technology
September 08, 2006
Pop Culture 2.0?
It's the end of an era. Two of the most influential figures in American pop culture were fired this week: Tom Freston and Robert Christgau. Freston, who was head of Viacom's cable networks, was one of the key executives behind the rise of MTV. Christgau is the self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics," the writer who redefined the rock canon away from the populism of the mainstream music press, and toward what he sometimes called "semipopular music."
Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV's web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by "Web 2.0" social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist's free classified ads.
The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop's presumed market of scarcity - only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars - is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions - and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it's the community they've built that brings eyeballs to Paris's page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.
The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels' sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial's shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. "The Long Tail" grows ever longer.
Which explains not only Freston's departure, but perhaps Christgau's, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there's no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?
Christgau himself was never an indie snob - he's always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I'm sure he'll land on his feet - some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I'm not so sure about, although I'm confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau's. But the real question is what comes next.
Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it's so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it's all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they're sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each - all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.
That doesn't mean they'll stay that way. I'm sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop's top tastemaker. But I doubt we'll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There's just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau's the one who taught me that. And now everybody's figuring it out.
Posted by tedf at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2006
Save the Internet!
A. J. Liebling warned, "Freedom of press is guaranteed only to those who own one." The internet has spawned millions of printing presses, leading to an explosion of democratic discourse perhaps unmatched in human history. Anybody with access to a computer and a web connection can join the fray.
But don't think it can't be taken away.
Right now, there's a debate in congress over "net neutrality." It's hard to get worked up over something that sounds so technical, but the stakes couldn't be higher.
The end of net neutrality would mean the end of the internet as we know it today in America. The giant corporations which provide internet access to most Americans would be free to sell preferential access to the highest bidder - and to squeeze the bandwidth of the websites that don't pay their protection money.
The internet didn't get the way it is today by accident, or simply because of the "free market." The system was coded - by regulators and technologists - in ways that enforce fair, equal treatment to all speakers. But code can be altered, and don't think big media wouldn't love to see all us uppity bloggers put back in our place, and the net turned from a global public square to just another mass medium.
If you think I'm exaggerating here, check out this shockingly spiteful and incoherent rant from Mike McCurry, onetime Clinton hand, now lapdog for the telcos. (To get some context on McCurry's bewhilderingly aggreived tone, check out Joshua Micah Marshall here, and Adam Green here.)
For more on how net neutrality works, check out this video distributed by MoveOn:
To get involved in this struggle over the future of democratic discourse in the United States, go to savetheinternet.com.
UPDATE: From the New Yorker, here's James Surowiecki on net neutrality. Surowiecki's an extraordinary business writer, and he does a great job of laying out the economics of the conflict, but I think he understates the dangers to democracy posed by the loss of net neutrality. Right now, the internet is America's public square. The end of net neutrality could turn it into a mall.
Posted by tedf at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
"The Future Is Already Here, It's Just Unevenly Distributed"
The above quote comes from William Gibson, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since it's turned up in the last two books my grad seminar in new media has read: first Peter Morville's wonderful Ambient Findability, then Joel Garreau's fascinating, overblown Radical Evolution.
Gibson's line is one of those sexy aphorisms that crystalizes a whole theory of the relationship between technology and society, like Stewart Brand's famous dictum, "Information wants to be free." But as with Brand's pontification, it conceals as much as it reveals.
What makes Gibson's phrase so appealing is the idea that we can get a grip on what is to come if we just examine today's cutting edge. To understand the future of mobile technologies, study how the hippest teens in Tokyo use IM. To see what ubiquitous broadband produces, go to Seoul. And to see the future of the human species, check out the research at DARPA's hottest labs (as Garreau did).
But there's something suspiciously self-flattering about a theory of history that so easily boils down to, "We technorati are already living in the future; now it's just up to the rest of the world to catch up."
Granted, this smug, monolithic vision of progress isn't an inevitable corollary of Gibson's aphorism. After all, the phrase doesn't specify who's living in the present, and who's living in the future. Perhaps it's Brazil's present that's the future of the USA: increasing stratification of haves and have-nots. Or maybe in a hundred years everybody will decide it's the Amish who really live the good life. We could simply interpret the line to mean, "To understand the possible shapes the future might take, study the range of ways people live today."
But when I actually see Gibson's phrase invoked, it's almost always being used to justify an author's predictions of inevitable social change to be produced by the inexorable forward march of technology. It implies you can't argue with the author's predictions of the future - after all, it's already here. And that's just a new way to justify old-fashioned technological determinism. Garreau's book claims to offer a range of "scenarios" for how the future might look. But what all of them take for granted, despite his protestations, is that the engine of history is technological change, and that such change is continuously accellerating (thanks to Moore's Law, which predicts that the speed of processing power will continue to double every two years for the foreseeable future). Even Garreau's less deterministic predictions start from the premise that humans will have to take strong action to avoid being pulled along by the tidal force of technology.
But Garreau too quickly takes the grand predictions of technologists - both the optimists like Ray Kurzweil and pessimists like Bill Joy - at face value. The past fifty years have seen many, many pronouncements of the inevitability of certain technological developments - from machine sentience to space tourism to the extension of the human life span. Each has been derailed by the irreducible complexity of the real world - by the mystery of consciousness, by the expense of space travel, by the relentlessness of mortality. Instead, the greatest breakthroughs have been in the development of a parallel universe designed precisely to escape the constraints of the material world: cyberspace. Given that track record, I'm skeptical that the next fifty years will see us finally get back to those flying cars and cancer cures we were promised fify years ago.
Moore's Law creates the illusion that technology is speeding forward at a breakneck, ever-accellerating pace. But a few minutes with Windows XP should be enough to shatter that fantasy. Processor power may double every two years, but that doesn't mean software improves at the same rate - or at all. Bloatware can make a Pentium 4 run more sluggishly than my old 386. That's supposed to be a sign of the progress that's going to transform the human species?
I'm being flip, I know. I'm sure we're in for profound changes over the next few decades, many influenced by the emergence of powerful new technologies. And certainly some awesome technologies - nuclear bombs, for one - have the power to radically and quickly transform our globe. But whenever I hear technologists make grand predictions about the future, I always consider how they may be projecting their own fantasies and fears. This is the process I describe in Electric Dreams as the dialectic of technological determinism: using the rhetoric of inevitability as a cover to authorize utopian (and dystopian) speculation. That's fine - by all means, let's talk about what kinds of futures we want to live in. But let's remember that the choice is always up to us. After all, our machines are just extensions of our selves.
The future may well already be here. But nobody can say for sure where it is, or how we'll know it when we see it.
Posted by tedf at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2006
Annals of Lousy Web Design
My Tivo eats the latest episode of The Amazing Race, so I go to Google Video to download it. I click to purchase, and discover paid downloads only work on Macs. So I switch to my PC, and when I click to purchase, up pops the CBS Amazing Race website - complete with a giant headline spoiling the results of the episode I was about to watch. D'oh!
Posted by tedf at 01:06 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2006
TPM on How Print Journalists Rip Off Bloggers
This is a fascinating rant from the normally diplomatic Joshua Micah Marshall, author of Talking Points Memo and editor/publisher of TPM Muckraker and TPM Cafe. It's on how print reporters routinely rip off stories first reported by bloggers and publish them without credit, as if they were original reporting.
I know many professional journalists are made defensive by the world of amateur/self-employed bloggers. But that's no excuse for intellectual dishonesty.
Posted by tedf at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
The Future of RSS
Thanks to the great Feedburner service, I've now incorporated my Flickr RSS feed into the Tedlog feed. That means that those of you who read this blog in an RSS aggregator will now get all the new Flickr photos as they're posted, as well. My hope is that this creates an RSS analogue to the design of the website, which runs a selection of photos along the right-hand column.
RSS is a tricky medium - full of promise, but also full of new design challenges. The concept of news aggregation is really smart and forward-thinking. It replaces the paradigm of the static bookmark with the paradigm of the continuously updated feed.
I think Apple's Safari 2.0 does the best job of turning RSS feeds into useful information. A bookmark menu runs along the top, just below the toolbar. After each menu item is a number in parentheses. That's how many new blog entries have been posted since the last time the feed was opened. So, at a glance, you can see which of your top blogs have new content, and which don't. You eliminate the annoyance of visiting a favorite site only to discover that nothing new has been posted since the last time you checked. And you can do it all from right inside your web browser, without having to run a separate program.
But I still have problems with how RSS is visually implemented. In Safari, if I decide I want to read a specific blog entry, I usually click straight through from the page that displays the RSS feed, to the website itself.
The problem is that in any RSS reader, the original visual context of a blog entry is effaced, replaced by the formatting options of a range of different aggregators. The challenge is to find ways to exploit the developing Atom feed language (Atom is the HTML of RSS, more or less) to put design back into blogs. This Feedburner service combining blog feeds with Flickr feeds is a great example of how to answer this challenge by leveraging the power of RSS technology. A web page is one single, indivisible thing. But an RSS feed is a collection of many discrete items. So they can be juggled and recombined in an array of ways.
If RSS is really going to reach its potential, it can't just be about content, but also form. There has to be room for bloggers to shape the visual style of their self-representations. The web isn't just about words. After all, it was Mosaic, the first graphical browser, which finally turned the internet into a mass medium. RSS is still waiting for its Mosaic.
Posted by tedf at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2006
Nate Annotates Dell's New Powerbook Wannabe
yuckybook on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Posted by tedf at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2006
Switching To The Mac
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been looking for feedback on the possibility of switching to the Mac after 20 years of PCs. Since I just made the switch myself, I sent him my advice. Here it is:
I switched from PC to Mac 6 months ago. I had all the same concerns as you - wasting my investment in PC skills and equipment, trusting one company for all my computing, paying the Mac premium, etc. The transition certainly hasn't been hassle-free, but it's definitely been worth it. The big differences are:- The stability of OS X vs. Win XP. I practically never have to reboot OS X. If a single app locks up, I can always Force Quit without affecting other programs.
- The elegance of the Mac interface. I thought it wasn't that big a difference, but I was wrong. In all the little things, the Mac is a pleasure to use, while Windows is clunky.
- The Mac apps. Mail, Pages, and Safari are just better programs than their Microsoft counterparts - faster, smoother, with smarter feature sets. If you use iTunes on your PC, you already know how much better that is than MediaPlayer. The other Apple programs are similar improvements.
Then there's the pleasure of not sending any more of my money to Redmond. Not that Jobs & Co. are saints, but at least they've earned my dollars.
UPDATE: Over the weekend, Marshall took the plunge and bought his first Mac.
Posted by tedf at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2006
Why Oh Why Can't The iPod Alternatives Get Their Acts Together?
I love iPods. I've had three of them, and each has served me well. KT just got the Nano, which is gorgeous. And I'm sure I'll eventually break down and get a video iPod. But when my last iPod disappeared last November, I decided to take a flyer on something different: the Creative Zen Micro. The big selling point for me was the new Rhapsody To Go service.
I've been a subscriber to the basic Rhapsody service for years. It's amazing - just about every album you could want (with a few exceptions, like the Beatles and obscure indies), all streaming to your PC for one monthly fee. I've discovered so much great music I never would have found otherwise. It's a whole different way of thinking about music - as a utility, rather than a commodity. (I take this up further in the chapter on digital music in my book.)
The idea behind Rhapsody To Go is to extend the utility model into the domain of the iPod, allowing you to fill up a portable player with all the music you want for $15 a month. What's supposed to make it work is the Windows "Plays for Sure" digital rights management system, which makes sure you can only access the music on your player if your subscription's up to date.
Fair enough. Except Plays for Sure is rarely a sure thing. Sometimes, Rhapsody will claim it can't transfer a track to my player because there's no space left, even when there's plenty of space. Other times, it'll insist the music's already on the player, when it isn't. And every month, when the subscription turns over, it doesn't politely remind you to plug your player back in to prove that you've paid up - it just locks up without warning and refuses to play any tracks. Very annoying if you're away from your computer, as you're likely to be when you're using a portable player. Scans of the support bulletin boards confirm that I'm hardly the only one with these problems. And the lack of official responses to any of the plaintive posts for help confirm that Real Networks, which bought Rhapsody a couple of years ago, is blowing off its frustrated customers, either through arrogance or ignorance.
I was still so enthralled by the whole portable-subscription concept that I bought another player, the Rio Carbon. Brought it home only to discover that the reason for the deep discount was that Rio had just gone under. Unsurprisingly, it didn't mesh with Rhapsody any better than the Zen did.
I tried Napster, which is now a legit music service offering its own To Go system. Neither Zen nor Carbon could make it happy.
With so many vendors failing so completely, the fault must lie with crappy underlying code, courtesy of Microsoft. What a shock.
Actually, I'm sure the problem isn't just Microsoft, but also the record companies that demanded DRM that they thought would be airtight enough to withstand decryption. As a result, the whole system is so clunky that it takes the Zen fifteen seconds just to boot up, and another ten seconds to start playing a new playlist. That's if it works at all, of course. And the DRM can still be easily evaded by anybody who uses Replay Music, a program that can turn any audio you play on your PC into an MP3.
Apple products may be overpriced and overhyped, but they're elegant, they're easy to use, and they work. That iPod that disappeared last November turned up last week - a saint of a GSU student found it and returned it. I'm packing up the Carbon and the Zen and reinstalling iTunes. I'll still use Rhapsody on my PC - and at least now I can use it on my Mac, too, thanks to a new cross-platform web-based version. (It's buggy, but at least it admits it's still a beta.) But for now, it's back to pay-as-you-go listening again.
Actually, I just read that Amazon's coming out with its own portable subscription service this summer. I'll try not to get my hopes up too high . . .
Posted by tedf at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
Transcipt of WashingtonPost.com Webchat
Thanks to all of you who dropped by today's webchat at WashingtonPost.com. If you didn't get a chance to follow it live, the transcript is available below. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us in the Comments section.
Posted by tedf at 03:22 PM | Comments (2)
My New Grad Class on the Past, Present and Future of Media
You can check out the syllabus here:
Comparative Studies in Emerging Media: Spring 2006 Syllabus
Posted by tedf at 04:22 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
This Is a New One On Me: Fake-Blog Spam
This is really bizarre: what appears to be an entire fake blog, filled with randomly-generated text, designed to build up Google page ranks for various webscams. In the middle of it is a completely arbitrary link to one of my old blog posts (that's how I stumbled across it - as a longtime alllergy sufferrer, I was curious what some blogger who called themselves "Flonase" had to say about my site). I guess this is latest variant on comment spam and trackback spam.
This kind of randomly-generated text always has a weird poetic quality, like William Burroughs's experiments with writing by cutting up newspapers and drawing words out of his hat. Like those proverbial monkeys at typewriters, presumably if this goes on long enough, somebody will accidentally produce the complete works of Shakespeare . . .
On the subject of webspam, I'm about to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2, which should hopefully help me fix the infestation which forced me to drop comments a few months ago. More on that to follow in a future post . . .
Posted by tedf at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2005
Very Smart Analysis from Scott Rosenberg on Google's New Service
"Google Base" appears to be Google's competitor to Craigslist, but it could be a whole lot more. Salon's Scott Rosenberg addresses why that could be a problem . . .
Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment
Posted by tedf at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2005
Dvorak on Gamers as the Real PC Visionaries
Here's a great column by computer industry pundit John Dvorak on the XBox 360. He concludes that it's the best computer product he's seen in a decade (a stealth Media PC), and that the reason why is because it was designed by gamers, not the business-software developers who have dominated product development over the last deade.
Opinions from PC Magazine: Xbox 360 to the Rescue
Posted by tedf at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
Books vs. Blogs
Steven Johnson makes a very persuasive case here for why he doesn't blog about his books as he writes them. On the other hand, as he acknowledges, other writers are experimenting with treating book-writing as an open-source project. Laurence Lessig, for example, has opened up his book Code to be collectively rewritten as a Wikki document. I haven't figured out yet exactly what relationship I want this blog to have to my books. Johnson points out that blogging and book-writing are very different activities: blogging is of the moment, while writing a book involves crafting a sustained relationship with a reader over hundreds of pages and hours of reading. But as I wrap up my first book, I feel like I could use a little bloglike urgency in my writing routine.
Academia's rhythms make Johnson's world of commercial book publishing look like a sprint. The oldest section in my book, on computer games, dates back to an essay I wrote in my first semester of graduate school, 13 years ago. I started the project itself as my dissertation in 1994 or so. I defended the diss in 1999. I took some time off, then revamped the whole thing and started sending proposals out to presses in 2003. Reviews and revisions for NYU Press have taken another two years. Now I'm finally at the stage of cover design and proofing copy edits, and it's still going to be another six months before the book goes on sale. Even after all that, it often takes years before academic journals get around to reviewing new books! As someone who's always leaned towards instant gratification over delayed pleasures, I'm amazed my head hasn't exploded yet. So forgive me if getting to see all my deepest musings on cats, gardening, and baseball posted instantly online makes me a little giddy.
Perhaps the most appealing model I've come across is the way Wired editor Chris Anderson is writing The Long Tail, the book version of his brilliant essay on how Internet technologies such as iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix encourage diversity and break down least-common-denominator culture by making less-popular music, books, movies, and so on financially viable and even lucrative. He's blogging continually about the writing process, getting feedback from his readers as he goes along.
That's what I'm hoping I can get going when I start gearing up for my next book, which will be on the politics of Hollywood movies. But first, I may need to get a few more random observations off my chest. Stay tuned for my feelings on this year's American Idol . . .
Posted by tedf at 02:59 AM | Comments (0)
Managing Info Overload
I'm grappling with a familiar dilemma. I've had a lot of fun blogging over the last few weeks, but the result has been a backlog of emails and articles I've meant to read. This week, I finally started catching up, but at the cost of the blogging.
It boils down to this: when I sit down at the computer with some free time, I have have the choice of reading or writing. Ideally, I'd flow smoothly from one to the other. But in practice, they're pretty different mindsets. I find spending a long time at the computer reading puts me in a fuzzy, passive, vaguely tense state. Writing these entries, on the other hand, tends to leave me feeling satisfied, with a sense of accomplishment.
Part of the problem is that reading online is never-ending - there's always backlog. (I start a new tab in Opera for every article I mean to read. I usually have several dozen tabs open at any one time. And I don't want to admit how many messages are sitting in my Inbox right now.) By contrast, posting a blog entry is a much more contained project - when it's done, it's done. (I force myself not to tweak entries, beyond a quick proofread.)
But when I don't keep up with my email, with the New York Times, with Salon and Slate and all my RSS feeds, I feel out of touch, and burdened by the backlog. I worry that blogging is just spinning my wheels, when I could be learning new things and catching up on my responsibilities.
Actually, I worry that the net is screwing up my reading patterns in general. On the one hand, having all this great stuff to read all the time is amazing, of course. But I find that if I don't watch out, I'm only reading ephemeral commentary - news articles, blogs - and never reading books (other than the ones I assign for classes). That's one nice part of adding book reviews to the blog, actually - it gives me another motivation to read entire books.
I can't be the only one feeling this way. I see references to blog overload all the time. A recent ad for The Washington Post on Talking Points Memo, for example, promoted a subscription as a one-stop alternative to having to keep up with dozens of political blogs. (They've pulled back on that now, presumably out of fear of offending the blog-reading audience - now they call themselves "the great complement to political blogs.")
So what's the ideal balance? How best to handle info overload? I don't know, but I do know that active is almost always better than passive, long-term trumps ephemera, and it's silly to stress out over self-imposed info-consumption expectations. So I'm going to do my best to read more books, keep writing, and accept that my online newsgathering may take a hit. And if I owe any of you reading this an email, my apologies - I promise I'll get to it as soon as I can.
Posted by tedf at 01:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
Flip Walk Gallery
In 2000, my buddy Gavin bought an apartment just a block away from the World Trade Center. He and his wife Jen were home on 9/11, and they raced north through the smoke with their cat, Alma. When I visited them all a couple of months later back at the apartment, the smell was still thick in the air.
Living in that neighborhood since then has been a distinct kind of challenge. Most of the retail vanished - the grocery store, the Borders, the Krispy Kreme. The future of their neighborhood has been the subject of architectural competition, international debate, and political grandstanding. And tourists hover on the corner to get a peek at Ground Zero.
Last year, Gavin began documenting part of his experience in this recovering neighborhood. Here's what he does:
In the summer of 2004, I decided to start walking around. I would leave my house and flip a coin. If it was heads, I'd go left. If it was tails, I'd go right. At every intersection, I'd flip the coin again: after an hour, I'd stop and photograph whatever block I was on.The result is this gallery. I've chosen one photograph from the end of each walk, and written up some information about where I went and how I got there. The plan is to do a hundred walks. I have a few ground rules about where I can walk and what the flips mean, but my basic rule is not to cheat: I'm surrendering my fate to chance.
As I step out my front door and flip my coin, I keep walking away from home. So far, I keep coming back.
Posted by tedf at 02:04 AM | Comments (5)
April 01, 2005
Tedlog Stats for March 2005
Today is the one-month anniversary of Tedlog. Some quick stats:
- Posts: 45
- Comments: 35
- Unique visitors: 3,260
- Pages viewed: 16,384
- Number of people who clicked on the "tedhair.jpg" image to get a larger view: 100
- Number of people who downloaded the movie I made in grad school about Star Trek: 41
- Strangest search string which led visitors to the site: "a man tries to overnight himself as a package." It led to my essay on Cast Away, although the searcher was more likely looking for info on the Velvet Underground's "The Gift."
Overall, I'm thrilled and a little boggled by the numbers, given that I'm just starting this thing. I'm particularly encouraged by the upward trend. At the beginning of the month, I was averaging 135-150 unique visitors a day. By the end of the month, I was up to over 200 unique visitors each day.
By far the biggest boost was the "Pick Ted's Hair Contest," which produced an immediate uptick in visitors. I may have to start thinking about other aspects of my persona which could be made over by blog vote. Any suggestions? (I guess the next contest could be, "Pick Ted's Next Contest.")
The content of the blog has been even more all over the place than I expected. I started out with the goal of making the blog an extension of my academic work - sort of a cultural studies version of how economist J. Bradford Delong writes about the economic aspects of breaking political news. There's been a fair bit of that, but I keep finding myself getting sidetracked by cats, baseball, gardening, Buddhism, and all my other random obsessions and fleeting enthusiasms. The result is probably a more accurate map of my scattered mind, but perhaps less useful than a more targeted resource. That's unlikely to change, though, because expounding on all this stuff has turned out to be more fun and rewarding than I could have imagined. And in the long run, I guess I do still hope that I can build a grand unified theory of cats, baseball, gardening, Buddhism, and post-Marxist critical theory.
I do hope to keep building up a readership, because part of the fun of this is feeling like it's not simply spinning into the void. I started out my writing career as a freelance critic at magazines like Spin and Details, because I wanted to find an outlet where my voice could be heard. I switched over to academia, because I wanted the freedom to write more than 200-word record reviews. Blogging may offer the best of all worlds.
Thanks for listening!
Posted by tedf at 01:28 AM | Comments (4)
March 01, 2005
Open for Business!
OK, this website is now fully operational and open for business! In addition to this blog, the site has archives of my writing, syllabi, multimedia projects, and other assorted stuff. Just about every page is enables with Comments. I’ll be using the blog itself both to post interesting media news items and to expound on topics relating to politics and pop culture.
Posted by tedf at 03:39 AM | Comments (3)
February 27, 2005
Under Construction
Hi Everybody -
Soon, this will be the home of my new blog, along with a completely updated website with papers, syllabi, links and more. For now, though, you can see the old version of my site here .
Posted by tedf at 05:05 AM | Comments (0)