I've moved my blog to WP: idefiningi.wordpress.com
October 14, 2010
www.life.com (n.)
- a true conundrum, after last night's Massey Lecture, which will be broadcast on CBC radio later this month.
Douglas Coupland made a fine point after a lovely reading of the first chapter of his 5 hour/5 chapter book Player One. We, as a live audience, even got the pleasure of watching the author himself sift through minefields of long sentences, chuckle under his breath after getting lost in punctuation - who put that comma there? Oh, I did! - and sip on his water before returning to a very witty narrative about five strangers meeting in an airport lounge during a world catastrophe (there will be blood).
This year's lecture was the first to date to be under the fiction category.
Topics of question included (without much expansion here, because I'll let you all use your imagination, as Coupland would probably appreciate):
split screens / player1 vs player 2 as Coupland's inspiration for telling a single story from the persepctive of at least 2 characters in many of his novels.
sequencing: When faced with a screen, we only have the attention span of the length of a Beatles song (2min45s)/i.e. we can't help but click, look elsewhere, open a new window within that time.
[I'm impressed I can even write this blog without checking Facebook].
In general, post-modern life is just a series of sequences (something that only humans can do), and with the digital age become more of a way of life than a mere phenomenon, we have less and less down time. And no down time can be bad - because our lives will slip by very quickly as we'll experience time as moving much faster. In a sense then, technology has partly lengthened our lives, but also shortened it...
fiction as timeless: it speeds up time. And it is great at taking us through ideas rather than preaching ideas to us (like lectures do!)
money as the physical form of our human desire to speed up time and somehow ultimately escape it.
[I also bought his book for $20.95, which really opens up a whole other realm of interesting philosophical conundrums].
pessimism is much more interesting than optimism. Realism is worst.
I also was introduced to Doug's Law:
"You can have information or you can have life, but you can't have both."
And with that I shall close my windo, let this informative internet world collapse away so I can go LIVE.
Toodles!
- Vish
Douglas Coupland made a fine point after a lovely reading of the first chapter of his 5 hour/5 chapter book Player One. We, as a live audience, even got the pleasure of watching the author himself sift through minefields of long sentences, chuckle under his breath after getting lost in punctuation - who put that comma there? Oh, I did! - and sip on his water before returning to a very witty narrative about five strangers meeting in an airport lounge during a world catastrophe (there will be blood).
This year's lecture was the first to date to be under the fiction category.
Topics of question included (without much expansion here, because I'll let you all use your imagination, as Coupland would probably appreciate):
split screens / player1 vs player 2 as Coupland's inspiration for telling a single story from the persepctive of at least 2 characters in many of his novels.
sequencing: When faced with a screen, we only have the attention span of the length of a Beatles song (2min45s)/i.e. we can't help but click, look elsewhere, open a new window within that time.
[I'm impressed I can even write this blog without checking Facebook].
In general, post-modern life is just a series of sequences (something that only humans can do), and with the digital age become more of a way of life than a mere phenomenon, we have less and less down time. And no down time can be bad - because our lives will slip by very quickly as we'll experience time as moving much faster. In a sense then, technology has partly lengthened our lives, but also shortened it...
fiction as timeless: it speeds up time. And it is great at taking us through ideas rather than preaching ideas to us (like lectures do!)
money as the physical form of our human desire to speed up time and somehow ultimately escape it.
[I also bought his book for $20.95, which really opens up a whole other realm of interesting philosophical conundrums].
pessimism is much more interesting than optimism. Realism is worst.
I also was introduced to Doug's Law:
"You can have information or you can have life, but you can't have both."
And with that I shall close my windo, let this informative internet world collapse away so I can go LIVE.
Toodles!
- Vish
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