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Category: zettel

scraps of paper

Geomagnetic storm erases earth’s hard disks

Published November 2, 2007 by cgerrish

Geomagnetic storm

A large geomagnetic storm, caused by unusually high sunspot activity, has hit the earth with the effect of erasing every computer hard disk on the planet. Meterologists have determined that these magnetic storms occur every 250 years. The last storm, while recorded by historians, seemed to have little noticeable effect.

Ironically, Google had just completed the transfer of all printed matter to digital format to create a univeral public library of the world. This digital library’s contents have been completely erased. Fortunately the source materials are still in existence. Another side effect for Google, it’s own indexes, software and search capability have been erased, along with all of the web sites it used to spider. In response, the Oxford English Dictionary has removed the verb “to google” from its pages. Google’s stock price was not effected.

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Intertextuality: the digerati and the literati

Published November 1, 2007 by cgerrish

Books

The New Yorker has an interesting article about the future of reading, library and books. There’s a quote by Kevin Kelly that caught my eye:

“all the books in the world� would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.� The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,� and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.�

This exposes the gap between the digerati and the literati. The idea of the a “single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas” is called intertextuality and was introduced into the conversation by Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that ‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it

While the digerati dream of a liquid, hyperlinked super document living on Web servers, the literati know that texts are connected on many axes. And the connections are not simple links, they contain politics, power, poetic and gender influences— they shade meaning.

Texts are always already connected, but literal connection in a super hypertext document could make implicit links explicit. But will explicit links also expose the influence of the linking? As with all software, it’s not about the code, it’s about the user. In this case, the locus of meaning, the only really important connections, are in the mind’s eye of the reader.

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The economics of user-generated content & attention

Published October 31, 2007 by cgerrish

Bubbles

The current set of Web app firms have valuations based on the generous contributions of users like you. The platforms, in and of themselves, aren’t worth the valuations that VCs, or acquiring firms, are attributing to them. It’s never about the software, it’s about the community, the audience, the users. In fact, the most interesting developments are the most simple. Think about blogging software, RSS, Twitter, podcatchers— it’s not the software it’s what is enabled for the users.

Audiences used to be aggregated so that you could sell their eyeballs to advertisers. Now, to a large extent, the audience creates the product. Jason Calacanis was criticized for wanting to pay the audience at Netscape. But if the user contributes to the value of a platform, shouldn’t the platform owner pass some of the revenue through? The economics of “user-generated” content will be similar to the economics of user attention data. The user will want to retain, or be compensated for, the value of both their raw attention and the content they’ve created.

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What we mean when we dream about Hamlet

Published October 30, 2007 by cgerrish

Wooster Group’s Hamlet

Kills me I’m going to miss this. From what I hear, it’s sold out even though the run was extended two weeks. It’s the Wooster Group’s Hamlet at the Public Theater in New York. The piece was performed last year in Barcelona. Elizabeth LaCompte calls it an archeological excursion into the film version of Hamlet starring Richard Burton.

The Wooster Group’s Hamlet continues their experiment with what counts as a source text in the theater. They may have done this with other pieces, but the last performance I saw was “Poor Theater,” based on the work of Jerzy Grotowski. Generally plays are created based on scripts, the work of playwrights. The Wooster Group has created performance pieces based on movies, documentary film, a series of still photos or stories they’ve heard. This Hamlet is based on the film, not the playscript. To some extent performances are always based on previous performances, in addition to the script.

Hamlet holds a unique place in English language theater, it’s a difficult role, usually tackled by our finest actors. A constellation of images, sounds, faces, voices and souls orbit around the playscript. There’s no finer experience in the theater than watching the Wooster Group perform Hamlet, and showing us what we mean when we dream about Hamlet.

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