Tomorrow in The Sunday Times I interview Iggy Pop - which is why I was in Miami - I review two books on the first moon landing and I write a strange and possibly incomprehensible piece about the web. Links when available.
well, I don't know. I don't think half this stuff applies to me. like the wheel, it isn't what it is (I imagine wheel 1.0 was a log) it's what you do with it.
6 pages on Iggy Pop! what a waste of energy (mine not yours, obviously). if Rupes expects me to pay for his paper he better include a hyperlink to the concluding paragraph.
the best bit about the moon is the sea of tranquillity. doesn't it sound like the best place to be? shame it's on the moon then, you'd have to be insane to go there.
Better batten down the hatches after that anti-web piece. Absolutely right though, of course, there's never a brave new world, just superficial variations on the same old.
I love this bit from the Iggy piece:
Much later Little Jim brought home Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a Changin' album.
"That picture on the front where Dylan had a particularly obnoxious sneer, like he's saying, 'How uncool is your country, everything you?ve done is worth nothing.'
I'd never noticed that before but it's obvious now it's been pointed out.
Iggy is the beneficiary of more good will than any other man living. In a career now lasting four decades he has made exactly five good records, the last of which was Lust for Life, which came out approx 30 years ago. Since then: records ranging from crap to the merely unnecessary, with the occasional decent guest spot on someone else's work. Enjoyed the piece though- it made me dig out those five good records and play them again.
Far from being an incomprehensible piece on the web, it's an excellent one. And you've had to suffer the usual hotheads wading in and badly missing the point, or the simple fact of your own URL lying at the bottom of the piece. When I was reading The Cult of the Amateur a few months ago a friend asked if it was really the kind of thing a blogger should be reading. I replied that it is exactly the kind of thing a blogger should read, as it puts Web 2.0 in perspective and reminds us that having a platform to say absolutely anything we want doesn't mean we should say anything we want.
Mind you, there was story here in Ireland recently (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0507/1224246059241.html) where a college student fabricated a quote and attributed it to a recently deceased composer on his wikipedia entry, just to see if it would appear in any mainstream media. He was shocked when it was used by some of the world's biggest papers.
If people with a professional responsibility to be accurate are using Wikipedia for research then we're all in trouble and a world of misinformation lies ahead.
I'm glad the web article mentioned energy use. This is indeed an Achilles Heel. Folks may blather about Web 2.0 being agile or nimble, but the whole show is dependent on gas-guzzling on a heroic scale. Server farms have the energy requirements of towns. And the circuitry of your PC has a jones for the juice. It takes an enormous amount of energy just to make your PC, and then the PC is obliged to stagger under the weight of a 96-stone fattie in the form of the unwieldy Microsoft operating system. And all so you can send a 140-character message on Twitter. Something of a joke really.
Still, the clue is in the word: ADSL. A = asymmetric. The men of affairs can stuff data down your pipe between ten and fifty times faster than you can send it to someone else. ADSL means that the consumer resembles someone who has been tied down with their mouth jammed open. If Murdoch and others can't make money out of a model so tilted in their favour then they don't deserve to, imho. Newspapers are a side-show in this regard.
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
12 Comments:
At May 16, 2009 9:21 AM,
ian russell said…
Iggy Pop: Self-Parody or self-delusion?
10:25 AM May 16th from Twitter
At May 16, 2009 1:49 PM,
Sean said…
"I'm a conservative
I like the crazy girls that I screw"
work of genius.
http://www.lyricsdepot.com/iggy-pop/im-a-conservative.html
At May 16, 2009 1:55 PM,
Gaw said…
I still haven't got over the insurance adverts. *Insurance*. Him and Farmer Rotten. Butter wouldn't melt in his bum-bag.
No-one would ever have believed it back in the day.
At May 16, 2009 3:12 PM,
Susan B. said…
Scary how much Iggy Pop looks like Bill Nighy. Or vice-versa.
At May 16, 2009 8:51 PM,
David said…
Bugger Iggy - just look at those amps ...
At May 17, 2009 9:45 AM,
ian russell said…
well, I don't know. I don't think half this stuff applies to me. like the wheel, it isn't what it is (I imagine wheel 1.0 was a log) it's what you do with it.
6 pages on Iggy Pop! what a waste of energy (mine not yours, obviously). if Rupes expects me to pay for his paper he better include a hyperlink to the concluding paragraph.
the best bit about the moon is the sea of tranquillity. doesn't it sound like the best place to be? shame it's on the moon then, you'd have to be insane to go there.
At May 17, 2009 9:53 AM,
Brit said…
Yes, Ian, going there would be pure 'lunar-sea'.
Geddit? Ithankyew.
At May 17, 2009 12:16 PM,
Brit said…
Better batten down the hatches after that anti-web piece. Absolutely right though, of course, there's never a brave new world, just superficial variations on the same old.
I love this bit from the Iggy piece:
Much later Little Jim brought home Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a Changin' album.
"That picture on the front where Dylan had a particularly obnoxious sneer, like he's saying, 'How uncool is your country, everything you?ve done is worth nothing.'
I'd never noticed that before but it's obvious now it's been pointed out.
At May 17, 2009 12:50 PM,
Gordon McCabe said…
I've actually been to the sea of tranquility once, but it was a bit of Mare getting there.
At May 17, 2009 2:33 PM,
Vernon Howell said…
Iggy is the beneficiary of more good will than any other man living. In a career now lasting four decades he has made exactly five good records, the last of which was Lust for Life, which came out approx 30 years ago. Since then: records ranging from crap to the merely unnecessary, with the occasional decent guest spot on someone else's work. Enjoyed the piece though- it made me dig out those five good records and play them again.
At May 17, 2009 3:18 PM,
Andrew said…
Far from being an incomprehensible piece on the web, it's an excellent one. And you've had to suffer the usual hotheads wading in and badly missing the point, or the simple fact of your own URL lying at the bottom of the piece. When I was reading The Cult of the Amateur a few months ago a friend asked if it was really the kind of thing a blogger should be reading. I replied that it is exactly the kind of thing a blogger should read, as it puts Web 2.0 in perspective and reminds us that having a platform to say absolutely anything we want doesn't mean we should say anything we want.
Mind you, there was story here in Ireland recently (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0507/1224246059241.html) where a college student fabricated a quote and attributed it to a recently deceased composer on his wikipedia entry, just to see if it would appear in any mainstream media. He was shocked when it was used by some of the world's biggest papers.
If people with a professional responsibility to be accurate are using Wikipedia for research then we're all in trouble and a world of misinformation lies ahead.
At May 18, 2009 10:41 AM,
Mark said…
I'm glad the web article mentioned energy use. This is indeed an Achilles Heel. Folks may blather about Web 2.0 being agile or nimble, but the whole show is dependent on gas-guzzling on a heroic scale. Server farms have the energy requirements of towns. And the circuitry of your PC has a jones for the juice. It takes an enormous amount of energy just to make your PC, and then the PC is obliged to stagger under the weight of a 96-stone fattie in the form of the unwieldy Microsoft operating system. And all so you can send a 140-character message on Twitter. Something of a joke really.
Still, the clue is in the word: ADSL. A = asymmetric. The men of affairs can stuff data down your pipe between ten and fifty times faster than you can send it to someone else. ADSL means that the consumer resembles someone who has been tied down with their mouth jammed open. If Murdoch and others can't make money out of a model so tilted in their favour then they don't deserve to, imho. Newspapers are a side-show in this regard.
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