[The following was partly written for the dialogue “underfire”, but it also stands on its own.] “If a gun is on the table in the first act, it will go off by the third act” – Anton Chekhov In real life, the gun isn’t necessarily ever fired, yet its presence is still of great significance, and the same was true for swords and spears in the past, and for all manner of weapons now. Just […]
Hoorah!Hoorah! “How (Not) to Study the Attention Economy: A Review of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information” (by Richard A. Lanham) is now out. I recommend my review as important for understanding the Attention Economy and how to study it.
On this blog, I don’t normally discuss raw politics or admit my preference for Democrats, but tonight, I am celebrating, so here goes: The Democrats manged to flip about 53 seats in the House. I notice an interesting pattern. Every single one of those flipped districts was adjacent to one or more existing Democratic districts. SEE MAP Democratic tendencies are spreading, oozing, perhaps, like blue maple syrup on a waffle. Neighbors don’t let neighbors vote […]
Note: The following is my contribution to a disucssion about war called underfire (Thanks to Jordan Crandall for conveing this discussion and inviting me. This is especially in response to the remarks of Saskia Sassen on borders, Alain Joxe on structured chaos and Paul Edwards on weak discipline.) As Immanuel Wallerstein once pointed out, old empires did not survive if they took more than forty days travel to cross from end to end. On that […]
A few months ago I gave a talk in the offices of Root Markets in NYC. In the audience, was an editor from Vanity Fair, who declared that the days of stardom are over. I don’t think so…… In the past few days: •A major news outlet (CNN?) reports that most Americans had probably never heard of Malawi until the brouhaha over Madonna adopting a child there. •Maureen Dowd in the NY Times (October 21, […]
Here is one more installment of this overly lengthy draft chapter. see the pdf for this third installment. The first installment (click for pdf) The second installment (click for pdf) Again, comments and questions welcome.
Now ready for downloading is the second draft installment of “What is Attention?” the book chapter I began putting out last week. I decided, owing to length, to put it out only as a pdf. (You can also read the first installment, as a pdf, or in this blog.)
It has been five years since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York with its horrible loss of life. With it, even more shockingly, perhaps, came the disappearance of what had become an essential part of the New York skyline. And what made it all even worse was that it seemed to be an intentional act of suicide terror, by an implacable foe, that had struck from far away. The fact that […]
Today I begin the serialization of the latest draft of my book The Emerging Attention Economy. We start with the first part of Chapter 3; subsequent parts of the chapter will follow at weekly intervals or less. The Preface and Chapter 1 introduce and summarize the book. Chapter 2 is a history explaining how feudalism grew, what it was, and why it gave way to what I call the Market-Money-Industrial system. You can read the […]
In my excitement of announcing the blog, I forgot to add this vital point: it would not exist and would not look so good were it not for the tremendous creative effort and advice of Jonas Goldstein. His own web design outfit is www.failurefactory.com. Many thanks, Jonas.