#rite

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#authors #bible #book #books #digitization

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. ↗

— Bill Withers

#about #am #feel #i #i am

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers. ↗

— James Wolcott

#break #fevers #full-scale #inside #into

Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing. ↗

— George Woodcock

#command #fairly #good #i #i am

Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking. ↗

— James Wolcott

#shut #shut up #sure #sure way #talking

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter'. He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. ↗

— Tom Wolfe

#because #called #desk #editor #father

I was never able to get through Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I've never been able to make it through. And I love the Smashing Pumpkins, they're one of my favorite bands ever, but I've never been able to listen to the whole thing all the way through. ↗

— John Wozniak

#bands #been #ever #favorite #get

Kiss me hot,heavy,wet & angry with that attitude like you do when your mouth yells it hates me but your tongue screams it can’t wait for me. Hug me, touch me, submit to me with that insatiable passion like you do when you thought you could leave but the sight of my throbbing rock hard love muscle made you too weak in the knees. Your mind is melting fast, your soul is whispering trust, your eyes are begging please and your anger has turned to lust. Let me undress your body, caress your skin and wetly massage your mind back into making love to me again. I’d rather say I’m sorry and keep my best friend than have this come to an end. Be encouraged but more importantly…be lethal with your make up love. ↗

— Kerry E. Wagner

#book-clubs #books #erotic-literature #erotica-romance #love

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife. ↗

— Roman Payne

#artists #creation #creativity #literature #writers

Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#books #building #finished #four #go