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alan lomax & the long tail of culture: an idea for the future 
01.25.2007, 9:34 AM
This is a review of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail which I've scanned from p. 27 of the print edition of the 19 January 2007 edition of the Times Literary Supplement. (The TLS has a month delay on posting their articles to their online archive, so I couldn't find an online version, hence this scan; click for a fullsize version.) This starts off like an ordinary review of The Long Tail, summarizing the ideas of the book; I've clipped the first column. Where this gets interesting is in the second column of the scan, the sentence that starts "Undeniably, computers and the internet". I really like how Hamilton turns back to Alan Lomax's vision: this seems not dissimilar from many of the ideas we were throwing around, and might be a useful point of discussion.
Posted by dan visel at January 25, 2007 9:34 AM
Comments
Interesting. Two major figures who saw new technologies as tending towards a liberation of minorities from the yoke of cultural hegemony, and whose thinking is missing something. Though in part I agree with that vision, I've been struggling today to formulate some thoughts about such frequently unbounded optimism about the emancipatory potential of technologies.
I'll write more about this when I've solidified my thoughts a bit, but meanwhile wanted to add to the fray a few paragraphs from a 1989 interview with Ivan Ilich that my colleague Dougald blogged here. Here, Ilich suggests that the very conceptual substructure of the 'Information Revolution' may be inimical to the kinds of liberation it promises. I think this conversation needs in part to spend a decent amount of time at least problematising the idealisms networked technologies can inspire.
Posted by: sebastian mary at January 25, 2007 11:39 AM
oops - didn't realise html linking doesn't seem to work in a comment post - here's that ilich link again.
Posted by: sebastian mary at January 25, 2007 11:40 AM