OurBlook Interview

2012 Talks

What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology? (with Dave Allen, David Ewald, Rick Moody, Jesse von Doom, and Anthony Batt)
2pm, March 14th, Room 17A
Austin Convention Center
SXSW
Austin, TX

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, which is available from The MIT Press and fine bookstores all over.

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Shutter to Think

April 30th, 2009 | No Comment | Category: Marginalia

Sandra Ordonez from OurBlook, which is named after a portmanteau of “blog” and “book” and whose tagline is “Today’s Voices, Tomorrow’s Solutions,” asked me a few questions about citizen journalism and whether or not it could save newspapers.

Here’s an excerpt:

Some critics cringe at the thought of citizen journalism, citing lack of quality. How would you respond to these critics? Are there any steps that newspapers can take to safeguard against inaccurate, dishonest, slanted or otherwise harmful citizen journalism?

RC: Newspapers are not facing a problem of quality of information. They’re facing a problem of technology. The organizing principle of the newspaper, unlike that of say, a book, translates easily to the “page” paradigm of the web. Thought it’s not perfect and quality of information is an issue, citizen journalism (in the form of blogs, micro-blogs, social media profiles, etc.) thrives online. Newspapers, or rather their owners, will only survive if they learn how to thrive online as well.

Here’s the full interview.

Further Posting:

Respond / React:

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.

I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »