“We have had an enormous and concerted act of social disobedience play out over the past half-decade, where millions have decided that the present regime of intellectual property law and corporate control over the way we communicate is no longer tenable. So, every day, with the click of a button, people from all walks of life are ignoring the law and protesting in public, simply by uploading content to YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else.”
—Make The Revolution - Anil Dash
September 2010
6 posts
“We need much more critical reading, and we also, desperately, need much more linking from Old Media to outside sources. Links aren’t something cute to relegate to a blog ghetto — they’re an intrinsic part of what journalism has to be in the 21st Century…”
—Teaching journalists to read by Felix Salmon at Reuters.
“You, on the other hand, actually are working on something, and it keeps evolving. You don’t like the section you just finished, and you are not sure what will happen next. When someone asks, “What are you working on?,” you stumble, because it is hard to explain. The smug guy with the beer and the cigarette? He’s a poseur and never actually writes anything. So he can practice his pat little answer endlessly, through hundreds of beers and thousands of cigarettes. Don’t be fooled: You are the winner here. When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don’t feel like that, then you aren’t working hard enough.”
—
10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education
(via aldaily)
Play
“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?”
—
Jonathan Lethem, The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism
(reblogged via stoweboyd)
“I’m not exactly a pessimist. I recognize, and celebrate, the fact that the digital environment of 2010 is the coolest, most interesting, most option-filled it’s ever been. In that sense, mirroring the situation with Internet access despite censorship around the world, the slope of the generative curve is positive. But, also mirroring the situation with censorship and filtering, I see the pieces further moving into place for a step change in how the Internet works. In where new innovations come from. And in how readily regulators can pull the plug on services and content they don’t like. At its core, the Future of the Internet is an argument against complacency, and against the simplicity of thinking that if only market forces are allowed to work their magic, everything else we care about will more or less fall into place.”
—Jonathan Zittrain asking, Has the Future of the Internet come about?
