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Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

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Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2001-10-03

I forgot one thing about the con that I really must write about. I don’t even know how I could have forgotten it in the first place.

Janne Wallenius had a huge sausage from Germany — I don’t really know why it’s important where it was from, but somehow it just feels right to mention it — wrapped inside paper which he kept in his pocket during all three days. He didn’t always hid it though, so when he walked around there, he ate from it from time to time and asked other people in a very polite way if they too wanted some. No one did. He even brought it with him into the bar in the Park Aveny Hotel.

“This bar is probably not the best place to eat from that sausage, at least not like that,” John-Henri told him in the calm way only he can manage.

“Bah! I have behaved myself much worse before, in much fine company than this.” He took another bite while the rest of us laughed.

Later, someone speculated that he had the sausage because the con was “dry” — all thanks to paranoia-suffering owners that hadn’t been clear on this until it was too late, so there where no usable bar in the house — so he couldn’t have his usual bottle of Vodka. This time he laughed.

“I had Vodka, but it’s almost empty now.”

In Den Sista Boken [trans. the Last Book] by Johan Svedjedal, the author have some minor radical and interesting ideas about what a book is and its future — for the convenience of others I’ll translate the quote into English, m’key?

»The pessimists say that the computerisation might kill of the book made on paper. But right now, the biggest threat is over-publishing to the degree that the books will hide each other. They don’t risk extinction because of a hunting game where they get shot down. No, instead the computers might do something that’s akin to an environment catastrophe — too much nutrition which leads to a violent invasion of algae that kills everything else.« (p 32).

In the next chapter he continues to talk about how the books will evolve into digital form, but unlike most other he maintains that the book will continue to exist, as it’s only a new medium that has been introduced. In my opinion he puts way to much trust in hypertext and its possibilities. It has so far done nothing to the state of being of book other than changing the way we buy them.

He ignores the faults of the system in order to prove that compact and liberty to choose the level of depth in the writings are superior to that we have now; he never thinks much about the how this might be negative. Ignorance might grow as no one wants to learn about disturbing things. Or the fact that what he calls the last book probably won’t last longer than microfiche, quite the opposite. We already have things from old computers rendered unusable thanks to an absence of means to actually read old file formats. He has forgotten the main rules about technology and progress: just because it’s new, it doesn’t have to be good. Just because it’s good, it doesn’t have to survive.