by Venkat on January 27, 2012
Coded, informal communication — significant messages buried inside innocuous messages — has long interested me. I don’t mean things like “NX398 VJ899 ABBX3″ that the NSA might deal with (though that’s related). I mean things like this:
You: let’s get coffee sometime
Me: Sure, that’d be great
We both know that the real exchange was:
You: let’s pretend we want to take this further
Me: yeah, let’s do that
The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?
The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures — historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion — increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.
Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly.
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by Venkat on January 18, 2012
In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling repeatedly uses a very effective technique: turning a character, initially introduced as part of the background, into a foreground character. This happens with the characters of Gilderoy Lockhart, Viktor Krum and Sirius Black for instance. In fact she uses the technique so frequently (with even minor characters like Mr. Ollivander and Stan Shunpike) that the background starts to empty out.
This is rather annoying because the narrative suggests and promises a very large world — comparable in scope and complexity to the Lord of the Rings world say — but delivers a very small world in which everybody knows everybody. You are promised an epic story about the fate of human civilization, but get what feels like the story of a small town. Characters end up influencing each other’s lives a little too frequently, given the apparent size of the canvas.
We are used to big worlds that act big and small worlds that act small. We are not used to big worlds that act small.
Which is a problem, because that’s the sort of world we now live in. Our world is turning into Rowling’s world.
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