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Edward Said and the Role of the Public Intellectual
I thought it was timely to reproduce some of the late Edward Said’s typically perceptive, but ultimately optimistic, thoughts on the alternatives to mass mediated culture – in particular the role of the independent intellectual, from which I think we can extrapolate to the role of the blogger: On one side, a half-dozen enormous multinationals […]
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know your “techno”
ishkur’s guide to electronic music v2.0 is online. It’s a Flash presentation with 100+ genres well mapped out according to stylistic affinities as well as chronological “development”. You have to question the linear evolution model, but once you get past the long-winded intro animation, it’s all good fun, and there are multiple audio examples for […]
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Intermission
I’m off to Sydney for a few days – back on Monday.
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MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare has now officially launched with hundreds of online courses. Dilettantes, start your engines! More seriously, there is some really interesting material available, including video “lectures” by staff and guest speakers. Is it just me, or is MIT dead sexy?
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The Amateur in History
Alex from Relevant History provides a nice counterweight to all the mass amateurisation hoopla, reminding us of what Wimbledon tennis commentators never forgot : The notion that being a ‘professional’ is a good thing, and that professionals know more than amateurs, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, being a ‘professional’ meant that you […]
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Research Blogs and Interdisciplinarity
Anne Galloway has put together an interesting post on interdisciplinarity (specifically concerning sociology, anthropology and ubiquitous computing). The comments to her post link back to earlier questions about the balance between readability and complexity that I think are relevant, not only to academic blogs, but to all specialist writing (boy, the unadulterated geek talk of […]
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MP3.com: The Company Without a Past
Further to the mp3.com thing, I thought I’d link to their artists’ page from about 1997 or so through the brilliant Internet Archive Wayback Machine. No luck, though – mp3.com has blocked robots. Very interesting, especially as I have previously accessed their archived pages this way (only a couple of months ago I think). I […]
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Swarm Theory
More sociobiology: Steven Johnson’s article Emerging Technology: Music of the Swarms is about music software that uses an analogy between the semi-structured patterns of jazz improvisation and the swarming behaviour of bees to teach computers how to “improvise”. In Tim Blackwell’s computerized “free improv” compositions, the notes sometimes fly together in formation, resembling bird flocks, […]
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Blogs as Outboard Brains
Swimming against the “blogs are exhibitionistic” tide, back in May last year Cory Doctorow described his blog as his outboard brain . This would be closer to the way I see my blog as well – a way of annotating the chaotic multimedia map that is my mind, and a way of forcing myself to […]
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(Im)possible Machines
Retro-futurist inventions created by artist Tom Jennings at WPS:Products.