Quick little gem from Svante Tidholm, author of a Swedish-language book on net culture entitled Loser:
Q. What role does technology play in the life of a loser? Did it help you find yourself in that way?
A. Yes, it helped me see that what you think and do is disposable. E-mail and Web sites makes it really easy to communicate in a higher level – instead of thinking for ten hours and writing two words that, in ten years, will make a great book, I can write two pages in ten minutes. That way of handling information has helped me to see the power of always changing and never squeezing your creations in a fixed template.
The smallest unit of online publishing is the post, however large that may be. When it comes to diarism or some other form of writing that does not need substantial vetting and fact-checking, the lesson here is “Get it out there in reasonable form and tinker with it later if you have to.”
And in Tidholm’s case, as with Matthew Good, of all people, if you add these snippets up you may find that parthenogenesis has taken place and you have given birth to an entirely new creature, a book.
Posted on 2002-01-27