Back to school
Yes, it’s September already. The US Open is underway. Football starts this week. The fog is coming back to San Francisco. But, most importantly, school is back in session.
Some required reading for the fall semester: Esther Dyson’s recent article re. intellectual property on the net. John Perry Barlow’s “Economy of Ideas” (because everything you know about intellectual property is wrong). The syllabus for Donna Hoffman’s course on Marketing in Computer Mediated Environments at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Dave Winer’s DaveNet column and Web site. And anything by Mark Amerika.
Speaking of Mark Amerika, I’m going to quote from his “This is all I do Now” piece, just because I can. The copyright is his. (But the fact that I can “reprint” this piece here on my pages just reinforces the need to understand what Dyson and Barlow are talking about in the articles above.) Anyway…
There seems to be an obvious difference between the emerging generation of alternative writers and their predecessors. The difference is that this current crop of writers, of which I’m part, has a higher level of comfort when it comes to activating their creative personas within the mediascape’s hypermarket of endless products. We new kids on the block have years of experience watching TV, checking out films, playing with computers, going to concerts, being bombarded by advertisements of all kinds, etc., and have immunized ourselves from the wads of uninspiring bullshit that constantly comes our way. We aren’t Vietnam Vets. Rather, we’re Media Vets. Our ability to angle, spin, surf, rap, digress and flow into uncharted territory is much more intuitive than the Silent and early-Boomer generations because we were born the live, on-line citizens of McLuhan’s global village and don’t have to be convinced that this is where we as a race are going. We’re already there.
- Mark Amerika, in Amerika-Online, “This is All I do Now“