I’m not sure how much I’ll update for the next week or so. Lara and I are leaving in the morning for Jamaica, where we’ve found a very cool beachfront house that we’ll be staying in for the next week. This is the first vacation we’ve taken together in quite a while. It will be nice to unwind. The Treasure Beach area of Jamaica sounds like it will be just the ticket.
I’ll try to post a few updates while we’re there, but it will depend on my ability (and willingness) to dial in from there.
Great piece by Howard Rheingold in Online Journalism Review on the rise of “peer-to-peer” journalism. Rheingold has been one of my cyber-heros from the start. His book “The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier” had a profound effect on me back in the day. I remember being mesmerized by the Electric Minds community he started in the mid-90s. I’d spend hours on there talking to people and interacting.
His latest is “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” Haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list. His article in OJR raises some fascinating ideas. I’m generally dubious that the masses can rise up and commit journalism. But it does seem to be happening. Blogging is an interesting example, and as we become more mobile, less tethered to a T1 line and desktop computer, the possibilities become endless. But there are plenty of obstacles that can emerge, too.
To quote Rheingold:
“As I write this, the world is in transition from … a moment when it is obvious that a new social phenomenon is emerging but it is not yet clear whether we are seeing a fad that is destined to be assimilated, commoditized, and/or disinformated, or whether we are witnessing the emergence of a powerful new medium for collective action, like the literacy that was enabled by the printing press and Internet.
“Because the winners and losers of the era of mobile media aren’t decided yet and the boundaries between domains have not been negotiated, the uncertainty of the situation presents an opportunity: Informed action in the near future could influence the way this nascent media culture develops — or fails to develop — for decades to come.”
Just finished “The Steel Workers” by John A. Fitch. It was part of the Pittsburgh series, several books that catalog Pittsburgh’s industrial might in the early 20th century. The book started with great promise, Fitch offering inteviews with steel workers that I though were heading toward a Studs Terkel kind of treatment. But he quickly retreated to official sources and details on the steel industry. Interesting, but I’d have found it more useful if he’d have let the workers speak more. The other thing that is odd is the way he dismisses the immigrant workers. He doesn’t even attempt to interview or talk to them and assesses them coldly, distantly. One of the “American born” workers gives a typical view of the immigrants: “Here I am with these hunkies. They don’t seem like men to me hardly. They can’t talk United States. You tell them somehting and they just look and say ‘Me no fustay, me no fustay.'”
Thanks to Howard Owens, I’m reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of a James Joyce. It’s a fascinating book, revealing a lot of the autobiograpy in Joyce’s fiction. It’s also a good read, which is sometimes not the case with literary biography. In fact, I reluctantly picked this one up. Now I can’t put it down. It’s making me want to re-read Joyce, who’s “grocer’s assistant’s mind” always fascinated me. His interest in minute detail and his ability to elevate the pedestrian is incredible …