Sunday, August 13, 2006
Liquids on my mind...
I've just come back from Newark airport where Colin caught a plane home to Mexico (we arrived at 3am--the recommended 2 hours plus 1 for good measure in advance of his 6am flight--along with a planeload of others, only to have the check-in crew arrive at 4:30am... (Of course, as soon as the lights and computers blinked into life, a kind of quiet bedlam broke out as people hustled for spaces at the do-it-yourself check-in computers while an official kept calling out, "Who's next? Who's next?" but not actually explaining what "next" meant...). Anyway, liquids are very much on my mind at present (I'm going to spend today seeing if there isn't a powdered form of eyedrops or something like that to take with me on my bazillion-hour flight to Oz on Wednesday. BoingBoing's recent post about the reviews of Tuscan milk (the 128-ounce jug of Tuscan Grade A Milk, that is) on Amazon.com show that reviews are potentially not only good for you, but they can get you thinking deeply about (a) when is a review a review, and (b) just what to call this kind of phenomenon, where people collectively "hijack" one intended purpose and make it over into something entirely different (we've blogged about a similar event on eBay, but this was a lone user making his own poetry/fiction/whacky narrative). Anyway, the Tuscan milk thingy is not a meme; it's not a swarm in terms of product/outcome. Maybe it's a kind of collaborative genre-jacking (hmmm, that term doesn't quite work, either). What is this practice?!
