It’s also in Cyberculture & History, and right now, in the New Arrivals.

So, if you’re in Austin and don’t have a copy, stop by and get yours.

Many thanks to Michael McCarthy and everyone at BookPeople for their support. And to you for yours.

The book was originally published in 2007, which makes it a rare, paradoxical and infinitely fertile cross between sort-of-contemporary cultural critique of the present and near-prophetic time-capsule of the recent past, swiftly fluttering across disciplines and ideologies to deliver a powerful cross-pollinator of modern intellectual and creative curiosity…

The time elapsed since the book’s publication makes it particularly fascinating to reverse-engineer how the ideas in recent popular books by these thinkers originally germinated…

Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.

You can read the full write-up here. Many thanks to Maria for the kind words and attention, and to my man Jeff Newelt for making the connection. These two truly get it, and it’s inspiring to have connected with them.

As always, Follow for Now is available from Powell’s, Amazon, on The Kindle, at various retail outlets, and from its very own site.

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse — intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist — is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

While I can’t completely agree with such a dismal view of contemporary society, I couldn’t state my purposes as a writer any better than that.

The Medium Picture is a history of the future of our relationship with technology. Technological mediation has changed and continues to change our relationships with each other, our information, time, space, and ourselves. It isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to become more pervasive. The Medium Picture explores these relationships at all levels, from language and literature to television and cell-phones. It’s about mediation, not just technology: It’s about the ripple, not the rock. That is, it’s about the process we undergo with our tools and toys. It calls attention to the effects of ever-expanding mediation and urges the reader to be more mindful of what constitutes authentic experience. It isn’t about relying on technology less, but it is about what relying on it means.

Given their commitment to critical and engaged theoretical reflection, I am happy to announce that I signed The Medium Picture to Zero Books.

Thank you all for your continued interest and support,

And many thanks to the early readers of this material. I’ll never remember everyone, but here are some helpful folks who read early drafts of the proposal and gave invaluable notes and advice: David Patterson, Mark Wieman, Alex Burns, Steven Shaviro, David Barker, David Miller, Matt Schulte, Kristen Sensenig, Matt Bialer, Rebecca Oliver, Kasey Pfaff, Micheal Schandorf, Doug Sery, Erik Davis, John Brockman, Max Brockman, Jason Weidemann, John Oakes, and Doug Rushkoff.

The post I did on How To Do Stuff and Be Happy provides some context. Enjoy!

My friend and colleague Mike Schandorf required Follow for Now for his Writing for New Media class this semester at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He snapped this shot of the stack of copies in their bookstore. I’m stoked.

Many thanks, Schandorf. See you soonly.

Is this image in the Public Domain? If anyone knows anything about it, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

I am very stoked to have my work in MonkeyWrench. As their website says, “MonkeyWrench Books is more than just a bookstore. It is a library and educational resource. It is a place for meetings, film screenings, talks, benefits and book readings. It is also a relaxed space to network and make connections over a cup of organic coffee or tea.” They’re located at 110 E. North Loop here in Austin, Texas.

Follow for Now is also available from the following fine places:

• Powell’s in Portland, OR.
• Reading Frenzy in Portland, OR.
• Skylight in Los Angeles, CA.
• Last Gasp in San Francisco, CA.

If you are near any of these stores, support the independent: Buy my book there. If not, it’s also available at Amazon and at its own site.

Thank you,

-Roy Christopher

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more (click here for the full Table of Contents). It includes interviews by John Brockman, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Paul D. Miller, and myself, among others.

Published through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages. Click here to look inside on Amazon.

Follow for Now is also available from Powell’s and several other fine retail outlets across the country. You can also join the Facebook Group or find out more.

Thanks for reading,

-Roy Christopher

The snapshot includes voices ranging from Howard Bloom (a pop music PR star who’s become a biological science fanatic) and DJ Spooky (an aspiring science fiction writer who’s become a hip hop music star), to Howard Rheingold (the virtual anthropologist who interpolates the present through a futuristic lens) and Bruce Sterling (the etymological founder who extrapolates the present into futuristic fiction). Follow for Now thus drops sufficiently many known and intriguing names in its table of contents (and on its cover) to stay on the shelves of both snooty philosophers and free-thinking subculturalites for decades. But the nuggets those names provide are intriguing enough to justify that stay, on those shelves and others. In short, the content is as intense as the cast.

The full review is here. Founded and directed by my friend and colleague David M. Silver, The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. I am damn proud to have Follow for Now acknowledged by them.

Follow for Now is available from Amazon, Powell’s, and directly from me.

To celebrate and commemorate the book’s release, Paul’s doing a reading in New York with Jonathan Lethem. Here’s the announcement from Paul:

Sound Unbound is a manifesto about sound art, digital media, and what I like to call contemporary composition. It has essays and interviews from people as diverse as Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jaron Lanier, Pauline Oliveros, Naeem Mohaiemen, and others. The audio companion to the book has super rare material from Sub Rosa Records, one of my favorite indie labels. I got rare material from Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and lots other others. I guess you can think of the book as a kind of literary mashup.

We’re having the Sound Unbound book launch event at McNally Robinson, a great bookstore. The launch event will be between me and Jonathan Lethem, the legendary writer.

The event is as follows:

Who: Paul D. Miller and Jonathan Lethem

What: Readings from new books. Sound Unbound and Jonathan’s new novel You Don’t Love Me Yet.

Where: McNally Robinson Bookstore
52 Prince St, just off of Lafayette

When: Friday May, 2nd 2008, 7pm
Cost: FREE!!!

If you’re in the area, check it out.

Also, you can get Sound Unbound from Powell’s here.

And here are some blurbs about it:

“What a marvelous collection! This provocative and wide ranging book is packed with a vast number of facts and theories: the sound of creation in the Vedas, the Muslim influence on early hip hop, mathematical permutations of bell patterns (Eno), the term ‘Emptyv’ (Chuck D). The essays criss cross over many aspects of sound–cosmic, chemical, political, economic. It sparks questions (Can sound be translated into light?) and presents bits of information like the name for Jamaican sound systems (‘Houses of Joy’). Plus you get to meet fascinating characters like Alex Steinweiss (album cover artist), Motown’s Berry Gordon and synthesizer pioneer Raymond Scott. And you get to consider how Bach’s style might have been influenced by his job copying Vivaldi scores. Reading Sound Unbound also invites you to reconsider techno hype, as when Bruce Sterling describes laptops as ‘colorful, buzzing cuddly things with the lifespan of hamsters.’ I love this book!”
– Laurie Anderson

“Paul Miller has grabbed disparate philosophies and references from the past five hundred years and tied them into a neat and interesting narrative on music, sound, and current thought in our time. Sound Unbound is an excellent reference on art–in the popular context–in the twenty-first century.”
– Branford Marsalis

“It’s a lovely eclectic collection that is a nice antidote to the usual way music and the history of music is often categorized into high/low, pop/classical, or black/white. I like Sterling’s analogy between our beloved high-tech media and inscrutable indecipherable archaic media like Incan quipus. From Raymond Scott to the hidden racism in digital circuitry to a history of easy listening, there is enough inspiring weirdness here to fuel some musical fires for a good while.”
– David Byrne

“Everything must be about one thing first, then it can be about many things. Paul Miller’s collection of texts is about one thing: the use of scanning in music and more generally the world around us. He gives us a single structure to put very different experiences and theoretical constructs into an overarching context. The result is always interesting and often illuminating. These essays by thinkers and practitioners range widely and produce their own static and interferences, but they fall into one perceptible rhythm. A good staging of an opera uses what you see on stage to make you hear better. Similarly, these reflections make it easier to tune in to the sometimes confusing soundscape of our dislocated, interrelated, networked times.”
– Robert Wilson

“For the maverick rhythm scientist Paul D. Miller, sound is liquid; it spills over and slips under categories, firewalls, case law, and legal codes to find us and move us. In the same way, his important collection of sound thinkers and sound ideas calls us to remove the fake ‘security’ imposed on us by capital and state, and, more crucially, to reimagine freedom and reclaim our creativity.”
– Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“Paul Miller is one of the best cultural radars in the world today. He always picks out the most relevant people working today and reveals previously unseen connections. If you want situational awareness about the world of sound, music, performance, computers, and ideas, read this book.”
– Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego