I will have to file this under “things I would have never thought to be possible a few months ago”.

I’ve always had a bit of a struggle with wanting to be a tech/blog grrl vs. the mandatory use of video games.

See, I began blogging in 2001. So that makes me “cool” by the blogosphere standards. But I didn’t know the first single thing about HTML until a couple of weeks ago. Which makes me uncool. I know a respectable amount about social networking, and wrote my dissertation about Blogs and the Generation Y. Cool. But my blog never had more than an average of 80 visitors a day. Not cool. I think that more and more I’d like to fancy myself as some kind of geek girl, but never really come around knowing a lot about it. It would probably involve knowing a lot of Php, sQL and Java, which is not going to happen anytime soon (unless someone volunteers to give me lessons?).

Now, knowing my bias and crushes for technology savvy female figures (I am a big fan of GenderIT), you’d think that I would be the kind of person to enjoy playing both online and video games. Truth is I always secretly despised game players, and frankly never made any fierce attempt to understand the appeal of the gaming culture. Too many of game enthusiasts seemed to be glued to their screens 24-7, eating flat Kraft dinners passed through their bedroom doors my worried parents anxious that their son or daughter might die from malnutrition (Microserfs, anyone?).

That was until a cold day of December which found Mark and I walking along an E2 road in East London. Passing by a shop selling video games, he mentioned wanting the Nintendo DS game Yoshi’s planet.

‘Yoshi’s planet?’, I shrugged. ‘Never heard of it’.

I was not really interested.But a couple of weeks later (struck by winter season’s gifts-inspiration related anxiety), I decided to purchase the game for Christmas.

I’ve been hooked ever since. Mind you, nothing like Mark, who recently purchased this legal device which enables you to download every DS games in the world in one chip card (don’t ask). But in “Jessica standards”, I fell quite hard considering my absolute lack of gaming-infatuation pre-Yoshi.

Oh sure, we look like some kind of extreme nerds when playing a wireless Golf match in the underground, but this is really fun. Well, apart from when I start attacking him violently because he’s way better than I am (a decade of game-playing helps, one would suppose) and well, you know me:

I.cannot.stand.losing.

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek decided to perpetuate the cliche of the bad, bad youth too easily impressed by decadent rck stars by featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on their front page. Followed an agonizingly ignorant, condescending and conservative-minded article seemingly written by a mother worried sick about her daughter’s admiration for teen-idol Lindsay Lohan.  Ugh.

After all, 2007 is the first year ever we hear about pop and rock stars’ substance abuse issues, isn’t it?

I can imagine Newsweek’s editorial meeting pretty clearly; in fact I picture it to be like those Orange advertisements featuring the infamous “Orange Film Funding board” - the ones the audience always sees in European theaters before any movie starts:

Marketing chief to Newsweek staff: We’re not doing so well these days. We need something to boost our sales, and can’t have G.W.Bush on our cover anymore.

Editorial staff: We can’t really beat the TIME’s “person of the year” idea though, they were too good on this one. Flattering one’s ego by making one believe he’s important, what a strike of genius!

Intern: Maybe we can scare our readers instead? They love to be frightenned: terrorism threats, pandemics, wars!

Editor in chief: That’s brilliant! We’ll assure every American family that their beloved children are about to become -gasp- sexually active adults! What’s more menacing than that! Putting to female teen idols on the cover will make this issue’s our best seller - young men can have sexual relationships if they want to, but women…

You get the idea.

(more…)

In an outstanding performance in the 1998 movie Bullworth, Warren Beatty embodies a Democrat presidential candidate who is struck by some mysterious spell, and who starts speaking the truth to masses. He is slowly letting go of all his heinous and clever rhetoric, and only states pure facts and realities. His speeches drive his advisers and public relations consultants on the verge of a nervous breakdown: he uses slang and harsh, vulgar words; flames his own supporters and lobbyists for investing in oil companies; and when visiting a baptist church in South Central, yells to an African American audience:

‘Of course democrats only want your votes! Don’t think I am here today because I actually cares about black people!’

… Needless to say, Beatty’s character gets killed by a governmental agency before the end of the movie, for he is out of control and a threat to political institutions nationwide. In that sense, Orwell, in all his legendary subtelty, is right: gouvernmental officials should from time to time create a difference by dropping their conventional language of Politics, and adress the Nation in an honest prose, without being able to hide behind politically correct words and ready to use sentences.

Buzzwords and acronyms such as ‘WTO’, ‘alterglobalisation’, ‘indymedia’ are icons of simplification when it comes to complex issues - they often represent vague notions and ideas which people understand but do not grasp the entire reality of. And wo would blame the people? The never ending use of those terms, both within politics and the media landscape, makes the pointing and blaming game as simple and effective as a child’s toy. It becomes as easy as pie to accuse ‘bad governance’ for any unresolved domestic issues, or ‘globalisation’ for international ones, without having to publicly go into details and produce long reports on why the WTO’s rules turn into local decisions, which in turn send people on the dole.

The use of acronyms seems to be inherent in post baby boomers generations’ communicational lifeworlds. In his novel Generation X, Coupland made up entire lists of ‘post modern’ words (such as ‘McJobs’ or ‘I-ism’) in order to illustrate his cynical and yet hilarious outlook on our abuse of categorizations, which achieve nothing but pigeon-hole complex notions and individuals.

However, in this an accelerated culture, the use of such vernacular might prove to be useful, if vicious and misleading in essence. The media need to pass on tons of news content and comments as quickly and efficiently as possible, just as politicians do. Therefore they need to set a common set of references, which anyone can understand in the blink of an eye. It might be indeed pure fantasy, but it answers present obligations and demands which originate from the PR and media markets.

It might create some confusion, albeit a helpful one for political mentors, and it might also participate in the rise of alienation from the elite -who knows what really is at stake when using terms such as globalisation- and the masses, who more and more end distancing themselves from official forms of governments (the low turn out of voters speaks loud enough). The former prefer to associate themselves with ’single issue protests’ or flash movements (Make Poverty History, street protests against wars or oil price).

This might prove to be encouraging, showing that democracy is far from moribund and that people do care, but are tired to be manipulated by distant forces using a newspeak which does not sound truthful or convincing anymore. They want to take matters in their own hands and obtain real, visible results, while forgetting about hypocritical strategies aiming to get them to vote for someone whom at the end of the day might not be able to make any valuable difference in their every day lives.

The next step would be to ask the media to go more in depth when using terms tending to oversimplify a discourse. It might also mean that the media needs more accuracy, and unbiased commentary and analysis.

When recently reading about Orwell writing that ‘one can at least change one’s habit’, I immedialty thought about David Letterman, who as recently receiving Fox News’ Bill O’reilly a few weeks ago. After a long debate on politics, Bush’s policies and the ‘necessity’ to go to war, Letterman - usually a neutral, polite host- lost his nerve and told O’reilly:

‘I think 60 % of what you say is crap’.

That was a bold (if surprising!) move, but it was also sending O’reilly’s hateful bias and lies into the dustbin. Where they belong. I cheered. We need more people able to take a stand and speak out, if only to start more debates. Because that’s exactly what politicians fear: people pointing out their mistakes. It creates more accountability asked from the government, and de facto fewer lies.

Now, if only we had more journalists like the late Ed Murrow - ones who are not afraid of cornering powerful politicians, just doing their jobs while honouring their allegiance to Truth- seeking. In other words, what if we had more BBC and less Clear Channel?

Surely political language would drastically change. One can only hope.