via Rhizome

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1. Frame analysis reveals the complexity of mundane social activities and it brings out the arbitrary nature of any fixed, social-domain or activity-based dichotomy between what is "staged" and what is "real". It brings out the reality-constructing capacities of what is staged, but also the staged nature of the everyday tangibly real. Note in this respect for instance that mass-media communication - including especially the solidly real called "news broadcasting" - is saturated by frame laminations which are deliberately and purposefully staged. What's more, an understanding of media communication is rather hard to arrive at, unless one comes to terms with the constructed pretense of an absence of mediation and the audiences' routine submission to an illusion of direct communication - even in situations where such a pretense becomes extremely hard to sustain... via Stef Slembrouck | What is meant by discourse analysis?
2. Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
   Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
   Source:  New York Times
3. What the world needs now? Donkey basketball and in-fighting yesterday afternoon and night in Texas.  Really now, this is what the world needs.  Change to pay the parking meter. It seems John McCain turned in early after an iced tea and chicken fried steak dinner. I burned the midnight oil second night in a row. How goes your team? (Best. Campaign. Ever.) Entranced Stage Left, Tejas

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Human beings are naturally hierarchical and they like arranging themselves into hierarchies of skill, age, wealth, competence, experience, whatever. We can deny it if we want, but we all know that when the chips are down and the anarchists have formed the anarchists’ association, the first thing they do is elect a governing committee.

 Hierarchies, writes Denis Dutton, are intrinsic to human society, and resentment of elites can be traced back to prehistory.

Read the rest of Hard-wired for the ups and downs by Denis Dutton

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1. Only a small fraction of funding by investment banks, mortgage companies, brokerages, equity funds, hedge funds, commodities futures speculators, etc., comes from actual investor capital. The rest—up to ninety-seven percent, in the case of commodities futures contracts—is credit self-created by the banks.

   Where did the banks get this credit? The answer is that they simply cranked it out through their fractional reserve privileges derived from their government charters. In fact the only way money comes into existence in this day and age is through a loan from a bank which must be repaid with interest. The loan is secured by the borrower’s collateral or promise to pay. But the cumulative interest load on the economy grows exponentially. As a part of the federal budget, for instance, interest on the national debt is around $500 billion a year and growing.

   via Global Research: Impacts of the Financial Crisis: The U.S. Is Becoming an Impoverished Nation
2. You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate "team-building" exercises. They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing. And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company. So why did it seem there was something odd about them? I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We've now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder. The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed. So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong. I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees. I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that's more natural for humans. I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild. Read the rest of the article here. via Paul Graham | hat tip Hugh MacLeod [gapingvoid.com]

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This post on Flickr caught my eye as I was skipping rocks in my Netvibes universe today.

Scanned cover of a book I found dumped in a box on a street in Berlin, from the Cambridge University Press printed in 1983. Love the dramatic title and the strangely psychedelic imagery.

Oh, btw, this is a language book for Germans

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1. So why not consider a revolutionary if not long-forgotten information concept: a book; a book whose pages have texture that can be felt; a book whose letters make a slight indentation in the paper yet jump off the page; a book with hand-stitched binding. "I'm trying to get people to see a book as an aesthetic artifact, not as a generic container," says Dave Wofford, who operates the one-man letterpress Horse and Buggy Press. "I like the concept of attention to detail, tactileness, intimacy. To me books can't be beat for those things. via The Durham News Horse and Buggy Press

2. He pioneered the cult of youth and turned himself into a brand. No wonder Oscar Wilde is still seen as ‘one of us’

   From The London Times

   by Gyles Brandreth Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death by Gyles Brandreth will be published by John Murray on May 1

   Last Sunday I made a pilgrimage to the Père Lachaise cemetery, in the northeast of Paris, to pay my respects to the shade of Oscar Wilde. I found I was not alone. The great man’s grave was surrounded by quite a crowd, including a party of Japanese students, a family of Germans (the father was wearing lederhosen) and an assortment of young people in their twenties: French, Italian, British and American.

   In his own time, he was an outsider and an exotic. Now he’s one of us. We understand his craving for celebrity. We share his obsession with youth. (“Youth is the one thing worth having,” he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

   As I arrived, one of the young women (an English student from St Andrews) was planting a kiss on the huge Jacob Epstein effigy that surmounts the poet’s grave. She was kissing the marble deliberately, to leave the lipstick impression of her mouth on the monument. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Because I love him,” she replied. “We all do,” added another of the girls. “He’s one of us.” Wilde, it seems, is our contemporary. He died in Paris 108 years ago, a near-friendless exile, impoverished, shunned, disgraced. Today, he is world-famous and universally admired. There are 1,000 lipstick impressions on his tomb. He would not have quarrelled with the attention: he was a pioneer of celebrity culture. “If you wish for reputation and fame in the world,” he advised, “take every opportunity of advertising yourself. Remember the Latin saying, ‘Fame springs from one’s own house.’ ” At theatrical first nights, as a matter of policy, during the 10 minutes before the curtain was due to rise, he would make a series of brief appearances around the auditorium - in the dress circle, in the stalls, in the boxes on either side of the stage. He wore outlandish clothes; he said outrageous things. He set out to get himself noticed. He was. And he is. I am writing a series of Victorian murder mysteries, traditional who-dunnits featuring Wilde as my detective, and, as my publishers cart me about the world, I am discovering that my hero’s fan base extends way beyond Europe and North America. He has a substantial following in South America, the Middle East, India and - wait for it - Korea. Other Victorian writers may be more widely read (Dickens and Conan Doyle, for example), but I reckon that no other individual Victorian, however eminent (no, not Queen Victoria herself), lives on as a personality in quite the way that Wilde does. [Continue reading the Times article here]

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