The Taste of Others

如果每天都是在穿fast fashion，我會覺得我的身體有點營養不良。
　我的意思是，身體好像有一種被養壞掉的感覺。身體可以培養？當然可以。我指的是身體本身的一種本能美學機制，不，我不覺得它是一種腦袋的意識，而是絕對身體的。你可以每天換穿時髦但是不太具有美學養份的衣服，你也可以一直穿著Yohji。你餵給身體fast fashion，你的身體就只會變成H＆M的樣子，你餵給身體另一種美學想像，你的身體就會變成詩人或是藝術品。

　在百分之九十九的人生裡，我們的身體都不是屬於我們的，我們的身體是資本主義的身體，是時尚編輯的身體，是辦公室OA家俱的身體，是電視購物頻道的身體，是凱特摩絲奧森姊妹花蔡依林的身體……，久而久之，你的身體喪失一種quality，你的身體失去了表達自我的能力，你的身體被流行體系馴服，你的身體終究變成了複製人的其中之一，你的胳臂只會知道A Bathing Ape，你的雙腳只會知道Nike和Jimmy Choo，你的眼睛只會看見ZARA，你的大腿只會知道窄管褲。

　你的眼睛與身體似乎在盡責地為流行工廠打工，流行成了一種義務;你的眼睛會很快地判斷何者是in，何者是out，你不會覺得雲南的繡花鞋很美，你只會對那些虐待腳趾的當季designer鞋款流口水;你不需要欣賞中世紀的武士鎧甲，你只需要想盡辦法擠進XXS尺碼;你覺得敦煌石窟壁畫太遙遠，你只需要販賣紐約當紅炸子包的店址；你不會需要一塊絲綢布料，你只需要成為I.T.的pre-sale 貴賓名單。

　那麼，當有一天你遇見一件挑戰你的身體的衣服的時候，你才發現身體變得僵硬而無法感應，眼睛變得遲鈍而失去辨別能力，你才發現你得到的是一個被fast fashion徹底污染的身體，一個被宣告得到流行癌的身體。

　現代消費生活就是一種被大量同質的潮流文化包圍的生活，時尚趨勢、Must Have必買清單、各類潮人推薦、名牌排行榜、百貨公司、精品商店……人們少掉感受其他世界的能力，探索力也變得遲鈍，對大眾流行的上癮像是一種漸凍症，它會破壞人們自體的感受能力和欣賞差異的敏感能力。我總是覺得，任何一個產生某種工業規模的事物，都令我高度懷疑。

　相較名牌設計師，我更熱愛那些開發身體可能性的小眾設計師。建築線條的身體，偏食的身體，死亡的身體，不節制的身體，白色的身體，潔癖的身體，少女的身體，無歷史感的身體，民俗的身體，發育不良的身體，安靜的身體。在莎拉潔西卡派克成為時裝設計師，卡爾拉格斐成為電玩代言人的時代，那些回到衣服的本質去做哲學與視覺探索的設計師，Gareth Pugh、高橋盾、宮下貴裕、Rick Owens、Marios Schwab……，他們讓你明白流行世界的瘋狂不過是一種普通的瘋狂。

Wikipedia's wide variety of contributors is both a strength and a weakness of the online encyclopedia

Online encyclopedias

The idea of an encyclopedia—a compendium of all the best available knowledge—is as tempting as it is flawed. Truth does not always come in bite-sized chunks. And the notion of an infinitely elastic internet encyclopedia, always up to date and distilling the collective wisdom of the wired is even more tempting. When open to all comers, anonymously, the problems are even more glaring.

This week a senior Wikipedia editor, who used the pseudonym Essjay, turned out not to be a professor of religious studies as he claimed, but in fact a 24-year-old college drop-out. That has highlighted both the strengths and the failings of the world’s biggest online encyclopedia, which now boasts well over 1.5m articles. The “Encyclopedia Britannica”, by contrast, has a mere 120,000.

Essjay (or Ryan Jordan in real life), got away with his pretence because Wikipedians jealously preserve their anonymity. With most entries, anyone can edit without even logging in; or they can create an entirely fictitious online identity before doing so. The effect is rather like an online role-playing game. Indeed, it is easy to imagine some sad fellow spending the morning pretending to be a polyglot professor on Wikipedia, and then becoming a buxom red-head on “Second Life”, a virtual online world, in the afternoon.

That anonymity creates a phoney equality, which puts cranks and experts on the same footing. The same egalitarian approach starts off by regarding all sources as equal, regardless of merit. If a peer-reviewed journal says one thing and a non-specialist newspaper report another, the Wikipedia entry is likely solemnly to cite them both, saying that the truth is disputed. If the cranky believe the latter and the experts the former, the result will be wearisome online editing wars before something approaching the academic mainstream consensus gains the weight it should.

Wikipedia has strengths too, chiefly the resilient power of collective common sense. It benefits from the volunteer efforts of many thousands of outside contributors and editors. If one drops out, another fills his place. People are vigilant on issues that interest them. When mistakes happen, they are usually resolved quickly. This correspondent’s modest Wikipedia entry was edited this week by an anonymous contributor who posted a series of entertaining but defamatory remarks; a mere four minutes later, another user had removed them.

Constant scrutiny and editing means even the worst articles are gradually getting better, while the best ones are kept nicely polished and up to date. Someone, eventually, will spot even the tiniest error, or tighten a patch of sloppy prose. Mr Jordan, for all his bragging, seems to have been a scrupulous and effective editor.

The most tiresome contributors do get banned eventually, though they can always log in under a new identity. Other shortcomings are the subject of earnest internal debate too, such as Wikipedia’s inherent bias towards trivial recent events rather than important historical ones. That is already changing, slowly, though subjects of interest to northern white computer-literate males are over-covered, while others are laughably neglected.

Wikipedia is the biggest collaborative online encyclopedia, but not the only one. Citizendium, supposedly launching soon, aims to be like Wikipedia but without anonymity, and with more weight given to recognised experts. Conservapedia aims to offer a version of the truth untainted by Wikipedia’s liberal secular bias on issues such as evolution.

So how useful is Wikipedia? Entries on uncontentious issues—logarithms, for example—are often admirable. The quality of writing is often a good guide to an entry’s usefulness: inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information. A regular user soon gets a feel for what to trust.

Those on contentious issues are useful in a different way. The information may be only roughly balanced. But the furiously contested entries on, say, “Armenian genocide” or “Scientology”, and their attached discussion pages, do give the reader an useful idea about the contours of the arguments, and the conflicting sources and approaches. In short: it would be unwise to rely on Wikipedia as the final word, but it can be an excellent jumping off point.

Mar 10th 2007
From Economist.com

The union of television and the internet is spawning a wide variety of offspring

BOSSES in the television industry have been keeping a nervous eye on two Scandinavians with a reputation for causing trouble. In recent years Niklas Zennström, a Swede, and Janus Friis, a Dane, have frightened the music industry by inventing KaZaA, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it. Then they horrified the mighty telecoms industry by inventing Skype, another P2P program, which lets internet users make free telephone calls between computers, and very cheap calls to ordinary phones. (The duo sold Skype to eBay, an internet-auction giant, for $2.6 billion in 2005.) Their next move was to found yet another start-up—this time, one that threatened to devastate the television industry.

It may do the opposite, as it turns out. The new service, called Joost and now in advanced testing, is based on P2P software that runs on people's computers, just like Skype and KaZaA. And it does indeed promise to transform the experience of watching television by combining what people like about old-fashioned TV with the exciting possibilities of the internet. But unlike KaZaA and Skype, says Fredrik de Wahl, a Swede whom Messrs Zennström and Friis have hired as Joost's boss, Joost does not “disrupt” the industry that it is entering. Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, he says, Joost might, as it were, give them new juice.

That is because Mr de Wahl and his Joost team, working mostly in the Netherlands, have bravely ignored the totems of the internet-video boom. Chief among these fashions is letting users upload anything they want to a video service—which might include clips of themselves doing odd things (“user-generated content”) or, more questionably, videos pirated from other sources. The celebrated example of this approach is YouTube, which is now part of Google, the leader in internet search. Its big problem, however, is that it can be illegal (if copyright is violated) and fiendishly hard to turn into a business.

On February 2nd Viacom, an American media giant, became the latest company to demand that YouTube remove copyright-infringing clips from its website. YouTube has struck deals with some media firms, including NBC and CBS, to allow their material to appear on its site, and had been trying to thrash out a similar agreement with Viacom. Many observers regard Viacom's move as a negotiating tactic. But whether YouTube can make money is unclear. Last month Chad Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, sketched out plans for generating advertising revenues and sharing them with content providers, but so far his firm has none to speak of.

Joost is also ignoring the two business models seen as the most respectable alternatives to advertising. One is to make users pay for each television show or film they download, but then to let them keep it. This is the tack chosen by Apple, an electronics firm that sells videos on iTunes, its popular online store; by Amazon, the largest online retailer; and by Wal-Mart, the largest traditional retailer, which launched a video-download service this week. The other approach is to let users subscribe to what is, in effect, an all-you-can-eat buffet of videos, and then to “stream” video to their computers without leaving a permanent copy. This is the approach taken by, for instance, Netflix, a Californian firm that mostly delivers DVDs to its subscribers by post, but now also streams films.

The reason that Joost is ignoring all of these methods, says Mr de Wahl, is that none has much to do with the experience of simply watching TV, which most people enjoy. Unlike the download or streaming approaches, he says, “TV is not about buying today what you want to watch tomorrow, it's about turning it on and watching.” And in contrast to the “lean-forward” context of “snacking” on a YouTube clip in one's cubicle while the boss has stepped out, TV is a longer and more relaxed “lean-backward” experience.

Hence Joost's most shocking innovation, which is not to change the practices that TV adopted decades ago. It will be free, with advertising breaks—no more than three minutes per hour—either before, during or after a show, depending on the market. Americans, says Mr de Wahl, are more tolerant of interruptions.

Joost has “channels”, like ordinary TV, but these are now playlists of videos that start whenever it is convenient to the viewer. Viewers can import their instant-messaging buddy lists and chat online with friends while watching the same programme. For advertisers, such engagement is worth something, because the activity proves that somebody is watching, rather than being asleep or out of the room. Combined with other information, such as the computer's IP address and hence its location, advertisers will be able to target their spots much more accurately—all “Desperate Housewives” fans in a particular neighbourhood, for example—and thus ought to pay a premium.

The thing that is missing in this new vision of television, however, is the set itself. Beaming video from a computer to a television is possible: Apple and other firms are starting to sell the necessary gadgets. But until it becomes much easier to connect televisions to the internet, big media companies are likely to “wait and see” before committing to Joost, says Jeremy Allaire, the boss of Brightcove, a rival internet-video firm based in Massachusetts. In the meantime, thinks Mr Allaire, media firms are mainly interested in building their own brands, so Brightcove provides content owners with technology to show television on their own websites, syndicate their shows to other websites, track audiences and collect advertising revenue.

There is, in short, no consensus about the best way to combine television with the internet. Instead, there are a variety of experiments, of which Joost is the latest example and YouTube the best-known. But as with telephony, the internet is unpicking service delivery from network ownership. Joost, YouTube, iTunes and Netflix do not need their own networks to supply their video services: they can piggyback on fast internet links provided by others.

According to iSuppli, a market-research firm, internet downloads will claim more than one-third of the market for on-demand video by 2010 (see chart). So just as internet telephony has been bad for traditional phone companies, this “internet bypass” could be bad for the “on demand” video services being offered by cable-TV and telecoms firms over their networks. But by bringing television to more screens in more social contexts, all this could provide new models for programme-makers to finance their productions and offer advertisers new ways to reach consumers. And so Joost and rival services could end up rejuvenating the 75-year-old medium.

Feb 8th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition