lattee?  I wonder.  Frugal, Frugal, Frugal.  Design costs $$$.
6. Owning a moleskin journal. – When did these suddenly become insanely trendy?  Useful they are, but they’re not an icon to represent designers.  We’ll use napkins to sketch ideas if need-be.
7. Being friends with other ‘designers’ on Twitter. – It’s kind of like digg, one giant political system, no one will properly critisize your work as long as you keep giving them floats & diggs.
8. Posting lists of resources. – Posting lists is great for other designers, until you realize people only posts lists because they have nothing substantive to say.          

There are plenty of other things but this completely distracts from the point of this article which is below & Big up’s to google for these images:

If you’ve gone to any accredited design university, college, or trade school there is one question that is bound to come up no matter what field of design you hail from: What makes a good designer?  The question rivals some of the most paradoxical philosophical questions today and is very much the center of debate among design researchers and scholars.  The question applies to all fields of design and suggests that there are basic requirements and that there is an ideological designer that all designers should aspire to be.  After copious amounts of design research both at universities and on my own, I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the ideological ‘good’ designer is one whom can design ethically functional societies and systems.

You might be asking yourself now: Design a Society?  I daresay Fred McCoy I’m through with Megalongcat and this foolishness.  But I must ask you to wait and hear me through.  What would it take to design the systems to help run a functional society?  Te help think about this, I’d like to point out here that being a designer is awkwardly similar to being a scientist.  The scientific method applies to how ‘Good’ Designers should go about design. Here’s the scientific method:

SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY:

1. Observe some aspect of the universe, “free from bias.”
2. Invent a hypothesis that is consistent with what your empirically described observations.
3. Form a falsifiable theory to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations.
5. Modify the hypothesis into a theory in the light of your results.
6. Publish your findings in a peer reviewed journal (Newer addition)
7. Consider criticisms offered, and revise your theory
8. Go to step 3. 

You might be wondering how to apply this to design, especially since nothing about being creative, talented or being abreast of trends is mentioned here.  The fact of the matter is the above methodology is how designers can think about going about their projects:

1. Find a problem in the world regardless of what it is.
2. Create a well though, plausible, and ethical solution.
3. Publish a well-written proposal and outline for your solution.
4. Prototype, Prototype, Prototype.
5. Test the prototype in the field.
6. Gather observations and publish in a document to send to relevant scholars, peers, designers, and artists.
7. Take in all constructive criticism and revise solution.
8. Return to step 4.

This is nothing more than a general guide, rather than any sort of hard rule of thumb for designers to think about their projects.  I will leave you with two parting notes.  The first is that if you can design a logo, you have the thought process and capabilities to  design a solution to war in the middle east.

The second is that when design is done right, no one will have any idea you did anything at all.

What are YOUR thoughts on what makes a good designer?  I’m sure there’s plenty to be said for my article which pigeonholes a lot of people who will come across this article.

**My profile picture you see everywhere associated with Megalongcat is the 3/4th’s MySpace headshot with black rimmed glasses.  It’s there to make fun of the very people described above, the glasses are actually 3D glasses I got from the movies. . 

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Web 2.0 is commonly hailed as an: “encapsulation of the idea of the proliferation of inter-connectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content in regards to global audiences” (Tim O’Reilly). Web 2.0 does not actually describe any technological improvement of how the internet functions, but instead encompasses the idea that the internet is no longer simply a platform for gaining information but instead is a platform for creation and distribution by any single person regardless of race, creed, or gender. Web 2.0 offers a way for people to interact with one another in ways they never could have previously. Technological strides in databases, content management systems, widespread broadband and wi-fi, and ubiquity of computers has allowed for the masses to take control of not only what the read on the internet, but what, where, and how it gets distributed. Therein that sentence lies the problem with Web 2.0 in relation to user-generated content: it has made all men equal under the sign of WWW.

You’re probably asking yourself “But why is the internet which now serves as a representation of all humans as equals a bad thing?” That logic, though morally hard to object to, is easily broken apart when we reflect on humans as a whole and quickly realize two important things: not everyone is as smart as everyone else, and large numbers of people interacting with each other at the same time or in the same place rapidly obliterates all forms of individualist reasoning, logic, and morals. To further this argument, we can look back at the philosopher Nietzsche and his description of the ‘herd mentality which describes these ‘herds’ in the form of two groups of people, “One lends itself to the religious points of views- their beliefs and how those dictated their actions, while the other lends itself to influence by the media…based upon following trends, social norms, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality). I’m not going to touch on the first half of the herd mentality but instead I am going to focus in on the herd in relation to media and trends. The best way to examine this is by directly picking apart the largest online social media platforms (in order of popularity) available to Americans (the country of choice in all of these articles); these lucky websites are: myspace, facebook, digg, and youtube.

Myspace:

The first, most common, and most hated tool that has clung to life since the beginning of the web 2.0 boom is MySpace. Before any formal or informal critique is given, it is important to see how MySpace chooses to describe itself to the public and investors:

“MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends!” – Myspace.com/About

Myspace claims to be a space dedicated for singles, matchmakers, families, businesses, classmates and those trying to connect with people from their past. From Myspace’s opening statement and its target audience we can in theory safely assume that the online community is a safe place for respectable people to mingle, interconnect, and establish relationships (plutonic and platonic) on a larger scale than possible without the internet. The target demographic therefore should be males and females between the ages of 15-17 (Highschool), 18-24(Undegrads) and 25-29(Young Business People) The reason I’ve marked these three demographics as Myspace’s target audience of choice is because anyone between the ages of 15-17 is only looking to connect with friends, those between the ages of 18-24 are looking for dating and career advice, and the final age group (25-29) is looking to establish and retain business opportunities. (I should note here that myspace does not claim to service any specific ethnicity over others).

Lets take a step back from the description of myspace above and simply throw it completely out the window. Take a look below at the real demographics behind MySpace’s actual audience:

Quantcast MySpace Demographics

As you can see MySpace actually calls for a certain type of person: a Caucasian female in her late high school years whom rides the paycheck of what is considered in America to be the lower middle class.  Upon closer inspection of these demographics I was able to glean a bit of information about the type of person who comes to MySpace and who they’re really marketing towards.  What the company wants, whether voiced or not, are young women that have no actual knowledge of the real world and seek advice and relationships through an online platform.  Sex sells best (though the price of sex has gone down within the past year) and MySpace solidifies its stance on using sex as the main drive behind the website in the little input forms you have to fill out when making a profile.  Note that it’s the same as filling out a questionaire on a dating/sex website to find your perfect match:

Myspace Input Profile Fields

 The biggest, and perhaps most underestimated tool that began to destroy the Internets was not that it fostered any sort of sordid activity, but it gave everyone their “five minutes of fame”.  It allowed a person to feel space, to feel different, and it made anyone who signed up for their service completely unique (just like everyone else).  Profile pages quickly became shrines to a user’s ego, the ability to customize CSS, HTML, and implement flash made using MySpace that much more tempting to anyone who wanted to take part in the internet.  MySpace become a conglomerate of competing egos which did not group themselves in accordance to ethnicity, religion, or creed like in the real world, but MySpace became divided into what I shall refer to as “schools of thought”.  Scene girls, Photoshop Wannabe’s, Garage Band Artists, Live Journal Rejects; there was a place for everyone on MySpace which leads me to point out the company’s most heinous crime: it promoted Content.

Content is an amazing thing, it can be used to bend search engines like Google to your will and it can foster and promote a positive discussion which would tie into a larger community with diverse, intelligent, and progressive opinions.  But ideology rarely falls in line with reality, and what MySpace promoted was instead a bog of egotistical journal entries, pictures of non-existent cleavage line of fourteen year old girls, and a cesspool of people who thought that they deserved to have their opinion heard by the masses.  And the masses did hear.  They Responded.  And they agreed.  And it is with something as trivial as MySpace, that the masses began to learn they could control the flow of information and trends if they stuck together and had one solid voice. 

 Youtube:

You will be quick to yell hypocrisy if you look to my sidebar and see that I’m using an embedded video from Youtube but let me explain myself.  What you see is one of the few proper uses of YouTube: Youtube as a video search engine.  The company does not describe themselves as a multimedia search engine, though Google would say differently, and identifies themselves as the:

“YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.

Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.” (http://www.youtube.com/t/about)

Let’s disseminate the information; Youtube is a place where anyone can upload videos of anything within a set of loose guidelines (that aren’t usually upheld) with no buffer to stop a single video from being viewed by millions of people.  Amateur film-makers, fresh motion graphic artists, and small-time cinematographers rejoiced around the globe; finally their intellectual views on the world of film and cinema could be heard and creativity could pour forth unto the masses.

But the masses had a very different feeling about Youtube.  I’m going to focus on two of the most heavily viewed sections of Youtube to clarify what I mean when I say the masses quickly assumed control of the online video sharing service.  The first is Reaction Videos and the second is Idiocy.  The latter category might not seem like a logical or educated choice, but after my explanation you’ll understand why.

Reaction Videos / ReMixed Videos:

If you search any major film or comedy skit you’re likely to have trouble finding what you’re searching for. I’ll reference the video in my sidebar again.  It actually took me time to find a video that should have been ranking first for the keyword I used: Quantum of Solace Intro.  But what did I find?  Reaction Videos.  These can be accurately described as videos made by the masses documenting their reactions to other videos (sometimes reaction videos) so that –everyone- can know how they felt about a major event (usually a movie).  Here’s what I got when I searched for the lovely intro movie to the new James Bond Movie:

Quantum of Solace Search Results

 A quick glance says the result is the fourth one down from the top; but on closer inspection we find that a user took the motion graphics intro to the movie, and swapped out the music track for the music from the video because he “felt it suited it better”.  An average user who blatantly disregarded the video cuts made specifically to “Another Way to Die” by Alica Keys.  Instead he slapped over an unedited track without even bothering to cut the intro movie to the new music. 

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjiqF9JbppI]

To simplify this for you: imagine taking the Mona Lisa, cutting it apart, and turning it into a collage that you throw into the trash when you’re bored of it. 

*Note: The video was met with nothing but applause and compliments of the new version by the masses.

A strong example of a reaction video is found with the famous “Dark Knight” movie that came out recently. Here is the result I received from “The Dark Knight”.

Dark Knight Search Results

Take a look at the number of hits for a spoof of a scene in the movie versus the Dark Knight Teaser Trailer. Complete obliteration by at least 2 million views.

Idiocy:

To best describe idiocy click HERE and look at the Youtube video.

Though I will quickly admit that I found this hilarious when I first saw it, I also was part of the crowd on /v/ and /b/ long before the masses had even stumbled onto the video.  At first I thought something as stupid and silly as the above video could never be popular.  People are smart right?  Why would they even waste their time laughing at something some user uploaded with little intellect behind it.  But I was wrong, horribly wrong.  The masses ate it up with over 11 million views and it quickly becomes a long standing meme associated with the internet.

(If you haven’t noticed by now you’ve been Rick Roll’d.)

But as we know, Idiocy sells just as well as sex does.  There’s a reason fart jokes will always topple political ones.  The human brain would much rather comprehend a short joke over one that could possibly require a few more currents along our brain synapses.  Other famous examples of Idiocy and the Masses:

Chocolate Rain – Addicting, homemade, quality rap.  It even managed to score itself a soft-drink deal.

Chocolate Rain Music Video

Party Boy – The world’s sexuality was called into question by amount of hits this young man bouncing around in a thong to techno music received.

Party Boy

Lonelygirl15 – Not only do the masses enjoy men in thongs, they seem to enjoy video blogs of young non-existent females.

Lonely Girl Fake Blog

Deviant Art

The subject of debate between everyone that works for me over at the Creative Fluff Design Magazine and Blog.  Half of us believe that Deviant art promotes creative content and gives the creative community an outlet for their work with the chance of it being seen by the masses; the other half of our team argues that Deviant Art promotes trends and gives the idea that anyone can become a professional designer/artist without formal training.  I’m currently leaning towards the latter.

Deviant Art is an online community for artists, designers, writers, and photographers looking to get exposed to the art world, garner feedback on their work, or simply to have a place to hold their precious art pieces. An analogy can be made to MySpace in that it falls prey to the same disconnect between ideology and reality.  Deviant Art quickly became a place where the masses swarmed and uploaded every bit of work from MS Paint stick figures to pictures of themselves in scene girl poses.  Extremely poor examples of literature run rampant throughout the online community and once again, Photoshop is treated as a device that when once mastered, enables a person to the idea that they deserve to be paid for their work.  Before I continue I should note that simply because you are on Deviant Art, does not mean you fall into any of my characterizations, there are amazing artists, designers, and writers who provide critical feedback, and amazing work.  But the few -never- outrank the masses on the internet.  As much as I love Neitzsche’s view on social hierarchy, it didn’t work with humans in the real world, and it definitely does not apply on the Internet.

Having given a very liberal disclaimer, let’s analyze why it’s important to understand that everyone might be creative, but it doesn’t make them worthy of getting paid for it.  Three things are important in any field.  Find something you’re good at, find something you love doing, and find someone who’s willing to pay you for it. Unless you have all three, you might want to re-think your field and this holds true here.  Deviants (I like that name) might be good at Photoshop, and they might love doing it, but how many design studios or firms are going to hire someone without formal training who produces a portfolio hosted on Deviant Art?  Not many and I wouldn’t like to meet the firm that does.  Once again, I have no problem with designers and artists who do not receive formal training, but their self-teaching should be able to match the level of education that a design/art student would receive at a university.

Deviant Art Comments

What Deviant Art offers is a place where instead of work being received and commented on by professionals/educated individuals it is seen by the masses whom have received not only no education in art and design, but have most likely not even received education on formal and informal critiques and constructive criticism.  Another problem caused by this artistic online community is that they over-saturate creative fields across the board and devalue the worth of decent, hard working designers.  If artists, designers, and photographers on Deviant Art seriously consider themselves halfway decent, then they should be hosting their work on their own websites, writing to blogs on their own domain names, and competing in contests held by the AIGA, CommArts, Metropolis, and The One Show.

Digg

Instead of describing what Digg is, I’m just going to show you a screenshot of the homepage:

Digg Top Stories

The most popular, and most dugg articles at the moment start off with: “IRONY: Ann Coulter’s Mouth Wired Shut”.  I don’t think the masses have ever had a more accurate banner to fly under than that title.  Digg is social bookmarking and article sharing website that bases how well an article survives on the website on a system called “Diggs”.  Diggs are votes, the more digs an article has the higher of a ranking it receives on the website.  Being on the front page of Digg is essentially the same thing as being God for a day.  At its heart, Digg is a popularity contest where users constantly compete to get their article noticed above anyone else’s.  The best way to do this, of course, is to form what resembles political bodies I.E. Schools of thought(likeminded individuals).  These groups get together and constantly promote anything made by one member of the group.  Digg, which runs itself on the premise that quality content will get the most digs couldn’t be further off.  Poor content, promoted by the masses is what sells.  It’s kind of like Wall Street.  Everyone’s buying the same stock, and when economies fail, people wonder why everyone’s going bankrupt at the same time; this is why.  The internet through these websites, which boasts individuality have done the exact opposite, it has created a place so free, so unadulterated that the uneducated masses have managed to usurp control under the notion that everything they have deserves to be heard.  In the Declaration of Independence it states that All men Are Created Equal.  On the internet it should be wise to remember that All Men Aren’t Created Equal and Some People Are More Important Than Others. Your opinion doesn’t ever matter unless you have the research and verbal prowess to support yourself.

Conclusion:

Conclusions will only be drawn at the end of “The State of the Internets” and will be the final 20th installment to the series. I will be constantly revising these essays so do not expect this, or any of them to be in their final states.  All feedback is critical and welcome.  Enjoy!

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The ‘State of the Internets’ is a well-thought and thoroughly researched 20 (Get it?  Web 2.0? Ha.) part essay on where the internet currently stands, and the possible futures of the World Wide Web. The first part of the essay will focus on the current web 2.0 philosophy and trends entrenched in the internet along with the positives and negatives that it brings to the online world. The second part of the essay will focus on five possible futures for the internet and the likelihood of each one to come to fruition. All of these ideas are expressions solely of the author and do not represent any other individual, group, or identity.

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