To put a weary metaphor to rest, I will do my best to never again refer to absorbing the internet as drinking from a fire hose.
At first I was reluctant to use Google Reader. Alex and John convinced me it was the civilized way to keep up with blog reading. I bought in and bought hard. I really love using the j and k keys to motor through unread posts. It's something like elective torture a la A Clockwork Orange. I don't even need those eyelid clips.
This has been an ongoing conversation lately among my peers. Are there repercussions from letting all of this stir together? I actually read/browsed/scanned four thousand items in the last four weeks. That doesn't count links emailed to me, the New York Times, images shared in our work chat, and anything from real life. I still have some idea of "my visual style" and "my personal politics" at the end of it, but I feel wary.
Searching for influences in a piece of design used to be something like spotting a familiar sample in a Public Enemy song. Now, I find, it's more like trying to keep up with the stream of provenance in Girl Talk.
A newish field of art has recently sprung a leak from the hose (last last time, I swear). I don't know if it has a name, but it's similar to the hybrid Curation Is Creation idea I
mentioned a few weeks ago.
Joachim Schmid spent years as a photo archivist and collector of found photography. More recently he has turned to searching Flickr for torrents of images sharing uncanny visual similarities. Self-portraits of feet, plates of food, objects shot in harsh flash.
Penelope Umbrico has made several similar bodies of work, one including thousands and thousands of Flickr sunsets. Another consists entirely of the flash reflected in television screens for sale on Craig's List. The prints were then sold on Craig's List for the asking price of the original TV. I bought one of those, it's nice.
In some ways this is all very exciting. All of this information flows over me and it's warm and fuzzy. I'm less confident, however, with my retention. I star/
delicious/share the good ones, but they are buried nonetheless. I suppose it'll just be refreshing to leave it all behind and retire to a mountain house some day. It will have very little furniture, and plenty of books that take a month to read.
This post was going to be called Designing Under The Influence, but I realized that sounded
familiar for some reason.
