Thursday 19 August 2010

When we put up our video of Bret Easton Ellis, we thought people would be interested but we didn’t expect the deluge of comments responding to the author’s talk.

First up was Gary Chau calling BEE “a douche” which inspired several of his fans to come to his defence. Emma wrote glowingly that Easton Ellis was “pretentious, opinionated, mildly subversive…and he was honest about his mood at the time” while Josie thought he “bridged the gap between generation x and y and baby-boomer” and was going to give his book to her 38-year-old son.

There was a lot of interest in the questions and the questioners. A character calling themselves Paul Bogan was against the whole idea: “As much as it’s democratic and breaks down the barrier between the artist and audience, the Q&A at the end was really embarassing, it’s no wonder Ellis was more interested in kvetching with his i-phone than anything else.”

Interviewer Alan Brough copped some flack from Mr Bogan, who compared his charisma to that of “hessian sack of unscrubbed potatoes”. We thought this was a little harsh and so did other commenters including Trev who outlined a golden rule “Don’t go the Brough”. Others agreed including Fran who “thought he [Brough] did an incredible job with someone who wasn’t that easy to interview” and Alex “walked away from the evening a little less a fan [of] Ellis but a new fan of Brough”.

According to his recent Atlantic article, Nicholas Carr thinks search engine juggernaut Google is trying to read your mind.

You’ve probably already seen the Google Suggest, the Google feature that predicts the text you’re typing into the search box, but Carr says it makes the search engine “like a nosy mother, intent on knowing everything her children are doing and thinking”.

As well as pointing to privacy concerns about gathering information about your every search, Carr is concerned about the impact of what he calls Googlethink. The problem is that Google is “scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment”. He sees creativity and curiosity shoehorned into crowdsourced generalisations which he believes will make us lazier thinkers. The real problem with Google Suggest, Facebook friend finders or any number of predictive text generators is that their “choices are convenient, but they’re not our own”.