When You Think The Internet Reinvented the World...
I'm supposed to be interviewing economist Tyler Cowen later today, and as preparation for the conversation I want to have, he pointed me to an essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin -- written in 1936. He essentially predicted blogging.
I pulled this from Benjamin's most famous piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction":
For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers - at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "letters to the editor."And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case.
At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship.
- Yahoo on Google Attack with Analytics Tool
- Oct 10 2008 12:44PM EDT
- Holiday Wars: Sony Counts on Games, Microsoft on Price
- Oct 10 2008 11:57AM EDT
- Yahoo Investor Pushes For a Microhoo at $22 a Share
- Oct 10 2008 11:10AM EDT
- IBM and Lessons from the Great Depression
- Oct 10 2008 10:18AM EDT
- First Bytes: Sequoia Capital's Warning, IBM, FitBit, Micron Tech
- Oct 10 2008 8:23AM EDT
- Tech Start-ups and the Economy's Best Hope
- Oct 9 2008 2:48PM EDT
- Yahoo's Other Problem: The Shrinking Display Market
- Oct 9 2008 11:03AM EDT
- BlackBerry's Storm and the Coolness Factor
- Oct 9 2008 10:24AM EDT
- Enough With the E-mail Goggles Already!
- Oct 9 2008 9:13AM EDT
- First Bytes: IBM Strong, Microsoft, Sony, Wozniak
- Oct 9 2008 7:57AM EDT
- Last Bytes: Cisco, Dipity, Yahoo, more
- Oct 8 2008 6:06PM EDT
- EMI Launching a Digital Marketplace
- Oct 8 2008 4:27PM EDT
- Tennessee Student Indicted for Hacking Palin E-mail
- Oct 8 2008 11:25AM EDT
- Probe Deepens Into Pentagon TV Analysts' Pay
- Oct 8 2008 11:05AM EDT
- YouTube, Finally Adding Up to Something?
- Oct 8 2008 9:55AM EDT
Categories
Links
- Mark Cuban's blog

- TechCrunch

- GigaOM

- Engadget

- USA TODAY Tech

- Romenesko

- BuzzTracker Tech

- Roger McGuinn's Folk Den

- Maney's band on MySpace

- Spiedies, mmmm

- Somewhat Frank's tech conference list

- Tom Foremski

- Fred Wilson

- Pandora

- SciTech Daily

- Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

- Steven Johnson

- The Long Tail

- paidContent

- John Battelle's SearchBlog

- Marc Andreessen

- Kevin's site

- Kevin Maney & His Briefs on CD Baby












