A Blogospheric MMORPG?

Curtis Gale Weeks has some interesting thoughts on the similarities between massive online multi-player role-playing games like World of Warcraft and blogs. I see them myself, but the differences are massive.

Brazil’s Charles Bronson

I want to see this when the subtitled DVD gets stateside. I’m a huge fan of the “hardboiled cop”-type movies, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series in particular. The larger issues raised in the article are also fascinating. Film scholars routinely analyze figures like Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer as throwbacks to the cultural archetype of the cowboy, the anti-hero who walks the thin line between civilization and savagery. Essentially, High Noon with cars and machine guns. But the theme seems to have wide resonance among many foreign audiences. I once read in a Criterion collection essay on Charles Bronson’s Death Watch that the author had seen it screened in Africa, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia–and each the time the audience broke into wild applause when Bronson began to gun down the gutter punks who killed his family. Perhaps the figure of the vigilante who takes the law into his own hands is more of a universal archetype than an American one.

Facebook: The Origins of Totalitarianism?

Ari Melber:

When one of America’s largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it “Gen Y’s first official revolution,” while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to “a mass scale.” Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.

Something to Chew On

Duck of Minerva:

But in this case, what difference is there between a CIA officer and Dana Priest? (she’s a Post Reporter who covers national security). Once, in a chat she was doing, someone asked her the question– who has better info, you or a spy–and she said her.

Eulogy

Whenever I turn on the TV and see yet another story about Lindsay Lohan’s alcoholism or the “tragic saga” of Anna Nicole Smith, I find myself growing nostalgic for an era of journalism I never experienced. Perhaps I’m dreaming of a golden age that never was. But the sad truth remains that we traded men and women like David Halberstam for the likes of Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera.