expectations of mediocrity
January 11, 2010 30 Comments
America’s Next Top Pundit
And I didn’t win. As Kevin Drum notes,
By the way, the ten winners include a Nobel Prize winner, a Bush 43 assistant secretary of commerce (guess which one), a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, a former researcher at the Kennedy School of Government, an Atlantic Media fellow, and a small-town newspaper editor. Not exactly a crowd of just plain folks. It might have been more fun to read the other 4,790 entries.
I guess the odds were against me. I was under the impression this would be a battle between relative amateurs and unknowns, not Nobel Prize winners and Atlantic Media fellows. I stand corrected.
In any case, here’s what I submitted, in case you’re interested: [Read more →]
November 2, 2009 6 Comments
Democratization and Meritocratization in Writing
My friend explained that it is indeed standard fair for DJs to play with laptops and that mp3s are used as much as records these days with an interface software that allows the mp3s to be grafted onto control records that allow the DJ to spin as though they are doing so with an actual pressed version of the track rather than just a digital copy. I thought that was all pretty cool until he said that, in fact, there werew programs out there that would do all of the beat matchng for you, so that anyone could basically buy the software, the hardware, and the tracks an call themselves a DJ.
“So the old argument about DJs being nothing more than glorified cd players has come true…” I quipped, somewhat disappointed.
In part he said that was true, but that on some level the innovation of mp3s and software had also deeply democratized the project of DJing.
“It used to be that the best DJs were the best DJs because they had relationships with the record stores and when the new tracks would come in the store owners would put them aside for those DJs so that only a select few people had the most cutting edge selection,” he said, “If you were just starting out, you had to beg, borrow, and steal your way into getting decent tracks.” “Now,” he noted, “everyone has access to the same material, and that just seems a lot more fair, despite the lamentable impact its had on the image of being a DJ.”
I thought about that for a bit and then proposed what I thought looked like a possible silver lining, suggesting that over time the democratizing impact of mp3s and computer software would actually have a corresponding meritocratizing effect on DJing. My reasoning was that if everyone had access to the same material, then how you chose to play that material — what kind of obscure or interesting tracks you were able to dig up, what order you chose to play them in, how you read a crowd and were able to adapt, and to what degree you were able to shape the sonic experience for the crowd — would eventually become even more important than it had been before. Becoming a great DJ, on the whole, would be a more difficult and nuanced task than it had been previously; the essential tradition of turntablism would find a way of not just surviving, but flourishing in spite and in the midst of technological advaces.
He agreed that that was already the case for many people.
I relay that story to you because I think it sheds some light on how I feel about the seeming inevitable demise of the print media industry that Freddie decried last week and what some of the longer term impacts might be should we choose to view this unavoidable collapse as containing some measure of opportunity. [Read more →]
March 23, 2009 2 Comments
