Ironically, given the title, this blog post will be very short:

My friends and I have left Livejournal alone lately; tumblr and twitter seems to allow us to do all this stuff a lot more easily, at the expense of the wordcount. The luddite in me worries: the biggest fear I have is that the emergent culture of microblogging (where our attention spans have shortened to the point where anything over two paragraphs is answered with 'TL:DR') will ultimately limit thought and expression on a wider scale.

As the invention of the ballpoint pen caused a worldwide decline in the art of penmanship, our new methods of communication could leard to verbal and literary articulacy becoming a dying art, too. Unlike grandpa shaking his fist at mobile phones and pudding pops, I think this is a legitimate concern; the less we can articulate big concepts, the less we can even think about them, and synthesise new ones. As other commenters have said, our TL:DR culture fulfils the same function of 1984's 'newspeak'; a self-imposed Orwellianism.

Though it's easier for humans to communicate now than in any point in history, generally the users of digital social media choose to stifle the exchange of ideas through peer pressure, too: introspection is sneered at as being 'emo', any lengthy discourse is 'TL:DR'. The aforementioned seem to be a right afforded only to those who create a pedestal for themselves, not the online proletariat, the average user- who has as much room to talk as anybody.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody; perhaps even more, since I'm not as full of words as the people I admire- but to me, it seems as if with TL:DR we're rejecting our own evolution, choosing to hide in the sea despite the legs we've been given.

Apologies for the lack of new artwork lately, but I've been incredibly busy! Which is a good thing, I guess! Expect a fairly large update soon.

For now: something I've wanted to write about on here for a while. Watch these videos all at the same time, then stop when you start to feel dizzy: These videos are part of a phenomenon called Youtube Poop. I should add that these clips are by no means the cream of the crop (I've posted some of my favorites in the comments, however). The kids who make Youtube Poop take old TV clips, usually the cartoons and kid's shows they grew up watching, and edit them to create surreal, funny and often rude mini-narratives. What sets this apart from someone doing the same thing in the early 90's on their home video editing equipment is the mimetic way ideas and jokes cross-pollinate from other people's videos. When one kid worked out it was possible to have Sonic's nemesis Dr Robotnik sound like he was saying 'penis' (by snipping out the middle portion of the phrase 'snoopin' as usual'), within a week about 50 videos had cropped upto take advantage of this discovery. Characters will gain widely-accepted personalities seperate from the source material; it's popular to create Youtube poops that depict Luigi as gay, Sonic as arrogant, and Dr Robotnik as an all-purpose sexual deviant, although these character traits were never explicitly present in the original material. Other characters in popular media that have been co-opted by Youtube Poopers include the Volvic volcano and a bizarre Japanese Ronald McDonald, who the scene has dubbed Ran Ran Ruu.

Youtube has revolutionized much of the way in which we consume media, but Youtube poop is an artform specific to Youtube- it didn't exist before Youtube and it couldn't exist without it. It reminds me of hip-hop in a lot of ways- the unspoken formal limitations in the artform that have evolved organically, the misuse of technology and reappropriation of existing media, and the way ideas are developed, debuted, copied and expanded upon. The account I described of Robotnik's Pingas spreading like wildfire is much like how I imagine breakdancers in the early 80's- the first time someone did a headspin, everyone wanted to go home and copy it, practise it, and try it out on the streets the next day. To bring it up to date, it's like T-Pain working out that the autotune software made rapping sound really great, and soon everyone from Lil Wayne to Kanye West was doing it. Where it differs from hip-hop is that no-one is making money or getting laid as a result of it- perhaps this even adds a purity to it, since everyone making Youtube Poop is in it purely for the love of it.

Ok, now here is is my counterpoint, and perhaps an invitation for discussion. 

On the one hand it's great that teenagers have created this unique and truly postmodern DIY culture. I genuinely think things like this and Youtube Poop represent the  foundations of an exciting cultural movement, one that doesn't even know it's a movement (so, the best kind).

On the other hand, the scene is reappropriating these corporate mascots without truly subverting their meaning or value, so most Youtube Poop is still functional as a piece of advertising for the brands the characters represent. In fact, since they are putting these iconic characters into contexts dictated on their own values, tastes and sense of humour, the internet's mimetic adoption of Ran Ran Ru, Mario, Robotnik et al is actually more effective at strengthening our relationship with their respective brands than an agency's advert would be. Their (should I say 'our'?) demographic is making its own advertising specifically targeted to itself, without knowing it. The Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon was only created to increase awareness and affection for the Sonic The Hedgehog brand, after all- while the cartoons are no longer aired and worthless as entertainment now, they are still very functionally serving their purpose in their new life as Youtube poop. In this sense, it's a counter-culture that isn't counter-cultural, and in fact reinforces the Poop fan's reverence and deference to mainstream media and large corporations, rather than teaching them that a counter-culture of their creation could be just as valid as a mainstream one.

The companies who own these mascots are characters very rarely take any kind of legal action against poops of their characters, with the one exception being Colgate. Which leads me to wonder if McDonalds and Nintendo are pleased about this sort of thing. I'd say they probably are.

 Like all new and popular entertainment mediums, videogames frequently come under criticism for a percieved lack of morality and harmful content. Usually, this will be over the consequence-free simulation of violence in such games as the Grand Theft Auto series. Personally, I don't think the casual depiction of violence is the most potentially damaging thing in videogame culture by any means. A game like Animal Crossing contains at least as many dangerous ideas as the Grand Theft Auto series. AM I BLOWING YOUR MIND YET

I wrote this on a videogames forum a while ago, but I was figured more people should read it, so here it is again, tidied up. After I've posted this I have to go to the city, so be sure to comment and tell me what you think of it while I'm gone ok guys

Nintendo's popular Animal Crossing series, now in its fourth major iteration on the Nintendo Wii, presents the player with a idyllic wooded rural community which is a simlacrum of the kind of simple living championed by the Slow Movement. The game is promoted in this way, too, and recent tv commercials show adult female players using the game to escape the stress of their everyday lives.

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The first time I played Animal Crossing I just thought it was dull, cold, and shallow; once you've had a few silly pre-scripted conversations with some animals, pressed a button to catch a fish, chopped down a tree and planted another one, there seems to be very little of interest for a player to occupy themselves with. I wrote a (pretty terrible) joke review about the experience on my old website here.

Slowly, however, when I started trying to buy furniture, find the perfect carpet for my house, or collect gyrating automatons, the game started to make sense. I felt compelled to keep playing and to try and get the uncommon and rare furniture, trick out my house and make it look better than my neighbour's (in this case, my friend Petra who I shared a real-life house with). Far from being a simulation of an idyllic and simple lifestyle, the main message game imparts is that it's impossible to live the Slow Life and be content with a simple, static existence- satisfaction within the game's world is only possible through the accumulation of wealth and material possessions.

In what purports to be a simulation of life which will be mostly played by young children, despite its adult-centric advertising, I believe that to present a lack of lifestyle choices outside of advanced technological society and consumerism is tasteless and irresponsible, especially in the current economic climate, where it's become clear that our culture of waste needs to be swiftly curtailed. Yet this is a common theme or many videogames. Most games do this, in fact, and present capitalism and 'collecting' in a similar fashion. The extremely popular monster-collecting game Pokemon, from which this post gets its title, is another very good example.

Outside of the pro-capitalist doctrine contained insiduously within the gameplay, the way games are anticipated, hyped and released creates a culture of false need in the minds of young children. Videogame magazines, mostly targeted at children, encourage children to anticipate new releases and form allegiances to particular brands and game manufacturers. In the last 15 years, the advent of the internet has allowed young videogame fans to connect with each other on news websites and message boards, and social interaction on these forums revolves mostly around the anticipation of new games long before they are released. Marketing and hype become intrinsically linked to the videogame fan's lifestyle, and players vow to buy games 'on launch day'. As a result, an early interest in videogames means that children are prepared from a very early age to be model consumers.

I know that I certainly was sucked in by all this, since I bought pretty much every first-party thing Nintendo put out during the Gamecube period including such curiosities as the e-reader cards. Somehow, I thought I could buy my way to the mythical center of the brand I admired. I guess I eventually woke up - these days I don't own any games consoles. Others aren't so lucky, and fill their houses with collectable videogame nonsense- sometimes paying upwards of £200 for an original format game they can easily get as a resissue for a more recent system, just for the 'experience of owning the game.' Their collections fill their houses and often their obsession prevents them from forging meaningful relationships- see the growing cult of the 'otaku' in Japan, lonely young men who turn to cartoons and videogames to compensate for their inability to fit into society.

"My Pokemon Collection", by "LugiaSilver"

This is an extreme example. Most people won't take their obsession to these lengths, but it's still a very real possibility that the pro-consumerist ideas in and around the videogame industry will have an effect on the unguarded mind, and will affect the way the player sees the world outside of gaming, too, whether that manifests itself in a fierce loyalty to a particular brand of soft drink or in the desire to buy a new kind of phone upon the product's launch.

I have been as guilty of this as anybody, perhaps more so! In my student days, used to try and collect everything Bjork and Radiohead ever put out! Maybe I thought that if I collected it all that Bjork and Thom Yorke were going to come round my house. I have no idea. I don't think that playing videogames from an early age was entirely responsible for this mentality. However, I do believe that by participating in mainstream videogame culture you almost unavoidably enter into a heightened, almost caricatured mirror of mainstream consumerism, both in the content of the games and in the way they are marketed. It would be very idealistic for me to call for game developers and advertisers to be more responsible in how they make and promote their games- however, I think it is a realistic wish to hope that future generations of consumers will be more conscious of, and guarded against, this insidous and powerful brain programming.