I lost my identity card /Yehuda Amichai

I lost my identity card.
I have to write out my curriculum vitae
all over again for many offices, one copy to God
and one to the devil. I remember
the photo taken thirty-three years ago
at a wind-scorched junction in the Negev.
My eyes were prophets then, but my body had no idea
what was happening to it or where it belonged.

You often say, This is the place,
This happened right here, but it’s not the place,
you just think so and live in error,
an error whose eternity is greater
than the eternity of truth.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names
like abandoned cemeteries
or like an absurd history class
or a telephone book in a foreign city.

And death is when someone keeps calling you
and calling you
and you no longer turn around to see
who it is

Me: Hey, listen – do you think any of the net-savvy literary theorists that you’re connected to has ever mentioned the connection between Bakhtin’s phatic function of language and things like twitter and other instances of ambient intimacy? [link, now broken]
She: could be, but I’m on the phone and then have to run. I’ll get back to you.  Hi, by the way!
Me: Exactly!

Lip-syncing was one of the genres which indicated the rise of YouTube and rising dominance of user-created video content. But why did so many people find it engaging as viewers or performers?

On a semiotic level, I find lip-synching fascinating, as it emerges as such prominent “sign of the times”. So this is my go at some “history of the present”…

Lip-syncing seems to me like the child of karaoke, it is the next step in a series of social activities centred around music. Additionally, both of them are socially acceptable ego-trips. Before both, we had sing-songs, with people coming together to sing in a group (The T-mobile singing flash-mob campaign looks more like a mass karaoke than a traditional sing-song).

With karaoke, the original performance remains the central subject of the performance. The performer becomes bigger as she connects with the original cultural artefact. Simply: I sing Bowie’s “let’s dance”, friends and strangers cheer, and for a moment – I touch glory.
The original self melts away, I’m now a vehicle for the song, and my gestures signify the original’s concept of stardom. I’m a prophet and my god is the original pop-culture artefact.
Many karaoke moments are compromised of people getting together to celebrate their mutual cultural history, performing the anthems of their youth, whilst celebrating their chance at feeling the kind of attention saved for pop-icons.

(Ah… Attention, the rarest resource of our times, the key ingredient in intimacy, unfortunately a magic ingredient in business, therefore coveted by many.)

One step beyond karaoke, Lip syncing is a purer ego-trip.
In lip-syncing, the original artefact is reduced to a soundtrack for the performance. The re-enactment of music is no longer as central, and, therefore, it’s importance seems reduced. While karaoke is an acting-out of a stardom fantasy, synching dismisses singing, therefore decreasing the imitation component, and indeed, more often than not the lip-syncer does not imitate the gestures of the original performer or any pop performer.
The vocabulary of lip syncing fuses three registers – the quoted mass produced style of pop videos ; a “tradition” of lip syncing gestures that is common to the genre and the peer group, often copied in “reply performances”; finally, it introduces the performers’ own style. While karaoke always creates a dialogue with the original performance, lip syncing, singing excluded, is more expressive of its performers own ideas and fantasies. The fact the soundtrack is identical to the original, rather than interpretive, shifts the focus to what happens on the visual level.
The song then become a soundtrack for the performers delight at her own mannerisms. The vocabulary of lip syncer’s gestures clearly focused on a dialogue between themselves and their peer group (and a reflexive dialogue with syncing genre itself). Syncers have their own private language, while karaoke singers try to merge with the big soul of music.

The famous Wayne’s World Bohemian Rhapsody scene embodies a bridge between karaoke led gen-x culture and lip-sync led gen-y culture. In that scene you can see the focus is still on worshipping the original, but in most YouTube creations, it isn’t so.

Karaoke, so often used as a metaphor for Postmodernity is a part of a culture of quoting, sampling, remixing. Lip-syncing is much closer to mash-ups, cut & paste – further towards the edge of postmodernity.

Personally, I see in lip synching a metaphor for adolescence. Youth tribalism is often unfairly accused of being vacuous and shallow, and lip syncing bundled with many other “online signs of the apocalypse”. But in fact, it is just a symptom of the struggle to discover individuality and authentic meaning in a mass-produced global culture. Both lip syncing and karaoke echo the dream of stardom, but oddly, there is more of the self coming across in lip-syncing.
As a viewer, with many instances of lip-synching, you often feel that beyond the allegedly narcissistic facade of conventions borrowed from leading-peers and mass produced culture, you get a glimpse at who those teenagers truly are. That’s why I find the genre strangely hopeful and optimistic.

* My thoughts on karaoke in this post owe a great debt to Israeli author and columnist Dror Foeyr. Who wrote “Tzadok”, a book about an international karaoke “star” and prophet, full of wonderfully charming, funny and insightful monologues. I wonder if he ever dabbles in lip-syncing.
** In the UK the term for lip syncing is miming, I chose the American term as the specific type of syncing I’m discussing has very much emerged in America.

And this kid was 7, maybe less. And he had this thing, for years, when he’d walk up to the mirror and watch himself for a while, and he’ll make faces and concentrate, and then he’d start crying. With big, round, wet tears. Often he’ll be truly bawling.

All this time he’d be staring at his own reflection in the mirror, and I seem to remember him having this intense look. Like he was amplifying and looking through it the same time.

Like he was trying to understand.
Who is this kid?
Why is he crying?
Whose body is this?
Why is it crying?
Whose kid is he?
What do those “crying” signs mean?
Who do they belong to?
And so on…

So lately I’ve been thinking this kid was a pioneer. It seems a lot of kids are doing that these days.
Or maybe he wasn’t and they always had.
Anyway, for some reason, nowadays kids are often quite happy doing it.

And in London they say: jyouknowhaamean?

Recovery, Java, Latency, Change, Art, RSS, Socialism, Elvis, Economics, Rotis, Analog, Location, Design, Snackr, Diversity, Violence, Prishtina, Enterprise search, Music, Elvis (again!), Prishtina (again), Matter (duh), The Pentagon (shiver), Elvis (lives!), Evolution, Ingrid Michaelson (lucky lady), Wildlife, Firefox, Elvis (never underestimate him ever again), Corruption.

End of page three, but it stays interesting.

There’s a web art installation waiting to happen here somewhere.

In the meantime – happy holidays and a happy new year.

(good night and good luck)

Here is me, modelling my kidney stones for Wired. Maybe I should release the stones themselves under a creative commons license, maybe they can be put to good use somewhere.

Source:

P.S. I’ve gone back to writing silly stuff on twitter. Check it out.

And I thought I’ve seen everything there was to be seen with Microsoft’s software.
I just took this screen-shot. On my FRESHLY INSTALLED Thinkpad.

If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been funny. (which it is)

P.S. no. Retry doesn’t work. It just takes a couple of seconds to think very hard, then arrives at the same conclusion.

Funny, I don’t usually join those things but so many good people have participated, I feel oddly compelled…

So, just before I’m off on my holiday – 5 things my blog readers may not know about me:

1. The reason I was incredibly driven about learning English from a young age was because there were books by E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl that weren’t available in Hebrew at the time.
2. One of my first jobs after high-school was selling Juggling equipment in a professional juggling shop. I’m still not so bad with a Diablo and have a weakness for yo-yos (own about 20 or so…).
3. I grew up in a farm, we were mostly growing fruit and veg until I went to high-school. I liked growing up in a small village until my early teens, when my obsessive curiosity and cultural appetite drove me to Tel Aviv. I absolutely hated all my agriculture related chores – found it devastatingly boring, but never protested.
4. I’m a pro-level tarot reader (have been doing it for about 9 years), but I don’t believe in the mystical aspect. Tarot for me is just another intresting and rich way to explore narratives and converse with the subconscious (mine or other people’s).
5. Until my career “took over”, I thought I was going to be in the academy. I left for my “first round” in London just before starting to work on a thesis about “the narrative mechanisms of comics as a visual storytelling medium” (or somthing along these lines). This area is still a side interest for me, and I speak about it when I get the chance.

It seems most of my roll is tagged already, and it took a while to find “victims” but I’m tagging: Mary Hodder, Danah Boyd, Yael Elish, Daniel Cohen, Andy Baio

I know I’ve been kind of quiet – been working hard on some speaking engagements for my holiday to Israel. Some will hopefully breed posts eventually…

Technorati tags: Mary Hodder, Danah Boyd, Yael Elish, Daniel Cohen, Andy Baio, Yaniv Golan, Jeff Pulver, blog-tag

The blogosphere is chock-full of lists of favourite extensions, renamed to add-ons in this version.  I published one in Hebrew a while ago myself.

I’ll take a minimalist approach and recommend only three that had very high impact on my browsing life (That doesn’t happen often any more…).

1. Super DragAndGo – Saves time by opening links in a new tab using a short drag gesture with the mouse. Why this has not become a default in firefox yet  – I have no idea.

2. Mouse Gestures – This add-on lets you add “macros” for almost anything based on combination of mouse gestures. I use it mostly for one short-cut that complements Super DragAndGo. (It’s not a default, you have to set it) Right-Click + drag mouse down to close tab. This way I can open and close tags without moving from where my mouse cursor currently is.
3. Roboform - In a web full of forms and logins, this application is a god send, and definitely my favourite and most often used utility of recent years (By far. Snagit is probably next. both highly purchase-worthy). It replaces long winded log-ins into one click processes, saves you from the risky “one password everywhere” habit, and is very powerful in filling forms. The latest version even recognises when you create a new user, remembers the user & password you choose and later updates the short-cut on your first login. Synch it with its mobile version + add firefox mobile and you have a close thing to your machine on a flashdrive. (Yes, I’m an affiliate. Mostly out of curiosity to check the power of my recommendations)

Technorati Tags: firefox, addons, add-ons, extensions, roboform, lifehacks

I work as a marketing strategy consultant, mainly on branding and customer experience oriented projects. Starting off as somewhat of an outsider, I’ve been doing that for over five years now. Before that I spent five years “client side”, mainly leading the creation of web products for major Israeli portal IOL.

Connected to the net roughly since 1993 (i.e. just in time to experience pre-web-browsers Internet), and involved with commercial & independent web projects since 1999 most of my web activity was conducted in the Israeli arena. A lot of love and hard work has resulted in a number of projects I’m quite proud of , and a certain reputation among the Israeli net digerati.
(more about my background here)

As you might have guessed, the reason you probably haven’t heard about any of these projects is they are all in Hebrew. This was an ideological choice, as me and my companions wanted to contribute specifically to the Hebrew web, which was quite small at the time we started. I don’t regret this choice, nor do I intend to stop trying to contribute to the Hebrew web, but with this blog I wish to join a more global conversation.
(Incidentally, I do have a low-traffic “sister-blog” in Hebrew, for more Israeli/Hebrew specific issues.)

So finally, I get to say: Hello world, my name is Uri Baruchin, I live in London and work with companies in the UK, Europe & the middle east. By day I’m a marketing strategy consultant with Brandinstinct, by night I work on various web projects, this blog being the most recent one.
I’ve started this blog to share my thoughts and experiences of practicing marketing and thinking about it on and off the web, in an environments/space increasingly affected by a reality I have nick-named “Marketing Babylon”, but since this is the title of this blog , it deserves a separate post.