Unmotivated...
Jan. 14th, 2005 10:40 amI haven't done much political blogging recently. It seems like this week I've been completely wrapped up in family needs-- the house, the kids-- and haven't had the time or inclination to really get down and do some heavy intellectual lifting. Also, there's something about the break in my rhythms of daily life that have made me feel a bit out of wonk this week. Nothing bad, just different.
Christine Rosen has proposed one reason, namely that the tools at my disposal have made me shallower, and I shall propose another: that there are too many tools. She writes about how TiVo and Ipods have turned us into egocasters, pulling in and listening and watching only what we want. One technology she didn't touch on was RSS, which does for one's intellectual media what TiVo and Ipod do for video and audio: allow you to suck in a whole bunch of it. There are 71 feeds in my RSS aggregator (The New Atlantis is one of them, thank to Liferea's "non-RSS handler"), and I just don't have enough time or brainwidth to boil down what I read into a theme, and trying to absorb what the people I read write takes more than I seem to have. It's probably time to ditch a few here and there, but do I ditch the ones with which I agree, or the ones with which I disagree? The latter are always more intriguing.
And when RSS slams into BitTorrent2 (Bittorrent with metatorrents and seed obscuration), the opera will, for all practical purposes, be over. Congress is already mulling over making the singing of "Happy Birthday" without paying the RIAA a crime, rather than a civil infringement (which it is, and which is really f'ing stupid). Imagine when Congress makes it a crime to tell someone else how to use Bittorrent; the line between "speech" and "mechanism" is already blurred by code, and it's going to get worse. The question is only whether the First Amendment is broadend to cover code, or narrowed to cover only non-code-like things.
Meanwhile, I worry that the size of my RSS feed encourages me to "graze" (which is the term industry insiders use for channel surfing) rather than "browse." The first term suggests passive, herd-like activity, the latter is what you do in a library or bookstore. It suggests that we don't get much nutrition from television, but we do from reading. Browsing leads to an encounter with depth, but one only grazes on the shallow and repititious grass of TV. A lot of my RSS feed is "find something outrageous and point at it" (Crooks & Liars, Morons.org, Shrill, Dhimmi Watch, for example) and on the one hand I'm tempted to ditch these because they just raise my blood pressure and on the other I like to keep track of what handbaskets the world is going going to Hell in.
Still, there's something outrageous about my listening to Dreaming: Colour Green while I write about how much data I take in: ( Lyrics )
And just to affirm Miss Rosen's point, I cued up the song on the house's stereo with a remote control, only to realize that I didn't have enough resolution in the speakers, so I sucked it down to my laptop and listened to it through headphones. I never had to leave the couch.
Christine Rosen has proposed one reason, namely that the tools at my disposal have made me shallower, and I shall propose another: that there are too many tools. She writes about how TiVo and Ipods have turned us into egocasters, pulling in and listening and watching only what we want. One technology she didn't touch on was RSS, which does for one's intellectual media what TiVo and Ipod do for video and audio: allow you to suck in a whole bunch of it. There are 71 feeds in my RSS aggregator (The New Atlantis is one of them, thank to Liferea's "non-RSS handler"), and I just don't have enough time or brainwidth to boil down what I read into a theme, and trying to absorb what the people I read write takes more than I seem to have. It's probably time to ditch a few here and there, but do I ditch the ones with which I agree, or the ones with which I disagree? The latter are always more intriguing.
And when RSS slams into BitTorrent2 (Bittorrent with metatorrents and seed obscuration), the opera will, for all practical purposes, be over. Congress is already mulling over making the singing of "Happy Birthday" without paying the RIAA a crime, rather than a civil infringement (which it is, and which is really f'ing stupid). Imagine when Congress makes it a crime to tell someone else how to use Bittorrent; the line between "speech" and "mechanism" is already blurred by code, and it's going to get worse. The question is only whether the First Amendment is broadend to cover code, or narrowed to cover only non-code-like things.
Meanwhile, I worry that the size of my RSS feed encourages me to "graze" (which is the term industry insiders use for channel surfing) rather than "browse." The first term suggests passive, herd-like activity, the latter is what you do in a library or bookstore. It suggests that we don't get much nutrition from television, but we do from reading. Browsing leads to an encounter with depth, but one only grazes on the shallow and repititious grass of TV. A lot of my RSS feed is "find something outrageous and point at it" (Crooks & Liars, Morons.org, Shrill, Dhimmi Watch, for example) and on the one hand I'm tempted to ditch these because they just raise my blood pressure and on the other I like to keep track of what handbaskets the world is going going to Hell in.
Still, there's something outrageous about my listening to Dreaming: Colour Green while I write about how much data I take in: ( Lyrics )
And just to affirm Miss Rosen's point, I cued up the song on the house's stereo with a remote control, only to realize that I didn't have enough resolution in the speakers, so I sucked it down to my laptop and listened to it through headphones. I never had to leave the couch.
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