Comments

1 - Jeff Beddow

Thu, Feb 5, 2009
@ 09:38

I like this chunking of lectures into 15 minutes!

Any consideration of the web and the public sphere is enriched by reading Norman O. Brown’s “Love’s Body” which is a brilliant post-Freud and post-Marx psychoanalysis of power. The web is driven by eros and thanatos, and models of capital and oppression are still valid but the metaphors must evolve and migrate.

The web busts up categories, but insights like Weber’s theory of the bureaucracy as flywheel absorbing minor perturbations can migrate into the new forms. The web creates its own version of the bureaucracy, but what is it? Careful with your answer. It might surprise you to know that Facebook is a major part of that evolution.

Great stuff, Howard. I am always inspired by your brainbits.