WE THE USERS



Digital Folklore. To Computer Users, with Love and Respect
Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied (ed.)
Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009
ISBN 9 783937 982250


Although we are being constantly told that this is the era of the user (or youser), as the TIME magazine Person of the Year cover in 2006 so triumphantly expressed and social networks try to remind us every day, the role of users is still underestimated, while their contributions are both labeled as "amateur" and absorbed into the structures provided by web 2.0 companies. In front of this, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied advocate the importance of the contribution of user-generated content to contemporary culture by coining the term Digital Folklore: "Digital Folklore encompasses the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from user's engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century" (p.9-10). The term stems from the artistic work of Lialina and Espenschied over the last years, as well as their research in Interface Design at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, which has derived into an unorthodox and very interesting publication, halfway between the scholarly reader and the artist's book.

The book is divided into three main sections. The first one, under the title "Observations (You can and must understand computer culture NOW)", puts together several texts written by Lialina and Espenschied between 2005 and 2008, some of which have already appeared on the author's websites. Among them is Lialina's much discussed "A Vernacular Web" (2005) and its sequel (2007), as well as Espenschied's popular "Idioms" (2007). This section is complemented with several full-page, fine art book-style reproductions of Lialina's and Espenschied's work on glossy paper (I particularly missed Zombie and Mummy here). It was high time to find these texts brought together in a more or less comprehensive reader (I can only recall Lialina's "A Vernacular Web" being printed in the Spanish magazine A::minima), yet at the same time it is clear that they belong to a website rather than a book. Particularly in the case of Lialina's texts, the book version with its (obviously) static, bi-chrome illustrations seems a bit lifeless despite the elaborate and decidedly playful layout created by Manuel Buerger. The constant references to websites invite the reader to put the book aside and start browsing the Internet, although it can be said that this is a shared condition of most printed texts about net culture. This collection of articles is indeed a fundamental part of the book, the texts in this section being the fragments that build an image of what the authors define as "Digital Folklore". Still, we will not find further definitions of the term here, but an exploration of computer culture. Olia Lialina describes the cultural forms which have evolved around the involvement of amateurs with the creative tools available for publishing content on the web, and how most of these individual forms of expression have been swallowed by web 2.0 companies in a tidier but less democratic Internet. An example of this is the disappearance of "home pages", substituted by customizable, company owned pages such as iGoogle. As Lialina states: "It might sound paradoxical, but by encouraging the user to 'feel at home' services create more distance between the users and themselves. Simplistic, silly graphics, senseless gadgets, customized pages (...) all of that subtly serves to show the user his proper place." (p.61).

This absorption of the user leads to the ongoing trend of the Cloud: Lialina asks who is generating this "cloud" and if there will be a place for genuine user expression in it. In fact the Cloud becomes the final stage of a tendency described by Dragan Espenschied in "Where Did the Computer Go?": the author states that "the home computer is physically vanishing" (p.51), which leads us to realize that in fact computer manufacturers work hard to make us believe that we are not working with machines made of mechanical parts and electronic boards but somewhat magical boxes which serve to display a tidy, light-weight interface. As in the Cloud, the system remains invisible and the options of the user to transform it are limited. Lialina introduces an interesting comment to this situation in a quote by Sherry Turkle: "Macintosh meaning of the word transparency had become a new lingua franca. By the mid 1990s when people said that a system was transparent they meant that they could immediately make it work, not that they knew how it works." (p.63). We users are governed by the tools and the interfaces created by manufacturers, software developers and Internet services providers. These tools and interfaces inoculate a particular sense of what is "correct" and "professional", dismissing any unorthodox uses and the popularity of some elements such as early 3D graphics or the Comic Sans font (discussed later on). Thus the expressions of what is now called "Digital Folklore" have always been underestimated, a fact that makes this publication and the research carried on by Lialina and Espenschied at the Merz Akademie not only interesting, but necessary.




The second part of the book is devoted to essays based on student theses developed at the aforementioned design school in Stuttgart and is consequently titled "Research". Each essay is printed in black ink on coloured paper (sepia, yellow, purple and blue), which reminds of home made flyers advertising piano lessons or lost animals, as well as amateur fanzines printed on a photocopy machine. Unlike the previous section, the illustrations are put together at the end of each text, an unnecessary simplification of the layout which may unnerve the reader and feels more like establishing a hierarchical gap between the editors' and the students' contributions.  The texts reflect upon how user creativity develops on the Internet and how it usually challenges mass media producers' assumptions of what people like and what they want to get involved in.

In "I Think You Got Cats on Your Internet", Helene Dams explores the all-pervasive world of LOLcats, funny images of cute cats with humorous headings which constitute a "gigantic, global insider joke which everyone can share" (p.107). Dams starts her text with a quote from Ethan Zuckerman which sums up the popularity of felines on the web: "Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats." (p.106). This sentence may seem to imply that progress is going backwards if we have more sophisticated technology to create and disseminate more banal content, yet in web 2.0 both research papers and photos of cute cats are shared. The same platforms that allow a user to share information about his cat allow another one to engage in an activist campaign, and furthermore as LOLcats become a popular form of expression they are used in other contexts, such as Barack Obama's campaign for the US presidential election in 2008.

Filling your blog with pictures of your cat or contributing to a forum with a funny collage of words and cute kittens is also a way to stand out and express your individuality. In "Defriending the Web", Dennis Knopf reflects on the forms in which users try to overcome the impersonal template grid the web has become. Generally deprived of means to alter the template, users instead fill the forms with as much personal information as they are allowed to. Social networks, as Knopf underscores, are not about common goals but about displaying one's individuality in front of peers. Companies happily provide users with virtual communities and tools that allow them to publish their own content and share it. In doing so, the users fill the company's servers with valuable data about themselves, which in turn will be used to sell products better. As Knopf states: "This concrete demographic information, combined with the personal details users insert voluntarily as a way to express their individuality, makes the social web a perfect post-fordist marketing tool." (p.152).

As a field for marketing experiments, the web has provided unprecedented strategies for the dissemination of brands and products. As Isabel Pettinato reminds us in "Viral Candy", these strategies always follow the examples of amateur content that has become widely popular due to its exotic or controversial nature. The fact that most of our buying decisions are influenced by someone's direct recommendation has lead to the trend of "viral marketing", in which companies disguise their advertisements as humorous or socially relevant content which will be distributed by the users themselves. This strategy worked while a quite naive attitude towards Internet content was predominant among users, but as Pettinato asseverates, "the era of blurred advertising efforts using what are purportedly amateur videos really appears to be over" (p.199). Still, the power of word-of-mouth is not something that companies are willing to relinquish, and now the focus is on target groups through social networks.



User contributions have been systematically labeled as "amateur" in derogatory terms, as compared to the "professional" content distributed by companies. User-generated content is seen at most as a rough material that can be used by these professionals in order to achieve wider acceptance of their products among the public. Therefore, while the content created by marketing companies imitating users' creations is considered valuable, the original material is allocated to a subculture whose value is what the term "Digital Folklore" aims to restore. A good example of this is the closing essay by Leo Merz, "Comic Resistance", in which the author examines de history of the infamous Comic Sans font, designed in 1994 by Vincent Connare for a Microsoft GUI named "Bob". Merz compares the font with the once discarded electronic synthesizers that gave birth to Acid House music by stating that "even these cult instruments carry with them a notion of waste" (p. 236). Comic Sans, "the epitome of trash culture typography", could then be seen as a particularly relevant element of our visual culture, ready to be taken from the garbage and recovered as the next cool font.

The final section of the book, titled "Giving Back", is devoted to the projects developed by New Media and Interface Design students at the Merz Akademie. Despite the fact that Lialina's and Espenschied's influence in their work is obvious, the students do not limit themselves to web 1.0 technology but develop more complex projects in which social networks and web 2.0 services are particularly predominant. Some of my favourites are Tobias Leingruber's Tobi's Timemachine (2007), a Firefox add-on that makes any website look like an amateur page of the 1990s; Alexander Schlegel's Pixelarts (2008), a collaborative project in which anyone can contribute a 32x32 pixel icon to a large gallery; Florian Kröner's Emolator (2008), which allows anyone to create their own profile picture as an Emo; and Steffan Krappitz's Flyer Generator (2009), which automatically creates compositions from source material freely available on the web. In most of these works, the focus is rather on the formal than on the conceptual aspect, as it is the pursue of an amateur, 1990s aesthetic which drives the projects and establishes a certain kinship between them.

"Digital Folklore" acts both as a reader and a report on the activities of Lialina and Espenschied with their students at the Merz Akademie. This turns out to be one of its virtues, as it covers a wider scope of the concept, ranging from the artist's texts and net art works to their student's essays and projects. This balance between theory and practice is not only interesting but also necessary when introducing a new concept, as the authors intend to. The question that remains is whether digital folklore will succeed to become integrated as one of the many popular terms in media culture or if it will remain ascribed to Lialina's and Espenschied's (as well as their students') conceptual and artistic work.


Pau Waelder
January, 2010