" . . . we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright." — Testimony of Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), at the Hearings on HOME RECORDING OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS before the Ninety-Seventh Congress of the United States, 1982

[Scripting News]

Fuck The Media / Become The Media. "I cannot believe I live in a world where the New York Times gives ink to a petty digital turf war. War bloggers versus web loggers? Please. . . . " [kill your tv dot com]

I'm reading Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined and he states on page 143 that you can view the Web as containing two forms of knowledge: the database and the joke. His point is that much of what we seek on the web is knowledge that supplies pure information, i.e. the kind that is in a database. What is the electrical impedence of a particular chip? Yada yada...

But the human quest for knowledge is about more than cataloguing data, and sorting it into relevant piles according to some taxonomy. People seek "fat" knowledge, which is where the jokes come in. Jokes are "sudden knowledge." They depend on the unexpected. And yet that unexpected element makes a point, and supplies knowledge. This is the sort of thing that AI [Artificial Intelligence] people don't obsess about, but which web-surfers are constantly seeking out. It is the 25 foot wave that we want to ride because the outcome is unpredictable.

Worth thinking about. But not too much, because then you just wind up with a database. Gotta leave room for the jokes. [Ernie the Attorney]