Zefrank’s Ugly MySpace Contest and Long Tail Aesthetics

“Ugly when compared to preexisting notions of taste is a bummer, but ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool” zefrank

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the do-it-yourself page design of eBay sellers, so I was really intrigued when Bryan Zug mentioned zefrank’s ugly MySpace contest. If you are looking for a good concrete example to illustrate the ideas about cultural production that Benkler is putting forth in Wealth of Networks, watch this video.   

Ze responds to a comment that he is mocking people with no artistic training or education, and he gives a very clear explanation about why untrained design is important at this point in time. Up until recently the capital required to produce artistic work was so prohibitive that rigorous and narrow rules developed regarding what was good taste or bad taste, and access to the apparatus of production was denied to all but a few. (He gives the example of the cost of $600K in the 60’s to design and cut a font family). He goes on to explain, people who trick out their myspace pages aren’t being influenced by the criteria of the design world, but they aren’t naive either. The accessibility of cheap and easy to use tools like iMovie and Movie Maker have created a formal awareness of meticulous artistic processes like movie editing. As easy to use authoring tools become more widely available and used, entirely new aesthetic criteria will emerge and things won’t look the way that today’s design elite would want. And that’s a very good thing.

To quote Chris Anderson’s original Long Tail article “And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”

Here’s an analogy from my own experience about how things are playing out: I used to listen to National Lampoon albums like That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick over and over again because there just weren’t that many places to find that kind of humor. Today, I get almost daily podcasts from The Onion that are every bit as funny. And in the podcast world, The Onion is in the same category as traditional, overproduced media with a corporate smell, so we’re only at the very beginning.

BTW –here’s the winner of zefrank’s contest.  And I gotta admit, it’s exciting design.

Comments

[Warren Whitlock]

I've been exploring ways that authors can use MySpace to engage readers and promote themselves.

We've seen some interesting stuff.. obviouly the ones this ugly would make it impossible to communicate. But Zefank is right. We don't need no stinkin' creative pros to tell us how to be ourselves

Thanks for the post.. and the link to the contest.. I missed it on the Zefank feed.