Watchmen

I want to refrain from posting about comics on here, since whatever I write will virtually be a retread of what I read on Daniel's blog, but in this one specific instance, I'm going to make an exception.

The upcoming Watchmen film has thrust the book itself back into the limelight, and with it hardcore fans are scrambling in their attempt to explain why the film is a bad idea. One of the main sticking points here is that it is impossible to maintain both the purity of the work and the spirit behind it. History suggests Zack Snyder will go for the former; it is easier to shoot Fearful Symmetry frame by frame than it is to riff on genre deconstruction and Reaganomics. A Watchmen movie that followed the spirit of the book would be a very odd thing indeed. Ironically the renewed aggressions of Mother Russia and the housing/banking crisis have done such a job of twisting the political landscape into a familiar old shape, that the viral marketing gurus at Warner Brothers are scratching their heads and wondering if they don't have superpowers themselves. Still, by all rights, shouldn't a Watchmen movie rip apart the superhero film genre? Of course this is Hollywood so instead of a follow up to Unbreakable "deconstructing the genre" gives us Hancock. Be careful what you wish for.

I've got to be honest here. From a modern perspective, the supposed subversion and deconstruction of the hero genre really is a quaint silver-age conceit. (By the way Green Lantern Green Arrow was doing the "real world problems" thing fifteen years earlier.) We read comics in a post Watchmen, post Crisis, post Dark Knight Returns world. Hell if it comes to that, we read comics in a post Sandman, post Bone, post Maus world. We live in a time when Penny Arcade has more readers than Spiderman, when you can go to any chain bookstore and pick up copies of Flight Vol. 1, Pride of Baghdad, and Transmetropolitan and put them in the same basket. Where you can go online and debate which 1995 debut: JtHM, Astro City, or Preacher affected the industry the most, while comparing top 200 sales figures for June, July, and August, and watching youtube videos of a guy making fun of The Dark Knight with his action figures.

Watchmen is a great book, but in the way Citizen Kane is a great movie. It is the pinnacle of the genre, but completely lost on everyone but the history students.

Friend Requests.

Let me be clear: I have no immediate issues befriending “Young Americans” on facebook. Saying I have no immediate issues isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement either. Let’s all agree that putting “Young Americans” on facebook, (and as person rather than a group or application,) is a specious move at best; it smacks of the same vein of misapprehensions regarding trend and technology the group has been dancing with virtually since its’ inception.

First of all, who are the target “friends” for this? Either it is the current and recent members of the group itself, or it is workshop participants. If it is the former: the technology that allows implementation of a Young Americans facebook account immediately makes the idea obsolete. The group members are already well connected to one another, both in the social and digital sense. The technology is digital, but these things still have to grow organically to have any sense of permanence. A Young American facebook profile exists on the extreme periphery of those social relationships, and paying digital lip service to the group by accepting friend requests on facebook isn’t enough to keep the idea alive or even relevant past the initial accept. You’ve got a Young Americans facebook account. What exactly do you plan to do with it?

If- rather than the Young Americans- the target is workshop participants, then you have the opposite problem. The children in a workshop quickly grow accustomed to specific relationships which are fostered and maintained through interpersonal interaction. Obviously this is something a facebook profile can not provide. Nor can you hope to provide any manner of personalized feedback. Instead of becoming irrelevant the profile becomes a letdown. “Thank you for participating in our workshop. Look for us in three years,” isn’t any easier to swallow clad in digital trappings. “Hey we connected on such a personal level, please visit our website, you can check out these pictures from the seventies." Gee, thanks.

Having said that, the entire YA digital experience is already something of a letdown. Sure the site is the first result on google, but it is easily skipped over because the associated preview text simply tells us that our browser doesn’t support frames. Great. We went through the trouble of a google bomb in order to outrank the wikipedia article about that Bowie song, only to have kids (whose eyes- studies suggest- are trained to skip over seemingly irrelevant links with higher page ranks,) ignore us. In fact judging by the preview text the most promising result on Google page one is a trashlink to yaoffice.ehost-services115 or somesuch. So now they get 404’d.

Then we get to the website itself, which only took two tries to load this time! Again, who is this for? Common sense would suggest it is for the kids who have taken the workshop. Current YA's aren't visiting the site for the same reason they're not keeping up with the Young American facebook persona, Parents can't get pictures of their kids or information about the college, and alumni seem to stick to their mailing list. The other guess is the convention show clientele, most of whom have trouble remember much after the moon landing. Odds are they’re not looking to be dazzled by a killer website. Still, instead of separate websites for business, outreach, current YA’s, and alumni, everything is crammed into a slow-loading mess. Young American leaders often lay claim to their own vaunted proficiencies regarding design principles. This philosophy clearly doesn’t carry over to the website. I could do an entire article on how the YA website represents epic failure for each adjective listed in the Google User Experience Design Principles.

The problem, of course, lies in the very linear thinking behind virtually all Young Americans web-based endeavors. The group needs a flickr account more than it needs a facebook account, for starters. There is literally no justifiable reason why photo, audio, and video content isn’t pouring in, excepting that the channels for creative contribution are being blocked. You want a successful online strategy? Access and control needs to be opened up to the people who have the ability to actually create and manipulate meaningful content. The very content that by all rights should’ve been showcased on the site all along. Digital proliferation is meaningless when you’ve got a single access point. Copies of the keys to the kingdom need to be handed out both liberally and quickly. Alexandria is burning; fresh coats of paint aren’t going to cut it anymore.

The other option is the safer one, in which the Young Americans as an organization goes about its business and doesn't attempt these blind and often ill-advised forays into the digital landscape. "Make it work" doesn't apply as much as "look before you leap." Actually, the appropriate idiom should be "L2P or GTFO." I'll probably get in trouble for that last one. And you wonder why I don't blog much.