Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase.

'Although barely more than a decade ago, the time she describes seems like another era, a forgotten world of boozy lunches and capacious expense accounts. ("We could have taught those MPs a thing or two about fiddling expenses," McAfee says, only half joking.) She thinks it is harder for us to remember relatively recent history than things that happened far longer ago. "I mean, can we imagine a world now without universal mobile phones? Can you remember trying to put coins into a call box? It wasn't so very long ago that there was no email. The changes have been so swift and they were mainly unforeseen. Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase."'

Annalena McAfee: 'I see myself as a recovering journalist' in The Observer today.

Also, James Gleick's latest book The Information sounds interesting. It looks at the history of information, the work of Claude Shannon (maths man, came up with the term 'bit') and the state of play today with 'the torrent of data and information that now engulfs us'.


For more of that sort of thing, read The internet at 40.

Thought For The Day

'Writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock' - Ann Beatie (via Francesca Rhydderch & The Paris Review)




Update:

This week I have mostly been reading books and taking long thinking walks, going to art galleries and scribbling things down in notebooks. I took a pile of books out of Cardiff Central Library. Books like

You Are Not A Gadget. A Manifesto. - Jaron Lanier
The Cult of the Amateur. How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today's user-generated media are killing our culture and economy - Andrew Keen (which of course I shall blog about)
Cyburbia. The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How we Live and Who we Are. - James Harkin
The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. - Jonathan Zittrain
The Shallows. How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember - Nicholas Carrhis

Can you guess what it is yet? This novel?

I've also read some other books. Books that include Cherry by Matt Thorne, The Rough Guide to the Future (because all these big non-fiction books seemed daunting, and this was an easy read introduction/revision of what I know about predictions for future technology),  Against The Machine by Lee Siegal, some cyberpunk because I'm interested in how we probably now live in a cyberpunk era, and some other stuff including newspapers and the Sunday Times winning short story. I read an article on David Foster Wallace was really interesting also, especially in light of this Guardian article on what writers leave behind in a digital age. Thoughts have been spinning around my head about how nothing is deleted on the internet and what that means for society and the individual, the longevity of the artist, life, death and what it means to be human. Nothing too big, paranoia inducing or existential then. Excellent. I'm going to sleep well writing this, I just know it.

PS. Talking of David Foster Wallace, his widow is interviewed in today's Observer.

I would like to thank the Academi...

...or rather the newly branded shiny fabulous people that are behind Literature Wales and the fabulous panel members for Literature Wales Writers’ Bursaries 2011-12: Katie Gramich (Chair), Catrin Beard, Catherine Fisher, Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Amanda Hopkinson and Idris Reynolds. Thanks very much all.

Yes the clever people at Literature Wales have awarded me money to take time off from all the other pay-the-rent journalism, PR etc. work I do to immerse myself in writing The Novel. My very first novel. I shall be posting updates of what I am reading and thinking about and how all the writing process is going or not going here. 


Otherwise, in social networking and journalism terms I shall be much quieter than usual for a spell. You will still see me performing here and there but otherwise enjoy the peace.