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* CYBERSPACE *
* A biweekly column on net culture appearing *
* in the Toronto Sunday Sun *
* *
* Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer *
* Free for online distribution *
* All Rights Reserved *
* Direct comments and questions to: *
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Whassup? I'm tired of whassup. That's whassup. So whassup with
whassup?
Since the debut of Budweiser's Super Bowl ad about a group of
friends sitting around talking on the phone, their unique way
of asking each other "what's up" has entered the popular
lexicon. Of course due to CRTC regulations that require cable
stations to substitute parallel Canadian programming on
American channels, yet another historic Super Bowl ad was lost
on the Canadian public.
Budweiser made the ad available via its web site and, much like
how people started passing around that link to Mahir's "I Kiss
You!!!!" page, pretty much everyone in the English-speaking
world became acquainted with "whassup" within a matter of
weeks.
It didn't stop there. Soon after two netizens created a parody
using the soundtrack but substituted images from the Saturday
cartoon Superfriends. Superman and Wonder Woman were calling
each other on their batphones shouting "whazzup". It was
clever enough.
Clever things on the net, from web browsers to dancing hamster
pages, spawn endless imitators. The quality (or lack thereof)
of these parodies is less surprising than what actually gets
parodied. A leisure suit wearing man in Turkey? Dancing
hamsters? A Budweiser beer commercial? Who'd have thunk it!
There's an archive of the various whassup take-offs at
www.floridastuff.com/bud. For anyone thinking of making a
whassup parody there's a list of well-considered do's and
don'ts at www.ugo.com/channels/filmTv/whassup. Whatever you do,
it's critical you don't copy the Monty Python style of
animation by using still photos with moving cut out mouths.
eBooks
Stephen King is a somewhat famous horror novelist who tends to
retell the same story about strange things happening to a nice
New England family. Each new book uses an increasingly larger
and larger number of pages to describe a family being
slaughtered by vampires, family pets, mechanical psychic space
spiders, or Jack Nicholson. The real horror here is the large
parts of North American deforested to satisfy readers anxious
for an "original" story from King.
In March the author released a 66 page story specifically and
solely for the emerging eBook format. It proved immensely
popular. The official site's download page was clogged with
people anxious to charge a measly $2.50 to their credit card to
read King's thin yarn. Online book retailers like Amazon.com
swallowed the $2.50 fee and used it as a loss-leader to
generate traffic.
In the computer world there's a saying that goes "it's the
software stupid". Software drives hardware sales. A computer
without great software is just a hunk of beige plastic. There
have been a number of attempts to create dedicated electronic
book devices but they've all been dismal failures despite the
availability of great "software" (i.e., popular books released
in electronic format).
Clearly trying to get the public to accept an eBook is
something more than having the right hardware and software.
With King's successful release and with everyone running around
these days with palmtop computers it seems the eBook concept is
worth another look.
I think, however, the eBook concept will always be doomed to a
niche market . First, there's the dork factor. Years ago I used
to download articles from Wired's web site to my Apple Newton
and read them on the subway to work. I always felt like a dork
doing it. You see more people obsessively tapping away on their
palm computers these days but now you run up against the cool
factor. If I'm on the subway and sitting across from me is a
cute woman in smart eyewear and she's carrying a Kangol
messenger bag, I want her to see I'm reading Love in the Time
of Cholera. With an eBook and my looks, she's more than likely
to think I'm reviewing notes on how to install new server
hardware.
Reading text on an LCD screen makes reading more difficult.
Kurt Vonnegut believes you have to make reading as simple as
possible. Everyone can appreciate an abstract artist like
Picasso but few can ever appreciate an equally abstract book
like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It takes society about
twelve years to teach a human being to read and many never
catch on.
When Vonnegut formulated this idea, he didn't consider a third
way. MP3Lit.com (www.mp3lit.com) marries the downloadable book
idea, MP3 technology, and books-on-tape which are popular with
idiots. You can download a number of free works of literature
at the site. Right now there's not a lot of complete novels.
Most of it is public domain short stories and poetry or excerpt
from popular current works like Harry Potter.
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