New Argus Site Online

The Argus launched an impressively revamped website this week, with a fresh new layout, comment capabilities, an automated Wespeak submission form, and even a blog featuring online-only content, the aptly named Blargus.

Already the Blargus has a style column harking back to the heyday of Well Dressed Wes, an economic analyst, and a lively political debate involving campus conservative Mytheos Holt. I'm curious to see what else will come from this expansion of the non-zero-sum game of online Wesleyan media. Looks good, Argus.

Pretension Through the Ages

Zeitgeisty NY Times columnist David Brooks has compiled a brief history of modern cultural pretentiousness in an Op-Ed last week, from which he launches into a tirade about the corrosive effect of rapid-cycling Internet media on intellectual rigor and genuine engagement in ideas.

Some of his points are a little awkward ("MySpace is the new leisure suit"? The iPhone is solely responsible for the media's displacement of culture?), but this kind of cultural commentary is compelling in our current age of Facebooks and blogs and things, during our intellectually formative college years:

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery... In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism... A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior...

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

...Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it...This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser... Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem... These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of. When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm...

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.

Ok commenters, no asking what the Wesleyan student body might gain from this.

NYTimes: Lord of the Memes

Helicopter the Shit Out of Your Kids

Helicopter parents can now reach new heights of invasiveness with a growing trend of making reports of students' every move available for viewing online by parents:

With some programs, not only is a student’s grade recalculated with every quiz, but parents can monitor the daily fluctuations of their child’s class ranking. The availability of so much up-to-the-minute information about a naturally evasive teenager can be intoxicating: one Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market.

Clearly there's some useful potential here, but it sounds like that can easily devolve into a massive time-sucker, where parents can procrastinate the arduous task of raising children by obsessively poring over the minutiae of their kid's daily existence.

Is the next generation of college students going to have been raised on this kind of thing? Will they still have personalities?

NYTimes: I Know What You Did Last Math Class

How D&D Conquered the World

If you're a little geeky you might be aware of (or still mourning) the recent death of Gary Gygax, the creator of supremely nerdy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.

Wired editor Adam Rogers explains how D&D shaped the young minds of socially impaired kids everywhere, giving them the training and confidence to eventually take over today's wired world - especially since D&D's influence is everywhere from World of Warcraft, to the prevalence of intricate pseudoscientific TV shows like Lost, to the virtual co-opting of socialization through Facebook.

I don't think I was ever secure enough in my nerdiness to know what D&D was all about, but this is pretty interesting - and might go a ways in explaining why people in PAC lab get so raucous over this weird online game when it's the last day before spring break and I just want to finish my midterm papers.

Full article here: Geek Love, and an entertaining graphic about the wonders that early exposure to D&D can do.

Interactive Dante

or, How to Procrastinate and Feel Intelligent
I have a soft spot for Dante. Admit it, you do too. But I'm seldom in the mood for reading Dante. The solution, then, is soft-core Dante on the internet:
1. Danteworlds is a beautiful interactive guide to the Divine Comedy. Lucifer never looked so good.

2. Dante's Inferno Test is a quiz that determines which level of hell you will end up in. I'm in Level 2 with Paolo & Francesca and Marilyn Monroe.

im in ur internets, whoring out ur memes

Remember when the money from the dollar gifts on Facebook actually went to charity? Ahh, the good old days...

Wireless file sharing

So there's been some changes to the wireless network at Wesleyan. For one, you can't use guest access anymore. However, by far the biggest change is the unblocking of windows network filesharing protocol over wireless. Hot stuff if you would like to you know...share...files...and stuff....not that you would...