Archive for July 14th, 2009
New Mos, New Hope
Has there ever been anything more disappointing in the world of hip-hop than the spectacular musical decline of Mos Def? Though I think his acting is actually pretty solid, his debut Black on Both Sides is still one of the most astounding albums I’ve ever heard – while The New Danger and his other ventures have, to put it generously, been abysmal.
So, I’m feeling hopeful about the good things I’ve heard about the newest release from the MC. I’ve had Mos’ new disc, The Ecstatic, for a few weeks now, but haven’t had a chance to sit down and listen to the entire record. Still, the first few tracks are promising and full of energy, and this review on Moreintelligentlife seems to augur good things. My favourite track so far, “Auditorium”, featuring Slick Rick is below.
Also: while I was a bit gutted to find Mos Def on Stuff White People Like, it’s stuff like this that reminds one of his immense talent.
Pfft, Says the Cyborg To Our Worries About ADD
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on July 14, 2009
Internet superstar and all-round bundle of awesomeness Danah Boyd has a new post up about an experience she had at a conference in Italy, where she was sternly and publicly rebuked for ‘not paying attention’ during a lecture. Of course, while she was ‘goofing off’, Boyd also:
“had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.”
But while the piece starts out as what I suppose is a defence of techno-multitasking, it moves towards considering the effects of a persistent, accessible and ubiquitous network of information. On some level – and even the iPhone is starting to bring us towards this – ‘the network’ enables the creation of a kind of cyborg, one with constant access to both data and databases, computers and computing power. This future-fantastic world is underpinned by a constant backchannel of chatter, a subcutaneous, pre-conscious layer of speech that hovers and hums in the background while conversations happen over and above and around it. Right now, this is probably best exemplified by Twitter, and having seen how much it enlivens and enriches a conference, I can tell you this is far less scary than it sounds.
The other interesting thing here is what happens to knowledge, both in its application and value. It seems that a database approach to knowledege will become key: that ‘smarts’ will now be about putting together knowledge that everyone else has access to in new, different, and newly usable ways, and I think it’s here that we might see a shift from the dominance of narrative to the primacy of the database.
The value of knowledge is an interesting question too. What will happen when knowledge is everywhere, accessible to everyone? A friend likes to argue that we’ll see a ‘return’ – but not – to a kind of oral culture. And that, I think, is about a good a guess as any I’ve heard.
