“Acoustic” was mostly used as a metaphor for “many things happening at once”
Any jazz lover can tell of the marvellous ways in which a simple riff becomes a rich, complex, unique piece of art through methodic experimentation and endless variation around a central theme.
A couple of years ago, inspired by the popularity of Lonelygirl15, I wrote the post lonelytv:
First consider the fact that TV is mostly an exercise of serializing and organizing a complex story in a way that can be digested by the masses with little effort: from the rigidity of weekly schedules, seasonal programming, series of predefined length to the organization of several threads of action into a cohesive sequence that eliminates any possibility of misunderstanding the story. It’s not too different from the organization of a novel in a book that must address several tracks in a way to keep the reader engaged. The advantage of this approach is accessibility. Very little effort is required to consume.
However, for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must. The Lonelygirl15 phenomenon provides a preview of the type of interactivity that the audience is demanding. Unscheduled snippets of action, very short, cuasi-serialized but [...]
Photo by somenice @ Flickr
A destination for over 2 million people every year, this small village of ten thousands inhabitants is perhaps a great example of a town that inspires urban dwellers to seek the outdoors throughout the year.
In Living Small, The CEOS for Cities blog suggests there are four trends driving people to downsize their living arrangements:
the tanking economy, eco-consciousness, millennials who have less money to spend and “want to be in a more social urban environment”, and the urban renaissance.
Downsizing must be in the minds of many citizens wondering how to adjust their greatly exaggerated life style to something more to par with the current economic landscape. Yet, according to Richard Florida in his article about rethinking our needs from the old order, a more profound change is needed, in particular when it comes to expenditures on houses and cars so more money can be diverted to emergent goods and services, likely those that will reconfigure the economy in the future. This reminds me of an architecture trend, a decade old, to create small houses. He then takes the argument one step further, suggesting not only smaller, but more flexible living arrangements are key:
…homeownership also ties people to locations, making it harder for them to move to where work is. Homeownership made sense when most people had one job and lived in the same city for life. But it makes less [...]
What is more likely: That an American entrepreneur will look for an early exit strategy to live the good life in Europe or that a French impresario will consider giving up a dinner invitation to Pierre Gagnaire (one of the World’s best restaurants) for a meeting with potential investors?
As absurd as the question seems, that is the tone of the debate going on among the readers of celebrity-entrepreneurs Michael Arrington (Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch) and Loic Le Meur (Should Michael Arrington Be Invited At LeWeb Next Year). The word battle, taking place across blogs posts, comments, twitter messages continues to scale as people are quick to join sides and it seems there are only two ways of being an entrepreneur: you either kill yourself building a company and sacrifice all immediate personal satisfaction or give up trying to be successful in the business world but discover the joys of life.
What most people engaged in this debate are not recognizing (and I’ll admit I haven’t finished reading all comments/posts) is that everyone is really advocating the liberal ideology, where individual success is what matters the most. One [...]
On the north-west coast of Corsica, the fishing village of Saint-Florent is a popular tourist destination. Great seafood, wineries, famous Mediterranean beaches and a full range of mountain roads nearby make for a busy yet relaxed hideaway.
Continuing with the exploration of cities with a population actively engaged in global communications, here is a snapshot of the top 30 cities with most tweets (twitter messages) as calculated by TwitterLocal. The link presents the top 30 in the last 24 hours, here is a snapshot at the time of publishing:
167830
Tokyo – 13.5%
New York – 9.2%
San Francisco – 6.1%
Los Angeles – 5.9%
London – 4.9%
Washington – 4.1%
Chicago – 3.9%
Boston – 3.0%
Seattle – 3.0%
Sao Paulo – 2.7%
Other cities outside of North America included in the list: Osaka, Madrid, Sydney, Amsterdam, Paris, Melbourne, Berlin, Bangkok, Barcelona, Taipei, Santiago, Dublin and Caracas.
10 years ago, looking for material to write a collection of short stories during a prolific fiction phase, I developed a series of ideas around the various mechanisms that our society had developed to exchange information. While I was looking to create a story that was telling of the dot-com days, focused on certain technologies that would have the ability to sense implicit agreement between unaware people, it was a much simpler idea that distracted me and ultimately killed that project: the fact that money acts as a powerful medium to exchange information globally. Yes, the basic premise was that in a society that has learned to assign a sticker price to pretty much everything, money became the sole mechanism by which we were given clear instructions on what to do, where to live, how to spend our lazy hours, how far to travel, which people we should know, etc. The school of liberalism had had its message about empowering individuals to pursue happiness oversimplified to a slogan worthy of the most grotesque marketing campaign. This was clearly more the topic of a dissertation than material for a short-story and so it died.
I [...]
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