J. G. Ballard + Social Media -- the Virtual & the Real

The ever-relevant Ballardian.com has put up a new article, this one about J. G. Ballard predicting Social Media.

Here's a quote / preview:

[Everybody] will be living inside a TV studio.  

That's what the domestic home aspires to these days ... 

We're all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, 

and they'll be very strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads.  

That's going to come, I'm absolutely sure of that, 

and it'll really shake up everything.

-- J.G. Ballard

Read the rest of the article here:

 ['No Original Response: J.G. Ballard Predicts Social Media, CCTV, Reality TV' ]

(what better way to talk about the condemnation of social media than on my personal blog?)

Although the article's title makes mention of Reality TV, 

it doesn't talk at much length about the topic, 

but I guess it shares principles with CCTV & Social Media?

Reality TV sort of borrows CCTV's "form" but applies the mechanics of traditional entertainment TV & Social Media.

I'm not the most familiar with J. G. Ballard's work, I've read The Day of Creation and a few of his short stories, but what I have read was intriguing -- and Ballardian.com has a lot of interesting articles and essays applying Ballardianism to our present day and age.

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[ The Virtual Audrey ]

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"We are Clinging to a Great many Piano tops" -- Buckminster Fuller

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver.  But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top.  I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

--  R. Buckminster Fuller,  

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth 

"The Montreal Biosphere"
designed by Buckminster Fuller

(image via wikipedia )

Centralia, Pennsylvania

(an update without my crappy photos in it)

A city in Pennsylvania,

Centralia--

a former coal mining town--

has been on fire

for half a century now.

(image via wikipedia)

population in year 2010 = 10 residents

The fire, I understand, began in an old strip mine which had been converted into a landfill.

The fire seeped into a crack in the mine, led into the tunnels of old coal mines, igniting the underground passages throughout town.