This is precisely what Dan Hill was talking about.
Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 21 of 39)
Kottke writes in defence of Twitter and quotes Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG:
Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.
Tee-hee.
Since I am finding my job particularly fascinating at the moment, I am using Twitter as an online diary of my work activities. Meanwhile, my relentless, commentless blogging about Internet Philosophy was vindicated yesterday, when I was able to instantly call up several links for the gentleman running Livefiction.co.uk (which has obvious similarities to what we did with Sweet Fanny Adams). For anyone who is not famous, and doesn’t have the time to make themselves famous (or infamous) online, I think blogging-as-scrapbook is probably the easiest way to justify an online presence.
This is all old ground of course. And Orwell would have had a blog.
In last month’s Prospect, David Goldblatt gave a couple of interesting statistics about Golf:
you have a global [golf] industry worth around $350bn. This is roughly the same as the GDP of Belgium, which coincidentally covers about the same land area as the world’s golf courses.
I was reminded of this just now, when I read a couple of statistics in the Shift Happens presentation by Karl Fisch.
- Nintendo invests double the US government in R&D (slides 31-32)
- If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th Largest in the World (slide 35)
These are further examples of how companies and communities are now operating on a scale that dwarves the efforts of some nation states. As I said in my notes on the Clay Shirky’s ‘Hello Everybody’ Demos podcast that accompanies his book, I find it fascinating that the nation state might wither in the face of alternative communal bonds:
However, I wonder whether the most profound shift might come when people transcend ethnicity as well as geography. With people spending so much time, and actually making money in worlds like Second Life, or building large guilds of allegiences in Eve Online or WarCraft, perhaps those bonds could be the basis for some other kind of nation or ‘polity’ with real power and relevance.
To Be Continued, I’m sure.
Update: 24th Sept 09
If all the gaming consoles in the US formed their own city, that city would use as much power as San Diego, the 9th-largest city in the country. (via Kottke)
Here’s a post I’ve just had published over at Comment is Free. Later, I will post a selection of the comments I’ve received there.
Credit where its due: The Way of the Blogs is hardly a new idea. It was much discussed back in the ’04 when people in the UK were starting to take notice of online debate. More recently, it was discussed at one of English PEN’s round-tables that we held as part of our ongoing inquiry into UK libel laws.
There was some depressing news from Geneva last week, as the UN Human Rights Council voted to adopt a resolution on “defamation of religions”. Although the resolution is non-binding, and does not compel any state to change its laws, it does lend authority to those in countries around the world who wish to clamp down on criticism of religion.
Here in the UK, English PEN’s No Offence campaign in 2005 successfully ensured that religious defamation laws remained off the statute books, and that blasphemy laws are a thing of the past (thank God). Such laws are bad for freedom of expression, of course, but in seeking to shield adherents from criticism of their faith, they ultimately weaken religion, too.
However, when religion comes under attack, the alienation and marginalisation felt by believers is real. How can they achieve redress for a perceived offence, without resorting to censorship, or its kid brother, the boycott?
I think there is a lesson to be learnt from blogs. Despite the robust nature of much of the debate online, I do perceive a sort of online Omerta, a Way of the Blogs. This states that if you have been offended or disrespected online, you can always fight your corner by setting up a counter-blog somewhere else. The idea is that you do not attempt to suppress the offensive material, legally or otherwise, but instead use the same medium to counter and debunk it.
Offline, a recent example from the US, shows this spirit in action. The Jewish organisation Theatre J, based in Washington DC, has been staging readings of Caryl Churchill’s controversial Seven Jewish Children, despite many people branding the play anti-semitic (Comment is Free has already discussed this point at length). Director Ari Roth says he doesn’t endorse the play, but feels the playwright’s language has some resonance: “So many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception.”
Roth denies that he is engaging in a form of self-flagellation, because Theatre J’s staging was not done so uncritically. He commissioned two new pieces that engage with Churchill’s text, entitled Seven Palestinian Children and The Eighth Child. Ultimately, what Theatre J has done is to appropriate Churchill’s play. They have mirrored its style in new works, subverting it in order to advance an alternative world view. The quick and impromptu way they have done so seems to me to be very much a 21st century act, reminiscent of the mash-ups, parodies and rebuttals at which internet culture excels. Not so different from The Way of the Blogs after all.
So, staging someone’s play, singing their song, or telling their story, is not necessarily an act of endorsement. Sometimes it can be a broadside attack on a particular orthodoxy. Appropriation and mutilation of art is an act of rebellion, a well-established weapon of the disenfranchised. To give two other examples: I am reminded of Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of traditional fairy tales; and the sampling and looping that is an inherent feature of urban music such as hip-hop. Those who found Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti offensive, or those who were upset by Jyllands-Posten’s provocative Mohammed cartoons, could and should have responded in a similar manner. New digital technology makes this cheap and easy.
But why engage? Why should religious communities have to dignify such attacks from a secular majority that is intent on insulting them at every turn? The answer is simple: art and culture evolves through conflict. Failure to engage leads a culture to stagnation, irrelevance, and finally, death. Religious defamation laws will strangle the very communities they seek to protect. Only raw and offensive free expression can offer salvation.
(Comment at Comment is Free)
Moritz Bleibtreu and Franka Potente in ‘Lola Rendt’ (Run Lola Run, 1998)
More thoughts on James Harkin’s Cyber-realism essay: With all my chat about hyperthinking in my previous post, I didn’t mention some alternative cultural reasons for the emergence of some of the films that Harkin name-checks. For me, what is noteworthy is the outward looking nature of many of the films. These movies have strong characters to carry them, but the story is never about the dissection or development of that character. They are not about the conflict any one character might be experiencing within themselves. Few people change, or learnanimportantlesson.
Instead, the stories are about the interaction between the ensemble, and the contradictions between them. They are about how whole cultures (Babel, Syriana) or classes (Crash, Traffic) fit together. They are political, scratching a post 9/11 itch to understand other worlds, and how the people in them can have an impact on our lives.
Linked to this idea is the concept of randomness. The key accidents in films like Babel, Crash, 21 Grams and Amores Perros all include an element of bad luck that the characters don’t really deserve. They are the opposite of tragedy, where the negative outcome depends on the character. The stories are utterly amoral in this respect, although admittedly the characters in Babel and 21 Grams are given the chance to show how they deal with the crisis (badly, it turns out).
The non-linearity of the story-telling in the films mentioned allows us to see alternative viewpoints on a key scene. In other films, the same techniques allow us to see parallel universes. But again, there is little room for morality in the stories. In the sexy, cartoonish classic Lola Rendt, the life or death of the characters depends not on a kind word or altruistic act (or, conversely an act of cruelty or selfishness), but by how Lola’s encounter with a dog-owner plays out. Sliding Doors (an early example of the genre) has a similar anti-lesson for its main characters.
Ultimately, what is being purveyed in all these films is the idea of determinism. The stars are in alignment and your destiny is written. Happenstance rules all.