Being (just a teensy bit less) digital

[imomus]

My new column for Wired News is The Curse of Storage, and it connects Ikea's Trissa LP crate to the Chinese emperor Qin Huang-di, somehow.

I love having a column. I mean, I love having two columns; Click Opera is a column too. But I love having a professional one. I remember reading the columns of a certain Albert Morris in The Scotsman when I was a kid, and thinking what a great job he had, just being able to write about whatever crossed his mind, week in, week out. How come he never ran out of things to say? How did he manage to wrap topical stuff up in his own characteristic concerns? And how did he turn such elegant phrases so consistently? Maybe it just became a habit when you wrote that much. (Read Morris' last column for the paper, written just last year after 35 years at it.)

When I meet people and get asked what I do, I enjoy explaining "I have a column in Wired" as one of my answers. But up until this week I've had to qualify that with some extra explanation. If people have heard of Wired magazine, I then have to explain that my column is in Wired News, the online site, and that Wired News and Wired magazine, although they started under the same owner and still have ties, have been under different parent companies since 1999. That's when Wired News was bought by Lycos. Wired magazine, on the other hand, has been owned by Condé Nast for a few years.

Well, I'm pleased to say that I'll never have to give that explanation again. Last week Condé Nast bought Wired News from Lycos for $25 million. So now the two Wireds are re-united. Wired News has returned to "the beloved homeland"; once again, it sits beside its paper sister, the digital culture publication started by Louis Rosetto in Amsterdam in 1992.

I must say that I've always written my columns as if I were writing for that original Wired, which I read religiously in the mid-90s. (I even met and had a chat with Rosetto in Amsterdam in 1996.) I've always tried to bring the same attitude to these columns as figures like Nicholas Negroponte did to the original Wired; Negroponte didn't look at specific technologies so much as the human state of "being digital". I also loved William Giibson's articles for the magazine, like his famous one on Singapore. Or their interviews with people like Rem Koolhaas or Brian Eno.

When I was first hired by Wired, my commissioning editor Leander Kahney (born British but based in San Francisco, Leander is author of The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod) told me it was for two reasons: he loved Click Opera and he liked the Japanese angle so often featured in my writings.

Interestingly enough, ever since I've been writing for Wired News, the company has been owned by Lycos, itself owned by a Korean internet service provider called Daum. That Asian angle was purely structural -- the site is very much an American one -- but it does reflect the thoroughly trans-cultural nature of business structure, a globalism I've been able to match in my writing, which tends to come from a different city each month. There may be no columns from Seoul yet, but it matters to me that my writings get translated and run in the Culture section of Hotwired Japan, and even get streamed to i-modes. It means I not only have a column which is often about Japan, but one which gets read in Japan, in Japanese... and even on keitais.

Editorially, nothing will change at Wired News under Condé Nast. I welcome the reunification with the magazine, which might lead to more crossovers between the bit-based Wired and the atom-based Wired. It's also nice to be under the umbrella of the organization that publishes Vogue, The New Yorker, The Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveller. I like the fact that those magazines are about human experiences, travel and ideas and colour and texture and lifestyles rather than machines, because that's the focus of my writing too. Hey, they even own lots of cooking magazines! Maybe I could do some cookery columns for Wired! Now there's texture for you!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Looks like there's a column space with your name on it in Auld Reekie...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Weirdly enough I was approached by The Scotsman about doing a column for them last year, just before I got the Wired gig. Nothing came of it, but it would be horrible to think they were planning to ease out old Albert on my behalf. He's irreplaceable, like Peel.

[(Anonymous)]

You've got the right headgear. And your mum and dad would be chuffed to bits...

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

If the (flat) cap fits... ;-)

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

thanks to you i've finally got round to reading the famed William Gibson article (which, 13 years on, the newspaper articles here *still* refer to sulkily whenever they do a patriotic piece).

i'm afraid what he said then still holds true now, i've just recently returned home and found a large swathe of historic buildings cut down and transformed into identikit soulless paceship-like buildings. oh well.

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

*spaceship, not paceship

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm personally rather attracted to buildings that look like spaceships... unless it's the Fuji TV headquarters at Odaiba:

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

i never knew that it was govt-sponsored (altho it does make sense). i doubt they tried to sue him though...

and that fuji TV HQ is a real monstrosity. what were they thinking!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

One thing I really love about the columns is when something that might look, from one angle, really just a few ideas banged out, hanging around for a week or so then dropping into some archive, actually turn out to have resonated with someone. The storage article, for instance, provoked this response (http://www.pundit.ca/indulgence/life-staring-storage/) on someone's blog -- with the interesting idea that it's worth keeping books around just to look at their spines from time to time, because reading titles can trigger trains of thought you wouldn't otherwise have!

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

i would have to agree, for instance, dj'ing from ipod/itunes i find is much harder memory-wise than having the physical thing there. colours & typefaces jog your memory & are reminders of content and emotions too...

also, with physical objects you can arrange them however you like,
the methods of sorting file/folder names are pretty limited in comparison.
bring on meta-data so these things can be sorted through on a whim...

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed your Wired column, and it re-engaged me in my long-time quest to declutter my own life. It wasn't so bad when I was in the military and living in dorms and bedrooms in apartments, but once I acquired 'real' housing' and actually stayed in one place for a while, stuff would accumulate like drifts of snow.

I made a big dent in it last month when I did some major cleaning for a disasterous yard sale (it rained and destroyed a lot of the stuff), but I still have a long ways to go. I may never achieve the 'zen' emptiness you have, and until I get my own home, the 'iceberg' off site storage idea is right out, too, because I actually have to put hand on book from time to time for reference sake. Still, if I can break out of the "ZOMG! Lookit alldaBOOKS!" and arrange them into some workable WabiSabi kind of order, I'll consider myself successful at conquering my 'stuff' at long last.

My office will still look like someone blew up a paper (and computer) factory, but oh, well...

liked the column

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

I have similar storage concerns. Only I tend to be OCD and now I'm on this big digitization kick. I want to select and digitize my stuff. Digitization has been a godsend in terms of limiting my spending on other things. Only problem now is that I have to think up new classification schemes. My apartment is more like an office with a kitchen and bed.

I wanted to buy that Japanese apartments book as soon as I read about it. Feeling cheap, I immediately thought....this is the sort of thing that ought to be a downloadable e-book!
I've gotten extremely conservative about acquiring stuff. My latest "complex" is about wanting to salvage old publications, particularly anything with images. I think I shall try the library instead.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

interesting - in so many ways:
i always wondered if kirk elder was Albert Morris' blog
http://kirkelder.blogspot.com/

BBC Radio Scotland presenter and former Shetland Times journalist
once ranted on his blog beatcroft about the Scotsmans "cleansing" issues
http://beatcroft.blogspot.com/2005/11/end-of-columnist.html#comments

what a difference a decade makes!
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-responses8.html

[cardindex.livejournal.com]

Momus, I was wondering if you read Bruce Sterling's blog on Wired News or indeed any of his non-fiction books. He's a very interesting man.

[cardindex.livejournal.com]

I subscribed to Wired a year or so, and while it was occasionally excellent, there were a few dud issues that made me think I might not need a monthly subscription. I quite miss it now though. There are too many magazines out there!

[tundraboy.livejournal.com]

Momus, where were you living in 99-2000? I'm writing a book that takes place in Japan and wanted to have you in there (as that was the time and place when I bought "Stars Forever" and listened to it incessantly) but if you were living elsewhere it would be odd to say you were in Tokyo.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was living in London in 1999, then moved to New York in March 2000. I spent half of 2001 and 2002 in Tokyo, then moved to Paris in late 2002. After three months there, I moved to Berlin in early 2003, and have been here ever since (with annual trips to Japan, usually three months a year).

[tundraboy.livejournal.com]

Many thanks!

Is there anywhere on Earth you've never been that you'd like to live?

I'd like to try Scandinavia.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

But Qin had a fatal flaw (and it's why history doesn't start with his Year Zero): Even he couldn't resist keeping just one copy of every book in China

Just out of interest in relation to this, have you been to China proper yet? It can certainly seem like a very 'Year Zero' place!

[rroland.livejournal.com]

thanks, nice Wired article. i think i'll rent a storage unit too. i have a lot of musical equipment and instruments which are filling up my space, alot of books i read and might want to refer to later. i have some shelves i'll keep them, but what do you do about clothes, dressers? shelves? i really don't like hangers. maybe some fisherman's nets attached to the ceiling, i could just lower them and stuff clothes in there! too much ironing then i suppose...

Hey, Rroland!

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

I have ZERO dressers....oh wait, I've got two Ikea drawer units that I keep in my dressing room for sweats and t-shirts. I picked my apartment so that I wouldn't need a lot of furniture...I just have a large dressing area. Needs cleaning and organizing, though. I'm sick of dressers, the drawers always come unglued eventually.

After years and years of renting, I figured it out. I moved into a fifties building. Now I have room for my clothing! I hang everything - even the shoes.

digi inspiration

[(Anonymous)]

You know you posted a link to your blog several weeks ago (just now took time to look at more closely) through a "tribe" I moderate (and that I'm rarely able to access anymore) called "fashion outlaws" and I'm so glad you did--thanks!

I'm positively inspired.

Enjoyed your Wired article, too. I have a background in libraries, so I'm fascinated by the topic. What a great thing to stumble on (your blog) just when I needed it (some inspiration)!

I'm looking forward to checking back. dig it.

[ruhue.livejournal.com]

ahhhh. i know the difference between wired magazine and wired news.
i was a production editor at hotwired when wired news was formed in 1996. i was approached to be the production manager for wired news, but i didn't want to be a manager of any sort at the time. the lovely and talented miss emily tucker took that job, and was fantastic.
my ex was the first managing editor of wired news.

this is the first time i have thought of that in a long while. riding that whole web wave. i was on my way to morocco to work with field biologists studying monkeys in 1995. i stopped in london on the way with friends of friends, crashing on a couch in an office in an old warehouse on the thames. someone let me in and left, and matt black (yazoo) was fiddling around with some electrical instrument in the office. i found a couch, fell asleep, and woke up to a group of four people who were just returning from landing the first levi's europe site. i knew computers... and was sucked into the electronic music scene and web exposion in london all at the same time. it took me 10 years and 2 continents to shake the web industry.

now we are just little footnotes.
now i'm just a gardener who paints.
and it's lovely.

good for you, to have a wired news column.