Gather round…

Philosophical journalist (Pop Philosopher? Celebrity Proust Fan? Oh, I don’t know) Writer Alain de Botton has a quick little post up on the Guardian’s Arts blog called ‘My Fantasy New Year’s Eve‘ where he picks out his ideal guests for NYE. Even better than Alain’s picks (Proust, Keira Knightley) are the comments:

"My ideal dinner guests would include Jonathan Ross, Catherine Tate,
Jade Goody, Pete Doherty, Posh Spice, Paris Hilton, and Dawn French.
Once they were all safely seated, I would make my excuses, leave the
building, and call in an air strike."

My own fantasy NYE list? In addition to friends and family, of course – it would be nice to unite my scattered tribe – I’d love some time to chat, drink and play Guitar Hero with the following… (all of them still alive, because if you’re going to go around collection dead people, you’re never gonna beat Bill n Ted):

John Squire
Slash
(Both fairly obvious really – I’m massively into Guitar Hero at the moment, so having two top guitarists on the list would make for some fun)

Gordon Bown (Hey, it makes sense to get in with the new boss!)

Hayao Miyazaki (Japan’s greatest living director. Need to convince him to make a movie of the novel I haven’t yet written, because he keeps threatening to retire. From the documentaries I’ve seen about him and his studio, he looks to be a fairly entertaining, if slightly cantankerous guy)

Mamoru Oshii (Director of both of the Ghost in the Shell movies, in interviews he’s fabulously uncompromising and challenging, particularly on the subject of humans, robots and AI)

David Mitchell (My favourite author. Would only be invited if I could control my jealousy.)

Chris Anderson (Wired editor. He’s an entertaining speaker – I saw him at the London launch of his Long Tail book – and who better to talk to about technology and magazines?)

Penguin’s new media/digital/technology team (Of all the big publishers, they seem to have been doing the best when it comes to the opportunities of new technology – I’m a big fan of their blog, of the Glass Books and their various other experiments online)

Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme (Creators of the West Wing, creators of superb drama and characters)

Courtney Love (She can come across as eminently hateable, but then you remember ‘Live Through This’; I’d love to talk to her face to face, see what she’s really like)

Richard Holmes (Biographer, writer. my ex-tutor at UEA, he was consistently thought-provoking and inspiring: "Everyone needs to talk about their own past, the forces and experiences that shaped them, and how rarely this constant need is satisfied in the competetive, pressurised world, except in moments of emotional crisis." – Footsteps, p207/8)

Nigel Slater (His cook books are great, and he’s an excellent writer, too)

Sir Howard Stringer (Head of Sony. Someone needs to ask him what the hell is going on what with that firm and tell him to make the most of the chance he’s got)

Will Wright (Creator of Sim City and the Sims, he’s an eloquent and thought provoking speaker: "The human imagination is an amazing thing. As
children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting
toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just
beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we
grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The
result is something we call games.")

Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (Founders of Flickr, the website that has, after Yahoo Mail, become the biggest online part of my real life)

Happy New Year everyone!

At the Custom PC Christmas lunch the other week, we ended up chatting about when we first came to regard internet access as an essential component of a PC. For me it was fairly late, as it took ages to get a broadband connection set up when I came to London after finishing my MA … (I remember having to let the BT engineer into the basement of the building I was living in to do the cabling; to my surprise, the room contained a roulette table and lots of boxes of beer and spirits – no wonder the owner of the shop on the ground floor was so reluctant to give me the key…)

Anyway, while net access was/is a big deal, I don’t think it is the change itself; it’s the conduit for the real changes, one of which will be this idea of always being on, and from this, a loss – or perhaps not loss, but a change in what’s considered private. When you use your PC to play music for instance, and it’s connected to the net, you can keep track of all the songs you’ve played via a service like Last.FM. I still have to manually upload my photos to Flickr, but if my camera had WiFi, it could do that more easily. This is the kind of data I don’t mind sharing; it’s stuff I want to share, and that I would, in the past, have shared in a more ‘analogue’ way – showing prints of my pictures to people when they came round, telling them about new CDs I’ve bought. This blog, too, is playing its part in recording things;  although I do occasionally write longer posts (like this one), most of the posts are short and sharp, written quickly and simply, and intended, primarily, to keep track of things; links, articles I’ve written, and books I’ve read. As much as people like to play up the ‘old vs new media’ aspect of the web, I think the biggest changes it makes (or will make) won’t be to the media world, but to people’s lives. The web’s most amazing potential is not to do with media or content, but is to do with community, with the links it makes. Links between people and other, links between people and events, links between people and their things, between, ultimately, people and their lives.

It’s something I’m interested in, so I’ve got myself some reading to do about it; I have two starting points, one a book called ‘Everyware‘ by Adam Greenfield, which is very directly about always-on computing and networked lives, and ‘The Human Touch‘, by Michael Frayn, which might initially seem only tangentially related to the topic; it’s philosophy, filtered via literature, but it’s about (so the reviews tell me), how the imagination constructs the world – a very fitting theory for an always on, virtual world…            

Akane is making cards tonight – here’s Pacman wishing you a ghost-free Christmas and a dot filled new year!

(Factlet: Pacman is called Pacman because ‘pacu pacu’ is the Japanese way of describing the noise people make when eating)