Filed under: booklists
The Practice of Everday Life, Michel de Certeau
The Sociology of Culture, Raymond Williams
De La Justification, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis
Filed under: booklists
Data and Reality, William Kent
Holding On to Reality, Albert Borgman
The Internet Imaginaire, Patrice Flichy
The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, Elaine Svenonius
anybody have any good database textbooks to recommend?
Filed under: general musings
some of you who know may or may not know that ryan (aka swampfoot aka beardy mountain man) is hot-stepping it through the appalachian trail, walking from northern Georgia to the tip of Maine. you can read about his travels here at his blog. i know for a fact that there’s no way i could walk the 2400 some miles, i think my ADDness would slowly unfold into itself and i would go a bit mad. but he’s not and that’s good. he’s walked almost 240 miles already, and is well ahead of schedule and seems to be hotfooting a good 15 miles or so a day. you should read his post on trail magic as he talks about how there is this really awesome community of AT diehards who will set up shop to hand out free food, smokes, and booze to all the ATers who pass by. i love seeing this kind of hippyness. this blog used to be called “information hippy” but then i got a reality check, but that’s not to say that i’ve fully abandoned this kind of ideal that i tacitly keep in my mind at all times. back when i was in a band during the week and a half i was on tour, i thought it was so amazing to see how random people would just let you crash at their house, make you some food, and let you hang out with them and show you around. one of the best days i’ve ever had in my life was going mushroom picking (no, not *that* kind of mushrooms) in the forest along the 1 somewhere near aracta in northern california and then going back to our host’s house, making creamed mushroom sauce and pasta, and watching the presidential elections.
generosity comes in some really random places and what’s most striking about acts of generosity is the nebulous communities that draws people to giving in these types of environments. in these instances giving is an act that symbolizes your membership to the community. you don’t necessarily feel a direct bond with the other person, but you do mutually recognize in the act of giving and receiving that you are singular parts of that larger whole.
Filed under: memory and forgetting
so i’ve been thinking a lot more about forgetting and have been trying to wrap my head around the notion and had a short discussion with some other students here at school. my friend matt made an interesting remark about scrolling through the internet archive’s wayback machine and coming across old pages where the html was still there, but the pictures and what not had disappeared altogether.
something about this started me thinking about how forgetting is conceived of as a specific act, that one can in fact ::forget:: versus something much more process oriented. particularly in the instance described above the notion of decay seemed to be more appropriate. as i mull it over, i can’t help but feel that forgetting in the digital environment does not entail a kind of active moment of forgetting but embodies a more evolutionary process and over time as we collectively move across systems and certain sites slowly unravel or change become updated. so, during this wider process of flux, forgetting inadvertenly happens, almost like an implicit and underlying fashion. that’s what i think for now at least. maybe i’m just making it more poetic than it needs to be.
