BBC's The Trap
Adam Curtis's brilliant 3 part documentary The Trap can be found (for how long I'm not sure and cannot guarantee) on Google Video. Tackling some big ideas like the assumption of self-interested individuals in society, the mathematical purity of game theory, and the powerful effects of these freedom-loving ideas on modern notions of liberty, control, and society, this is worth taking a good 3 hrs of your time and soaking in it for a while.
The Trap Part 1: F*ck you buddy
The Trap Part 2: The lonely robot
The Trap Part 3: We will force you to be free
I managed to see the Century of the Self at the Vancouver International Film Fest a few years ago and love the montage and narrative style of Curtis to tell a compelling (and yes, opinionated and biased) story. He's up there with Errol Morris in my books.
As a lot of my thinking recently has been focused around a) the rise of the network as a dominant metaphor in viewing, understanding, and organizing individual behaviour within a large-scale group, organization, or societal context and spending a lot of time trying to understand b) how social behaviour actually works within organizations in particular (and if it's at all possible to really "understand" it), and therefore how to c) encourage certain types of interactions through the use of internet-based technologies (i.e.: intranet software in particular), I'll have to admit that this stuff sent all sorts of bells off in my head. I'm not immune to the political nature of the objects that I create. Far from it. But what are those politics? What are the fundamental effects of that which lurks behind the anti-authority / anti-hierarchy, meritocratic, individual-freedom-reigns-supreme rhetoric of the network-as-dominant metaphor for social organization?
This also falls squarely into the understanding of the known, knowable, complex, and chaotic.
Phew.
I hope to have something coherent to say in the near future on all of this. But for now, just enjoy the show.
(Thanks to George for blogging this and the magic of RSS for bringing it to my awareness - why did all those cool Flickr folks have to move away from Vancouver to San Jose anyhow?).
The Trap Part 1: F*ck you buddy
The Trap Part 2: The lonely robot
The Trap Part 3: We will force you to be free
I managed to see the Century of the Self at the Vancouver International Film Fest a few years ago and love the montage and narrative style of Curtis to tell a compelling (and yes, opinionated and biased) story. He's up there with Errol Morris in my books.
As a lot of my thinking recently has been focused around a) the rise of the network as a dominant metaphor in viewing, understanding, and organizing individual behaviour within a large-scale group, organization, or societal context and spending a lot of time trying to understand b) how social behaviour actually works within organizations in particular (and if it's at all possible to really "understand" it), and therefore how to c) encourage certain types of interactions through the use of internet-based technologies (i.e.: intranet software in particular), I'll have to admit that this stuff sent all sorts of bells off in my head. I'm not immune to the political nature of the objects that I create. Far from it. But what are those politics? What are the fundamental effects of that which lurks behind the anti-authority / anti-hierarchy, meritocratic, individual-freedom-reigns-supreme rhetoric of the network-as-dominant metaphor for social organization?
This also falls squarely into the understanding of the known, knowable, complex, and chaotic.
Phew.
I hope to have something coherent to say in the near future on all of this. But for now, just enjoy the show.
(Thanks to George for blogging this and the magic of RSS for bringing it to my awareness - why did all those cool Flickr folks have to move away from Vancouver to San Jose anyhow?).
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home