Burnin’

As a new media intra/entrepreneur, I spend a great deal of time exploring the bleeding edges of communications technology–social networks, mobile platforms, consumer generated content, etc. Yet, I was an English major in college and I maintain a fondness for books and other printed matter—a fact which helps make the following academic discourse meaningful to me.

Sven Birkerts, editor of the journal Agni, defends print and the critical culture that analyzes it for the common good. Here’s a passage from his piece in The Boston Globe:

I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises. My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian “polymorphous perverse,” that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself — what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.

But this “mattering” requires the existence of a common ground, a shared set of traditions — a center which is the collectively known picture of private and public life as set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so. Arbiters, critics . . . reviewers.

The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty — some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well — but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.

Academics and critics LOVE authority. Their very existence depends upon it. Hence, the trouble they have adopting blogs, believing in Wikipedia and the like. The thing is there’s no going back. The question is therefore, “How best to extract value from new media?” It seems to me the formal set might do well to establish their own corner of the Web where standards matter. The Web is enormous. There’s room for amateurs and pros.

Thanks to a business trip to NYC, I was fortunate to dine at Gotham Bar and Grill last night. I opened with Black Bass Ceviche made with purple Peruvian potatoes, red onion and avocado in a pineapple aji amarillo emulsion. For my main course, I chose organic salmon with jasmine rice and yard beans in an eggplant and cilantro coconut lime broth.

Then today on the plane back to Savannah, I read in the Business section of The New York Times how Singapore Airlines is serving chef Alfred Portale’s food in first class, including the ceviche dish, which I can now attest is out of this world.

We think of successful CEOs as people with exceptional technical skills, and while they may in fact embody this type of knowledge, their curious minds can be more closely linked to their capital achievements.

Author Harriet Rubin paid a visit to the personal libraries of some of America’s business titans for her article in The New York Times. Here she is with Michael Moritz in San Francisco:

Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind.

“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.”

Rubin notes that Steve Jobs has an “inexhaustible interest” in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. How revealing is that?

“Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.

If you believe an informed citizenry is the key to a healthy democracy, this following bit of news from The New York Times is more than a little alarming.

According to a report released last week the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, only 16 percent of young adults aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and only 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.

Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.

[UPDATE] A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.

Source: Wired

“Writers differ from all other creative types in that they suffer the illusion that the world really needs to hear what they have to say.” -Rollo May Ph.D.

Jackie Danicki recently came across the above quote from America’s best known existential psychologist. But she ain’t buying it.

As soon as I read that quotation, I knew it was the misguided sentiment of a socialist. When you no longer view “the world” as a faceless, voiceless collective and instead see it for what it is - made up of distinct, wonderful, flawed individuals - losing self-consciousness in the doing of good is no longer a problem.

Danicki believes that social media services like Twitter, blogs, Flickr and Facebook expands her world, making it “more special and more populated with valued people.” Amen to that, sister.

Footnote: I found Danicki on Twitter.

Near the end of President “I’m the decider” Bush’s press conference yesterday, he said something interesting.

I’m like any other political figure. Everybody wants to be loved — just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don’t enable you to be loved. And so, when it’s all said and done, if you ever come down and visit the old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say, I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics. And that’s important to me.

If you believe, as many do, that Bush is a dolt, then you can take his above statement at face value and give the man some credit for having convictions.

On the other hand, if he’s something more than a frat boy gone bad, if he is in fact a calculating, semi-intelligent member of the American aristocracy–and I believe he is–then we must examine which convictions he refers to. Is it his desire to make his buddies in the military industrial complex, of which the oil industry is front and center, rich beyond compare? That’s a good bet.

With the possible exception of WWI and WWII, the United States doesn’t enter wars for idealogical reasons. I know that may sound shocking, but a close analysis of American history resolves the question. We enter wars for financial gain, pure and simple. Given that, Bush can pound his fist and make faces all he wants, while telling “the people” about his noble fight for a democratic Middle East. It simply isn’t believable. There’s too much evidence to the contrary. Not on TV. In books and well-researched print articles from serious journalists like Greg Palast.

I’ll give him this, Bush does not play politics. His reign has shown that politics–that tired old system whereby consensus is sought–matters not. This man, and the peolpe he is surrounded by, have no concern whatsoever for the American people, nor the people of the world. His rhetoric about democracy is a joke. Given that we don’t have a democracy at home, how could we possibly export such a system abroad?

by Shawn Stucky

Yo! What Happened To Peace? is an exhibition of anti-war posters that’s opening in Brussels, Belgium on July 20th. The exhibition has already been shown in Los Angeles, Rome, Milan, Chicago, Tokyo, and Reykjavik.

See more images in the Flickr gallery. The image above is also available for purchase from Etsy.

Andrew Keen has the digeratis’ panties in a twist. His new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard.

According to the review in the The New York Times, his book is “a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the wisdom of the crowd.”

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

This reaction to the democratization of media is to be expected. I’m surprised there aren’t more such critics lurking about. Grassroots structures scare so called experts. This particular expert is also quite the name caller. The San Francisco Chronicle invited him to guest blog, and he used the opportunity to say:

Unfortunately, the intellectual life of Silicon Valley is monopolized by intellectual communists like Stanford’s Larry Lessig, hippies posing as futurists like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, new-age geeks like Larry Page and Craig Newmark, wide-eyed economic utopians like Chris “Long Tail” Anderson and technophile impresarios like John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly.

Thankfully, he also calls himself an elitist.

I fully admit to being an elitist. I believe in a strictly meritocratic society of experts, one is which creative ability is rewarded. I think that most people have little talent and shouldn’t be encouraged to think of themselves as writers or musicians or porn stars. I want to be educated and entertained by the opinion of Habermas, Zizek, Lucy Kellaway or Maureen Dowd, rather than the ranting of some half-educated blogger.

This guy has the whiff of Ann Coulter about him. In other words, the more outrageous his babble the more press he gets.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is running for U.S. Congress as an Independent and she hopes to topple the current Speaker of the House in the process.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Sheehan, a Californian, announced she will challenge Nancy Pelosi if the lawmaker has not moved to impeach Bush and Cheney by July 23–the day she plans to arrive in Washington after her 13-day caravan to the nation’s capitol.

“My campaign is going to happen, because we know she is not going to put impeachment on the table,” Sheehan said.

A spokesman for Pelosi said her “focus is on winning the war in Iraq.”

In cultural terms, New Orleans is arguably the most important city in the United States. I’ve been there five times and there is no place like it—not in this country. Which is why I find Dan Baum’s reports from New Orleans so vital.

Painting by James Michalopoulos

Baum, a staff writer at The New Yorker, arrived in New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina and has reported on the disaster and its aftermath ever since. Earlier this year, he returned for four months, filing daily dispatches from New Orleans and working with his wife and writing partner on a book to be published in 2009.

In his final blog post on The New Yorker’s site, Baum dives into cultural insights about the Crescent City, noting just how different the place is from the rest of America.

New Orleans endures as the national repository of the loose-jointed Huck Finn spirit we Americans claim to cherish. While the rest of us pare down our humanity in service to the dollar, New Orleans is a corner of America where efficiency and maximized profit are not the civic religion. As I drive past endless repetitions of Wendy’s, Golden Corral, Ethan Allen furniture, Jiffy Lube, Red Lobster, and the like on my way back to Colorado, I realize that I haven’t spent a dollar anyplace but locally owned business in four months. A long time ago, David Freedman, the general manager of the listener-supported radio station WWOZ, described New Orleans to me as a kind of resistance-army headquarters. “Everyplace else in America, Clear Channel has commodified our music, McDonald’s has commodified our food, and Disney has commodified our fantasies,” he said. “None of that has taken hold in New Orleans.” In the speedy, future-oriented, hyper-productive, and globalized twenty-first century, New Orleans’s refusal to sacrifice the pleasures of the moment amounts to a life style of civil disobedience.

Baum goes on to descibe Boulder, CO–where’s he lives–as “a city full of high-achieving software engineers and real-estate brokers who have built a fabulously well-organized community, with excellent schools, thriving businesses, and immaculate parks, but who can’t find the time to sit a spell on the porch, let alone enjoy a second beer.”

Sounds like he’s going to miss New Orleans.

[via Evelyn Rodriguez]