Posts by giovanni tiso
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She has the knack of writing beautifully about plain things.
Has she ever.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to BenWilson,
The idea that we are unable to see the future and genius can strike at any time. Music could be revolutionized next year by something totally unforeseen, as could some branch of science, and we’ll reflect that actually the period we lived through just had a dearth.
That’s Lanier point I think. And it’s worth remarking that he came out of a milieu – the Californian cradle of digital culture – whose core belief was that the ICT revolution would bring about unimaginable creative innovation in both industry and the arts. So to hear him say that it hasn’t quite worked out so far is possibly more noteworthy that if a jaded postmodernist had made the same observations.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to nzlemming,
Was it a marketing thing, do you think? I’m curious why binge-drinking seems to have become a problem world-wide, and I wonder how much of it traces back to marketing the products at the young.
I don't know. It may have something to do with the decrease in availability of the aforementioned heroin, but really I have no clue. There wasn't a lot of marketing of alcohol to youths as far as I can recall, but then I was no longer the target market at that point.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
It seems things are different now, sadly:
Yes, we have developed quite the binge drinking culture in the last decade and a half, just not as a result of changes in liquor law or availability of the stuff. (And I didn’t mean to say that we were more virtuous back in the day either – not that I'm suggesting you thought I was – in fact heroin was quite popular in my age group when I was a lad. I understand it’s not as much of a problem now.)
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Can I get this straight? Do you think that abolishing any age restriction on the purchase of alcohol would result in more or fewer 12 year-olds consuming alcohol?
When I grew up I didn't even know what the legal drinking age was in Italy - in fact I still don't. I know we used to order beer in restaurants at 16, and it was never an issue. Nor did we wait for a magical age threshold after which we could get smashed. Which is not to say that New Zealand doesn't need an age limit, just that the drinking culture would seem the bigger culprit by a very sizeable margin.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
I do think the data are such that anyone who proposes a mere correlation needs to suggest some alternative causes.
I was asking because when I was a kid in the seventies I was well aware of the dangers of smoking, unlike my parents before me, and in spite of the lack of any antismoking campaigns. And so when the age came when I would have taken up smoking otherwise, ie the mid eighties, I didn't, like many of my peers.
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Do you include greater knowledge about the dangers of smoking under "smokefree policy"?
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The CEO of the Bad News Burial Service is called Coffin. You can't make this shit up.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Sacha,
We're currently being railroaded in the opposite direction by American entertainment industry lobbying.
And by Kevin Kelly. I wouldn't underestimate the extent in which the "adapt or die" crowd is huting this debate - which I guess is my whole point.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's not necessarily anything wrong with working with something from the 1950s -- it's but a second ago in the context of the span of human popular culture.
I think his argument (and the book was published before dubstep, I should note. Also, he rates hip hop as the latest greatest innovation) is that flourishing of new genres of the first nine decades of the 20th century stopped at a time that coincided with the explosion of digital media. I am not not terribly qualified to judge the content of the argument or satisfied that he has proved causation, but it's quite interesting coming from a guy that for years was selling the concept that innovation would have accelerated post-Web, instead of endlessly replaying old forms.
(Coming from a literary angle one could make the argument that pastiche predated the web, although it happened to coincide with the rise of electronic media.)