I have to admit, I was trying to blog during the SuperBowl, but my heart wasn’t in it. Greg’s post about the ads yesterday reminded me that I was already missing the boat on relevance a day later and now that it’s Tuesday, and I’m still pulling this post together, and it’s getting to the point of complete irrelevance, which is more a statement of how fast topics move on in importance.

What struck me as I half-watched the ill-fated game was the importance of digital cable and on-demand video for how we view and re-view cultural moments such as the Superbowl and its ads. For example, take the infamous Justin/Janet “costume malfunction” of the 2004 Superbowl half-time show. It was early in my DVR experience, and when the infamous “malfunction” occurred, I was incredulous. Did what I think just happened, happen? Stop. Rewind. Replay. Pause. Stop. Rewind. I can now stop time and slow it to the pace I need. What did we do before DVR?

All of a sudden, TV becomes a fundamentally different viewing experience. Though the NFL has implemented the “instant replay” for the first time in 1986 (and then abandoned it and then brought it back in 1999), now a large number or viewers of television have that power. Furthermore, even if some do not have that ability when watching television, the increasing pervasiveness of online video is making more and more moments available for us to play and replay over and over.

Meanwhile, we take it for granted that we will have access to much content whenever we wish. Ads during the Superbowl this season were touted as being available on MySpace after the game. What other ways has increased user control and on-demand video impacted our role as “audience”?

Greg tagged The Life Cycle of a Blog Post published by Wired magazine. I stumbled upon this post (not literally using Stumble Upon) by checking out my aggregator (Google Reader!) feed for del.icio.us tags. (I wish the Life Cycle had notations so I could refer to specific items on the diagram. Not a big deal, just would be nice).

The Life Cycle positions the blogger in the role of consumer, at least that’s how I read it. The blogger has slightly more agency than the typical consumer, according to this diagram, based on the ability to generate data that can be easily found and sorted for marketers. In part, this outlook is fueled by the presence if “adservers” and “corporations” are in the middle of the cycle. Of course, the relationship of your blog to adservers depends on whether you have registered to place ads on your blog. And, not to burst anyone’s bubble, but the significance of one’s blog for a corporation, I suspect, will still depend on the influence of the blog or whether more influential blogs pick up on a particular story and start to link to it. Of course, this can be a very powerful way to generate attention for specific concerns as a consumer, which is not easily replicated by non-digital means.

However, our role on the internet is as more than consumers, I hope. If we were thinking of the life cycle of a blog post beyond a consumer role, what other components might be a part of this diagram?

 I love the blogging-of-book format  of  The Googlization of Everything, and I appreciate Siva Vaidhyanathan’s perspective on the increasing omnipresence of Google. I’m pretty sure you can’t be everywhere at once (monopoly!) and not be evil. One of the concerns I have about the pervasive use of Google is that we, as a society, will not value resources that can’t be googled. Says Lyotard,

“We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.” - from the Postmodern Condition

On the one hand, with the burgeoning volumes of information available, some sort of whittling down is necessary. On the other hand, this digitized version of the world becomes the only cultural framework the “world” will know. This digital colonization of the mind will be the ultimate cultural monopoly.