Web Monitor
16:01 UK time, Thursday, 12 November 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: the allure of lists, how cute took over cool and going underground.
• He's curating at the Louvre an exhibition on the subject of the infinity of lists. So what is it that makes lists so alluring to novelist Umberto Eco?
Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris why he thinks we write lists:
"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order - not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through collections in museums and through encyclopaedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte... We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die."
• Web Monitor has often been a proud protector against the onslaught of kitten videos on the web. But why are cute things so popular anyway? it's just a phase:
"The popularity of Cute Overload (and the more than 150 other cute-animal sites catalogued by the recommendation engine StumbleUpon, including Stuff on My Cat, Cute Things Falling Asleep, Kittenwar, and I Can Has Cheezburger) reflects a growing self-infantilization that is also in evidence at the social-networking site Facebook, where countless subscribers have posted photos of themselves as babies on their profile. Maybe the move toward cuteness has come about partly because the idea of 'edge' has gotten old. We used to romanticize tortured souls like Dylan Thomas, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, but their equivalents from recent years - Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Heath Ledger, David Foster Wallace - have elicited expressions of pity more than anything else.
Sigh."
• When cities reach their breaking point, life must be moved beneath the surface . He's China's subterranean-development expert. After years of working in Japan's underground worlds, he's moved back to China and tells Triple Canopy that you have to get past a lot of hesitancy to convince people to live work and play underground:
"For underground developments to be successful, you have to find a way to get around the problems of light, moisture, and noise. People associate the underground with tombs and bomb shelters. On the surface, the field of vision is broad: You can see light, trees, people going about their business. Underground, in a sealed space, you can't; it's difficult for people to see how they might escape if something happens. If the air quality isn't sufficiently regulated, it will give off an 'underground smell'. Generally, cramped, closed spaces make people agitated and uncomfortable. We are still researching the underground environment to determine the extent to which its characteristics affect physiology and psychology."
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