Technology Is a Young Person's Game PC Magazine
21.07.09
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I found some of the coverage of this 15-year-old's report derisive. I prefer to think of it as predictive. While we don't have any 15 year olds working at PCMag, we do have some college interns who are nearly as young but probably twice as knowledgeable in tech as the Morgan Stanley intern.
The other day I approached one of our interns, Ryan, and began peppering him with questions about the tech habits of the average college student. This guy knows more than most. Essentially, he's IT support for his college residence.
I asked him if it was a tough job, and he said he spends most of his time clearing out infections from his schoolmates' computers. Students spend a lot f time downloading content, so they tend to get more system infections than your average user. That didn't surprise me. One of his other jobs, however, did. He told me that one of the other things he often does is clear out a student's system at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) . Apparently, the RIAA can tell which students have been illegally downloading songs. The first strike is that the system gets wiped and the student is banned from the Internet for a day or so. A second time could up the ban to a week. And a third and the student is off the Net for the duration of the year.
Source:
The Work of Art in the Age of Outsourced Reproduction
On a recent trip to Montreal, the hotel room my wife and I booked was described as a “loft” and was likewise decorated with the requisite modern furniture and exposed brick walls. An offshoot of a very fine hotel located a few blocks away, our “loft” unit was comfortable and rather tastefully decorated. There were even original oil paintings on the walls, or so we initially thought.
After a few days in the room, something about the “artwork” didn’t sit quite right. It was all too homogeneous- the paintings in the bathroom (yes, above the toilet in a bathroom with no fan) and the ones above the bed and the desk all looked a bit too similar. We initially imagined that they had bought artwork from a local artist of limited creativity. My curiosity finally got the best of me, and I took one of the paintings off the wall and saw this:
Made in China hotel art, Model E-002
Upon taking both the paintings in the bathroom off the wall, we discovered that they both held the same model number and were both “Made in China.” There was no artist’s signature, and they were clearly painted on a larger piece of canvas that was cut up and stretched over various wooden supports to create a number of smaller “artworks.”
The "Artwork"
I should not have been shocked. It’s not that I expect hotel rooms to have great art- they usually have some sort of sailboat or flower themed art above the beds that blends into the wallpaper. I think the shock in this particular example comes from the very fact that the hotel went to such great lengths to brand itself as hip, modern, and urban. By putting abstract oil paintings on thick stretcher bars in each room, it conveys the idea that it is some sort of “artist’s loft” that we had the good fortune to stay at for the week.
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