September 2, 2004
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Chafed Elbows and the New Age of Media
I’ve discovered the secret engine of modern civilization.
Electricity? Hardly.
The wheel? Not quite.
Fire? Sorry, no.
The invention that unlocked humanity’s productive potential was clearly the desk, ‘cause I don’t have one yet, and let me tell you, I cannot get anything done.
Typing on the floor requires a strange, gargoyle-like hunched position, elbows bent, wrists curled, eyes cast down.
I know, I know. Political prisoners in Burma are really feeling my pain right now.
Anyway, I brave these cruel conditions to bring you this report from my friend Kevin, who attended Penny Arcade’s video game expo/nerd-fest recently. I point it out for two reasons:
I love niche event blogging. These are events that, okay, sure, not everyone is interested in—so maybe they don’t belong in the local paper. But for the people who are interested, it’s awesome to have a long, comprehensive dispatch—with more detail, in fact, than you’d ever find in a mainstream media report of any kind.
Niche event blogging began, to my knowledge, at blogging conferences; now it’s spread to related industries: tech and video games. I hope it continues to expand. It’s all about widening the mediasphere—getting everything represented online, not just the big! breaking! news of the day.
I’m always really impressed by the guys at Penny Arcade. They are indie media superstars: By keeping up a constant pulse of posts over the years, and by always staying authentic and honest, they’ve built an audience that rivals the big corporate video game news sites. And even if it doesn’t match gamespot.com or whatever in absolute numbers, it beats them in influence.
Now they’ve leveraged that online audience into a real-world event which drew thousands of people. Nice.
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Comments
I have a professor at Penn, Peter Stallybrass, who spends a lot of time thinking about the role the material culture of the study and libraries play in the formation of modern intellectual culture.
For example, many humanists had custom-made desks that were either multi-sided and capable of pivoting, or were even fitted with a large ferris-wheel type rotation device, to allow them to have multiple books open and available for consulting at the same time. (It's sort of like Firefox's multi-tabbed browsing, which I feel gives me an advantage over you single-window IE fools.)
So, imagine: Shakespeare's writing Hamlet. At his desk, he has open copies of the earlier, anonymous Hamlet play, a widely available commonplace book filled with the kind of rhetorical arguments Hamlet employs throughout the play, maybe a copy of a translation of the Aeneid (which Hamlet and the Player quote to one another), his notes, etc. People are burning scientists for witchcraft, and some schlub from Stratford can whip out the greatest corpus in Western history, all because of the power of his desk.
And then there's Robin. All that technological know-how, stylistic pizazz, and eagerness to stark bubbling up from within, and what can he do? Noootthhiiinnggg!!!
:-)
Hey Hunchback of Notre Sacto, Ikea sells a super awesome coffee table for $20 that should serve your most basic need of getting your computer off the floor. at least then you could sit on the floor and type on the table.
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