How to distill meaning David Barrie's weblog is one of those connection-forging endeavours, pushing links, visual and otherwise, between differing strands of contemporary culture, for example the return to lush, Klimt-like styling and the increasing role of participatory culture. There seem to be two schools of thoughts regarding the latter: the enthusiastic advocates and the soundly dismissive.

David Mitchell is one of the latter, drolly commentating about the fashion for invited commentary as the ultimate manifestation of a particularly unwelcome and unhelpful form of consumer freedom (here and here), decrying the constant chatter of opinion, comment and trivia that blitzes its way back and forth along with the desperate attempts to harness this noise for some kind of political and social good.

There are networks, albeit very informal ones, that exist within this quasi-public realm, a secondary strata of commentary and connections that binds together those who place most emphasis on the binding, if you see what we mean. In other words, twitter and its ilk have become a self-perpetuating network that somehow pulls content out of perpetual distraction. From outside looking in, all you see is noise. Yet within the network, the possibilities are more encouraging. Russell Davies noted in the launch issue of UK Wired that ('I'm not a Zen monk. I'm doing my expenses') that 'Distractions make these things bearable. And, I’d argue, better. Those wasted minutes trawling through Flickr to illustrate your slides are in fact great minutes to be thinking, to be open to ideas, to allow your point to be subtly changed and improved by the images you find'.

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Strange Maps poses the interesting question: was there a real-life model for the generically named Treasure Island - and if so, where was it? One suggestion is that the form of Stevenson's island was based on the Shetland Island of Unst, the most northerly populated island in the British Isles.

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Historic polar images at Freeze Frame, via White Noise of Everyday Life. We like the ships / three colour phootography by Beierle + Keijser, curators of the excellent Mrs Deane weblog (sample post, from Vienna to Vientiane: botanic studies on the dissemination of architecture) / Freesound, open sample library (via flavorpill).

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J G Ballard: 1930-2009, an obituary at the Architects' Journal. 'He was the only writer, for example, to notice that before 9/11 no one had considered the World Trade Centre to be a symbolic target at all - indeed, he noted, that was the whole point, it was a meaningless act and it was this that people found so unsettling.' See also J G Ballard's architectural inspiration.

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The short, disgusting life of the Hummer: 'By 2002, the New York Times reports that, thanks to changes in the tax code during the Bush administration, an eligible buyer can deduct $34,912 of the $48,800 base price of the Hummer.' See also the Dongfeng Mengshi, the quasi-official Chinese knock-off of the original H1.posted by things at 06:40 / 1 comments