Long Zoom Interview

PopMatters is running a long interview with me about my various books and projects, conducted by the excellent Jason Jones. One of the things that's great about this kind of conversation -- particularly when it's with someone as smart as Jason, and someone who has read your work closely -- is that you discover all sorts of things about your own work that you wouldn't have otherwise. Jason has a question here about the absence of Foucault -- one of my college idols -- in Ghost Map which I'm still mulling over.

But the most hilarious discovery for me comes at the very end of the interview. When I was writing my "Long Zoom" article about Spore for the Times Magazine, I had a vague suspicion that I'd used the phrase in a FEED article in sometime around 1999-2000. I searched through the FEED articles I have on my local hard drive -- I know, I know, I'm an idiot for not having the full FEED archives online -- but never found it. But then I read Jason's interview, and it begins with this quote from the closing pages of Emergence:

Imagine a kind of conceptual tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale—like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten... Only in our long zoom do we find, at each scale, the same behavior repeating itself again and again.

I think this is what happens when you've written five or more books on very different topics. It gets hard enough just keeping track of your own ideas, much less other people's.

Comments

[Orli]

This is great. It's really interesting to hear you talk about the slow evolution of the long zoom.

I gotta say, I didn't miss the omission of Foucault in the Ghost Map. I see the parallels he's drawing: Foucault's writing is about how culture circumscribes the individual by exerting control. And I guess the birth of epidemiology can be seen as an expression of the cultural authorities exerting control. But I think there's a fundamental (and fundamentally irreconcilable) difference between Foucault's approach and yours in that you see culturally imposed order as generative for the most part, and Foucault saw it as a corruption of the individual spirit. (Least ways, that what I got from reading him all those years ago.)

I was so glad to see that someone finally asked you about the Dickens fascination too. The connection between long zoom and Dickens' teeming sociological dramas makes so much sense, but it never occurred to me.

Middlemarch is a brilliant novel and one of my favorites too, but in Dicken's defense, while his characters sometimes lack authenticity, his books have a narrative momentum that Elliot never quite achieved.

[Damien DeBarra]

Steve,
I stumbled across Everything 'Bad is Good for You' on Amazon and have just ordered it. Looking forward to getting stuck into it when it arrives. My curiosity piqued I found your blog and have had a rummage around. Very interesting stuff.

I'm an e-learning designer who is trying to break out of the traditional death by 'click for more' e-learning models and trying to push the folks I work with towards a more game-based learning model. It's tricky - with a lot of vested interests and old-fashioned pedagogies and attitudes to students to overcome. But it's fun trying to win the argument.

I'm also an insufferable blogger and always like it when I come across a well-written blog - which yours is.

Cracking stuff Gromit.

[Jason]

I just finished writing my own first book and can already start to see what you're saying. I have ideas for dozens of new books, some of which are contradictory to the ideas I placed forward in the first. How do you best balance this issue?

[nakliyat]

thank you veryy veryy nıce very nice....

[evden eve nakliyat]

thankkks

[Kinetic]

"I think this is what happens when you've written five or more books on very different topics. It gets hard enough just keeping track of your own ideas, much less other people's."

Time to start writing sequels!

Oh btw I have this idea about Lost..... ahh nvm

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