I read a great article by Nicholas Carr about how the internet is ruining our attention spans. I couldn't agree with him more, in fact, I'm already bored of writing this entry. I'd rather go check my mail or see if anyone's posted anything new to Flickr. Plus there's this HUGE fly in my house that's just buzzing around and it's driving me insane. Oh, and I'm watching South Park while I try and write this. It's the one where Kyle has surgery to become tall and black so he can be good at basketball. I've seen this one but I don't want to turn it to Iron Chef because then I'll get all involved in the show and never finish this post.
*sigh* This post is going to be weird.
One of my heroes is Marshall McLuhan. His ideas about communication and media were brilliant and prophetic. I'm not even going to attempt to capitulate Mr. McLuhan, I just wanted to bring up his writing style. His books have been called 'mosaics' since there is no linear pattern to be found. Check out "War and Peace in the Global Village." It's incredible.
"We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies."
The internet tries far too hard to fit into other media molds. News sites are newspapers, company's websites are brochures, store's websites are catalogs. In its better moments, the internet is at its best when it rejects these molds. Too few people think about the MEDIUM. The web is clouded with methods, monetization, standards and trends.
Did you see they're showing TV shows on the internet now? Yep. Brilliant. They got radio on that thing now, too.
*sigh*
I remember having this conversation when I was about 14… in 1992. The olden days. $1/gallon gas days.
Boy: "This Telnet chat is cool."
Me: "Totally."
Boy: "But what if we had a computer with a really good sound card and a microphone. Then what if we had a really fast internet connection that could handle sending audio. Then you could actually TALK to the person on the other end. They'd just have to have a speaker and a microphone too."
Me: "So… you'd have a telephone."
South Park is long over. Now the midnight rerun of the Daily Show is on.
Gotta go.