Following up on a discussion at Crooked Timber, I looked at this much-linked piece by Camille Paglia, and was struck by its dated references to television and the 60s[1]. She goes on to talk about computers, but apparently sees the computer as nothing more than a turbocharged TV set. This impelled me to dig out a piece I wrote nearly ten years ago, making the point that far from privileging visual media, the computer, and particularly the Internet are contributing to a new golden age of text. Blogs weren’t thought of when I wrote this piece, but the argument anticipates them, I think.

fn1. Oddly enough, although the main argument is a restatement of positions that were familiar 50 years ago, the piece is full of references to the young, as though the current generation of young adults has been, in some way, more saturated in TV than were the baby booomers.
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Just a note that anyone interested in the issues of intellectual property and the Internet could usefully look at JSTOR: A history by Roger Schonfeld. JSTOR was the first big attempt to put complete series of academic journals (including back issues) online and free[1]. Despite a lot of missteps, JSTOR survived and prospered while well-funded commercial ventures failed. I’m pleased to say the economics profession played a prominent role, with the American Economic Review, Econometrica and others being among the early participants.

The success of JSTOR is an illustration of the proposition, put forward most clearly by Clay Shirky that the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame (taken generally to include anyone who has something to say and wants others to read it) over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune.

fn1. Quite a few commentators over at Crooked Timber have pointed out that JSTOR isn’t free or easily accessible to individuals, though it is non-profit and the charges for library subscriptions are modest – less than a single commercial journal in many cases.

For Good Friday, I thought I’d focus on some good news.

First, the Indonesian parliamentary election is nearly all good news. It’s good news that the election was held at all, and was pretty much free and fair. It’s even more good news that the military no longer holds a block of seats as it did under Suharto. And, generally speaking the results have been encouraging. Militant Islamists did poorly and the success of the Democrat party provides a plausible alternative presidential candidate, Yudhoyono. The unappealing prospect that Wiranto would make a comeback as president seems to be receding.

The earlier elections in Malaysia were also reasonably encouraging is showing little support for radical Islamism. But here, as in Singapore, the system can’t really be called democratic until it has managed a change of government. Surprisingly, Indonesia seems to have surpassed its neighbours in this respect. Given the dire state of affairs a few years ago, with Christian and Islamist militias fighting it out, the military fomenting trouble and Suharto still in the wings, this is an impressive achievement.

I’m considering adding a threaded comments feature to the site. You can see how it works, here. I’m in two minds about it. I don’t at all like the usual threaded comments systems where you have to open each comment individually, but this doesn’t seem to suffer from that problem. But it might be overkill for the discussions we have here. Any thoughts?

I’m reposting this piece by Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber

It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for Jew instead. (See Norman Geras for more details).

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

I’ve been putting off updating my blogroll, but I’ve finally had a first go at the task. I’ve finally accepted that the “hiatus” of some of my favorite sites is permanent, and removed them. I also deleted a few blogs that I can no longer be bothered with, and updated lots of broken links. I’ve added a number of new ones, but I’ve been fairly lazy about this, so I’m inviting anyone (particularly in Oz/NZ) who thinks a link would make sense to email me. In addition, if anyone reading this still has links to my old blog(s), this is the time to update them.

I had my first blogging brush with fame today. I was presenting some lectures to a very interested/interesting group of students at the Australia-NZ School of Government , held at the College of Art which is part of Griffith Uni’s Southbank campus. Not only had several of the students (senior public sector people) read the blog, but someone came up to me in the cafe, asked “Are you John Quiggin?” and introduced himself as a reader.

It’s puzzling to me that, although the stats say the blog has far fewer readers than the Fin Review (where I’ve been writing for ten years) my daily experience is the opposite. Far more people in my circle of friends and acquaintances seem to be aware of the blog than have read the column.

Like teenage acne, the arrival of comment spam, with the corresponding need to install MT Blacklist, is a sign that a new blog is making its way into the world, being noticed by search engines and, inevitably, by spambots. So, Morse Michael, while I won’t be ordering your viagra and phentermine, I’m not entirely disappointed to say “Hello and Goodbye!”.