The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 1: The Xbox

xbox 360The online mag­a­zine Slate runs most of its arts and cul­ture sto­ries in a sec­tion called “Cul­ture­box.” Iron­i­cal­ly, it’s tak­en the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try sev­er­al years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gad­get is mar­ket­ed as a cul­ture­box, from the shiny iPhone to the pio­neer­ing Tivo to the hot-run­ning Xbox 360. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, adver­tis­ers and pro­duc­ers every­where are think­ing about how to sell us sleek­er, bet­ter box­es and the media that go with them.

The trou­ble is, nobody is quite sure what the cul­ture­box should look like or what it should do. We can all agree on video, audio and some kind of stor­age func­tion. But do we want our media pock­et-sized or on a big screen? Is the goal to enter­tain us on the com­mute or to build up a library of cher­ished media objects? More impor­tant­ly, when we say “cul­ture” do we essen­tial­ly mean tele­vi­sion or the whole panoply of forms? Are cul­ture­box­es just TV by oth­er means or are there gen­uine­ly new cul­tur­al forms on the hori­zon?

Last week Microsoft announced that Xbox 360s are fail­ing in unprece­dent­ed num­bers: A dra­mat­ic exam­ple of Cul­ture­box Anx­i­ety Syn­drome. The new gen­er­a­tion of videogame con­soles allow us to do so much more than blast­ing aliens—video on demand, HD and Blu-Ray DVD play­back, online chat­ting and music library man­age­ment are just a few of the roles these par­tic­u­lar cul­ture­box­es want to serve. The com­plex­i­ty is clear­ly an over­load: the New York Times argues that the $1 bil­lion Microsoft is set­ting aside for this prob­lem implies that between a third and half of Xbox 360 con­soles could get the cul­ture­box blues. Now a high-lev­el Xbox exec­u­tive has announced his res­ig­na­tion, though few peo­ple think it’s a pun­ish­ment since the plat­form is gen­er­al­ly sell­ing well.

Per­haps I’m only writ­ing because I use all these gad­gets and my Xbox recent­ly suc­cumbed to “red ring of death” syn­drome. Iron­i­cal­ly, it only freezes up when I use it to load a videogame. But there is a broad­er issue here: the trans­for­ma­tion of cul­ture from some­thing we expe­ri­ence in con­cert halls, movie the­aters and oth­er shared pub­lic spaces into some­thing that we do on the couch or on the go.

Radio Lab: A Great Science Podcast

Radi­o­Lab, a sci­ence radio show cre­at­ed by WNYC in New York, is a lit­tle unusu­al for a pub­lic radio show. It comes out in short sea­sons of about five episodes. Each episode address­es a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion in sci­ence through a wide lens–I found their most recent­ly pod­cast show, on Moral­i­ty, to be par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. We’re adding the new show to our col­lec­tion of Sci­ence Pod­casts. Check it out for your­self!

Radi­o­Lab (Site, iTunes, Feed)

The Future of the Internet: A New Stanford Course

Here is a new and free course to come out of a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­gram that (full dis­clo­sure) I help orga­nize. It’s called The Future of the Inter­net: Archi­tec­ture and Pol­i­cy (iTunes), and it’s taught by Ramesh Johari. The course, designed for non-techies, gets into the impor­tant ques­tion of whether the inter­net will remain “neu­tral” and freely avail­able to you and me. This course will appeal to any­one who has ever liked the work of Lawrence Lessig. (Please note that we’ll be rolling out a cou­ple more lec­tures in this course on a rolling basis.)

Check out the com­plete course descrip­tion below (and click here for many more free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es):

“The Inter­net today has evolved a long way from its hum­ble begin­nings as a fed­er­al­ly fund­ed research project. As a soci­ety, we find our­selves increas­ing­ly depen­dent on the Inter­net for our dai­ly rou­tine; and yet, the future of the Inter­net remains a mat­ter of vig­or­ous polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and aca­d­e­m­ic debate. This debate cen­ters around own­er­ship: who will own the infra­struc­ture, and who will own the con­tent that the net­work deliv­ers? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of this debate does not involve a sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion of the “archi­tec­ture” of the net­work, or the role that archi­tec­tur­al design will play in shap­ing the own­er­ship of the future glob­al net­work.

This course pro­vides a non-tech­ni­cal intro­duc­tion to the archi­tec­ture of the Inter­net, present and future. Stu­dents will be tak­en on a tour through the inner work­ings of the net­work, with a view toward how these details inform the cur­rent debate about “net­work neu­tral­i­ty” and the own­er­ship of the future Inter­net.”

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Weekly Wrap — July 15

It’s a wrap for the week. Here is what we served up:

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The Cult of the Amateur: A Short Review (and a Free Book)

New rule: Books that are short on good ideas should only get short reviews. And so that’s what we’re serv­ing up today — a short review of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Ama­teur: How the Democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the Dig­i­tal World is Assault­ing Our Cul­ture.

Keen’s argu­ment can essen­tial­ly be boiled down to this: Web 2.0 has brought us blogs, Youtube-style video, Wikipedia and oth­er plat­forms that pro­mote user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, and it’s all killing our Cul­ture. Hacks are now crank­ing out “an end­less dig­i­tal for­est of medi­oc­rity;” “the pro­fes­sion­al is being replaced by the ama­teur… the Har­vard pro­fes­sor by the unschooled pop­u­lace;” “kids can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between cred­i­ble news by objec­tive pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com;” “every post­ing is just anoth­er per­son­’s ver­sion of the truth;” with the net result being that in “today’s cul­ture of the ama­teur, the mon­keys are run­ning the show.” Using his own words, that’s the gist of Keen’s argu­ment.

You’d think that by posi­tion­ing him­self as the defend­er of high cul­ture and cul­tur­al author­i­ty, Keen would uphold his end of the bar­gain. That is, you’d expect him to offer us a nuanced, care­ful­ly-craft­ed look at the uses and abus­es of Web 2.0. But that is not what you get here. Miss­ing the mark, The Cult of the Ama­teur is long on hyper­bol­ic rhetoric (see above) and short on sub­tle think­ing and bal­ance. It stretch­es out argu­ments that ought to fill a 15 page arti­cle to 215 pages, and reit­er­ates the same points again and again. (Although tar­get­ed to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, the book places no pre­mi­um on effi­cien­cy.) And then you have sprin­kled in var­i­ous dilet­tan­tish ref­er­ences to philoso­phers (Marx, Rousseau, Haber­mas, etc.), cou­pled with slop­py read­ings of oth­er con­tem­po­rary media observers.

The ulti­mate irony is that Keen’s polemic against ama­teur con­tent comes off as strange­ly ama­teur­ish. It’s most­ly oper­at­ing at the same lev­el as the very blo­gos­phere he’s attack­ing. And this impres­sion only gets con­firmed by his admis­sion in the acknowl­edg­ments: “I con­fess that, as a writer, I remain a bit of an ama­teur. This is my first book, and I’m still learn­ing the craft of this com­plex busi­ness.” Appar­ent­ly, the divide between tra­di­tion­al media and dig­i­tal media, between high cul­ture and low cul­ture, is not as real and imper­me­able as Keen would have us believe.

If any­one wants my copy of Keen’s book, just let me know. I will send it any­where in the US at book rate. But be warned that it has some illeg­i­ble mar­gin­a­lia, and my kid doo­dled on one page (page 40), unbe­knownst to me. But think of it this way: You get what you don’t pay for. Our email address is in the ban­ner above. First come, first served.

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The Decline and Fall of the Roman (and American?) Empire: A Free Audiobook

Edward Gib­bon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – It’s a major work of the Enlight­en­ment, a book that shaped how we mod­erns write his­to­ry (and, for that mat­ter, how we aspire to write in the Eng­lish lan­guage), and it’s now avail­able as a free pod­cast thanks to Lib­rivox. Or at least Vol­ume 1 is. With a run­time of almost 20 hours, this audio­book — click to access indi­vid­ual files or the full zip file — will make it so that you’re not look­ing for the remain­ing vol­umes any time soon. But don’t wor­ry they’re even­tu­al­ly com­ing.

Pub­lished first in 1776, just as the US declared its inde­pen­dence from Eng­land, Gib­bon’s Decline and Fall looked to offer an empir­i­cal expla­na­tion for why Ancient Rome fell as a pow­er, and he gen­er­al­ly point­ed to a decline in civic virtue among its cit­i­zen­ry (why both­er fight­ing the Empire’s wars when you can get mer­ce­nar­ies to do it?) and to the rise of Chris­tian­i­ty (why wor­ry about Rome when a bet­ter life, an eter­nal after­life, awaits you?).

In part, Gib­bon’s work has endured because it speaks to ques­tions that mod­ern pow­ers have on their minds. What brings Empires down, and what (implic­it­ly) allows them to endure? These ques­tions have a cer­tain amount of rel­e­vance these days in an anx­ious US. And indeed Gib­bon’s name was imme­di­ate­ly invoked in a recent pod­cast that asked whether Amer­i­ca, today’s empire, is on the brink. (Click to lis­ten.) The par­al­lels between Gib­bon’s Rome and the con­tem­po­rary Unit­ed States have also been direct­ly explored by the pro­lif­ic, young Har­vard his­to­ri­an, Niall Fer­gu­son. You may want to check out his Octo­ber 2006 piece in Van­i­ty Fair, Empire Falls. And depend­ing on what you think, you can give time to his two books on Empire — the first (and bet­ter) one focus­es on the British Empire, and a sec­ond one devotes itself to the US.

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Elvis Costello: The First Ten Years Podcast

A quick heads up for Elvis Costel­lo fans: In this ten-part pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), Elvis reflects on the first 10 years of his career, tak­ing lis­ten­ers on a tour that looks back at “his child­hood, musi­cal influ­ences, singing, song­writ­ing, chang­ing his name, record­ing, Nick Lowe, the Attrac­tions, the hits, the miss­es, get­ting arrest­ed and much more.” So far, 4 of the 10 seg­ments have been released; the oth­ers will be rolled out over the remain­der of the summer.For more pod­casts along these lines, check out our Music Pod­cast Col­lec­tion as well as our Arts & Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

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Ten Podcasts to Build Your Vocabulary

Recent­ly Mer­ri­am-Web­ster announced that they’re adding “ginor­mous,” “speed dat­ing” and a few oth­er gems to the lat­est edi­tion of their dic­tio­nary. In their hon­or, we present ten pod­casts to help you expand your vocab­u­lary. Enjoy!

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.