DJ Culture

Salon interviews Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil. There isn't much new here, but this is worth commenting on:

There’s always been too much to read. Nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need and what we always seem to get is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We need search engines, we need indexing, we need reviews. We have all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for.

The Dish can't read the whole internet, but the web allows social networks to filter the best content upwards. We try to catch as much smart stuff in the net net as we can. In this fast-evolving medium, a blogger still writes and edits, but he or she also acts as a kind of disk-jockey for the collective mind - sampling the best, re-mixing the funny, keeping the crowd dancing in the public square.