Celebrating Life

This is my 100th posting so I thought I would write about something profound, like the need to celebrate life. A couple of recent incidents have conspired to make this top of mind for me. One Sunday morning earlier this month, as my wife and I were preparing to go speak at a local church, a neighbor’s oak tree fell onto our house, narrowly missing my wife. And on the Friday of that week she was laid off from her job.

The good news is that our insurance is replacing the entire roof and my business has picked up the slack from my wife’s job loss. It suffices to say my wife and I have been reminded of the fragility of life and the resulting need to handle it with prayer. Despite what might ordinarily threaten our tranquility we have been supernaturally sustained by peace that surpasses our understanding. As the saying goes, “life’s a gift, that is why it’s called the present,” and my wife and I are very aware of how much we have to celebrate.

Content is King

In his book ©ontent: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, author Cory Doctorow argues that digital rights management (DRM) is bad for artists, not the least of which are writers.

He feels that such measures meant to liberate artistic creativity instead manage to limit it. In the age of the iPad and similar devices designed to facilitate the digital reading experience, his commentary is made all the more compelling.

According to Doctorow, “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.”

The point he makes is that content is king and thus made to morph: “Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it.”

I don’t know that I’m on the exact same page as Doctorow but I do find myself agreeing with his overall thesis: “New technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that’s what tech is for. Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of.”