I see a lot of kitschy terms, e.g. "emblog", cropping up on finger-on-the-pulse sites like BoingBoing and not-so-finger-on-the-pulse sites like MSNBC's Weblog Central. Naturally, the terminology pretty much all has to do with blogging, and it all strikes me as just so much navelgazing: attempts at coinages and commentary that will never be seen outside the event horizon that is the blogosphere. (Oft-times they fall into the singularity and vanish even to us. Shit, I haven't heard anyone say "emblog" in a good two weeks.)
I wonder, sometimes, what it is that causes/allows new coinages to achieve escape velocity -- why "All your base are belong to us" is still unknown to my students despite coverage in Time, but other geek terms cross-pollinate. I also wonder why so much intrablog coverage is given to new terms. Prima facie, talk is cheap and server space is only slightly less cheap, but what's the point? Do people want to be able to claim that they were the ones who put <foo> on the lips of millions, or something?
And now, doused liberally with my own hypocrisy, I go to take a nap before class.
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maradydd- Meredith L. Patterson
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There's a lot of other things involved as well, such as the need to slap suburban culture in it's bland, plastic, overly-medicated face with my metaphorical dick. There's that and my recent decision to aquire every issue of Transmet, start to finish. The sad truth of Spider is that the Social Amboeba (singular) will simply swallow any kinetic energy one throws at it. I could make a twenty foot tall neon green statue of Christ fucking a sheep and it still would fall short of escape velocity.
Actually, "we" as a culture haven't really reached that point yet, it's happening, but not homogenously. There have been a lot of suprising cultural aquisitions in the past 3-4 years, but by and large the population is still strictly in the 20th century.
To quote someone else "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Having said that, is anyone else as impressed at the small amount of outcry Postal 2 has gotten? Before playing this game I didn't realize how empowering it could be to clonk someone with a police baton and pee in their hair - and you can do that in this game! This game should be causing public burnings by social conservaties large enough to make John Lennon's corpse cough - and nothing.
They're probably not aware of it yet. Wait until one of their staffers points it out.
A large part of my frustration is that I'm not working within a particular social structure. I'm not, for example, a late Renaissance Dutch painter whose audience is so steeped in Christian symbolism that they understand the significance of the placement of a pair of salad tongs.
That being said, I have to run the razor's edge between my works being specific enough that they aren't just Color Field paintings and not being so specific that they are inaccessable to all but five people. How then am I supposed to effect change in the populace at large? A populace I might add, that generally doesn't give a rat's ass about art in the first place.
This is what happened to Hitler.
"I can not get this tree right!"
*throws down brushes*
"Damn! I will kill everyone in the world!"
I was hoping this was a reference to an actual work... o_O
It was a discussion about the internet and the music industry. It got around to what he felt music labels SHOULD be doing. His idea was that they should sell their mp3s for pennies a download (actually I think he went even cheaper than pennies a download). Millions of people paying pennies still adds up, especially without the need for the packaging, shipping, middlemen, etc.
People could be much more easily cowed into shame for shirking the cost of $0.01 for a song.
In a global internet, you could glean enough fans for tens of thousands of artists to survive off of.
Then he suggested that stars would not exist.
If you cut the overhead enough, (ie: management) there would be less need to get your return from ONE particular artist.
Of course, there's something about this idea... to implement it would require revolutionary change in the arts industry. It would never jive in the heads of the label heads, because it would require a LOT of trimming in the industry. A lot of C**s would get the boot. Kill the cost of overhead!
But I did find the idea simultaneously wonderful and scary.
Scary, because the idea I might be missing out on really good talent is already displeasing, without the possibility that my six-degrees connection to the artist via word of mouth might not lead to a hit.
Wonderful, because there could be room for so much more talent... the money would be spread around.
Anyway, I tend to think it's a pipe dream. There are too many sheep in the world, and I don't think anyone is planning to let them loose.
I think this might have gone incoherent, I'm finding myself tired.
I hope this made sense.
I need to stop posting on poor
Stopping now.
'Blog' sounds better to me as a noun than a verb, and people using it as a verb ('I'll be blogging from a conference in Anaheim this weekend') always strike me as poseur-ish. Why not 'I'll be updating my blog...'?
But that aside, using the three fad words brought up, I'd make a suggestion.
Blog, the one that persists, is a viable noun/verb. It has been growing steadily in usage for years. It has a logical etymology, if not a pleasant sound.
AYBABTU is not actually viable as anything other than a cultural reference. Sure, it was rampant for a while, but it grew old, because it was entertainment, not vocabulary. I was barely even drawn to the "All Your Iraq Are Belong to Us" flash, and when it didn't load on this Macintrash because of memory, I was not really disappointed. If I see another spoof, I might not even bother to load it. It got old. Depending on what the makeup of your students is, they might not have been 'netizens' at the time of its heyday. (And even if they read Time, they might have even blocked it out as useless.)
While emblog is vocabulary, I see it as too specialised to persist in a short attention span world. Only a select group of people are able to create "emblogs"... and beyond times where popular (ie: CNN-ratings wise) conflicts exist, these "emblogs" will not have a lot of traffic or use. The word will likely die for this reason. Not enough people to emblog, and not enough people to read the emblogs.
I also just don't like it, so I hope that's the last time I refer to them as emblogs. I'd rather call it a warblog or something like that.
As for nounverbing, I think it's something that the internet might foster. emailing, ircing, ftping, dccing... but then again, there's faxing, so maybe it's not a net thing :)
I do like your metaphor of a memetic event horizon.