I dove right in to this excerpt of an N+1 article posted on Slate over the holiday weekend: MFA vs. NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last? Having not broken into either literary culture myself, I admit that my reading was at first simply an exercise in seeing how both halves lived. But as I made my way through the piece, I kept testing the substitution of the word "music" (in the new/academic-ish/non-commercial sense) for "fiction" and wondered if we could … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: More Seats At the Table
November 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Blogger and sometimes Mind the Gap commenter Brian Rosen has been following along with us this week for Book Club IV and was even inspired enough to play along at home on his own excellent Music vs. Theater site. He was kind enough to drop me a line, and I'm sorry we didn't have him with us all week. Just so discussion generated by our little pow-wow here was linked up, I asked Brian if we could include a bit of his analysis in this space, and this is what he sent along in response. [Kelly … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: Muss es sein?
November 19, 2010 By 3 Comments
by Matthew GuerrieriDang, Molly got to the Kelly's whole technology-is-inevitable argument before I did, but that's OK, I'll talk about it anyway, because I think it's a good example of the interesting tension that I felt throughout the entire book. Kelly insists on inevitability to argue against throwing up cautionary roadblocks, what, in chapter 12, he calls the Precautionary Principle. One the one hand, this is, in part, fodder for the six-degrees-of-teleology game that you can play … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: It’s Alive!
November 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
[excerpted from today's xkcd multi-post] No, not really alive alive.Or, as Kelly would explain it: … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: Unstoppable
November 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Molly Sheridan "Technology is anything invented before you were born." "Technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet."--Kelly jokes about how other people define technology I admit that sometimes Kelly's book made me nervous, like trapped on a speeding train nervous. This was not the only pop culture parallel I drew. One of the points he grounds his argument on is the idea that certain ideas and developments have been and will continue to be inevitable, in that they have historically … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: It’s All How You Look at It
November 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Matthew GuerrieriMarc has already pointed out one of the most immediate connections between the proliferation of technology and music-making, that is, the evolution and development of instruments. He's exactly right--there's a deep, sometimes invisible relationship between the musical technology we choose to adopt and the music that results. (There's also Kelly's own what-if-Bach-didn't-have-the-harpsichord contrafactual, which I find mildly ridiculous for reasons I might get into before … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: More Than 31 Flavors
November 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Molly SheridanWhat Technology Wants was the first book I purchased for my Kindle, and considering I'm a feet-dragger when it comes to new tech tools (the reader was a gift from my husband) the reverse concept was never far from my mind as I read: Yeah, and what about what I want from technology? What Matthew suspects is correct: Kelly will hold to the idea that progress is always a good thing, no matter what, to the very end of the book. I thought his arguments as to why that was might make … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: It Thinks It’s People!
November 16, 2010 By 4 Comments
By Matthew GuerrieriAh, the anthropomorphic fallacy. Is there any more comfortable way of avoiding having to deal with the darker impulses of human nature? And like a lot of other optimistic views of technology, What Technology Wants is steeped in it. Kelly even puts it in the title, straight off begging the question: does technology want anything?Now, I should clarify up front that I don't think anthropomorphization is necessarily a bad thing. It can be a useful way to illustrate ideas, an … [Read more...]
What Technology Wants: The Evolution of Making Sound
November 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Marc Weidenbaum With music, as well as more broadly culture, as the context in which we're reading Kevin Kelly's book, the (entirely hypothetical) evolution-like course of the development of musical instruments is something I've been especially interested in. I understand that Kelly defines "technology" as broadly as to include written language (which is something that Julian Dibbell, it's worth mentioning, also emphasizes in his introduction to this year's Best Technology Writing … [Read more...]
Book Club Is Back: What Technology Wants
November 14, 2010 By 1 Comment
This week (November 15-19) members of our friendly music and culture blogger think tank are once again gathering around the computer, this time to reflect on Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. This wasn't in the book, but I sure hope technology wants 3-D printers that produce wine and cheese so these things can have sharable snacks in the near future. In the meantime, to get everyone's appetite whetted, what the book does cover is not just the recent explosion of new technologies and how they … [Read more...]
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