If you're into pithy word bombs, you know, those "Future Shock" "New World Order" "we're bigger than the Beatles" type things -- the type of three or four word slogan that leads to book and sitcom deals -- then you are going to LOVE this one:
"Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur."
HEGEMONY of the AMATEUR. You saw it here second! or third!
Ain't those the bon-est mots you've read since... the "Digital Divide" or "whazzup"? But how could it not be good when the essay -- make no mistake this was no mere blog entry -- by Nicholas Carr starts with:
"From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing."
Huh? "From the start..."? I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee would have to say about that?
(c) copyright 2004,2005,2006,2007 by Bradford Gibson. Almost all rights reserved. Citation for journalistic, academic or weblog use is permitted with attribution.
Pithy word bombs
This may not be so new. I'll bet the words "hegemony of the amateur"
(in German) are buried somewhere in the dense text of Arno Schmidt's
magnum opus, Zettels Traum.
It was published in 1970.
The book is laid out on a three-column template, just like some weblogs. It's hypertext without the links. Schmidt actually typed the whole manuscript in three columns on his typewriter.
It's thousands of pages long--what a madman!
This guy was inhuman, so wouldn't you know he was the great uncle of Dave Winer, the old Centaur himself.
Dave Winer, say thank you to your uncle Arno.
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