Futurismic

Bruce Sterling has assembled some interesting thoughts on the future of blogging, from Thomas Purves:

There’s a flavourshift in the blogosphere. The olde flavour of blogging is leaving us.

When you think of it, (personal) blogs never really caught on anyway.

Compare this one data point, my blogroll: 21 my FB Friendlist: 249

Blogs as dead media. At least as we once (hardly) knew ye.

Blogs are for pros, facebook is for friends

blogs dead. long live blogs.

I’m not sure about this. I’d bet that people will be still be indulging in blog-like behaviour (publicly available text with more than 140 characters per post, in a diary format) in 50 years time.

There will also be private “friends-only” blogs, but I doubt one will displace the other. People blog for different reasons, and there will always be a sufficient supply of people narcissistic enough to imagine that complete strangers are interested in what they have to say, even if they’re not doing it professionally (irony!).

Then there is the idea of Lifestreaming, from Sarah Perez on Read Write Web:

Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.

…

The simplicity of a lifestream is ideal for our information overloaded age. Lifestreams are short and sweet, yet still provide the same insight into a person’s life as yesterday’s casual personal blog did. A video here, a photo there, and today’s web citizens can voyeuristically peer into anyone’s life and get a sense of who they are. Long-form bloggers, on the other hand (myself included) require time and attention to read, but with so many publishers out there, people just aren’t reading content like they used to - they’re just scanning text and moving on. For new bloggers, this means getting readers is harder than ever - your words are getting lost in a sea of noise.

Hence what Sterling means by blogging being “inherently unstable” as a medium - it exists for a few years before technological change mutates it into something else.

I still feel that old-fashioned blogs have a long way to go, particularly if you want to put a point across, or have an agenda, or want to inspire people to think deeply - rather than spray the intimate details of your everyday life over eyeballs in exchange for ad-revenues.

[story-coagulation from Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond, specific stories from Sarah Perez on Read, Write Web and Thomas Purves on ThomasPurves.com]

Related posts

• The ultimate in effortless blogging? (0)
• Mixed messages: Wired in two minds over Estonian “cyberwar” story (2)
• Hello Everyone! (0)
• Futurismic needs YOU! (1)
• Burmese government turns off internet to stop citizen journalists (0)

Regular readers will be aware of my status as a card-carrying fanboy for Commandant Bruce Sterling.

It is in that capacity that I’m very pleased to report that the British Science Fiction Association’s online media magazine, Matrix, has an interview with Sterling wherein he talks about The Difference Engine, and the steampunk subgenre it arguably spawned:

“My feeling about science fiction is that it ought to expand the scope of things that are possible to think. When Steampunk succeeded it did a little of that. If it’s just costume-drama or a merchandising tag, that’s not the end of the world, but it’s not a pursuit of a lot of use to anybody. Wells’ War of the Worlds reads in a very Steampunk way now, but if you dote on that book because the technology clanks and clatters so much, you’re not appreciating Wells; you don’t understand the gift he offered us.”

Related posts

• Kim Stanley Robinson interviewed (0)
• Bruce Sterling publishes new short story in Technology Review (0)
• Yet more free fiction (0)
• Wish Sir Arthur C Clarke a happy birthday (2)
• Wired interviews the VanderMeers, gives away chapbook (1)

Every year at The WELL, legendary author Bruce Sterling discusses his thoughts on the year just gone and the year to come. This year he talked with members of the WELL plus Jon Lebkowsky, who writes interesting articles himself for Worldchanging and Webblogsky. Among the highlights mentioned in the ‘State of The World, 2008′ talk are Pakistan, getting closer to a worldwide consensus, Sterling’s opinions of Europe (where he now lives) and the future of nation-states versus cities:

‘Well, there’s nothing inherent about nations as an organizing principle. Nations could go away. Global government, that’s never existed. It’s a sci-fi idea. It’s kinda hard to imagine *cities* going away, though, short of a massive population crash. All the major cities in the Balkans are still there, even though the “nations” they conjure up have changed their flags, passports and currencies five or six times. New York has a future. Chicago has a future. San Francisco is dynamic. Any place called a ‘creative class city” is very attractive’

Bruce Sterling has always been a fascinating writer and futurist and this is a thought-provoking discussion on the future of our world. Another great writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, also had a great interview recently on BLDGBLOG which is worth checking out too. As one of the commentators says,

“One of the things I’ve long admired about (Bruce Sterling) is his rejection of apocaphilia (ed- the love of thinking about the world ending) — not in the sense of being a cyberpollyanna sunshine thinker, but in recognizing that options exist and choices matter, even in the bleakest of landscapes.”

I think that’s an important point to make and one that I’m attempting to take on with my posts here at Futurismic. It’s essential to be aware of possible dangers to our world but we need to think about them constructively, not wallow in the prospect of something out of John Joseph Adams’ ‘Wastelands’ anthology. When I and others talk of the potential pitfalls of peak resources or climate change it’s not to glorify the threat but because the solutions are exciting.

Related posts

• Top 87 Bad Predictions About the Future (5)
• Why we shouldn’t be so hard on Spitzer (9)
• Why Nancy Kress has gone to the Dogs (0)
• Things can only get better (1)
• The tipping point for climate change denial? (13)

Bruce Sterling has published his new short story Interoperation in the MIT Technology Review journal. Says Bruce on his Wired blog: “One of my better efforts lately, and a rare example of a science fiction work that belongs by its nature in TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.”

Yuri pulled his sons from school to watch the big robot wreck the motel. His wife had packed a tasty picnic lunch, but 11-year-old Tommy was a hard kid to please. “You said a giant robot would blow that place up,” Tommy said. “No, son, I told you a robot would ‘take it down,’” said Yuri. “Go shoot some pictures for your mom.” Tommy swung his little camera, hopped his bamboo bike, and took off. Yuri patiently pushed his younger son’s smaller bike across the sunlit tarmac. Nick, age seven, was learning to ride. His mother had dressed him for the ordeal, so Nick’s head, knees, feet, fists, and elbows were all lavishly padded with brightly colored foam. Nick had the lumpy plastic look of a Japanese action figure.

Related posts

• Bruce Sterling interview: is the shine off steampunk as a literary genre? (2)
• Yet more free fiction (0)
• Wish Sir Arthur C Clarke a happy birthday (2)
• Why Nancy Kress has gone to the Dogs (0)
• Vicarious WorldCon! (1)