Waldman advocates tearing a century of movie culture into bleeding chunks and playing the whole lot back in no particular order – a sort of Attention Deficit Cinema. Personally, I think he’s onto something. I blogged the effect of iTunes on my music listening habits a few months ago. The effect on narrative cinema of the arrival of a generation of rippers and burners is difficult to predict, of course…
Month: February 2003
Drive-through zoo
What’s the latest thinking on Safari Parks? A beautiful sunny Winter’s day, lots of entertaining animals (and a diverting attempt to eat our car by the giraffes) made for a very happy half term day out yesterday but there is something surreal about an artificial traffic jam in a fenced enclosure – engines all running, windows sealed (apart from the crazy people in the Cavalier hanging out the sunroof in the bear enclosure). Are these drive-through zoos an eco-anachronism or the future for captive nature?
No substitute for a fat consulting fee
Great writing
This, from The Guardian’s John Sutherland, is how I’d like my column to read. Fat chance.
Power laws
Bloggers are fixating on ‘power laws’. I’ve read all the stuff (including Clay’s perfectly sane starting point) and it’s obviously useful stuff with plenty of predictive power but it’s dry as dust. Now this dreary economic concept is going to be rattling round the blogosphere for months and we’re going to have to get used to listening to a thousand second-rate interpreters flattening it out and applying it way outside its useful scope. Nothing inherantly reductive about the concept – but something very human and inevitable about its cooption to a simplified mechanical worldview. The reductivists are a bit like the ‘pub Darwinists ‘ I mentioned earlier – expending way too much energy shoe-horning reality into their favourite model. There’s something autistic about this obsessive focus on one of the many factors that produce a web site’s popularity, currency, connectedness, influence, personality…
I wrote about this ? and Richard Sennet’s excellent the Formation of Character in a World of Inequality – in my column for today’s Guardian.
Golf War
Watching the anti-war march on the TV the other day we noticed that two of the most prominent placards in the throng at Piccadilly Circus were advertising a Golf Sale.
Docherty on BBCi
David Docherty, until recently head of broadband content at Telewest, defends the ?200M invested in BBCi so far. From Media Guardian.
Love and War
Juliet’s worrying about the war (and Valentine’s Day) in her latest Planet Parent column at Tigerchild.
Roger Needham
A lovely tribute to Cambridge University’s Roger Needham from John Naughton in The Observer.
Azhar on 3G
Good piece by Azeem Azhar in The Guardian about the mobile operators’ perilous leap into 3G.