Saw this on the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights this morning, on my daily walk to work (teaching a class on Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"): a complete and pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana, tossed in the rubbish heap.
Score one more for Wikipedia.
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Annenberg Center for Communication, based on the research I've been doing into sample-based music for my doctoral dissertation. Musicologist, musician and all-around cool human Joanna Demers (author of Steal this Music) also spoke, about the aesthetics of electronic music.
There's a WMV video of the event here, and an MP3 here. Howard Rheingold also blogged it here.
Many thanks to the Annenberg Center for giving us the opportunity to present our research, and to all the people who came to hear us.
Incidentally, Marissa and I will be presenting related research, based on our recent consumer survey about configurable cultural practices (e.g. mash-ups, remixes, machinima, etc.) at MIT5 in Cambridge later this month, and at ICA in San Francisco next month.
Novelist, humanist and futurist Kurt Vonnegut died last night at age 84.
Without Vonnegut's inspirational work, I would not be the writer, humanist or futurist I am today. In fact, I'm not sure I would have survived junior high school. I am eternally grateful to my father for putting Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan in my 12-year-old hands, and to Vonnegut for keeping my hands, eyes and mind full during the subsequent decades.
He was one of those rare individuals who could speak cogently and forcefully about the human soul in the postindustrial age, and who could look forward with crystal clarity, resorting to neither utopian nor dystopian cliches along the way.
He also taught me -- and millions of others -- to think more broadly about death than our middle class American culture typically provides for. In Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim announces publicly that he is about to be assassinated, and then warns the crowd not to mourn for him. His words are especially poignant when considering Vonnegut's own death:
"It is high time I was dead. Many years ago, a certain man promised to have me killed. He is an old man now, living not far from here. He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance in your fair city. He is insane. Tonight he will keep his promise.
"If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said. . . . Farewell, hello, farewell, hello."
Here are the links to the New York Times obituary, Vonnegut's Wikipedia entry and Vonnegut's official web site.
So it goes.
Heads up: Friend-of-Radar Ben Adair interviewed Friend-of-Radar David Ritz on KPCC's Pacific Drift this weekend. David co-authored the song "Sexual Healing" with the late, great Marvin Gaye, and served as his official biographer, to boot. David's a great speaker -- he came and guest lectured for the class I teach at USC a few weeks back, and knocked 'em dead. Here's a link.
Edge is hosting the transcript and MP3 of a panel discussion hosted at LSE last week, featuring Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other fascinating books about the genetics, information, and human society.
In this book, published 30 years ago, Dawkins introduced the notion of the "meme" -- a discrete piece of information that competes, mutates and thrives in the environment of human culture, much as genes do in their biological environment:
“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
You don't have to be an Internet guru to see how this idea is infintely more provocative in an age of global networked media than it was 30 years ago. What's amazing is the degree to which the concept of the "meme" has become a powerful meme in its own right, especially in the blogosphere.
