Before Twittter, a serious connoisseur might study the Mona Lisa for 20 years before reaching a conclusion. Today, the average museum visitor looks at a work of art for 42 seconds. Now 45 seconds is a long time compared to the 11 seconds that most shares are owned by high frequency trading machines. But for […]
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From Easter Island to Three Mile Island
You don’t need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web? For Douglas Rushkoff, in his new book Program or be Programmed, the answer is that the web is different. ‘It’s […]
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The meaning of melons (revisited)
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last year that Japan’s debt path was ‘out of control’. Simon warned of “a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default”. [The IMF expects Japan’s gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) […]
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Innovating our way to oblivion
(Summer re-run: first published 16 June 2008) Out-of-control buzzwords are like locusts: you can swat handfuls of them down with a bat, but more will come to take their place. I’ve been swatting away for ages in this blog at all things Conceptual, Cultural, Clustered and (especially) Creative. But now we’re suffering a massive counter-attack […]
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Marketing, me, and the future of tv
(Summer re-run: first published September 2009) A marketing whiz I know in New York asked me to do her a favour: answer some questions about the future of tv. At least, that’s what I thought she asked. But when, a couple of days later, a FedEx package arrived, it contained a tiny digital voice recorder […]
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Doors of Perception seeks editor/writer to volunteer for special project
Doors of Perception seeks a very capable – but under-employed – editor/writer willing to volunteer for a special project. It’s to compile a New Yorker style listings that will be published as a stand-alone feature. I’m guessing that it will entail three to four weeks of intermittent work – and that it can be done […]
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Live longer! become a micro-philanthropist!
A Swedish study has found that ‘survival was 29 percent better in the donor group’. The study concerned kidney donors, it’s true – but we’re confident the principle also applies if you donate money to Doors of Perception and help us develop this site. A ‘donate’ button is on the left of your screen. What […]
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Requiem for a species
“It’s too late to avert catastrophic change. Our politics and institutions are too dysfunctional to make elegant adaptations. We’d better prepare ourselves for surviving as best we can”. Clive Hamilton’s new book Requiem for a Species is not for the faint-hearted. But my first reaction was to think: “So? what am I supposed to do […]
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Look – or connect?
Each year 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness and on any given night, over 700,000 people are without a roof. In Houston alone, some 15,000 homeless people live in abandoned buildings, on cardboard makeshift beds, under freeways, and in shelters throughout the city. In Western Europe, too, the number of homeless people is at its highest […]