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Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0
hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"
Application of the twelve-tone method appeared well into the 20th century. Mahler is "turn of the century", Romantic-era Schoenberg is "turn of the century", but twelve-tone music really gets its start two decades in.
Schoenberg turned to twelve-tone rows to impose discipline on his music after some years writing freely atonal music. He felt that what he was doing up to that point was "random-sounding music", while twelve-tone rows make it less arbitrary. I for one find great gestalt in twelve-tone music, even the 1950s Darmstadt bleep-bloop stuff. The only truly random-sounding music in the modern-classical world I've encountered is some Ferneyhough, but at least his scores offer some pleasure for reading.
It's funny that conservative music lovers think the Second Viennese School were hacks, yet they don't rage against the Japanese and Detroit noise music scenes, which arguably have a larger popular following and influence and are spreading widely. I've ever been to a couple of sold-out concerts in Beijing where it was just two hours of feedback. Compared to this stuff, Schoenberg's twelve-tone period might as well be late Romanticism.
"Over the years, Lanier has become a skeptic of that amorphous thing called Web 2.0. He directs most of his ire toward the "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups" that flit through our browsers and Twitter feeds. But he's also critical of bigger Internet landmarks, such as Wikipedia, the open-source software Linux, and the "hive mind" in general. It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter." article link
Just another cranky failed ex-hip guy who flamed out cuz he couldn't keep up.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Most European films and art music recordings are made with a boatload of state funding (which is essentially a modern-day patronage system), and there's still quite a few productions that are financed mainly by some nice old man like in traditional patronage. Americans might not accept that -- remember the polemics about the NEA funding "pornography"? -- but it's just how things work in the EU. And yes, a lot of productions are made that have a small audience, but voters in many countries support heavy funding for the whole range of the arts. In Finland where I reside, a poll earlier this year showed overwhelming support among the people for subsidizing orchestral concerts and the like even if only a couple of hundred people attend.
Incidentally, I've always wondered how the Hong Kong film industry not only survives but outright flourishes when it's really difficult to find authentic copies of anything in Hong Kong. How do films generate revenue there?
A claim that the classical music world was somehow taken over by atonalists is just an urban myth. See Joseph N. Straus's famous article "The myth of serial 'tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s" in The Musical Times Vol. 83, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 301-343. He carefully examines the statistics and finds that not only was twelve-tone music not prevalent among music in concert halls (tonal composers like Britten and Copland consistently holding sway), but even in academic ivory towers only a minority of instructors were pushing twelve-tone music.
Consequently, the idea of minimalism coming in and saving the scene from itself just isn't how things were.