For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.
Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.
The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:
We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia. As the “predominant world power,” it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that’s foolish from a more long-term perspective. |
Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)
There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures. But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious). |
Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:
I’m often told that social networks are the future of the sociable Internet. Guess what? They were the cornerstone of the Internet, always. What is different is that we’ve tried to mechanically organize them, to formalize them. Doing so did not make social networks suddenly appear; formalization meant that they became less serious, more game-like. All other Internet social networks are embedded into another set of practices, not seeking an application to validate their existence. |
Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?
Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:
The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me. |
And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class:
“Journalism is chores. Journalism is bondage unless you can see yourself as a private eye inquiring into the mysteries of a new phenomenon.” |
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