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| Friday, November 8, 2002 |
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Pro motion 
| | Here's the problem with RageBoy's blog. If you link to just one thing, you risk missing the rest of what's going on. That's just not acceptable. Kinda like what you tend to find there. And why you keep coming back. |
Unmarked
| | Anybody know any big warchalking image galleries? |
Where we are
| | The braggarts of the Web, who claim now that the Bastille of media dominance has been disassembled, think that they are literally in charge of the public agenda and possessed of superior intuition about what the public wants. Their knowledge of the world is painfully constricted, filtered through their own prejudices and not based on a balanced view of the world -- just like the media executives who, for years, may or may not have underestimated the intelligence of the viewing public. |
| | Well, this braggart never made the dissassembly point in the past tense. Nor do I think anybody within a click of here is in charge of an agenda any more public than his or her own blogified social network.(Aside from Glenn Reynolds, who runs the whole Republican/War thing.) |
| | Anyway, Mitch's context for this piece is this ... something ... we call the Web. Here's how he describes our relationship to it: |
| | Being part of a young medium is like being a young writer, in a way. When you are a young writer, you write angry and intense stuff. You go to readings and brood, drinking coffee or beer to excess to amplify your intensity. Your poems and stories are filled with angst and attitude, but very little grace. Characters erupt, they seldom reflect and, so, at the end of the story, nothing really has happened. Respected journals and then the journals of ill repute reject your stories. One day, you realize that teen angst doesn't make for a career. Your anger wears out and you discover that a whole world of emotion and action is open to you and your characters. If you get through that, you may succeed as a writer. |
| | So he talks about a medium here. So does Hollywood. So does Congress. So does the FCC. |
| | Some of us also talk about the Web as a place. Different metaphor. Radically different, in fact. |
| | One sees the Net as a distribution system for content that is addressed for delivery by downloading or streaming to an end user or a consumer. |
| | The other sees the Net as a commons with locations and sites with adresses, where people connect when they link or point or talk or blog or surf or post or put something up — all of which one does when one is located somewhere. |
| | The prepositions are the give-aways. By one metaphor, the Net is something you go through. By the other metaphor, the Net is something you go on. |
| | Of course, both apply. Both are true. Most subjects are understood in terms of many different metaphors. What we need to remember is that we never stop thinking and talking in terms of them. Every metphor brings its own vocabulary, even its own morality. |
| | In Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't, George Lakoff makes a convincing case that both wings conceive politics in terms of an idealized family. The difference is in the models used. Conservatives have what Lakoff calls a "strict father" model, while Liberals have what he calls a "nurturant parent" model. Conservative rhetoric is induced by one, while Liberal rhetoric is induced by the other. For the last election, the GOP sold strict-fatherism thing a lot better than the Dems sold nurturance. And the reason was right there in the title of a book Lakoff wrote back in '95. |
| | So unconscious metaphors are one of those things that make life the journey that it is. Which is another of Mitch's points, I think. The complicated part, anyway. |
| | Today, everyone wants to be part of the show. They don't see that the show is what's wrong, that the showmanship they attribute to themselves is precisely what they damn in others. If the Net is going to change the world, it will have to do it without the hubris it condemns in the established media, established political system and society at large. As it is, the Net is like one big life raft, full of people paddling desperately toward the klieg lights of relevance, a relevance defined by trolls and television producers, who value confession without the accompanying pain of real atonement for one's crimes. I've got just one thing to say: Grow up, people. Of course, who am I to talk? |
| | Well, there we have another metaphor: the stage. When we're part of a show, we're performing for an audience, no? |
| | Actually, I think we are growing up. And part of that growth is what we get when we realize that the kleig lights all still point toward people in makeup playing characters in stories that attract consumers to messages that sell products — and gradually, click by click, we stop watching. Maybe we surf over to one of the nine Discovery Channels, or one of the forty movie channels, or off the tube completely. |
| | What we find when we look around the Web, more and more, isn't kleig lights. It's just other people, showing and saying stuff, and pointing to others who like to do the same. |
| | It's not show-biz, and it's not content-delivery. It's just people showing and saying stuff in a whole new place they're still only beginning to understand. |
Proving them theses
So much for the fire season
| | We're in the midst of the heaviest rain in two years, and our first at the new house. The street out front is a river. Both cars have problems. Two radio stations got knocked off last night. Lots of stuff is due today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that. |
discuss
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