Earlier this week Greta and I went to see the new climate change film The Age of Stupid. It's a documentary with a speculative fiction frame around it, and that's what I want to talk about, the form, rather than the content of the film. I've blogged before several times about climate change. You know where I stand on that. Read more>>>

author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Steev
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2009/09/20
shelves: fun, novels, politics
review:

author: Ursula K. Le Guin

name: Steev

average rating: 3.52

book published: 1985

rating: 5

read at: 2003/01/01

date added: 2009/09/20

shelves: novels, politics

review:

author: Louis Rosenfeld

name: Steev

average rating: 3.82

book published: 1998

rating: 3

read at:

date added: 2009/09/18

shelves:

review:

author: Douglas Stone

name: Steev

average rating: 3.87

book published: 1999

rating: 5

read at: 2009/09/10

date added: 2009/09/16

shelves: spirit-self

author: Junot Díaz

name: Steev

average rating: 3.88

book published: 2007

rating: 4

read at: 2009/09/16

date added: 2009/09/16

shelves: novels

I just, stupidly enough, wasted about 15 minutes trying to figure out what happened with Kanye West. Something he did made even the president of the United States call him a jackass? Hmm. I finally figured it out (amazing how the entertainment media will always assume you know the background, as opposed to real news that is constantly re-explaining everything as if nobody has any more than a 3rd-grade education) and then found a great post by Mike Hale on his New York Times blog where he really summed the whole phenomenon (not just of what Kanye did but more importantly why it's such a big deal) up nicely:

...just the latest manifestation of our addiction to artificial drama, which has grown stronger as the stuff has become more plentiful and cheap, and the shamelessness with which the media now picks at the scabs of any sort of conflict in order to boost ratings.

My friend Ryn brought to my attention a very interesting and worthwhile article about the tendencies for social divisions to be duplicated online, concentrating specifically on the class divisions between MySpace and Facebook.

I think I have some doubts about some of the author's conclusions, but without seeing her actual numbers and methods, having only the anecdotal examples she gave, I can't argue and will give her the benefit of the doubt that her data supports her points. Certainly, I don't doubt and fully believe the most general points, that
1) different social networking communities are populated by different demographics and are self-segregated, somewhat.
and
2) technology will not automatically solve the separations and prejudices that exist in the "real" world.

The really interesting thing, to me, is that this has been happening for awhile - these kind of debates and debunkings of popular hype about "new media" were going on starting 14 or 15 years ago when the Web first started taking off, with a flood of rhetoric about the "digital 'revolution'" and the liberatory potential of technology. People were questioning this along various lines, including class and race based analyses. I'd recommend a great anthology called
"Resisting the Virtual Life" and a little later there was a great book
called "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents".

A professor of mine at CalArts told me back in 1996 how excited everyone (well, artists and activists, at least) was in the early 70s about the radical and democratic potential of video, but things didn't really pan out how they hoped, so she was a little skeptical about the same sort of talk regarding the web. Basically people have always been scared of, hopeful for, hyping, and debunking new technologies, probably since the wheel and fire, certainly on into film, TV, radio, home computers, etc. I'm glad that some are bringin' the noise on this round, but it's helpful to remember that it's a continuous loop.... and a continuous fight, to make sure that the pernicious effects of any new technology are minimized and the beneficial ones are amplified and widespread...

author: Ellen Ullman

name: Steev

average rating: 3.41

book published: 1997

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2009/09/07

shelves: politics

review:

author: Iain A. Boal

name: Steev

average rating: 4.67

book published: 1995

rating: 5

read at: 1997/01/01

date added: 2009/09/07

shelves: politics

review: