Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ads by Google, or, from one thing to another

In the latest issue of The Nation, Jochen Hellbeck reviews Lynne Viola's recent book, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements and Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. All to the good. In the present climate, many among the chattering classes seem to want 'to know something' about Russia (in the same way, and for the same reasons as five years ago they wanted 'to know something' about Islam), and all three of these writers have produced sophisticated but accessible studies of Stalinism, which offer such interested audiences something they won't find in tendentious biographies of Putin. (Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin is particularly good.)
Anyway, a few paragraphs in to this review, I was interrupted by an advert in the middle of the text. Nothing new there, but this appeared to be a 'targeted' advert based on the keywords in the text. Except, of course, that it wasn't very well targeted at all. After "Her book, The Unknown Gulag, is an indictment of the utopian folly and criminal neglect of Soviet officials, and a moving account of human suffering." you get: "RussianEuro.com - Find your Russian Beauty Today! Browse Photos Now!" with an image of a youthful, scantly clad, smiling blonde. A litte unsettling to say the least. But these targeted ads, in their illogical associative sense, reveal something useful. On a day when The Independent has devoted its front page to melting polar ice caps, if you look, you are likely to find an advert for £10 plane flights inside. Maybe more than one. But it doesn't often seem very strange. There is a process of neutralization going on which is far more insidious than anything the copy editors could consciously plan. The senses are dulled; separations are made. None of this need be intentional: the 'forms' reproduce themselves simply by virtue of the fact that they work. If layouts become increasingly based on crass keyword associations, it might just jog us back in to some recognition of just what is going on when we consume news media. Maybe Google Ads will eat itself. Maybe we will be forced to confront what our news media do, and what we would have them do if we had any say in the matter. Maybe we will be forced into a situation in which we must decide what we actually want from media. Maybe we will decide that we no longer wish to be passive objects whose attention is for sale (to advertisers, by media companies). Or maybe we will allow the folly to be rebuilt on an even grander scale. Which is it to be?

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Oral exams

"Answer the questions in full, expand, communicate. Look at us, smile, pretend that you are happy to tell us your story: remember Russian saying: “soldat spit, sluzhba idet”. Time passes as you speak, so - using not the most elegant English expression - DO NOT SHUT UP!!!"

--Advice for oral exams (and life in general) from Svetlana.