Vemödalen is defined by Koenig as “the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist … which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap.” The video opens with the comforting statement that all of us are unique. Set to the beat of melancholic piano music, 465 photographic frames of similar subject matter, shot from similar angles, by 465 different individuals unfold over 2 minutes. As I witnessed the photographic pulsation of airplane wings, beach POV leg shots, coffee art, sunsets, snow angels, and iris close-ups, I was overcome by a silent and intense embarrassment. I too had taken such photographs to express myself, to preserve memories, and to show off. Perhaps I was embarrassed because these photos overlapped so much with The 25 Pictures Girls Need to Stop Posting in Social Media. Mostly, I was embarrassed that I had the audacity to imagine – in this ranked, tagged, and filtered insta-age of social everything – that I was capable of photographic novelty.

Like most emotions kindled by late night clickbait, this embarrassment quickly abated – mollified by the video’s denouement that artists of Instagram be comforted by the knowledge that we’re not so different, that our perspectives so neatly align. Quoting Walt Whitman, Koenig elegantly concludes that expressive novelty lies between repetition and revolution – in recursion. “The powerful play goes on,” the narrator rhythmically restates, ending with the invitation (or consolation) that we “may contribute a verse.” Framing a tireless gif of various coffee art, Buzzfeed’s video recap paraphrases that “perhaps it’s just a collective unconscious thing.” The structure of feeling denoted by Vemödalen is therefore a paralysis of self-expression that is suspended between art and craft, as well as between innovation and continuity. Koenig himself describes Vemödalen as the photographic equivalent of assembling Ikea furniture – a “kind of prefabricated piece of art that you happened to have assembled yourself.” Cradled in the rounded authority of Koenig’s white male narration, I am reassured that Art is dead – long live the worldly craftspeople of Instagram!

Vemödalen is also a paralysis of self-expression suspended between Romantic Individualism and pop culture collectivism. Today’s insta-subjectivity is trapped in this reflexive hall of mirrors – between Tyler Durden’s Ikea-fied apartment and Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Like Tyler Durden, we know that we are not beautiful or unique snowflakes, yet we long to be loved for who we really are. Like Werner Herzog, we know that everything that has been done before will be done again, yet we are desperate to experience everything like it is the first time. And who can blame us? At the end of Vemödalen, my humiliation does not dissipate into a transcendent affective communion with humanity, which is part of the filmmaker’s personal definition of the obscure sorrow that thematizes his dictionary. Instead, I remain unsettled by the comforting symmetry of the video’s beginning and ending – of humankind’s existential and expressive uniqueness. Like the prefabricated Ikea assemblages that Koenig deems hollow and pulpy, the tumbling power of his artfully edited slideshow is somehow cheapened by this narrative enclosure.

In the end, however, Vemödalen does live up to its creator’s intentions as an entry in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. A dictionary’s purpose is after all to pin down meanings that flit in and out of conversations and consciousnesses. Keonig’s Dictionary uses the linguistic power of naming to successfully transform affect into emotion. In the end, however, too many of us remain trapped in social media’s hall of mirrors, seeking ambivalently to differentiate ourselves amid the undifferentiated recursion of uncountable airplane wings, sunsets, snow angels, and irises. If Anthony Gidden’s postmodern self is still engaged in its reflexive project, what kinds of stories can it tell from within this hall of mirrors? Are these stories about the self clouded by the corresponding characters, settings, and events of others? Or are the outlines of self emboldened by the stories traced by corresponding others? As for my personal collection of sunsets, snowflakes, plane wings, and cryptic closeups – they remain offline, locked in a cave in the recesses of my mind (and hard drive) waiting to be discovered. Time will tell if the linguistic exercise of naming Vemödalen will entrench it in, or exorcise it from our collectively mediated unconscious.

Way of Life, "The Ultimate Habit Building App"

On New Year’s Day, instead of signing up for a gym or joining a writing group, I binge downloaded apps on my iPad. Perhaps it was the grease hangover from a night of eating only chicken wings in a comedy club upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, or perhaps it was the usual grad student anxiety made worse by habitual procrastination to Academic Coach Taylor memes. Whatever the cause of my guilt, my answer was in the App Store. So, I downloaded a bunch of apps: one to count calories, another to create ambient music in order work better, harder, and faster, and another to figure out what mental roadblocks weigh me down, in order to – as the app urges – “live better every day.” To top it off, I bought a habit building app that reminds me to record whether I counted my calories, whether I worked harder, better, and faster, and whether I overcame those mental roadblocks. The app charts my progress over time and shares it with my social networks.

This remedy is one part Lifehacker’s cult of productivity, half part Anthony Robbin’s self-help-ism, and two parts Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self. And like eating fried chicken in the dark, this remedy instantly gratifies but never quite satisfies. Like other purported technological cure-alls today, this one is identified through a neologism, is criticized as a buzzword, and is hailed by proponents as a movement. “Gamification” is this process of using game logics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and rewards to enhance traditionally non-game experiences. This experience might be uploading your fitness milestones onto Nike+  and syncing it with your workout on the Xbox 360 Kinect; it may be boosting productivity at a call center by using leaderboards and badges; it may be competing with your roommate for tangible rewards using a sophisticated system of rules to more pleasantly accomplish household chores. It is the carrot and the stick; it is putting more life into your life.

Nike+ Kinect Training

In all these examples, there is a representational structure linking reward to achievement, cause to effect – a structure that gamification enthusiasts claim produces unprecedented behavior change. Gamification allows you to incentivize anything in your (or your employees’) life to make it more fun, more efficient, more effective. In the words of Jane McGonigal – the movement’s high priestess who galvanized a legion of marketers and game designers in that TED talk – games can make a better world and make us “SuperBetter”™ – incidentally, also the name of her latest game.

At MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, a panel of gaming experts playfully refused to respond to a persistent question rising to the top of a crowdsourced backchannel – “What is the future of Gamification?” Dismissed by these experts as a a fancy name for customer loyalty programs that are a perversion of game mechanics, and disdained as “marketing bullshit,” it is easy to write off gamification as the latest marketing buzzword. However, as media scholars have witnessed in half a decade of critical deconstruction of what was known as “Web 2.0,” technological buzzwords are never empty – they are ciphers for configurations of cultural values that iteratively shape relations between people, systems, and institutions.

The gamified website for NBC's The Office

On The Office’s gamified website, users signed up as employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company and earned “Schrute Bucks” for making comments, posting photos and performing tasks that built engagement and buzz for the show. It didn’t take long for the site to be populated with user-generated content. In an interview with Mashable, the gamification startup Bunchball raved that “NBC loved it because they were paying all these users fake money to do real work.” Unlike the conception of pure waste that game scholars such as Roger Caillois have used to define play, the playfulness of gamification is consummately productive.

According to the Pew center’s survey of experts, gamification may retreat as a fad, but only because its mechanisms will become more entrenched and quotidian – a trajectory that Web 2.0 took in becoming simply “social media.” Therefore, despite the fatigue from yet another marketing revolution, media scholars must map the contours of Gamification’s discourses as they erect and legitimate motivational structures for narrowly predetermined behaviors in our work, leisure, and psychic lives. These are structures that capture our playfulness, our guilt, our desires, our energies, and convert them into quantifiable outcomes such as engagement in platforms, loyalty to brands, user-generated data, and user-generated content. In Blade Runner (1982), the visionary doctor proclaimed that “commerce is our goal here at Tyrell; more human than human is our motto.” And as the film has taught three decades of moviegoers, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Similarly, as we reinvent our lives through gamification, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive.

A recent Wired post suggests that the page-flip user interface – which replaces scrolling navigation with rigid paginated screens – is a popular feature that set tablet reading apps like iBooks, Flipboard, and Instapaper apart from their competitors. iBooks in particular, features a dramatic page-flip animation with a curled edge and translucent text rendered on the underside of pages as they are turned – a feature recently adapted by Instapaper. This is all pretty fancy stuff that designers admit is arbitrary to un-paginated web content. According to Wired, by mimicking the familiar book, the page-flip beats its scrolling counterparts by being more intuitive and “classy.”

Bolter and Grusin would agree that this is part of the formal logic of remediation – newer media are fashioned in the image and expectations of older media (and vice versa). They would also agree that the page-flip interface’s intuitiveness and classiness fulfills the double logic of remediation – that of immediacy and hypermediacy. So, looking like a book erases the need for scroll bars or buttons, creating a more immediate user experience; yet the book interface adds an audiovisual layer that makes us hyper aware of our mediated experience.

And let’s not forget a more fundamental and related reason why we like the page-flip interface – it’s cooler. Is Apple’s iBooks cooler than Amazon’s Kindle in the same way that Instagram is cooler than your mom’s digital photos? Did Apple include a sepia-toned filter to its iPad reader for the same reason Instagram built its brand around their polaroid-esque “1977” filter? Before you stop scrolling/flipping because you think you’ve heard this story before – I’m not blaming it all on nostalgia, as postmodern theorists have done since Frederic Jameson in 1984. Well, actually I am, but with the important caveat that not all nostalgias are created equal.

Drawing on Susan Sontag, this New Yorker post suggests that Instagram taps a mode of nostalgia specific to photography. Photographs freeze moments in time and thus remind us of the inexorable passing of time and transience of human experience. By instantly aging images through its filters, Instagram simulates nostalgic desire and esteem for moments that are arguably still in progress. Instagram’s recent $1 billion sale to Facebook is another testament to Jameson’s observation that this nostalgia of the present is endemic to contemporary consumer capitalism.

Perhaps the page-flip user interface taps a mode of nostalgia specific to our relationship to knowledge – nostalgia for a way of knowing that is bounded and finite. Let’s consider two popular tablet news aggregators, Flipboard and Pulse. Flipboard curates news in a magazine format that paginates articles and collections of articles. When I’m on Flipboard, I always know which page I’m on relative to the total pages of each article and each collection. Pulse presents my news through vertical scrolling through collections, horizontal scrolling between articles, and vertical scrolling within articles. When I’m on Pulse, I feel like I’m on an information treadmill, always moving from one story to the next. However artificial or arbitrary, Flipboard gives me a sense of orientation relative my reading accomplishments and goals. Pulse on the other hand, replaces accomplishment with an insatiable appetite for evermore stories, anecdotes, images, statistics. Jodi Dean relates this compulsive pattern of media consumption to psychoanalytic theories in her conception of  “circuits of drive.”

The book encapsulates and now simulates a mode of knowing this is a far cry from the distracted and unbounded media consumption habits of the networked present. Before Jameson – the story goes – readers of books lived in an era where stories held a sense of discreteness, finitude, and authority. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that in a networked age riddled with mediated circuits of drive that lead everywhere and nowhere, critics and moviegoers are ineluctably drawn to a film like Hugo. In a pivotal scene that crystallizes the film’s central metaphor, Hugo explains his fascination with machines – the thing that automatons, clocks, and 20th century cities have in common is that they are built to fulfill a purpose. By fixing his beloved automaton, Hugo unlocks the secret left by his father, and fulfills his destiny of social integration.

This is arguably a fantasy of compensation inspired by the same cybernetic zeitgeist that has ushered in a world/view of networked complexity and posthuman agnosticism. Instead of financial networks of systemic risk and digital networks of emergent outcomes, perhaps we are all nostalgic for Newton’s good old world machine – a bounded entity designed for predetermined outcomes. Like Hugo and his automaton, perhaps we too long to find our missing pieces, to fix our broken parts, and to fulfill the purpose we were designed for. Purpose and especially destiny can only exist in bounded systems with finite outcomes, kind of like a machine, a clock, or a book. Can a book really tell us about our changing attitudes towards knowledge? Can a page-flip user interface really shed light on ways of being in the world? The answers to these questions are not governed by destiny, but by your emergent responses.