barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Thu, 09 Feb 2012

But I miss the small, eclectic linkers, I wrote a few posts back. There used to be people who threw a couple of links in at the end of their blog posts, or wrote entire posts about the weird junk they found online. It was really fun.

Since then, I've made an effort to publicly share more links on Google+, with the intent of bringing some of them back here to share as well. Christa was inspired to link more. But my free-form, do-as-you-feel, no-pressure approach to this blog has meant that it hasn't happened. Yet. No big surprise.

Anyway, here are a few things I've enjoyed recently on the World Wide Web.

The Death of the Cyberflâneur | This gets right to the crux of what I've been trying to say about links. The web was built on linking and browsing, activities which seem to be falling out of vogue, or rather being pushed out of vogue by the huge forces of advertising and commerce on the internet as they promote and dominate social media. Instead of a web, I tend to think of today's online experience like shopping at a mall. Most people enter a few favorite chain stores, and that's all they do. In this metaphor, Facebook is like WalMart, trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator by offering a little bit of everything at an extremely discounted "price," often at the expense of quality. Totally hypocritical, since I found this via Fimoculous.

The Hip Hop Family Tree | I can't recommend this enough. An ongoing web comic detailing the origins of hip hop in 1970s New York.

New York in the 1970s | Speaking of which. I've often said that I want to spend a few weeks in 1970s-80s New York, which is the New York I remember from TV and movies while I was growing up. It's nothing like that anymore, of course. I suppose I could get a sense of that grittiness and edginess by going somewhere horrible like Detroit of Cincinnati, but that sounds dangerous and terrible in a bad way.

Donald Barthelme's Reading List | I've only read three books on this list. The rest intimidate the hell out of me.

January in Duluth | Milwaukee journalist Adam Carr did a bit of an "experiment" by spending this past January in Duluth, Minnesota trying to discover what makes the city tick. Unfortunately, it was one of the warmest and driest Januarys in recent memory. I walked around my neighborhood with him one day. He's a likable guy, and it's been fun to see my hometown through the eyes of an observer.

[filepath: /links]