I like the lift-off metaphor that my friend Mathew uses in his post today on the mesh ’07 conference. “Lift-off” evokes both a sense of effort and accomplishment, and also of excitement about what lies ahead. And that’s pretty much how I feel about mesh. Last year’s conference was a ton of work, but the […]

David Radler tries to explain the problem with movies in a piece in the LAT that, essentially, points the finger at American Narcissism: “Who needs Brad Pitt if you can be your own hero on a video game, make your own video on YouTube or feature yourself on Facebook?… I think Radler’s right to point the finger at the Internet’s power as a niche machine, and at social media’s power to engage attention, but to my mind the appeal is not the satisfaction of narcissistic urges – the appeal is the desire to connect with People Like Us. And if Hollywood (and the music and TV businesses) has done one thing very effectively, it’s been to create an industry around the notion that They are not People Like Us. Royalty, maybe; visitors from another planet, it sometimes seems; but certainly not People Like Us. The only exception to this I can think of is Reality TV (more to my point, though even that now seems past its stale date and has descended more into Circus than reality). The online niches that Radler describes are each miniature worlds where we can spend our time being Us and meeting others who are Like Us. I think movies are troubled now in part because we have an alternative to escaping into lives other than our own – we now have the opportunity to make our own lives more meaningful by connecting to others who have lives like ours.I’m not saying we no longer need Escapism – there will always be some need for it…. The Internet gives us the power to make our lives more meaningful by tapping into People Like Us – perhaps finding ways to derive this deeper meaning from our lives is simply more satisfying than escaping from them.