Monthly Archives: November 2009

2 posts

Just Blow It All Up

2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)

In his book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis notes the particular enthusiasm in popular culture for destroying Los Angeles, and categorises the different ways in which the city bites the dust. Nuclear weapons lead the way with 49 surveyed works. Earthquakes: 28 works. Invasion: 10. Monsters: 10. Pollution: 7. Gangs or terrorism: 6. Floods: 6. Plagues: 6… and so on. What nobody, so far, had seen fit to do was just tip Los Angeles over and throw it in the ocean.

Enter Roland Emmerich.

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All-a-Twitter

Well, I’ve dived into the world of Twitter. My original intent was just to create another option to alert people to my infrequent updates, but I ended up using the site frequently. You can find me here. My main account will include stuff about both my main online interests (film and urban planning) as well as my various other obsessions.

As to my impressions of Twitter itself after a couple of weeks of using it – well, its a strange beast. Obviously, given I’ve taken it up with some regularity, I understand the appeal. Basically, it’s not so much a social networking site as a kind of rest-stop for tired bloggers (this is why the description of it as a micro-blogging site is much more accurate than lumping it in with things like Facebook or MySpace as a social networking site). Certainly the 140 character limit on posts seems liberating compared to the drudgery of maintaining a webpage or blog. When audiences expect sites to update with new content at least daily, that’s a huge demand on the author; 140 characters allows for the faster turnover without the chore factor. Twitter is basically reducing our expectations of on-line content so that they better align with expectations about how fast sites should update.

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