Saturday, April 4, 2009

My Life in Travel

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/my-life-in-travel-melanie-singer-1661717.html

I'm in the Independent Newspaper today!

Love Melanie
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4 comments:

  1. Len BullardApril 4, 2009 at 8:49 PM

    "Places where there is less media and fewer behavioural modification tools being used. Like the Caribbean islands; the more remote the better."

    That's an interesting answer. You understand the media and Skinner Boxes.

    An artist's life, particularly touring performers, has been about boxes and the people who keep us in them for millennia. The good thing about the Internet is we can be free of those people. The bad thing is any user interface is by nature, a behavioral modification tool: (S/R chain). Where it is insidious is in choice of choices. Pick any of you videos in youtube and look at the 14 it groups by your video before you select any.

    That is the machine setting your choice of choices.

    Understand it like taffy strings to beach balls. It pulls them together by the tags but the tags are semantically associative, so it pulls them together by emotions as well. It surprises me how well it does this, because that is emergent intelligence and comes very close to rudimentary but very important human choices: what we do in the first two seconds we look at a situation or set of choices.

    Because it is a feedback system (select/next/select), it modifies behavior. Because it ranks choices, it modifies behavior.

    But then, so does your guitar and for the very same reasons. When you see the web as you see your guitar, it becomes another instrument by which you can affect people and events through communication as you do with your fans.

    At this point in our lives, old folkies like you and me are virtual sheepdogs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TarBabyJimApril 5, 2009 at 2:10 AM

    I'm not quite sure what Len is talking about but, it is a very good read. Thank you for the link.

    Are you trying to brainwash me Melanie? Is that what Len means?
    Love,
    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  3. TarBabyJimApril 5, 2009 at 3:06 AM

    PS:

    Here is a great book to red Melanie. I love it!

    http://www.amazon.com/America-Daughter-Babylon-Allen-Bonck/dp/059550213X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_a

    ReplyDelete
  4. Len BullardApril 5, 2009 at 7:53 AM

    Len means: it's in the way that you use it. :)

    ReplyDelete

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