via Jozef Imrich - Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
"The name-letter effect," proven many times over, finds that people prefer letters that appear in their own names.↩︎ Futility Closet
The Unpunished Vice: A Life Of Reading By Edmund White
Some nightmares, the worst ones, move so slowly that you don’t wake up from them right away. The terror feels normal, even though you may know something’s not right. It’s a usual sort of bad feeling, typical enough to fool the mind into believing that you may be awake. That is, until the monster shows up. Only then does the brain recognize it is inside something that isn’t real
Gough Whitlam attended Sydney University from the age of 18 and graduated as a Bachelor of Arts
with honours in classics. He then studied law, but it is true to say
that the classics remained with him throughout his life. He often quoted
one of the ancients, be it a Greek or Roman philosopher, in the
parliament, party room or an interview, usually to the bewilderment of
his audience. Senator Bernardi would be interested to learn that Mr
Whitlam excelled in the sport of rowing whilst at university.When you shift to a new topic or activity, you segue as Dr Simon Longstaff once observed that Gough Whitlam was very good at finding common grounds even in the houses of the members of the ultra conservative parties. Allegedly, Gough was invited to a dinner party at the house of a Tory who used to be an Olympic rower. Even though Gough had nothing in common with the host he started his after dinner speech with one thing that connected them. "We might not appear to have anything in common, however, we both share the same characteristics you as a rower look one way but head the other just as the politicians do ..."
Here are three essays that make very different arguments but are worth reading, and (I think) worth reading together via Kotke h/t Michael Schaefer of DeepBlog An Easy Guide & Portal to Quality Blogs
1. “How the Blog Broke the Web,” by Amy Hoy. Hoy’s essay is alternately nostalgic for the early days of blogs and smartly critical of the choices that were made then and how they affected the later development of the web.
Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.Suddenly, instead of building their own system, they were workinginside one.A system someone else built.
In particular, Hoy argues, the push towards chronological organization and frequent chronological updates privileged blogs over other kinds of early web production, and drove out sites that had a weirder, more perpendicular relationship to time.
2. Dave Winer, “What Became of the Blogosphere?” Winer is focused on a narrower problem, but he gives it wide implications.
What changed is we lost the center. I know something about this because I created and operated weblogs.com. It worked at first, but then the blogosphere grew and grew, and weblogs.com didn’t or couldn’t scale to meet it. Eventually I sold it because it was such a personal burden for me.The blogosphere is made of people, but the people treated the center like a corporation, and it wasn’t. If we ever want to reboot the center, there has to be a cooperative spirit, and a limit to its scope to avoid the scaling problems. You can’t put a big corp at the center of something so independent, or it ceases to be independent…There used to be a communication network among bloggers, but that’s gone now.
3. Navneet Alang, “Ding Dong, The Feed Is Dead.” Alang is interested in how the disappearing story is coming to displace the chronological archive.
Even if a tweet didn’t ruin your life, you still have an archive of embarrassment that Facebook has diligently saved for you: ill-advised jokes, too-earnest expressions of emotion, and photos in which we simply look terrible. While movements like #deletefacebook were ostensibly about protecting your data from corporations, perhaps they also reflected a desire for another kind of privacy: a way to just erase all that unflattering history.What happens next is probably not the overthrow of Facebook or Twitter especially now that those platforms are making a lot of noise about how they want to change. The need for an online presence, even if it’s just LinkedIn, is a big historical shift, not just a fad. But instead of a handful of big, public platforms, I wonder if we can expect a proliferation of smaller, more private platforms to find their place. Not only are they safer and friendlier, but they also foster a loyalty and intimacy that the big networks simply can’t….These smaller, temporary spaces produce a similar effect to traditional social media—a space to vent and laugh and carebut without the downsides of a public forum.
There are some things that reverse chronology is good for, and some things where it isn’t. There are some cases where a greater visibility and intercommunication is exactly what you want, and some where you want the exact opposite. But we’re also riding the wave of dozens if not hundreds of subtly shaping decisions that are not ours, and maybe were never ours. We can only change them if we understand them first.
That’s a tall order for anyone, even if you weren’t here for the entire history of how everything unfolded in the first place.
Michael Erard pokes away at the “administrative hypothesis,” the idea that ancient writing had its origin in accounting bureaucracies and existed primarily as a function of state power. There’s just as much evidence, he argues, that states and proto-states co-opted already-existing symbols used by pre-state farmers to keep tallies and mark time, and more provocatively, by priests who used writing as a script for prophecy, narrative, and magic spells. N
Over and over, what we see is that writing is more like gunpowder than like a nuclear bomb. In each of the four sites of the independent invention of writing, there’s either no evidence one way or the other, or there’s evidence that a proto-writing pre-dated the administrative needs of the state. Even in Mesopotamia, a phonetic cuneiform script was used for a few hundred years for accounting before writing was used for overtly political purposes. As far as the reductive argument that accountants invented writing in Mesopotamia, it’s true that writing came from counting, but temple priests get the credit more than accountants do. ‘Priests invented writing’ is a reduction I can live with - it posits writing as a tool for contacting the supernatural realm, recording the movement of spirits, inspecting the inscrutable wishes of divinities.
It’s a complex argument, because it has at least two parts:
1) writing wasn’t invented by states (even writing for accounting purposes);
2) writing has been invented for reasons other than an accounting function.
2) writing has been invented for reasons other than an accounting function.
So most of Erard’s examples are arguing against one part of the most robust version of the adminstrative hypothesis, rather than refuting it outright. This is hardly a knockout blow, but it makes for some notable asterisks. (I wish there were more here about China.)