"the nature of the partnerships between artists and technology people are the opposite of what they might have been back in the day, where the art boys were the crazy, wild people, pairing up with nerds to sort of envision this technological future. And now it’s wild-eyed technologists pairing up with educated, almost PhD-like artists, in order to contextualize what they’re doing more responsibly. … the artist, even more than government, has become the one who is doing long-term thinking about what’s happening, what are the implications, what are we doing to ourselves? And they’re some of the only ones, really. An artist’s job is to sit outside what’s happening and reflect back to us where the human is in this. I think it’s a very valuable exercise. It’s just the opposite exercise of what most people probably think it is. It’s not for technologists to realize the visions of artists. It feels much more like it’s for artists to contextualize the visions of technologists." via Chris (Twitter)

"There is little in the way of revisionism or controversy here; but if the objects are overfamiliar, the subtexts running through them are less so. Avoiding a simplistic chronology, the curators have chosen to define the characteristics of British design thematically. The middle section of the show focuses on subversion. … This anti-authoritarian streak, by turns camp and punk, has become one of the defining features of Britain's cultural self-image; it's a spiky brand identity that Wolff Olins' Olympic logo has attempted to make official. The role recession has played in shaping Britain's design identity is one of the more revealing themes. … How does the story end? What does a show that is part of the flag-waving runup to the Olympics tell us about British design today? In the end, not that much, partly because it is drawn mainly from the V&A's own collection, and museum collections are weakest when it comes to contemporary artefacts. The last decade is much richer than you would think from the few pieces shown here; as the show approaches the present, the narrative threads that run so richly through the rest – of tradition versus modernity, of youth versus authority – begin to fray. … Troika's Falling Light installation (2010), a programmed chandelier that precipitates light like raindrops, is probably the most representative example of contemporary British design. Neither a product nor an artwork, this is innovative for its own sake and was made by a group of designers from France and Germany living in London. It shows us that the boundaries of design are dissolving, and that it is time for us to dispense with the notion of "British design" altogether. The UK's design scene is now nothing if not international, and London, in particular, is a magnet for talent from all over Europe."

"We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is. … The humble form of the mobile phone galvanises culture and design like few other products ever have. Well beyond its original brief of connecting voices in real-time, and now dissolved in social media substrate, the mobile phone is essentially a tool for cultural production and consumption, for the everyday projection, dissembling or articulation of identity itself. As such, the cellphone represents an entirely new form of industrial design; it is intimate physically, psychologically and culturally, as well as framing the city and its activities. It can only be understood in the context of the few genuinely new design disciplines of the last two decades: the overlapping circles of interaction design, experience design, service design. And for mobile phones, read Facebook Timeline’s interface design, the organising principles underpinning operating systems like OSX and Google Chrome OS, the platform service ecosystem of iTunes+iPhone, an RFID-based airport check-in system, the architecture of Angry Birds, what XBox Live says about community; what transport data apps say about contemporary urbanism; what the Microsoft Word interface says about our approach to tools; how the design strategy of the New York Times sketches the future of journalism, how Spotify follows in a lineage of music experiences from Brionvega to Technics …"

"Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,[3] used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”.[4] It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”".

“The alternative to the reputation theory is that humans evolved substantive morality in the course of our evolution as a species, and developed a cultural system that was extremely inhospitable to sociopaths who are nice only when others are looking, and are depraved maniacs otherwise.”

"One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of childhood_ music accompanied ten years ago: in external memory network these are simply Remembering them_ exchanging and developing them is something as natural 'Casablanca' you. find online watched children show children_ just you told story about Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can imagine someone could accuse breaking law this way? cannot_ either."

"there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. … once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this. … I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” … Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most"

"We live in a world that is increasingly coded, that is, it exists as a composite of physical space and language and software, a strange hybridity that I have been trying to articulate in the New Aesthetic that others have been pointing at too, in Kevin Slavin’s algotremors, in BERG’s robot-readable world, in Timo‘s beautifully compelling compilation of machine visions … I’ve been talking about the fact that the best arrangements for our most complex spaces rely on a highly specialised cooperation between humans and intelligent agents, and the fact that the best chess is not played by computers against humans—they outstripped us long ago—but by teams of computers and humans. Twenty-two of the top thirty Wikipedia editors are bots. Knowledge and literature are coded spaces too. Stuart Geiger puts this succinctly: “a non-vitalistic ethnography: an account of a culture devoid of life. Like with Latour and agency, once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins.” This is why I am increasingly pro-Artificial Life. … I want to build a system for cooperating with software and chance."

via Chris (Twitter) "Discover and view the national inventory of Collections at all National Trust Places - from fine art and furnishings in grand show rooms to many rarely seen items from behind closed doors."

A problem "legislating around emerging technology": "nobody legislates the technology into emergence” — @GreatDismal

"Provocations are good for the soul. They force one to look at the world a bit differently. We’re largely conservative beings – change is hard to imagine and even harder to suffer through. It disrupts our routines. Provocations are like lenses that turn the world upside down, if only for a moment, in order to see what could be, or how things could be different. … I’d say that storytellers are the gatekeepers of innovation, even if I’m not entirely sure what innovation is. If you can tell a big enough story with a compelling plot line you can entice people with what could be and you may even entice them enough to get them to get excited and make things and self-assuredly valuate themselves as worthy of billions of dollars. … Cloud computing has a story. It’s not an especially great one, but it got out there enough that people got hopped up and started making everything cloud-enabled. It’s a shoddy story full of holes and an incredibly high chance of becoming an epic, systemic fail, but people got excited because a story was told that normally reasonable people believed. … If cloud computing or augmented reality are examples of what you mean by innovation, I’d take innovation in whoopee cushions over that stuff any old day. … the influence is arbitrarily predetermined by saying there is some clear distinction between fact and fiction. It’s like apologising for a great sci-fi film because it’s not real. You just don’t do that. You accept things as they are and you let them shape and influence and inform how and what you think about. That’s it. It’s that simple. We shouldn’t pretend to know fact from fiction – embrace them both as ways of trying to explain the world we are in and the world we want in the future. … Technology is a reification of culture—it’s a materialization of our rituals, practices and aspirations. It’s not so much a tool or something purely instrumental as it is itself culture. We make it not to do things but as an expression of culture—it just happens to be expressed in things that take batteries or have a screen or require technical specifications, industry standards, FCC approvals and tooling to manufacture. … you have to get a bit messy and figure out how you might make the thing beyond specifying it. In that process of making the thing—and it could be a little film or a bit of code or hardware or all of those things—all these questions are forced upon you. Responding to those questions by iterate and refining, that’s the soul of design"

"A particular English sensibility, defined by a wild and class-coded oscillation between repression and release." via Sascha (Twitter)

"What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.") Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give."

"He got some things right. We have a distrust of large organizations. We don’t look down on people creating small businesses. But we’re not emotionless, that couldn’t be further from the truth. We have anger, which flares up to become the Arab Spring and OccupyWallStreet movements. We have ego, which I see in every entrepreneur who thinks their tech startup is the best thing since sliced bread. We have passion, and an intense drive to follow our passions through, immediately. Our generation is autonomous. It is impatient. We refuse to pay our dues; if we start an entry level job then 6 months later we want to be running the department. We hop from job to job; the average tenure at any job for an American 25 to 34-years-old is just 3 years. We think we can do anything we can imagine, whether it is rise to fame like Deadmau5 for our music or launch a new product on Kickstarter, and hate the idea that we should ever be beholden to someone else. We do this because we have been abandoned by the institutions that should have embraced us. … We are a generation of makers. A generation of creators. Maybe we don’t have the global idealism of the hippies. Our idealism is more individual: that every person should be able to live their own life, working on what they choose, creating what they choose. … We follow our passions."

"hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration. Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble. Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place."

"The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and u­sing it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination." "the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps—just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life—it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it." "Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it—a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera." "There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture."

"More of the same: A major threat to the shareability -- like fire -- that has enabled human culture and knowledge to advance."

"It's become a library of the air. … It now seems that we are becoming an encyclopaedia (I say "we" not in the Mrs Thatcher sense of "We are a grandmother" but "we" in the sense of "the succession of producers, researchers and myself"). There couldn't be a much better outcome, could there? We are asking people to come in and talk whose work furnishes the great written encyclopaedias, and who themselves are salami-slicers of encyclopaedias, and they are now being recycled into a soundipaedia. Can we claim that as a new word?"

"this is a crisis of major proportions for anyone involved in thinking about human culture in the long term and we need to make all the noise about it we can."

"The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not."

"The fourth pivotal concept, Te, means literally, “power, specifically the power by which men are ruled.”..No state, Confucius, was convinced, can constrain all its citizens all the time, nor even any large fraction of them a large part of the time. It must depend on widespread acceptance of its will, which in turn requires a certain positive fund of faith in its total character…Real Te, therefore, lies in the power of moral example…” The final concept, Wen, refers to the ‘arts of peace’ as contrasted to the ‘arts of war’; to music, art, poetry, the sum of culture in its esthetic mode. Confucius contended that the ultimate vitory goes to the state that develops the highest Wen, the most exalted culture…For in the end it is these things that elicity the spontaneous admiration of men and women everywhere."

Summary of: Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation: Summaries and Findings
Author(s) / Editor(s) Boyd, Robert, Henrich, Joseph, Richerson, Peter: "Innate human propensities for cooperation with strangers, shaped during the Pleistocene in response to rapidly changing environments, could have provided highly adaptive social instincts that more recently coevolved with cultural institutions; although the biological capacity for primate sociality evolved genetically, the authors propose that channeling of tribal instincts via symbol systems has involved a cultural transmission and selection that continues the evolution of cooperative human capacities at a cultural rather than genetic level — and pace."

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/1998: "De-lurking briefly to post a link I hope and believe the group may find useful. Thought some of you might enjoy this little project a few friends of mine have been working on. With the help and blessing of Stephanie McLuhan, one of Marshall's daughters, we've helped put together this curated online video archive of select interviews with the man himself - part of a celebration around what would have been his 100th birthday later this year. The site is organized into short clips in which Marshall McLuhan explains what he really meant by such resonant aphorisms as "the global village", "the medium is the message", and such. There's also a rather special intro piece from Tom Wolfe, which is interesting in its own right, IMHO. Good for challenging misquotations and settling McLuhan-based arguments. We now return you to your regularly scheduled lurk age,

/m

Michael O'Connor Clarke http://michaelocc.com +1.416.893.4941 <at> michaelocc"

"According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture. “I like the fact that moral panic is remarkably stable and it is always played out in the bodies of children and women,” she said. …She has a sort of work-in-progress theory to work out which technologies will trigger panic, and which will not. It has to change your relationship to time. It has to change your relationship to space. It has to change your relationship to other people. And, says Ms. Bell, it has to hit all three, or at least have the potential to hit them. … The problem, says Ms. Bell, is that cultures change far slower than technologies do. And because the rate of technological innovation is increasing, so too is the rate of moral panic. When a new technology comes in, society has to establish norms about how to handle it. That is a long and slow process. … And ironically, in a world that has a greater ability to communicate and pass messages than at any other time in our history, we are no better at working these things out today than we were with the introduction of the printing press: “One of the challenges is that culture is transmitted through things that cannot be digitized.”"

@alex_forey :)

"perhaps when it comes to our collective cultural memory, a single life is long enough: long enough, that is, for the next generation to pick up the torch. This, I believe, is why a book feels permanent, even though enough libraries have burned over the centuries that we ought to know better. A well-made book, stored upright, in a dry, dark place, will survive a hundred years—that is, a lifetime. More if it is especially well printed, and only carefully handled, but a hundred years is a safe bet. Plenty of time to read it as a child, hold onto it through adolescence and adulthood, and then give it to your first great-grandchild. That’s as much forever as any of us can reasonably conceive. … no civilization has ever saved everything; acknowledging that fact does not obviate the need to try and save as much as we can"

"I can't help thinking that in 10 years time there will be comparisons with the short-sighted junking of 60s TV shows - including Doctor Who episodes - that was done in the 70s to save money and space." http://853blog.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-internet-history/: "The BBC should be shouting about its role in creating the British web, not sweeping this history under the carpet for fear of offending ideologically-obsessed blowhards. Archive these sites somewhere, give them to the British Library, but don’t kill them off – people worked hard on those. The BBC regrets the days it routinely wiped TV shows to save on storage space. It may similarly come to rue the day it deleted all these old websites." http://adactio.com/journal/4336/, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/02/bbc-internet-deletion-follow-u.php, http://adactio.com/journal/4377/

"the History button is, for me, the most fascinating and enlightening thing about Wikipedia. It's right there at the top of every article, and hardly anybody looks at it. It's amazing because Wikipedia's history is a form of historiography, but then historiography isn't something we think very much about. … we don't save all … [the] different versions and we don't understand them and we don't have a way of seeing them. … [instead we have] history written by the victors. … historiography … is what culture actually looks like, a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification. And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording and making use of every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information, a new project for every generation."

"To me, humans have always been practical microbiologists: we probably settled down to farm barley for beer, one of the oldest pieces of writing is a recipe for beer, and it’s not surprising that early biochemists studied enzymes in the fermentation process."

"It’s not just enough to invent something and see it once, you have to change the world around you, get underneath it, interfere with it somehow, because otherwise you’re just problem solving. And I wont say that design has an exclusive hold over this – you can invent things and change culture with art, music, business practices, ethnography, market research; all of these are valid too – design just happens to be the way we do it. … our things should be hopeful, and not just functional … beautiful, inventive and mainstream. … you could see our work as experimental, or science-fiction, or futuristic; but I would say … our design is essentially a political act. We design ‘normative’ products, normative being that you design for the world as it should be. Invention is always for the world as it should be, and not for the world you are in. … Design these products and you’ll move the world just slightly in that direction."

"Our sense of the immediate here and now is altered by the layer of the internet, its systems, data and users. This new sense of reality is reflected in our art – and our games. Who is ‘there’ when we play Left 4 Dead? Am I hosting the server? Is he? Did it migrate? Is he there or is that a bot? Has he joined another game? Am I alone? What does ‘alone’ even mean where worlds overlap and relocate, and characters’ bodies are intermittently inhabited or automated? We don’t think twice about these things when we play L4D, but the hyperdimensional structure of the game reflects a culture that similarly doesn’t give a second thought to navigating with stitched-together photographs taken in different months or years to rendezvous with friends geotagging their tweets only to find out they have already left – leaving us in the physical company of one set of friends and the psychological company of someone absent."

"He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared & no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power & he makes them look stupid … I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us. Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing & spreading the Internet. … It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky & disheartening … “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. … “Transparency” & “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order & the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, & now that’s obvious"

http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2010/12/from_harvard_an.html, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/16/the-cultural-genome-google-books-reveals-traces-of-fame-censorship-and-changing-languages/, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html

"the necessity for us to consider the longevity of our data and knowledge in a corporate context. Archives are so often born post-mortem, but they need to become part of the business plan; not only in terms of a negative "funeral strategy" but a positive data management plan."

"The digital communication revolution of the last two decades has utterly transformed the relationship between media companies and the people who consume their output. In the seventies, one phone number pretty much represented all the interactivity that a child could expect to have with a television show. At the moment, it seems unlikely that a child will be able to conceive of a form of mass media that isn't in some way interactive, in a format enabled by digital technology. It has meant a massive change for organisations, and for those embracing the change, a shift from being publishers to being a communication platform. There is no reason to expect that the next twenty years won't be just as different, disruptive and as exciting to work in." http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2010/11/belam-wud2.php, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2010/12/belam-wud3.php, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2010/12/belam-wud4.php, http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2010/12/belam-wud5.php

The idiosyncratic director defies expectation once more by turning singer-songwriter
David Lynch: revered film-maker, avant-garde visionary, artist. But pop star? The suggestion is not as far-fetched as it may seem, as the legendary American director tomorrow makes an unexpected departure from his previous work and launches himself on an alternative career path as a writer and singer.
The creator of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive is releasing two debut singles, Good Day Today and I Know, through a British independent label. After a film career spanning more than four decades, Lynch told the Guardian that music has become a powerful inspiration in his life.
"I've always loved sounds and so I built a studio where I can experiment with sound, and gradually I started experimenting with music. I'm not a musician, but I love to experiment and try to make music," he said, speaking from his home in LA.
It is 20 years since Twin Peaks hit the small screen, a fact celebrated by the first UK Twin Peaks festival yesterday, but these days the 64-year-old likes to spend a part of every day in his custom-built studio. His first solo single, Good Day Today – a dreamlike electronic soundscape with a surprisingly poppy chorus, which features the director's vocals – came to him unprompted.
"I was just sitting and these notes came and then I went down and started working with Dean [Hurley, his engineer] and then these few notes, 'I want to have a good day, today' came and the song was built around that," he said. Unlike his famously ambiguous and non-linear films, the song is accessible and, he readily admits, has a catchy "feel-good chorus", with undertones of angsty electro-popsters Crystal Castles or veteran dance act Underworld. Why did he turn to electro for his first solo single? "Well, I love electricity so it sort of stands to reason that I would like electronics," he said.
Music is one of the director's longest standing passions. He worked for many years with his regular soundtrack partner Angelo Badalamenti, who he credits with "introducing me to the world of music", most notably on the album Floating Into The Night for singer Julee Cruise. It featured the Grammy-award-winning, and instantly recognisable theme tune to Twin Peaks, Falling. More recently he collaborated with the band Sparklehorse and producer Danger Mouse, providing photography and vocals for two tracks on the album Dark Night of the Soul, which was released in July, four months after Sparklehorse's frontman, Mark Linkous, tragically took his own life.
But will Lynch's foray into the music industry spell the end of his film-making career? "I'm not leaving film," Lynch said. "Music is a big part of film. Film has led me to so many different mediums, and film came out of painting. It's just that these days I've been more involved in music." His response to those who may say he is not a musician, and should stick to making films, is pragmatic. "Well, I should concentrate on films and I'm not a musician, so there is plenty of room for criticism," he deadpanned.
Although music may be his preferred medium of the moment, it has not replaced the other art forms in his life – films, photography, painting – nor does he feel it is more powerful. "[Music is] its own thing," he said. "A still photo can be mighty powerful, a film can be mighty powerful. The world you can make in a film is incredible. Music is something that goes inside a person and it does something and it can really thrill the soul. It's another magical medium."
Lynch's last film, Inland Empire, was made without a script, with actors handed new dialogue each day. Lynch described using a similar method for his music. "It's intuitive. Intuition is the number one tool. You act and react, you see and hear, you use that thing of intuition to go to the next step … it kind of goes like that," he said.
Lynch is releasing the two tracks, available from tomorrow on iTunes, with British independent label Sunday Best, founded 15 years ago by the Radio 1 DJ Rob da Bank. The track had made it into the hands of co-director Ben Turner via influential west coast KCRW radio DJ Jason Bentley when the pair were in Ibiza, said Turner. "My initial reaction was – are you joking? But immediately you can hear it is his voice and he just shines through the music," he said. "It's a massive statement that someone this visionary has chosen electronic music to express himself."
Sunday Best snapped up the worldwide rights and CD packages, featuring art work from respected designer Vaughan Oliver, producer of sleeves for the Pixies and Cocteau Twins.
Lynch is modest in his desires for the single. Not everyone will like it, but he hopes that those that do will like it a lot, he said. "The music is the number one thing. Musicians in a room playing, they are as one. They are like children, they are so happy. It's great if it's a success but what's so great is the world of music."
Still, does he think it may yet shoot to the top of the charts? "Absolutely," he said. "With a bullet."
• Hear Alexandra Topping's full interview with David Lynch hereHollywood rocksDavid Lynch is far from being the first Hollywood name to explore his inner rock star. Actor and director Tim Robbins released his debut album this year. The son of an American folk singer, he has been playing and writing songs for most of his life, but only released an album aged 51.
Everyone's favourite action hero Bruce Willis released his debut album, The Return of Bruno, an album of soul and R&B covers, in 1987. Critical acclaim may not have been forthcoming, but the record nonetheless managed to reach number 14 in the Billboard 200 album chart.
Juliette Lewis, star of Natural Born Killers and Cape Fear, launched a new career at the age of 35 as the front woman of Juliette and the Licks and later the New Romantiques. "Acting doesn't challenge me in the way that writing songs, leading a band, and designing things for our next record do," she said.
And who can forget William Shatner from Star Trek's contribution? His experimental spoken word version of the Beatles' Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds emerged in 1968.
George Clooney later included the track in his Desert Island Discs, explaining: "If you listen to this song, you will want to hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it to get off the island."
David LynchPop and rockAlexandra Toppingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

"they played a significant part in many team projects, working both as colleagues and as assistants (though hitherto only acknowledged in their family capacities as wives, sisters or daughters). More crucially, they pioneered new methods of scientific education, not only for children, but for young adults and general readers. They also played a vital part as translators, illustrators and interpreters and, most particularly, as “scientific popularisers”. … women were a catalyst in the early discussion of the social role of science. More even than their male colleagues, they had a gift for imagining the human impact of scientific discovery, both exploring and questioning it. Precisely by being excluded from the fellowship of the society, they saw the life of science in a wider world. They raised questions about its duties and its moral responsibilities, its promise and its menace, in ways we can appreciate far more fully today."

"Zero History is Network Realism because of the way that it talks about the world, and the way its knowledge of the world is gathered and disseminated. Gibson seems to be navigating the spider graph of current reality as wikiracing does human knowledge. … This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network. The Order Flow of the Universe. Speculative Realism, Networked Fiction: Network Realism. … the first outline of Network Realism … A literature of the digital diaspora, not epistolic but electronic. Here and Not Here, but Together. … It’s realism because it’s happening right now; it couldn’t exist without the network. … Network Realism feels, to me, like something genuinely new in literature, and we’re only just seeing the edges of it."

"No other jury verdict in British history has had such a deep social impact. Over the next three months Penguin sold 3m copies of the book – an example of what many years later was described as "the Spycatcher effect", by which the attempt to suppress a book through unsuccessful litigation serves only to promote huge sales. The jury – that iconic representative of democratic society – had given its imprimatur to ending the taboo on sexual discussion in art and entertainment. Within a few years the stifling censorship of the theatre by the lord chamberlain had been abolished, and a gritty realism emerged in British cinema and drama. … Homosexuality was decriminalised, abortions were available on reasonable demand, and in order to obtain a divorce it was unnecessary to prove that a spouse had committed the "matrimonial crime" of adultery. Judges no longer put on black caps to sentence prisoners to hang by the neck until dead."

1999's The Blair Witch Project was expected to spawn a wave of imitators. It's good news for a powerful subgenre that it didn't
Today's Commission us is brought to you by commenter numbersix99, who turned up a few queries in his musings on the "found footage" subgenre.

"One of the main trends we're seeing in cinema is the idea of 'found footage'. Blair Witch made it big, but we failed to see any imitators hit the mainstream ... until Cloverfield and then Paranormal Activity. Why did it take so long to become popular after Blair Witch [and] what about it makes it so effective (did it detour into TV with the likes of The Office)? What are its flaws? And will it work applied to non-horror genres, such as the upcoming found-footage comedy The Virginity Hit?"

Well, numbersix99. What typically happens after a box-office smash is that a raft of imitations are given the green light. That's how you go from Jaws in 1975 to Orca the killer whale two years later, or from Star Wars in 1977 to (the far more enjoyable) Battle Beyond the Stars and Battlestar Galactica before the decade was out. But, like numbersix99, I too have wondered about the dearth of copycats in the wake of lo-fi shaky-cam mockumentary horror hit The Blair Witch Project.

That simple but incomparably effective movie was, you will remember, a genuine phenomenon; while rooted in the hoariest ghost story format, it utilised an amateurish "found footage" style to suggest that the film we were watching was really all that was left of three young film-makers who went camping in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. I remember seeing the film in May '99 at the Cannes film festival and feeling that the true measure of its success was not how chilling it felt in the dark but how hard it was to clear it from my mind during the sunny days that followed. It isn't the creepiest movie ever made. It wasn't even the creepiest thing at Cannes that year – Mel Gibson was in town, after all. But the film's absolute fidelity to its chosen form – the way it never deviated from material shot by the characters, or allowed us any comforting distance – ensured that it could not be dismissed, even by those who didn't like it.

The most striking thing about Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's film was its box-office success: a worldwide gross of $248m for a poorly lit video with a three-person cast and a budget of $60,000. The second most striking thing about it was that this supposedly game-changing phenomenon changed the game not a jot. No camcorder revolution followed in its wake. Guerrilla auteurs never did decapitate studio heads with clapperboards, or break down establishment doors using Steven Seagal as a battering ram. The industry's multimillion dollar film-making model was, it seemed, too robust to be overturned by one movie. The arrival a year later of a Blair Witch sequel (the lamentable, non-mockumentary Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) seemed to accept as much; there was no whiff of originality about this conventional yarn, and no danger of shivers or goosebumps for the audience.

In the 11 years since the first Blair Witch, the expected camcorder imitations have been conspicuous by their absence. Only the monster movie Cloverfield, the Iraq war drama Redacted (both 2007) and last year's supremely terrifying Paranormal Activity engaged comprehensively with the "found footage" idea. For which I maintain we should be grateful, since this is a subgenre which must be used sparingly if it is to retain any of its potency. Can you imagine the incredulity with which we would greet film after film that deployed this device? Subversive storytelling formats tend to lose their edge when they are adopted by the mainstream. Not that this is the reason the Blair Witch style never caught on (I can't imagine a Hollywood executive deciding, upon being offered another found-footage camcorder chiller, to pass on it for fear of diluting the form). It's more likely that any species of cinema where A-list stars and merchandising tie-ins count for nought would be anathema to the industry.

For the sake of once-in-a-decade shocks like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity, I'm glad. You can already feel the fatigue setting in with the rise of the mockumentary, the one genuinely new genre of the last 40 years; hopes are high that the forthcoming sex comedy The Virginity Hit, produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, will be good enough to overcome the familiarity of the concept.

Mockumentaries have long been favoured by Woody Allen, who has directed no less than four (including Take the Money and Run and Zelig), and Christopher Guest, who made Best In Show and co-wrote and starred in This Is Spinal Tap, the Fender Stratocaster of the genre. For a comedy, This Is Spinal Tap was deadly serious about authenticity, which I think is the key to any mockumentary worth the name. To appreciate the pivotal part that seriousness plays in the DNA of the faux documentary, you need only compare This is Spinal Tap or Best in Show with other experiments that have failed to adhere to those laws of verisimilitude such as Drop Dead Gorgeous, Bob Roberts or Man Bites Dog, all of which winked to camera at regular intervals and contained scenes to which no documentary crew would have been allowed access. By contrast, the makers of This is Spinal Tap were so intent on maintaining plausibility that they excised a shot of the band taking drugs, reasoning that the characters would never have risked being caught red-handed, or white-nosed, with the camera running. (That was only one of the rules broken by Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here: if we were in any doubt that the movie was bogus, the shots of Joaquin Phoenix snorting cocaine should've set alarm bells clanging.)

It's true, as numbersix99 suggests, that some of that Blair Witch mockumentary magic was siphoned off into TV. Think of The Office, which plays out in documentary style complete with interviews to camera, or Summer Heights High, or the entire career of Sacha Baron Cohen. But I think, too, that some of the Blair Witch influence has permeated other areas of film-making. There's a whole sprawling family tree through which we can trace the cult of amateurism: think of Jonathan Demme giving video cameras to the actors playing wedding guests in Rachel Getting Married or Anthony Minghella doing the same for extras in a battle scene in Cold Mountain, then both directors incorporating the footage into their finished films; or the Beastie Boys (in Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!) and Radiohead (Live in Praha) cutting together entire concert movies from fans' recordings. The inventiveness and the appetite for change is out there, even if Hollywood will never allow the juddery camcorder close-up to replace the swooping crane shot.
HorrorComedyRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

In four decades as a performance artist, Marina Abramovic has had a stranger point a loaded gun at her head, sat in silence for 700 hours and set herself on fire. Now, as she prepares for a new show in which she enacts her own funeral, the 63-year-old reveals why "Freud would have had a field day" with her
Earlier this year, just before she began her 700-hour-long performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marina Abramovic was asked by an art critic to define the difference between performance art and theatre.
"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre," she replied. "Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real."
In her 40-odd years as a performance artist, Abramovic has dealt in what she calls "true reality", often at great physical and psychological cost. She has stabbed her hand with knives and sliced her skin with razor blades. She has lain naked on a cross of ice for hours. She has allowed the public to prod, probe and abuse her prone body. Once she almost died when a performance, in which she lay inside a huge flaming star made of petrol-soaked sawdust, went horribly wrong. (The fire sucked the oxygen from around her, causing her to pass out. An audience member intervened and she was rushed to hospital with burns to her head and body.)
"I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself," she says, "but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way. This is why people in the audience often cry or become angry or whatever. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room."
I travelled to Madrid to meet Abramovic, where she is preparing a new theatrical work tantalisingly titled The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, a collaboration with the avant-garde director Robert Wilson, the actor Willem Dafoe and the singer Antony Hegarty. (It will be one of the biggest shows at the Manchester International Festival next year.) A retrospective of her work, including videos of her many performances, photographs and an installation, also opens at the Lisson Gallery in London this month, and she will deliver a lecture on performance art at Tate Modern.
My request to sit in on a rehearsal for The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, in which she will enact her own funeral, has been turned down. Thus I find myself sitting nervously in the foyer of a very grand hotel awaiting her presence and wondering what I have let myself in for. Like most right-minded people, I reach for my bullshit detector when I hear the term "performance art". I have no interest in seeing people inflict pain on themselves – and the audience – in the name of art, much less watch them bleed. Abramovic, though, is the exception. She cites Josef Beuys and Yves Klein among her inspirations and, to a degree, she has a similar kind of charisma, inspiring a devotion that borders on the obsessive from her legions of fans.
Abramovic is 63 years old but looks 20 years younger. Dressed head to toe in black like a designer goth, with a mane of dark hair that falls over her pale, unmade-up face, she has the energy and enthusiasm of an eager teenager.
To my immense relief, she's also self-deprecating, flirtatious and funny. "Will we have the English tea?" she says, sitting down and looking around for a waiter.
She is, she says, still exhausted from the marathon Moma performance which ended almost four months ago. Entitled The Artist is Present, it redefined the parameters of performance art, and in the process became a huge cultural event discussed on talk shows and in news features. It took the form of what Abramovic calls "a pared-down, long-durational piece that destroys the illusion of time". To this end she sat motionless and silent on a wooden chair inside a circle of light in the huge atrium of Moma, seven hours a day, from mid-March until the end of May. Anyone who was prepared to queue could sit opposite her just as long as they agreed to remain silent and motionless and to stare back into her eyes.
The results were surprising even to her. Every day several people broke down in tears, usually after just a few minutes of silent staring. On personal blogs and MySpace, people shared their experiences of sitting with Marina, often in quasi-religious or life-altering language. "I gazed into the eyes of many people who were carrying such pain inside that I could immediately see it and feel it," she says, still sounding excited. "I become a mirror for them of their own emotions. One big Hell's Angel with tattoos everywhere stared at me fiercely, but after 10 minutes was collapsing into tears and weeping like a baby."
The Artist is Present broke attendance records at Moma, attracting more than 850,000 visitors, many of whom queued all night for a one-to-one audience with Abramovic. At first a few interventionists refused to obey the code of silence but, extraordinarily, most people respected the rules of engagement. The performance soon took on a momentum of its own. People who sat with her more than 10 times formed their own club, and a group of New York artists gave out badges – "I cried with Marina Abramovic" – to those who had broken down before her. She was most impressed, though, by the man who sat silently opposite her for seven hours, an entire day's duration. "The others in line grew angry and aggressive," she says, laughing, "but then they realised that the waiting was also part of the performance."
On the last day, when the queue was several thousand strong, one man walked into the circle of light, stuck his fingers down his throat and threw up. "It was an enormous amount of liquid he was carrying inside," she says. "I am almost certain he was a performance artist."
It is hard now to get a word in, but when she pauses for breath, I ask her why she thought her presence had such an extraordinary effect on people. Was this art as therapy, or something much deeper? "Oh, it's plain to me that this is something incredible. I give people a space to simply sit in silence and communicate with me deeply but non-verbally. I did almost nothing, but they take this religious experience from it. Art had lost that power, but for a while Moma was like Lourdes."
It was, though, Lourdes with a celebrity guest list. Among the famous who turned up to sit with her were Sharon Stone, Isabella Rossellini and Rufus Wainwright as well as Björk and her partner Matthew Barney and their kids. Lady Gaga came to the show, but did not – or could not? – sit in silence. "She created a big buzz though," says Abramovic. "Madonna takes so much from art and performance and never mentions it; Gaga is more generous." There was much online scorn poured on Moma's PR department for its decision to let the famous jump the queue, a decision that, according to Abramovic, had nothing to do with her. "I didn't even know it was Isabella Rossellini. I kept thinking: 'She looks familiar.' I didn't even recognise Sharon Stone. I was in another zone."
The zone that Abramovic enters when she undertakes "a long-durational performance" is perhaps the defining aspect of her art, yet it remains an ambiguous and hard-to-define element in her work. In the months leading up to the Moma show, she underwent a training programme devised by Nasa, the American space programme. "Physically, mentally, I have to prepare myself for a feat of endurance. I became a vegetarian, I did deep meditation, I cleansed myself. I train the body and the mind. I learn to eat certain foods so that I don't have to go to the toilet for seven hours. I learn to sleep in short bursts at night. This is very hard: sleep, wake, drink, pee, exercise, sleep, wake and on and on. So even the not-performing is intense."
The sitting-still, she says, was the worst part and choosing a wooden chair without armrests her biggest mistake. "This one detail makes it hellish. The shoulders sag, the arms swell, the pain starts to increase. Then the ribs are going into the organs. I had an incredible amount of physical pain and even some out-of-body experiences where the pain just vanishes, but always it comes back. In the end, it comes down to pure dedication and discipline."
The underlying question in all of this is, of course: why? Why put yourself though such suffering in the name of art? Abramovic has no easy answers to that question. "I am obsessive always, even as a child," she says, suddenly serious, and, for the first time, pausing for thought. "On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure." She hoots with laughter again and reaches for the English tea.
Abramovic was born in Belgrade in former Yugoslavia on 30 November 1946. "When people ask me where I am from," she says, "I never say Serbia. I always say I come from a country that no longer exists." (In 1997 she performed Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale. It involved her scrubbing clean 1,500 cow bones six hours a day for four days and weeping as she sang songs and told stories from her native country.) Her mother, Danica Rosi, came from a very wealthy, very powerful, very religious clan; her father, Vojin Abramovic, came from peasant stock. Both were born in Montenegro and fought for the communist partisans during the Second World War, their bravery making them national heroes and earning them prominent positions in President Tito's post-war Yugoslavian government. "We were Red bourgeoisie," their daughter once told an interviewer.
The family dynamic seems to have been explosive. Her parents quarrelled constantly and Abramovic was often beaten by her disciplinarian mother for supposedly showing off. For six years she lived with her grandmother, an […]

One of the humble yet essential uses of the link is to help us avoid having to repeat what others have already said. I make no great claim to novelty for my “Defense of Links” series; much of what I said, others had already expressed earlier this year when Carr first floated his “delinkification” meme. In particular, Jason Fry’s excellent post at Nieman Lab surveyed the ground well.

Fry talked about the role of links in three areas: credibility, readability and connectivity. “Readability” is plainly the area where Carr had the most provocative and defensible case against links. My motivation from the start was to examine that case closely and evaluate the studies it was based on — to follow the links, as it were.

I found that the studies Carr relied on really didn’t support his case. Just as interesting to me was the fact that a lengthy and in-depth discussion of Carr’s argument had unfolded on the Web without anyone actually looking up the research. Would that have happened had Carr provided links to these studies? (That’s possible on a blog but not, of course, in print. Still, one can publish endnotes online and activate the links, as I have for both of my books. Carr’s book site is quite the link desert, which I guess should not surprise.)

Fry asked a question that several respondents to my series echoed: ” Is opening links in new tabs really so different from links at the end of the piece?” For me, it is: ironically, the end-linking style is, I think, far more distracting than simple inline linking.

If you’re reading along and feel the desire to dig deeper on some point and the link is right there, you can just open the link in a new tab. If it’s not, you don’t know whether the author has provided a link or not. You have an unhappy choice. You can file the question away in your brain to make sure you remember to check once you reach the end of the article (now there’s a cognitive load). Or you can stop reading and scroll down to the bottom of the story to look for the link, which involves reviewing the whole list, figuring out whether the link you seek is actually there, clicking on it if it is, and then scrolling back to the top to find where you were. All of which thoroughly disrupts the deep reading Carr aims to protect far more thoroughly than a handful of highlighted link-words.

For instance, when I read Carr’s “Delinkification” post and saw his references to the “cognitive penalty” of links, I wanted to know where the studies were that supported this claim. There are no links inline, but I knew the whole post was about the experiment of putting links at the end, so I went on a wild goose chase to the bottom of the post hoping to find the studies linked there. (They’re not.) How can this possibly serve the reader’s concentration?

Those with long memories will recall that the original incarnation of Slate, driven by Michael Kinsley’s naivete about the Web, actually employed links-at-the-end as a policy. The magazine gave it up some time later. Turns out Carr’s “experiment” already had some in-the-field results. (You can see what this looks like on this Internet Archive capture of a Jacob Weisberg piece from 1999.)

I got into some of this argument in the comments at Scott Esposito’s thoughtful response to my series. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm provided a nice summary of my lengthier musings. I would also recommend Brian Frank’s rich philosophical take.

Tomorrow, wider thoughts on The Shallows, which of course addresses far more than links!

"This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification. And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future."

"It’s really exciting to live in the 21st Century but breathtakingly arrogant to portray our predecessors as information poor. It feeds a narrative of technological determinism and “information overload” while blinding us to a much more enticing prospect: that people have been creating stuff since, erm, the dawn of civilisation." http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/, http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/8/5/no-anonymity-future-web-says-google-ceo/

"Google's home is a campus, and being there is a "total" experience: if you work there, you can enjoy a gymnasium, sunny courtyards, beach volleyball, endless tech toys, laundry facilities and three excellent meals a day on site. As one employee explained it, workers are treated "like adults"—trusted to work and play hard, pursuing their projects in their own time. In another sense, of course, this also means they are treated like schoolchildren, or at least like members of a politely paternal institution—liberated from mundane concerns the better to learn and perform. … there's more than hint of the Renaissance city state to both Google and its great Californian colleague, Apple. Each is a place of extraordinary cultural fertility, complete with its own aesthetic and attitude … The most brilliant minds of a generation flock to enter these citadels"

"I’m worried that we’re spending less and less time thinking about the long-term future of our data, our culture, and ultimately, our civilisation. Currently we are preoccupied with the real-time web: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook …all services concerned with what’s happening right here, right now. The Long Now Foundation and Tau Zero Foundation offer a much-needed sense of perspective. As with that other great challenge of our time—the alteration of our biosphere through climate change—the first step to confronting the destruction of our collective digital knowledge must be to think in terms greater than the local and the present."

"Since the early 1990s, both medievalists & electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts … there were a lot of “distractions” built into a medieval book. … Add to these distractions the fact that medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. … They were mash-ups … “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative that contributed to Enlightenment understandings of the “focused” mind of the individual thinker. … the physical format of medieval books is not the only way in which they seem familiar to many contemporary users of digital media. Medieval reading as a practice was deeply social. … long after the invention of the printing press, until rather late in the 18th century, reading was a communal affair, with a group of hearers gathering around a reader to engage a book, letter, or other textual production."

Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on “The End of Forgetting” was a big disappointment, I felt. He’s taking on important themes — how the nature of personal reputation is evolving in the Internet era, the dangers of a world in which social-network postings can get people fired, and the fuzzier prospect of a Web that prevents people from reinventing themselves or starting new lives.

But I’m afraid this New York Times Magazine cover story hangs from some very thin reeds. It offers few concrete examples of the problems it laments, resorts to vague generalizations and straw men, and lists some truly preposterous proposed remedies.

Rosen presents his premise — that information once posted to the Web is permanent and indelible — as a given. But it’s highly debatable. In the near future, we are, I’d argue, far more likely to find ourselves trying to cope with the opposite problem: the Web “forgets” far too easily.

Rosen begins with the tale of Stacy Snyder, a Pennsylvania teacher in training who was denied her degree because her teachers’ college didn’t like a photo of her on Facebook. Snyder’s sin? Wearing a pirate hat in a party photo labeled “drunken pirate.” This outrageous promotion of alcohol consumption got her booted from her teaching school and deep-sixed her career. She sued, but a Federal district court has rejected her complaint.

It took me a few minutes of reading into Rosen’s many-thousands-of-words piece before I realized that Snyder’s story would be the only case of an actual person being damaged by the ostensible “end of forgetting” that Rosen would explore in any detail. On this meager evidence, he postulates “a collective identity crisis,” “an urgent problem” for all of society.

But does Snyder’s mistreatment have anything to do with the longevity of the information we post about ourselves online? It was a trivial indiscretion in the present that got her in trouble. Her tale, in fact, has little to do with “the end of forgetting.” You can blame Facebook, but shouldn’t you blame the school administrators and the federal judges even more? The photo is harmless; the trouble lies with the people who have turned it into a problem.

The only two other examples Rosen cites are similarly weak. There is a “16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, ‘I’m so totally bored!!!’ ” And a Canadian psychotherapist who was blocked at the US border because a guard turned up his description of an LSD trip 30 years before.

These are both injustices. But humorless bosses and overreaching immigration officials will be with us no matter how we reform Facebook.

People have been losing their jobs because of the Web for almost as long as there has been a Web. We get new stories of Internet-driven job loss with each new iteration of the form of participation — email, chat rooms, forums, blogs (where Heather “Dooce” Armstrong was the poster child, but let’s not forget Ellen Simonetti, Jessica Cutler, Mark Jen, and all the others who’ve been dooced — fired for blogging indiscretions), and now Facebook and Twitter. This is a problem, but one that has less to do with the nature of “digital forgetting” (firing-level indiscretions are nearly all contemporaneous) than with youthful hubris, overconfidence in anonymity, or the misfortune of having a vindictive employer.

With these less-than-ideal examples out of the way, Rosen can get to the heart of his material: He fears that the Internet’s archival memory of each of our missteps will make it impossible for any of us to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. Once, he argues, the Web offered a new frontier, which, like the Old West, allowed us to reinvent ourselves. But now that social safety valve is closed.

Rosen writes that this vision of the Web as frontier “has proved to be another myth.” In truth, it was always a myth. The Internet was never an alternate universe. It has always been interwoven with our “real” offline lives. It offered us new opportunities for expression and connection and imaginative play, and it still does, but only the very naive or the very deluded could ever think that what they did on the Web stayed on the Web.

Rosen maintains that our Internet-driven culture is making it harder for the disgraced to rebuild their lives and careers. But is there any actual evidence that anything has changed in this realm? As in the pre-Internet era, the ability to get up from a knockdown has less to do with making the world “forget” than with power, position and cash.

If you operate in the higher reaches of society, as a successful businessperson or political leader or intellectual, you will get your second act, whatever your shame. Henry Blodget is building a successful media company on the Web; Eliot Spitzer is hosting on CNN; sock-puppet maestro Lee Siegel publishes books and articles.

The people who have to worry are those on the lower rungs of the economy, who are in greater danger of losing jobs and homes and rights at the whim of bosses and bankers and bureaucrats. That problem, alas, predates the Web.

Rosen really loses me when he starts compiling “solutions” to the problem of the “end of forgetting.” Some of the options he lists with a straight face include: DMCA-style takedown notices for “false information” online — if someone publishes something you think is false, you get to serve them with a notice and they have to take it down! Can’t wait to start seeing those fly. Or what about resurrecting Microsoft’s Clippy — perhaps the most reviled software creation of all time — to offer a “reproachful look” at users who are about to upload some risque photo?

These ludicrous ideas don’t stand much chance of harassing us. Society will outgrow the “fired for Facebook” problem once an entire generation with a shared online past begins to take the reins. When everyone has party pictures on Facebook, no one will find them an impediment to employment or higher office. After all, once upon a time, a politician’s admission of past drug use meant kissing the White House goodbye.

In the meantime, of course, people ought to get smarter about what to share and what to keep private. I believe they will; one of my motivations for writing Say Everything was to try to help people learn from the experiences of early bloggers as they move their own lives online. I will also gladly join my voice to Rosen’s in support of giving users much more direct control of their data on services like Facebook. If it takes laws to insure that, let there be laws.

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for “expire dates” on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea that the Web has a long memory is hardly new (here’s J.D. Lasica’s piece on how “The Web Never Forgets” from 1998). But there is a flipside to this notion: Information online can be fragile and fleeting, as well. There is an entropic quality to everything that is shared online. Data gets lost; servers die; databases are corrupted; formats fall into disuse; storage media deteriorate; backups fail.

The Web is now old enough for us to know just how badly links rot over time. Much of the material from the early days of the Web is already gone. Facebook and Twitter actually make it nearly impossible for you to find older material, even stuff that you’ve contributed yourself. The more dynamic the Web gets and the more stuff we move into “the cloud,” the less confident we can be that information that once was public will remain available to the public.

There are conferences on “digital preservation” these days because this is actually a serious and important problem. We need to solve it for the sake of future historians and for the sake of our descendants. We need, as Dave Winer puts it, to “future-safe” the culture we are creating together today.

In other words: I’m a lot less worried about the Web that never forgets than I am about the Web that can’t remember.

"Plastered on a conference room wall, an informal slogan of the on-board shuttle group captures the essence of keeping focused on the process: "The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.""

"This is a service that will live and die based on the culture of its community and is very dependent on "power users” who altruistically provide lots of value to the site in exchange for respect from their peers. The challenge for Quora is that it will be difficult to keep its current culture as it grows bigger. Will Facebook and Google insiders still be showing up in various question threads if the site grows to be as big as Yahoo! Answers with the same breadth of audience and volume of content? I can’t imagine that happening."

"it’s a culture war, and Brooks joins Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, and a long list of others who say that what we are doing on the web is immoral, illegitimate, and immature. They are threatened by the change in values that seems to accompany deep involvement in web culture, a change that diminishes much of what Brooks holds up for our regard in his piece. I don’t mean the specific authors he may have been alluding to — although he names none but Carr — but rather a supposed hierarchical structure of western culture, which is reflected in the literary niche is supports. Brooks is actually making a more sinister case: to the young that would like to get ahead, avoid the rabble on the web with their egalitarian and multitasking ways. Read books instead, because it is the mark of aspiring members of the elite, the ruling class."

via Anne (Tumblr)

"I suspect 'creating something personal, even of moderate quality' and letting people share it is going to be one of the business models of the next century. And one of the social movements. Which will happen if we can squeeze the convenience and scale of the internet into other places. … what you need to do - satisfy a desire for autonomy, competence, generosity and sharing. … The easiest way to misunderstand Twitter and Facebook is to take them as a single type of network. Because there are celebrities on Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers, people assume that's what it's for. That it's a broadcast, celebrity, mass audience tool. And while it is that, it's also a small, personal, intimate one. Private accounts, small networks. I wonder, actually, whether this'll continue. Whether the public and the personal existing within the same channel/tool is sustainable or useful. I bet the next interesting thing will be tools for small networks."

"we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools. … It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow & fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies. … the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous & cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press & freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech."

"all artistic endeavour involves borrowing from other art works. … every song ever written has been informed by music that the composer has absorbed in his or her earlier life. Or, as TS Eliot put it, one of the "surest tests" of the superiority or inferiority of a poet "is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, & good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion". The YouTube remix culture is thus a new take on a venerable tradition. I wouldn't argue that the Downfall spoofs are high art, but they are evidence of bottom-up creativity & intelligence in a new medium. & if we allow narrow considerations of intellectual property to stifle this creativity, then we may all, except for the lawyers, live to regret it."

"Big Data presents new opportunities for understanding social practice. … [But] Just because you see traces of data doesn’t mean you always know the intention or cultural logic behind them. … just because you have a big N doesn’t mean that it’s representative or generalizable. … Many computational scientists believe that because they have large N data that they know more about people’s practices than any other social scientist. Time & … again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic. … [the] difference between why people connect on social network sites & why they declare relationships when … interviewed by a sociologist … is the difference between articulated networks & personal networks. … These days, the obsession is with behavioral networks. … Our disciplinary nature makes a mess out of this. … mucking with Big Data alone is not research. … seeing patterns … is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer"

"Same talk of magazines and books being a better form factor for long prose than screens. … most music journalists have no idea how a record is made or how music works / we need people to make sense of culture more than ever – at the time when there are less organisations willing to pay for them (to write) or for them to make a living"

I am always a surprised that no one much bothers to tell the story of capitalism.  

No, the stories we prefer to tell our children is that capitalism is a dangerous, soulless, relentlessly exploitative exercise. Indeed, this story is so preferred as our received wisdom, that it is exceedingly rare to here anyone recite Adam Smith’s magical insight, that good things can and do come from people pursuing their own, sometimes narrow, objectives. 

The anti-capitalism view is an ideological fixture of our education systems at every level, from grade to graduate school.  We could call it orthodoxy if it were not so much like boilerplate.  It’s not so much argued as assumed.  

Capitalists are sanguine.  Apparently, they don’t feel they have to tell the story of capitalism.  Somehow capitalism will teach its own lessons.  Once people escape the magic kingdom of education, the truth will dawn.  Once they have spend a little time in the marketplace, the penny will drop.  Or, as the English like to say, "if a man’s not a Marxist at 20, there’s something wrong with his heart.  But if he is still a Marxist at 30, there’s something wrong with his head."

When Peter Robinson interviewed Gary Becker, Professor at the University of Chicago and winner of the Nobel Prize, recently, the master surprised Robinson be announcing, "Markets are hard to appreciate."   Robinson asks for clarification and Becker obliges:

"People tend to impute good motives to government. And if you assume that government officials are well meaning, then you also tend to assume that government officials always act on behalf of the greater good. People understand that entrepreneurs and investors by contrast just try to make money, not act on behalf of the greater good. And they have trouble seeing how this pursuit of profits can lift the general standard of living. The idea is too counterintuitive. So we’re always up against a kind of in-built suspicion of markets. There’s always a temptation to believe that markets succeed by looting the unfortunate."

And I think this gets at some part of the heart of the problem.  Capitalism is, as Becker says, counterintuitive.  It tells a bad story.  In fact, it isn’t a story.  It is anti-storyish.  

Capitalism doesn’t have heroes.  It doesn’t have people called to higher motives.  It doesn’t have noble sacrifices for the good of others.  It doesn’t, usually, have daring action on a public stage.  

No, capitalism is just has some guy who owns a handful of dry cleaning outfits in a small town in New Hampshire.  He works hard, supplies a service, pays off his loans, coaches Little League, goes to church, gets his kids through college, and spends his very few disposable hours on the golf course.  

Script!  Casting!  Some one call the studio!   This is appalling.  It doesn’t matter that out of these mundane activities in lots of towns big and small, played out by millions of people across the US, something remarkable will come.  This just isn’t a story anyone wants to listen to.  So no one much wants to tell it.  Not Hollywood.  Not our mythmakers.  Not our story tellers.  

The economist has spoken.  It is a little clearer why we do not tell the story of capitalism.  It just doesn’t tell very well. But if the anthropologist may join in here.  Can we at least acknowledge that there is something fabulously odd about a culture that depends on capitalism but that will not ever acknowledge it in the stories it tells itself about itself.  

References 

Robinson, Peter.  2010.  Basically an Optimist–Still.  The Wall Street Journal.  March 27 -28.  p. A13. 

"you can still buy … trimmings on top of fees of £28,500 a year. And what do you get for your money? A good education, a place at a good university, social connection, confidence, & all the other things largely confined to one small section of society that make Britain among the most unequal countries in the developed world. … Parents of privately educated sons could expect their children to be paid 8% more by their mid-20s than boys from state schools; more than half the children at private schools went on to study at leading universities; in Europe only Italy, Greece & Spain had greater rates of poverty. … Nearly 70 years have passed since Picture Post protested at exactly this state of affairs. I looked at the picture that accompanied the Daily Telegraph’s report in January 2010, & it was the same one Picture Post had published in January 1941. Sime’s, of course. There they were again: Wagner, Dyson, Salmon, Catlin, Young, doomed for ever to represent a continuing social tragedy"

"Morris was a designer & a craftsman. It was in his deeply practical, resilient nature to reconfigure & reconstruct. … Iceland itself became a kind of yardstick against which Morris measured the follies & iniquities of Victorian Britain. The Icelanders lived hard lives, but they never lost their dignity or sense of true priorities. … he was already painfully aware of the economic pressures towards short cuts & shoddiness, the negation of the basic human instinct to perfect one's skills. In Iceland's more rudimentary economy craftsmanship still flourished within a living tradition of folk art. … a country where design was directed only at supplying basic human needs fuelled his future diatribes against the Victorian culture of excess. … he became aware of how Icelandic society was held together almost in defiance of the elements. It was a society that took care of its own … & his travels through the mountains braced him & inspired him for the years of environmental campaigning ahead."

"Join us in welcoming the National Archives UK as the newest member of the Commons on Flickr. Located in Kew, in the west of London, they are the UK government’s official archive."

"One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. … people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. … Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. …  It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. … This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish. … In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the "lower classes" when we mean humanity minus ourselves." via Kim (Delicious and Buzz)

"Henrich suggests that culture evolved toward fairness for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, which in turn fostered stable, ever-larger community structures that further accelerated the cultural evolution of fairness. This could have biological effects, favoring the development of linguistic and cognitive abilities, but the fundamental driver was culture. “We can’t rule out the possibility that there was culture-gene interaction, but all the variation we see could be explained by plain cultural evolution,” Henrich said." via Howard (Twitter)