I’ve been getting kind of frustrated with the recycling of media around me. Like I read something on BoingBoing and then it gets posted somewhere else aand then two weeks later I hear people on CBC talking about it as if they just discovered it independently. Maclean’s does the same thing in their page near the back of random neat things. Every week I read it (so like 8 months worth of magazines) one of the things was something they found via a BoingBoing post.
Now it’s not even like BoingBoing creates these things, they’re just pointing out what other people send them. So it’s kind of like getting different information but if everyone just represents it, what’s the point?
Like there’s very little point to watching a newscast anymore, unless it’s for the indepth features. I’m getting the same headlines they’re talking about on my computer here all day via RSS and all that. I can pick the top three stories of the day no problem (even make a fairly educated guess about the differences between where Global and the CBC’ll run them in the newscast). Okay, locally I’m a bit more shaky, but still. Why watch television? At least when I read a story on the Net that’s done sort of poorly it’s quick. Sitting through a half hour of poorly chosen leads for a slow news day is nigh tortuous.
I’m reading (among other things) Hugo Stross’ book Accelerando, which is a postsingularity sort of novel (kind of like cyberpunk but more realistic and less chrome). In it the main character just got his metacortex stolen. All those feeds of information that are augmenting his brain become so much a part of him that he’s suffering from “drive by amnesia.” That idea of constant inflow attracts me so much, but makes me so sick, I love it. I love that kicking it up a notch and kicking it down notches are both legitimately radically transforming things to do. This really is a great time to be alive.
