Here’s a new video that goes with the how to draw a running cat video, based on my book Cat and Dog. I tech this to five year olds and they do lovely drawings -so do their teachers, who are often quite surprised that they can draw! Go on have a go.
Actually, this is a cunning plan to see wether cats or dogs are more popular on Youtube. So far on my drawing channel, dogs are way more popular. We shall see.
I must be mad, but I’m working on an online shop again. I’ve had so many problems with this in the past, I should have learned my lessons, But I’ve found a new shop system called prestashop which is pretty cool.
All online shops have their problems and learning curves. They all have different ways of doing things. Prestashop is french, so it has a certain style about it and a certain amount of confusion. How ever much it is translated, the gallic mind is different and puts things in different places and works on different business analogies. I’m getting there. I keep telling myself that once it is up and running then the hard work is done, but that is not quite the case – there are always updates and security patches to be installed.
Children often ask me at schools where they can buy my books. What they really want is a signed copy – which they can get from a personal store. I’ve decided that I will hold a specific shop stock, so I know when to re-order.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet since about 1977, when I first realised what computers could do and that they could talk to each other. I used to tell people that one day that we would all have computers and that they would be connected by the phone and that one day the final connection would be made that would turn the mass of computers into one brain.
Of course everyone said I was mad! Many people, technologists mostly, believe that this is likely in some way.
Thinking about the idea of the Web, this morning, I wonder if it hasn’t come alive already. I always assumed it would be a thinking, reasoning brain. What if it is just plain stupid or just not very intelligent?
Like a spider… sitting in the middle of a web, catching anything it can, sucking the juice out and doing nothing other than surviving to do the same the next day.
Isn’t that what the web is doing – sucking the juice out of what it is that makes us humans? Anything original that is posted on the web is immediately homogenised, made to fit into standards, broken up into bits, re-mashed, churned up and made to look like something new, which it isn’t. We come to expect standards.
A couple of years ago it was fashionable to talk about nano technology leading us into a world of grey goo. Well, isn’t that where we are heading on the internet? A world of grey digital goo, where everything is so chopped up and interlinked that it becomes meaningless.
A couple of days ago I posted an article about eBooks and authors. This was then posted up on a meaningless site called astonmartinnews.com. This site seems to have no reason to exist, other than to post links to other sites in the hope you will be drawn to it and then click on the advertising.
The page says that my blog entry has been tweeted about three times from that page! There are three comments on the article each linking to adverts to sell you ebooks. The whole confection has been whipped up by computers and there has not been one human interchange in the whole affair. What the hell is it about? All that Human ingenuity put to work for absolutely nothing. And this is going on all over the web every single microsecond. As more and more spurious links are made by mindless machines, the whole net becomes a mess, the real stuff gets harder to find so we fall back on the homogenised wisdom of Wikipedia, a wonderful encyclopaedia of pop culture.
When did you last get a really useful result from Google on the front page? The rest of the net is obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation, which basically means that you have to lie about the quality of your content to get to the front page so you can sell some ads. Real content is to be found on page 1245.
The net is a dead-eyed, care-less living monster that is slowly consuming our culture. Next it will begin sucking out the essence of our humanity.
The internet is probably the greatest tool we have ever invented – it may also be the worst.