8.27.2004

Weird ends

Neal Stephenson, author of several science fiction-ish opus's as quoted in Locus Magazine: “The analogy (which I've used a lot before) is to the electric guitar. Thomas Edison made electricity into a consumer product and developed the light bulb, probably anticipated washing machines and stuff, but he sure didn't anticipate the electric guitar! That was far too weird of an idea. No one could have predicted that the descendants of slaves could have adopted this and come up with what would become the dominant form of popular music in the whole world. That's the kind of thing real societies do with real technology. One of the things [William] Gibson has achieved is that he put some of that into his world. We've got information technology. How is it going to be used, not just by engineers who design products but by regular people who pick this stuff up and turn it to their own weird ends? Spam is another thing kind of like the electric guitar, though it's much darker, less palatable. Clearly the people who originated the technology never in their wildest dreams could have imagined that everyone on Earth who has e-mail would get 30 penis enlargement advertisements a day!”

Similarly we have the blogosphere (I find that term kinda goofy, but 'in the parlance of our times'...) as part of the internet, morphing from your average weblog/online diary sort of thing to a tool that seems to be taking on that somewhat antiquated/monolithic form of information distribution, in the "media". The Belmont Club makes an apt comparison: "Yet for good or ill, the genie is out of the bottle. Before the Gutenberg printing press men knew the contents of the Bible solely through the prism of the professional clergy, who could alone afford the expensively hand copied books and who exclusively interpreted it. But when technology made books widely available, men could read the sacred texts for themselves and form their own opinions. And the world was never the same again."

For most of us Bloggin' is pretty much a really fast and convient way to get ideas out of our heads so they can play with others. Now I'm talking to the contributers mostly, but this should go for everyone. If you've got a story, tell it. If you have a thought or point of view you want to vet, get it up here and see what happens. In the words of the immortal Lucas of "Lucas with the Lid off" fame: "Whatever bubbles, bubbles up". One way or another this blog should meet it's weird (bubbly) end.

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