Please spread this far and wide.
Category: Personal Page 55 of 59
Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow puts it perfectly:
“Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
For example, I love The Wire. It’s an excellent show that can lay a solid claim on being the best television out there. But what do I enjoy most about the Wire? Talking about it. Talking about how it captures some of my own experiences. Talking about about how it helps illustrate the interconnected nature of a city.  So, as great as it is to watch it, the conversations it inspires are better. Perhaps content isn’t “just” something to talk about, but it’s not the end. It’s a means to a more important end, for me. And for most of us, I suspect.
tuned to a dead channel.
Of course I want you to see this.
I just finished (a few years after everyone else did, apparently) Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. It is an . . . *amazing* examination of race. I have never come across a book (or article, or movie, or . . .) that has done a better job of capturing the impact of race in the 70s and 80s. Read it.
A brilliant solution to a growing problem. I’ll definitely be doing this next time I need to check luggage.