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Dan Hill has a fantastic post called "Why Lost is genuinely new media". It has a few very nice shout-outs to some of my work, but you can skip those and get to the good bits:

On the form itself, Lost episodes are famously laden with arcana to pore over, deconstruct and even construct in the first place, such is the collective-imagination-run-wild of the show's fans. For instance, this site which supplies transcripts of the eery 'whispers'; character names are opportunities for anagrams ('Ethan Rom' = 'Other Man'); there are numbers, codes everywhere; hieroglyphics; mystical allusions; references to philosophy (Locke, Rousseau); the constant casual appearance of literary works etc. The embedded puzzles involved will remind some of a certain age of the Masquerade phenomenon ...

Many of these links above go to the Lostpedia wiki - an entire clone of Wikipedia devoted to the Lost universe. Wikipedia has entries too, of course. These are both 'unofficial' offerings around the show, but the show's creators haven't exactly been tardy with official offerings. The ABC site has everything you'd expect: trails, profiles, recaps, podcasts etc. They've also created a whole series of fake sites around the show, such as Oceanic Flight 815 or for the fictional band Driveshaft.

I've always been weirdly obsessed with the question of how life on earth would have evolved differently if there had been no moon. So I was delighted to stumble across this fragment of an essay by Isamov from the early seventies called The Triple Triumph of the Moon. His most provocative conclusion: land-based life might have never have evolved without the moon:

Life spread outward into the rims of the ocean, where the sea water rose up against the continental slopes and then fell back twice each day. And thousands of species of seaweed and worms and crustaceans and molluscs and fish rose and fell with those tides. Some were exposed on shore as the sea retreated, and of those a very few survived, because they happened, for some reason, to be the best able to withstand the nightmare of land existence until the healing, life-giving water returned.

Species adapted to the temporary endurance of dry land
developed, and the continuing pressure of competitor saw
to it that there was survival value to be gained in developing
the capacity to withstand dry-land conditions for longer and
ever-longer periods.

Eventually species developed that could remain on land
indefinitely...

And of course the tides are the product of the Moon. The
Sun, to be sure, also produces tides, nearly half the size of
those produced by the Moon today, but that smaller to-and-fro
wash of salt water would represent a smaller drive towards
land and might have led to the colonisation of the
continents much later in time, if at all.

About twelve years ago, Alan Rusbridger gave me my first paying gig as a writer, hiring me to write an occasional column for the Online section of the Guardian that he was then overseeing. Some may doubt the wisdom of that decision, but there's no doubt that otherwise he's a brilliant guy, and The Guardian is lucky to have him running the paper in such turbulent times. This speech is a great case in point:

The more of a wall that you put around, whether it's a wall of payment or a wall of registration, the more you're repelling people rather than building an audience for the day when we hope that advertising will come in like the cavalry and rescue us. So I think at the moment, the smarter thing to do is to make your content available everywhere and to have it aggregated and linked to like mad by everybody in the world, because that way you will reach a gigantic audience. And that matters journalistically. If you're in the business of journalism for influence, and because of the Guardian worldview that you believe in, it's terrific to have an audience of 14 million instead of 400,000. That's wonderful. So why would you want to turn them away?

Jarvis has a good overview with excellent commentary, natch, here.

OK To Disconnect

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads this blog, I'm not the sort of person likely to write an article bemoaning how kids today are tuning out of normal social interaction by listening to their iPods all day. But for those of you who are working on just such an article, I've got a tip -- one of you should borrow the phrase that iTunes uses to announce that it's finished loading up your iPod with music: "OK To Disconnect." What kind of message is that sending the youth of America?

E. M. Forster is no doubt rolling in his grave...

Wired has an excellent new special issue on video games edited by Will Wright that's worth checking out in full. I have a little essay that just went online a few hours ago, though I've been getting a lot of mail about it already. It's called "When Virtual Worlds Collide":

But virtual reality has failed to conform to forward-looking visions in one crucial respect. We don't live in the Matrix, but in the matrices. Your World of Warcraft persona can't visit a Stonehenge replica in Second Life. You can't impress an EverQuest elfin hottie with Jedi skills honed in Star Wars Galaxies. If you want to buy an Ultima scepter with Therebucks, you'll have to exit both worlds and consummate the transaction on eBay.
Because the current metaverse evolved largely out of videogames, it makes sense that it should be composed of fiefdoms - after all, you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims. But there is reason to believe that the divided metaverse is merely a transitional phase, and that its component worlds will coalesce.
All virtual worlds require a communication protocol that lets you talk with other people, a software platform that lets you build things on top of it, and a currency that enables trade. These three elements share one thing: a gravitational pull toward a common standard. Think of the diversity of the PC marketplace in the early 1980s: the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS-80, IBM's PCjr, the Commodore-64, the Atari 400/800 series - they all ran different operating systems or flavors of Basic. Ten years later, however, Windows held 90 percent of the market. Email followed the same pattern. Diverse and incompatible standards - CompuServe members could only email other CompuServe members - gave way to a common platform that allowed everyone to connect.
The logic of convergence may be even stronger in the metaverse...

I love this NPR commentary from Dave Weinberger about the etiquette of not keeping up with other people's blogs, and feeling guilty about it when they say, "Hey, why are you asking about how my new car is working out -- didn't you see my post from last week?"

It's not that I never read your blog -- I read it occasionally, intermittently, from time to time. It might be once a week, though it's probably more like once a month, or three months. And I skim to see what's important in your life, and, well, to see if you've mentioned my blog. But I still get a sense of what's going on with you. I just don't want to be quizzed on it!

Following on the heels of last week's roundtable discussion on the future, I make another appearance in Time Magazine this week, this time in the form of an essay defending what they're calling Generation M (presumably for "multitasking.") It's all part of a cover package they've put together on both the perils and promise of kids growing up in the age of iPod, MySpace, et al. I think in some ways it marks a bit of a turning point -- it's precisely the sort of cover package that a few years ago would have been full of scaremongering about the dangers of all these new technologies. But this issue is quite balanced; they certainly voice some concerns about the impact of 24/7 multitasking, which of course is entirely appropriate, but they also talk about the positive aspects. And they gave me an entire page to do my riff.

A few weeks ago I went out to L.A. to tape a roundtable discussion on the future for Time Magazine's annual "What's Next?" issue. It's on the stands now, and it features a full-height picture of me looking gravely concerned about something (presumably the future.) It's a fun conversation, covering lots of different issues. I ride a few hobby-horses that most of you are already familiar with, but there are also a couple of riffs that are new ones. There's an edited version (without photos) here, and an unedited audio podcast here.

Readers Want To Know: What The Hell Is The Bell Curve Doing On My Bookshelf?

My old sparring partner and current NYU colleague Mark Dery and I have been having an interesting exchange in the comments thread about the presence of The Bell Curve in my personal "canon." This morning, I started typing out a longer response, and thought I'd bump it up to the front door, since others may be interested. Briefly, the conversation involved this exchange:

Me: The Bell Curve is there because I've been dealing with IQ a lot in the past few years, and it's the most influential book about IQ -- though completely wrongheaded on almost every front -- published in the last few decades, maybe ever.

Mark: I'm surprised to hear it, since in the (admittedly closed) circles I travel in, it's viewed as a strain of intellectual leprosy, trapped between two covers. Who has it influenced, I wonder? Are there that many unreconstructed social Darwinists out there?

Now, to the extent that Mark's and my circles don't entirely overlap, I'm sure they're united in agreement that The Bell Curve was an evil, racist book. But that's precisely why it's on my shelf. The Bell Curve was influential in three senses. On the most basic level, it had a reach that no other book about IQ -- as far as I know -- has ever had. It made the Times bestseller list, and had whole issues of magazines and journals devoted to critiques of its argument. (Granted, "emotional IQ" has had even more of an impact in the form of the book Emotional Intelligence, but that's a different IQ.)

Now, that huge response had two polarizing effects. A bunch of largely conservative folks embraced the argument, and particularly embraced the premise that IQ was rigidly determined by genes, which is the basis for the entire book. On the left -- in Mark's and my circles -- the book was not only denounced on its own terms, but it became the poster child for the dangers of talking about IQ seriously in any context. There's a whole crowd out there who -- thanks to the attack on The Bell Curve -- think that IQ is just a completely made-up number, or worse, a racist made-up number.

I happen to consider both those positions to be wrong, for reasons that I spell out in the second half of Everything Bad. The whole point of the Flynn Effect is that it demonstrates convincingly that IQ can be shaped by environmental conditions, and is not purely genetic in nature. That's why I think Flynn is a much more interesting figure in this than Gould, because he's every bit as progressive in his politics, but instead of trying to unravel the entire category of IQ, he instead uses it as a kind of wedge for progressive ends. And so in publicly arguing for the relevance of the Flynn Effect, I knew I would have to battle both sides of the Bell Curve legacy, which made me think that I probably should actually read the book. And in fact, it turned out to be incredibly helpful on a number of fronts. I can't tell you how many radio call in shows and interviews and lectures I did where someone would listen to me talk about the Flynn Effect, and then angrily denounce my biological determinism in invoking IQ in the first place. And I'd have to say: did you just hear what I said? The Flynn Effect is an argument against biological determinism! What's more, it's the one fact in The Bell Curve that causes Murray and Herrnstein to admit that IQ may also be influenced by social factors.

Great summary by Kevin Kelly on what he calls "Consensus Web Filters". This captures the appeal of these sites perfectly:

How I use these consensus tools: By scanning these lists daily I get a fantastic sense of what the web is reading, and an early glimpse of what will reach the MSM in the next day or so. But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.