The currency of currency
I was reading last week's Sunday NY Times and read two articles that related to my school work.
I really liked that because so often I feel like I'm spending my time on a lot of scholarly "exercises," so it's somewhat validating to see those same issues in my favorite newspaper.
The articles were both in the Week in Review section. One talked about "The Gamer as Artiste" and it dicussed many of the same game issues that we dealt in class.
The second was about Wikipedia, which I really enjoy using, though I know it shouldn't be a primary source.
While I'm not going to go into the details of the articles, I do want to comment on the prevailing theme in almost everything I read these days regarding how we define cultural mainstays like artist, writer, novel, game. None of these have a solid definition anymore. The ideological space that each of them takes up continual expands and overlaps with other definitions.
The knowableness of individual aspects of life is becoming vague. Each cultural entity is spilling over into the next. We can't tell you exactly or succinctly what a game or a narrative is anymore, or a writer, or novel. I think that it frustrates the more orderly of minds, especially in academia.
This situation feels inevitable. and the same loss of conciseness is evident in people as well. You can see it a lot on the Web. I am this, and this, and that, oh and this too, but only sometimes, but I can also do this, but only if I have that, and occasionally I can do this but only if I know that these will be here, and when those are gone, then I can move like these, see? That is me.
Posted by wood0072 at December 10, 2005 4:10 PM