Procrastination, interrupted by productivity; a link post to fill in the gaps…

• Tom Ewing in Pitchfork, Around the World in 84 Tweets:

  Endless disappointment is the cross the early adopter has to bear.

  Sad for early adopters, but true; early adopters simply aren’t great judges of what the rest of the world wants or needs. Ever wonder why crossing the chasm is so hard?

  What Twitter doesn’t have is much cyber-utopianism: Everyone knows now the web isn’t an equalizing force.

  Twitter amplifies your voice in proportion to how loud it was anyway. The rest is up to you.

  Evolution, not revolution.

• Upton Sinclair:
  

  It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

  (via Jay Parkinson)

• Micah Sifry, discussing Michael Wesch’s keynote at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 about YouTube culture and the politics of authenticity:
  

  [Wesch] artfully sketches a picture of modern culture, where individuals consume mass media, powerful institutions rule their lives from a distance, and anomie and disconnection are the norm … But then he asks whether the new mass practices of uploading, remixing, commenting and sharing media–where we ARE the media–might be enabling a different, more genuinely connected and hopeful culture to form.

  Personally, I think we don’t know the answer but Wesch’s talk both sharpened the question for me and helped frame more clearly how we think about this debate. His juxtaposition of the photo of his college lecture hall class sitting bored at their desks with a photo of hundreds of young people eagerly, desperately trying to get onto American Idol makes clear that whatever we PdFers may imagine is the new culture, it’s still mostly a marginal phenomenon.

  Meanwhile, check out the video for a couple points by Wesch:

  1) Starting at 6:20, the history of “whatever” and a couple Simpsons references to “eh” and “meh”.

  2) Starting at 18:05, about conversations through mediums, creating versions of ourselves and context collapse:

  Talking to a camera [a communication medium] creates a version of context collapse, which forces a certain amount of … self-consciousness that maybe isn’t evident in everyday conversation.

  3) And his closing question, at 30:46:

  How do we use this to conquer the narcissistic disengagement that we see today in a society still ruled by trivialities?

  Or better yet, can we?

  (via Charles Frith)