reviews

I've just come across this selection of Amazon.com reviews. From Amazon's extensive product list, "Bewerter" has reviewed:

• a chair;
  
• an electric fan;
  
• and a popular book on Algorithmic Information Theory and philosophy of Mathematics

(you can guess which of those led me to stumble across him).

This is so interesting. First of all there's the Amazon customer's name: "Bewerter". That means "reviewer", doesn't it? Certainly not "mathematician" or "sedentary person" or "cool guy". And the objects reviewed, though few in number, are so spectacularly diverse. What do they have in common? Only that this chap (somehow I think it's a he) has reviewed them.

Is Bewerter showing us a new way of looking at the world? One rooted in Web 2.0 and the new forms of online capitalism? Where the defining attribute of objects is not function or content, but how they've been reviewed?

Why are we still here?

I guess there are several people who'd like answers to that question, each with his or her own view of why we shouldn't still be here. What a lot of fun I could have! But I had something less destructive in mind.

When you think about it, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned: the idea of people sitting in a room listening to another person speak, even with multimedia accompaniment, or talking to one another. What's wrong with them? Don't they have internet in their houses? Surely that's enough, whether they want to know about the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Laplace's Equation, the Killing Times or medieval tapestry. More and more scholarly articles are widely available for those who want to delve deeper. Why come to a class? - you can just teach yourself.

Of course there are a lot of obvious answers. I hope anybody who reads this and is interested will add some of them as comments - just a word or two will be fine, guys! But I'm also wondering, not for the first time, how we can use the new opportunities these media present, what useful revisions of practice they offer us. We need to keep thinking about this because the technologies keep changing.

I was grappling with this topic two or three posts ago and I deferred to Aimee Mann; now I think it's either write a book or tackle it a tiny bit at a time, with no idea of where we'll wind up. And I guess that's what a blog is for. So, first of what may become an extended sequence. Give us your thoughts!

Aimee Mann

I've been mulling over the implications of the internet for the ownership of knowledge and expertise, and the question of where people like ourselves fit into the big flows of these quantities (can we even speak about them in such terms?) across societal groupings in the light of these new media. Mulling so much I'm not sure what to say that can be spat out in a little blog. Need to mull some more. Or produce a long series of them. Or defer to cleverer people.

So let me just for now share this, possibly surprising news to those who hear the fearsome sounds that sometimes accompany my work in room 406, that this evening I am enjoying very much Aimee Mann's "Bachelor No 2", songs full of darkness, passion and intensity that comes across in the finely and carefully crafted words and the measured arrangements and is only enhanced by the understatement of the singing; strategies for lasting effect. Potent.

Normal service resumed soon.