Inchoate Ascendant™: August 19, 2011.

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August 19, 2011

What Is Important in the Culling?

I thought that I would let people in a little today to the inner workings of an author's constant work. At least it's my constant work. The job is researching. I don't have to be working on any particular project to be researching. I do it, well, all of the time. I keep up on any number of topics in any number of manners. As a specific example I like to look at what is new in technology from the perspective of what people do with it, will do with it when the next new thing comes along--whether it seems to be the "next big thing" or not.

Yesterday I was perusing my social sites where a lot of content comes to me without any effort. I ended up looking at Opening government, the Chicago way, which led to The News Challenge-winning PANDA Project aims to make research easier in the newsroom, which in turn led to What is data science?, and then to Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space. In and amongst those were a host of other sites to read up on different words and concepts to help in grasping the rest.

Somewhere in the midst of it all I stopped off at Google+ to leave the following note... "Once again I brushed against something of gargantuan scale and intense complexity. I tried to feel my way around it, and then to step back far enough to get a sense of what it was. It spawned a number of lesser forms that milled around, and mired be down until whatever I was beginning to fathom of the great beast slipped away back into the depths until I find it by happenstance once more. Like a nightmare it is an endless loop and nothing new will come of it. It's very frustrating and my only consolation is I do not know if anyone else has ever grasped it either."

So what did I gain from this raft of links? I don't know as of yet. That's the way it goes sometimes. I've been chasing this idea of how the world will change. It's not about the technology or software itself, it's about what we will do with it. What will it allow us to do? How will we relate to it? How will it affect the ways we interact with each other and with the world?

As a parting thought, why am I interested in this since I'm a horror author? Well certainly just about everything has its dark side, but beyond that it all comes down to characters and the myriad of ways their psychology and makeup, and their place in the world and the objects they use in self-defining ways. That is the common thread in all fiction, no matter your genre.

Music: The Ballroom Blitz by Sweet.