Miscellanea

A play in multiple parts:

Part the 1st: Creative types are the best sorts of people. Seriously, Marshall McLuhan playing cards. Whodathunkit. I bet the man would have been pleased as piss. Now if only we could get on the ball and get some digital editions of his book.

Part 2: This interview slash review thing just whets my appetite for my coming new gizmo even more. I've already got a series of apps that do entirely different things picked out and downloaded, I just need to get my hands on the shiny. It's so close, and yet, so far.

Third: I really need to get around to grabbing an avatar, I think. As classy as the mysterious head photo is, it's... not terribly descriptive.

4th Portion: Gitelman is incredibly difficult to read. It does not appear to be a fantastic scan. I'm wondering if the Kindle edition would be worth buying just to avoid the headache of trying to read a bad scan.

Sometimes, there's nothing I love better than a history lesson. Mind you, not all history. If I ever have to hear the history of figure skating again, I will throw my sister out of the moving vehicle. There are topics that interest me, though, and reading the histories of such topics can be fascinating. Case in point: Technology and media.

Technology offers some fascinating reading. Take, for example, the Memex. "But what's a Memex?" you may ask, scratching your head in confusion at the mystery (perhaps miraculous?) machine. God knows I did. But after I watched the aforementioned video and read the Wikipedia page a time or two, it finally dawned on me. It's an analog way of linking people to ridiculous videos and related facts. It's a hyperlink machine in an analog world! Amazing. Not only did it theoretically sound cool, but it did with very basic programming what we can do with slightly more advanced programming. You don't hear about these historical oddities terribly often (This one likely because it didn't really exist, but even then it was a good idea), so it's fun whenever one pops up. I'm almost saddened that hyperlinks aren't called Memexs (Memexes? Mememememexexexes? Mmx? The world will never know.).

You know what's just as fun, and tangentially related to the (awesomely named) Memex? The progression of technology and the sussing out of its place in our general lives and culture. I actually like this particular piece, by one Vannevar Bush. Keep in mind that this dates back to 1945. In it, he argues that with the advances in technology brought about by WWII, and the future costs taken into account, we should begin moving more towards a digital landscape. In fact, he creates the hypothetical memex from various technologies that existed at the time. While it's not a perfect machine (I'm sorry, but index numbers for any given thing I own will not work without a search function, which in turn will not work with index numbers), it's an utterly fascinating one to look back on. Take this line for example, early on in the work:

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van.

To put it lightly, this guy would be tripping balls over what we can do with technology now. My phone, which itself is not the most recent model, has more computing power than most of the 20th century. I'm looking at buying a computer with two terabytes worth of hard drive space. I have trouble wrapping my head around one TB. His basic argument is interesting though. By inventing all this technology, humanity finds itself needing to reinvent itself. To do this, we should use technology, and in using technology we will change to become better at using technology, and so will improve said technology.

So which came first: The memex or the genius people who discovered their knack for remembering where things are connected to each other using alphanumeric codes who never lose their keys?

Blogs are, at their basic being, an interesting form of communication. As Andrew Sullivan noted in his piece on why he blogs:

The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation.

This is kind of a big deal. Never before have so few people with so little money been able to reach out to such a wide and broad audience. Everyone uses the internet to some degree. Some, such as my mother, only uses the great series of tubes to look at e-mail and do shopping. Others, such as myself, I suppose, use it much more heavily and broadly. I ingest media with a fervor saved only for cats and their cheezburgers. There are millions like me; us; and we like reading things. Authors sometimes tend to enjoy to writing things. It's win-win for everyone.

Of course, Sullivan tends towards a more... utopian view of this arrangement. Where the commentors act in concert with the blogger, and together they form a more perfect union. With the readers help, the blogger can fact check whatever he writes. With the blogger's help, the readers can help to broaden the blog's purview and add to the general discourse in a meaningful manner. This definitely happens! Somewhere. More often though, the blogger and the reader aren't... necessarily friendly. Something happens with the anonymity of the internet, and some people are.... not as polite as they could be. John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, said it best in this post:

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.

Honestly, I agree with Sullivan about many things in his piece. The ephemeral nature of works on the internet, the strange new world we've all been thrust into regardless of what we did or didn't want, the fun it is to post on THE INTERNETS. I will disagree about the role of the reader though. In a conversation where, at any time, a picture of a cat stuck in a box or a link to any given video (Now in topical humor edition!), isn't much of a conversation. While it all depends on where you're posting and who you're posting to, the commentor/blogger relationship seems fragile, tenuous, at best.

Welcome to Inhilation of Microcosm, my own personal blogspace.

Warning: Not all contents proofread, edited, or completely baked. I will drop half developed threads throughout posts and not return to them until later, if ever. I will switch gears halfway through a sentence and expect the reader to catch up. And I most certainly will include internet culture jokes and links to Rick Rolls. You have been warned.