Reykjavik walk

On Good Friday I walked all around downtown Reykjavik, enjoying the near-empty streets, and wondering what happened to the city centre. Laugavegur, the shopping street, is turning into a hollow core for a small city occupied by people in cars who prefer large parking spaces and malls.

Still, the graffiti takes on an intensity in the late-winter sunshine. I put some of the snaps on Flickr.

Somehow I didn’t have the heart to take photos of all the vacant buildings bought up by real-estate developers, rows of houses boarded up, waiting for the wrecking ball. Downtown Reykjavik is waiting to be rebuilt, one house at a time.

Filed under: Images , graffiti, pictures, Reykjavik, walking

Fjölmiðlar og fámiðlar (Presentation at the Reykjavik Academy)

This post is an extended footnote with my presentation today at a symposium organized by Kistan.is, at the Reykjavik Academy (see press release in Icelandic). In addition to myself, the panelists are Elin Hirst (director of TV news RUV), Pétur Gunnarson (Eyjan.is), and Þröstur Helgason (editor, Morgunbladid).

Broadly, I argue that the distinction between print, radio and TV has become untenable, and we need different concepts for database-driven media platforms, their interfaces, their scale, temporality and modes of reception.

Here’s a collection of links to recent news stories on the topic (in English), most of which I refer to in the presentation. Except Chris Anderson’s article “The Long Tail,” from Wired (Oct 2004), which deserves pride of place anyway.

Remarking on TV and it’s ongoing dissolution, or rather the becoming-television of various media, I mentioned Joost, the open-source Miro, BBC iPlayer. In relation to music, particularly sites that encourage music discovery and the mapping of users’ tastes, I mentioned (in addition to iTunes, unavailable in Iceland), Rhapsody, Last.fm, and Musicovery.

And, naturally, I couldn’t resist mentioning Gawker and it’s spawn of specialist blogs (e.g., Consumerist, Defamer, Fleshbot, Gizmodo, and so on).

Now to write something up for Kistan.

Filed under: Academic , Media Theory, presentation, Social media

The Observer’s Top 50 Blogs

Leaving aside the question whether these are “the world’s 50 most powerful blogs”, The Observer’s list is certainly useful and entertaining.

And if you’re planning to get on the list, read Cory Doctorow’s fine article, “17 Tips for Getting Bloggers to Write About You”.

Filed under: Social media , blogging, Pleasures, Technoculture

Heima – all of it

All of SigurRós’ music documentary Heima, on YouTube, generously uploaded by the band themselves.

I have the DVD, which is worth every penny, and it makes me homesick every time, until I notice that everyone’s wearing a lot of clothes for summer…

Filed under: Audio , Music, Pleasures

Time, time, time

I’ve always been suspicious of people who mindlessly drive themselves and others to work, work, work, cheerfully spouting Ben Franklin’s dictum “time is money”. Time is many things, and it certainly is valuable, but it doesn’t equate to money – even when you’re getting paid by the hour. 

 

It turns out that worrying too much about wasting time, losing time, saving time, not having enough time, and generally treating time more like a thing than a quality is profoundly counterproductive. Hence my great pleasure at Stefan Klein’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Time Out of Mind”. It explains, but only partly, why time seems to pass at a fourfold speed whenever I so much look at a game of Scrabulous on Facebook…

Filed under: Social media , Education, Pleasures, time