Category: Culture

The new — the last — Warren Zevon album comes out on August 26th. The buzz is good.

First, watch this (Quicktime, 1.7 megs). Then, read the rest of the Web site. Especially make sure you read the thesis, even though it’s long. You never knew about Disney dissecting fawns before, did you?

Kevin over at funmurphys.com has more thoughts on media, following up on his comments here. He’s got an excellent point, which in my book touches on the true value of the Internet: you can get more information faster. Context is what’s valuable, and information provides context.

This is one reason I link to conservative blogs as well as liberal blogs. The other reason is because I’ll link anywhere if I get good writing out of it.

Warren Ellis is writing a novel on the Internet. Using LiveJournal. It starts here. You also get occasional comments on LiveJournal itself:

Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world’s biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn’t stopped it being successful, and it hasn’t stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of “social software,” it’s not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge.

The first thing we all do when we find out about this: we link to it. The second thing we do, those of us who have LiveJournal accounts: we add him to our friends list.

Stop and think about that one for a second. On LiveJournal, adding someone to your friends list doesn’t just mean you can read their entries easily. It also means that they’re on the list of people who can read your private entries, unless you’ve customized things a little.

At the moment, 332 people have added Warren Ellis to their friends list. He has access to the private entries of, well, most of those people. He can read them talking about things they don’t mean to show to anyone they don’t know — let alone a writer who’s always searching for new material for his perverted comic books.

In my universe, I’m going to believe that he did this on purpose, knowing full well what access he would be granted.

Don’t let anyone tell you affirmative action is only for minorities these days. I’m thinking Bishop Caldwell is crazy like a fox — he’s picking up a fair amount of attention, which easily assists with both his stated objectives and any yearning for publicity he might feel.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday than browsing through the Dead Media Working Notes. Don’t miss the uncategorized notes, either. I regard this as a museum of ways in which human beings have tried to touch one another; it strikes me as deeply Cronenbergian.

And what goes around, comes around.

I had an interesting discussion with Jere about the whole flash mob thing, with some random musing on dada. I wound up saying:

I’m not sure that there’s not a paradox inherent in the concept. The need to draw in a lot of people conflicts with the need to keep the details under wraps. Once People Magazine does a story on it (which will be next week, I understand), it’s no longer mysterious.

Another effect of cheap communication. But you can’t know until you try, so it’s worth trying to see what happens. Failed experiments are still useful.

Regarding spontaneity, I think we had some in Boston. In the absence of specific instructions, I triggered the Happy Birthday whistle on the spur of the moment, and the crowd was willing to pick it up. Someone else (not an organizer) triggered the applause.

That was what was fun for me. The crowd knew it was supposed to do something, but didn’t know what. Supersaturated solution. It was clear from moment one that the surprise and delight aspect wasn’t going to be so strong. But it was interesting getting the crowd to come together on something that wasn’t preplanned.

In the more general sense, I think it’s healthy for the media to be reminded that sometimes fads grow and fade without their help. The phenomenon indicates that the media isn’t the only vector of information anymore.

Which is probably not the final story, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Pictures of last night’s flash mob are here (mmm, lots of cops), here (mmm, lots of media), and here.

I forgot to mention that the Coop had a bunch of copies of Smart Mobs piled up at one of the registers. Lucky guess on someone’s part.