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I have written three books
and the strange thing about it is that
even although they are less that a year old
they all feel really out of date
so even the ideas I was writing
less than twelve months ago already feel like they have passed
the ideas in there fell like they have already passed
perhaps I should have written it like an ongoing statement
and then just updated it
rather than writing a book because it seems so of its time
not that these things are amazing things
but you know they are kind of
they've had it already
they are already getting a bit dirty as well
so I just wanted to say that
the summary
think about what
these things are in a sentence
I'd say that
Flat Culture
was this idea of
culture flattening out
so the idea that you can do everything you can do anything
but when I really thought about it that almost sounded like it had to be like that
so there was something in there that was...
you are almost telling someone they have to do it
in this way
so there was a kind of limit to how well that will work
and then I thought about
having discussions with lots of different people we thought about the idea of Bumpy Culture
so this idea that
culture will never be kind of Flat
it will always have
peaks and troughs
that you know if you think about
Modernism you might think of it as a huge spike or a huge monolith
where everything is in one direction
Flat culture would mean everything on the same plane, so everything is very democratic
bumpy culture is a way of thinking about it, what is more interesting is
that there is
bits of disagreement you know that's kind of these different shapes
of all these different places, all these different kind of things going on
so Bumpy culture looks at those things as a good thing. So problems are a good thing.
whereas Flat Culture
is more idealistic
and maybe thinks about utopia and that sort of thing
So Flat Culture is almost like a dead culture
Bumpy Culture likes problems
so i started reading and thinking about Bumpy Culture
and then thinking about the idea of Lumpy Culture
so
Lumpy Culture is really a
reflection of
a lot of thinking about
particularly to do with the internet, where you end up with a very small group of
people who really like
small cats or
there is a very particular group over here that like a particular type of ska music
whatever
so it's trying to think about how these little
pockets of
dense pockets of agreement how they all fit together
within Bumpy Culture
and
I kind of think that
Bumpy Culture is actually
a better phrase than Lumpy
because Lumpy is really based on this idea that came out of the euphoria
for the early internet
this idea that
everybody will have a voice
and everyone will belong to these tiny groups
perhaps our real experience after the internet became more mundane
you just end up with huge swathes of information
you don't really get these exciting niches, you just get masses, masses and masses of the same thing
reproduced over and over again
people copying from wikipedia putting it on their own website and someone else copies that information the pension in
so you get a lot of repetition that
perhaps we thought that it wouldn't come out like that much
and then
but also the other thing is that we have things like Facebook and Twitter that
are almost universal, almost universal
methods in which we
we access the internet
so on one hand there is this idea that we would
all be very very different and just come together on these tiny little
agreements everywhere
but on the other hand we stick to really familiar things like the big names like Facebook and Twitter I am
sure that
there are loads of other big one that we stick to
you know maybe we only go to four different places for our news
what am I trying to say? I am trying to say that
that Lumpy Culture has come out of a euphoria from the start of the internet
and perhaps that dies off perhaos we are not so convinced by it, this very democratic
thing that we started off with
its not quite
open for everyone
I am going to stick with Bumpy Culture
That is what I am going to have in my mind about how I think about the world out there.