Ecology, energy efficiency, compact living, locally sourced food, third world worries... Are they sympoms of a mega-trend, or rather a necessity? Now that the glaciers are melting, the rain forests are shrinking, the deserts are growing and we have yet another financial crisis at our hands - what can we do? Perhaps, the popularisation of these issues is our way of dealing with the fact that we have no choice but to start making some changes. Since we have to go through with it anyway, why not convince ourselves that it is cool, just to make it less daunting to begin recycling our shit.
Or maybe it is just the cynic in me that thinks of us humans as comfortable creatures, driven mostly by equal parts of fear, shame and lust. Haha! I see you! Just put the blinders on and rename genocide to population control - it will feel much better. Allegedly. So, we finally step out of the shade to face the truth on judgement day. With pride, politically correct "altruism" and vanity saturating our souls, mind you.
Oh, and check out this page (which is also a moderately, but surely amusing book): The Lazy Environmentalist. The mission is to convey methods of conveniently becoming eco chic and such. Get the nice paperback here.
---
Cy-nic-al, (sin'ik'al), a.: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.
An example of a news portal, that could well, if steered with skill and foresight, become one of the networks I discussed briefly in a previous blog post: Nyhetskompassen.se. Another is iGoogle. I know, the whole "i"-prefix thing-of-the-past is becoming increasingly annoying, but the concept will definitely hit us hard in a short matter of time.
We have all studied and debated the future of news papers. it is now more or less a fact that the printed paper will disappear in a proximate future and give way to the web based version. But most of the time, the discussion is till based on the assumption that the format and content will remain generally the same, with editorial work, journalistic filtering and such.
I am not so sure about the validity of that assumption, though, when viewed against the current development of new (obviously mostly web based) media and information accessing and processing. I see a clear tendency towards people demanding increasingly more first-hand and immediate information. When we are searching for the latest speeches given by presidential candidates or facts and figures about practically anything, we tend to consult blogs, YouTube and Wikipedia before the daily news papers, simply because we can skip one major middleman. Furthermore, we also rid ourselves from a great deal of biased filtering that we no longer have a need for, now that we have the tools and skills we need to navigate efficiently and conduct the sorting ourselves.
My view of the future news feed provider, is more of a "News-Wikipedia" than timesonline.co.uk, in the sense that it is quicker, self-sanitating, often first-hand and not dependant on a limited editorial staff. Rather than the classic web based new papers of today, I imagine web portals/networks of news providers in the form of bloggers or on-location film-makers etc., with wide possibilities of worldwide commenting and debating. The whole problem of fast-paced editing and changing of the content of articles would probably not be very much of a hassle, since we are always online anyway (pretending to work). I mean, I check dn.se, di.se and other sites at least ten times a day only because I can. Like Wikipedia, the continuously, organically changing content works just fine! Who hasn't used the old Wiki successfully for panic-studying before exams?...
To me, it would feel natural for any open society in a globalization trend, to get rid of the narrow delimitations of today and start acting as true parts of a shared world. Plus, the whole pretentious white-boy lifestyle (you know: bicycling, urban densification, obscure Glasgow indie, locally grown, ethnic majority complex...) probably would adore and embrace the added authenticity, objectivity and legitimacy values of reading about the Midde East when it is written by people from all sides and with all kinds of agendas who are actually there. We just love to flatter our own intellects by forming our own opinions from "pure data". The real deal... yeah!
So, I look forward to the future news portal, where the traditional news paper sites are reduced to providers and suggesters of potientially interesting topics and fields of study, for further investigation elsewhere. When DJ:ing we want the cues and track, not the ready made mixes. You know: fuck that. That's just embarassing.
Ecology, energy efficiency, compact living, locally sourced food, third world worries... Are they sympoms of a mega-trend, or rather a necessity? Now that the glaciers are melting, the rain forests are shrinking, the deserts are growing and we have yet another financial crisis at our hands - what can we do? Perhaps, the popularisation of these issues is our way of dealing with the fact that we have no choice but to start making some changes. Since we have to go through with it anyway, why not convince ourselves that it is cool, just to make it less daunting to begin recycling our shit.
