Author Archives: Ali
Ali’s 4 hour news challenge
The Lego Movie – review
“A totalitarian-capitalist fantasy,” I said to myself, after watching the “The Lego Movie”, a computer-animated movie that Fox News slammed as an anti-capitalist propaganda. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the movie is based on the LEGO line of construction toys and was released on February 7. With a 100-minute run time, “The LEGO Movie” is a roller-coaster commercial that leaves you kicking for more: the LEGO world is impressively well-rendered in the form of a plastic phantasmagoria, the storyline is packed with satirical zingers and the voice cast is exceptional.
Set in a clockwork world of LEGO elements, “The LEGO Movie” tells the story of Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), an ordinary LEGO construction worker with no special abilities. His life in his world— where everything is routine, mundane and predictable— feels like a cog in the machine. It is a world where he is happy to pay $37 for a cup of coffee and sing along to upbeat faux pop anthem “Everything Is Awesome.” In short, he is a model citizen of the LEGO world which is controlled by Lord Business (Will Ferrell), an evil tyrant who wants everything built in the world according to his vision and instructions. Life for Emmet is hunky-dory until he runs into Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a flamboyant and fearless LEGO female, and falls in with a group of extraordinary LEGO builders, called the Master Builders, who can construct anything without instruction manuals. The Master Builders—led by Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a white-haired wizard—mistakenly take Emmet for “The Special”, a Master Builder who is prophesized to save the world from the evil plans of Lord Business, who is conspiring to freeze the entire LEGO world so that people cannot tamper with the idealized vision of his LEGO world. The rest of the plot follows the journey of the archetypical hero who reluctantly accepts the call to adventure and, in doing so, realizes his heroic destiny.
Coming back to the capitalist vs. anti-capitalist import of the movie, I found the movie to be a cleverly-executed LEGO corporation commercial, which echoes the radical marketing of Apple’s Super Bowl advertisement in 1984. While one can see streaks of a proletariat revolutionary in the protagonist of the movie, the ending of the movie suggests that the protagonist has a rather benign agenda— i.e. reconciliation with capitalism in the form of “balancing creativity with a follow-the-rules approach to life.”
Not surprisingly, Mark Kermode, a film critic, describes “the repositioning of luddite LEGO bricks [in form of this movie] as a saleable staple of the digital gaming revolution” as “one of the greatest marketing coups of the 21st century.”
So in a world of conglomerates and big money, if a global corporation produces a record-breaking commercial film with a commoditized narrative that makes a case for an anodyne individuality in a global business order, what would you call it? A successful product or propaganda marketing or an opiate for the masses, I leave it up to the reader to decide.
With a current IMDB rating of 8.5, the movie has grossed nearly $200 million worldwide in its first 10 days of release.
Ali’s media diary
Ubiquitous computing has become an integral part of our lives. In the past week, I spent, on an average, about 13 hours everyday using some sort of computing device. I spent a great chunk of my time reading theory on the subjects of security, territory, population and topic modeling. I also devoted a decent amount of time to topic modeling modules that I am developing as part of my research. The charts below depict my daily media usage from Feb. 5 to Feb. 11.
Marshall Mcluhan defines media as “artificial extensions of sensory experience.” But a talk about the media, as defined by Mcluhan, is impossible without bringing into discussion the ideas from the physical world because we experience the interaction of media and the physical world in the form of resemblances and analogies. While tracking all media that I encountered in the past week, I realized how media shapes and paces my day-to-day conduct. To say that I experience media in various modalities assigns a passive role to the media in my life. I would rather say that I encounter the world through the media. Below are three analogies that I found useful in understanding some aspects of this encounter.
Twitter and Facebook as town squares
The town square is a public space where communities gather and interact. The function of a typical town square in pre-Renaissance Europe revolved around community interaction rather than mercantilism. People traveled to town square to know what was going on in the community. Their arrival and departure was constrained by physical mobility— i.e. they had to move from one place to another. Both Twitter and Facebook are analogous to traditional town squares, except that they are frequented more often because there are virtually no physical barriers. When I say that “I am going on Twitter or Facebook”, I am defining my relationship to these media artifacts in terms of space. Both Twitter and Facebook are ‘places’ where I find what’s going on in the communities that I am part of. I can interact with people in these places, or I can choose to be a passive observer. This is why I think that the metaphor of town square appropriately fits these virtual places. In the last week, I spent, on a daily basis, about 15 minutes using Twitter and about 9 minutes using Facebook. What was remarkable about my interaction with Facebook and Twitter was the daily frequency of visiting these sites: I visited Facebook about 17 times and Twitter about 30 times. So even though I was spending less than a minute on each visit on these sites, I was visiting these sites more than two times in an hour on an average.
News and the art of scrying
The art of scrying is an archaic idea, but we can also say that it is completely contemporary, since the art of scrying basically involves revealing the unknown. To that extent we can say that the practice of scrying is a dream of our contemporary news needs: to reveal what is happening and to predict what will happen. Technology has delimited our visible space like a scrying crystal ball. I am able to gaze at things and regions that hitherto seemed obscure. I follow news as it is happening, I analyze what has happened, and I look for indicators that are predicting what is to come. In addition, I look at news not from the perspective of a nation-state’s subject, but rather from the perspective of a world citizen who belongs to multiple polities and communities. The desire to know things in real-time now is reflected in my continual attentiveness toward news websites. The chart below shows the daily frequency breakdown for my preferred news sites. 
Gmail and Skype as rhizome roots
Rhizome: www.nomadology.com/rhizome.jpg
The idea that any point can be connected to another point is contained in the metaphor of rhizome. It is a metaphor that apprehends multiplicities. My world on the Internet extends my physical world. In other words, the world on the Internet, which is hyperreal, is very much part of my territorial locus. Both Gmail and Skype allow me to interact in a rhizome reality that exists at the intersection of the real and the hyperreal. Gmail and Skype are the main means of communication and scheduling for me. Even my off-line encounters are organized by these tools. In the past week, I spent about 70 minutes using Gmail and about 15 minutes using Skype on a daily basis. These interactions, like my news usage, permeated my daily schedule on a continual basis.