Crash

Gripping and very moving stuff, but still somehow a bit contrived. Much of the dialogue rings false, starting with the opening 'crash' of Angeleno ethnicities in which a Chinese tailgater calls Jennifer Esposito's well turned out policewoman a "wetback".

It's all based on the shaky premise that you can win the battle against stereotypes by confronting your characters (and your audience) with individuals that only outwardly conform to them − such as the Mexican locksmith covered in marero tattoos who turns out to be the ideal loving father and family man.

We witness LA as the messed-up metropolis where the bad are capable of doing good and the good of doing bad. Roger Ebert sees reason for New World optimism at then end:

"Until several hundred years ago, most people everywhere on earth never saw
anybody who didn't look like them. They were not racist because, as far as they
knew, there was only one race."

Contrast this with the view expressed by a ranting character in Michel Houellebecq's Platform: that old style racism was "benevolent" because white men considered other races inferior and it is hard to feel genuine hatred for an inferior; "at most a sort of cordial contempt". The new kind of racism is masochistic, with all unblended races feeling increasingly anxious, if not downright inferior. Anyway, Ebert's remarks confuse racism with xenophobia, which is one of the faults of this movie, and perhaps of America as a whole.

Yet it is a very good movie, and in parts a very funny one too. One to watch more than once. Don Cheadle and Matt Dillon are a pair of actors I have a lot of time for.

Like both Magnolia and Short Cuts (and to a lesser extent Traffic, though its influence is clear) this is one of those narratives made up of lots of connected personal stories, the connections here tending to emphasise the ironies underpinning the central theme. As the end of the second hour approaches, Crash looks as if it's struggling to find its ending, but you sense that at least one member of the ensemble cast might have to end up dead before the titles run. And when it comes, even this script can't lay on a big surprise.

The brother always gets it.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay...cantaba

My father's lawn is being visited daily by a rare black pheasant. There are usually one or more cute little female pheasants nibbling around at the time, over which he affects to watch from a distance.

Another rara avis lives a few blocks away from us in Antigua − a parrot that can bark like a dog! It may not be quite as startling as the Alsatians or St Bernard's that typically lurk in vocal readiness just behind the iron garage doors, but it definitely sounds canine. And according to the housekeeper in the next-door property, its owner has also taught it to croon that famous old ranchera Cucurrucucu Paloma! I didn't get to experience this phenomenon live and unplugged, but it can't have been any worse than the recent rather constipated version by Caetano Veloso.

Otherwise, it's an extremely quiet neighbourhood. Most of the homes are occupied solely by their guardians and receive but occasional visits from their absentee owners. Almost every passing tradesman bears his own audio signpost though: a signature noise to alert anyone shaded away inside these private strongholds that a buying opportunity is moving slowly along the road outside. It's fun to listen out for them. My personal favourite is that of the knife-sharpener; clearly fit to purpose.

'Jardines' is bordered to the west by a finca (Pavón) with sizeable coffee plantations shaded by Gravilea trees, some of which have been left inside the residential area to do a similar job for patches of what currently passes for common land.

Arzú's is the largest house in the area, not that you can catch even a glimpse of it through its thick protective armour of plaster and vine-covered walls and magnificent, towering ficus. He keeps a private menagerie in the grounds − you can sometimes hear the chatter of monkeys and there are wild rumours about a giraffe!

Some pics from around 'Jardines de Antigua'.

The Boathouse

Birthday dinner number two duly took place at The Boathouse at the Beetle and Wedge. Aside from my father and myself it was an all female group, something he seemed a little less comfortable with than I was, and looked disconsolate when Maggie seated us apart.

The hotel has a double wammy of literary associations: Jerome K. Jerome sat down to write Three Men in a Boat within its walls, and this particular stretch of the Thames at Mouslford was the location for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

I love this comment on their website: "Our puds are very special and have gained praise from even the most jaded food writers." If they have to wait half as long as we did for their food, it's no wonder they're feeling jaded by the time they pack in their pavlovas.

My father, who somewhat masochistically enjoys timing these things, reckoned that we had been at the table for an hour and a half before the main course made its appearance. It was quickly followed by the chef from the open charcoal grill (pictured) with an apology − though he did say it was somehow all the fault of my halibut. Of course while sitting around waiting for food what most of us tend to do is drink, so their chosen method of compensation, a rather nice pudding wine, guaranteed a slow start to Sunday.

The menu is rather unconventional: starters and mains are jumbled together in the top section followed by 'Limited Edition' (eh?) and 'From the Charcoal Grill'. I had the English lamb sweetbreads and the aforementioned halibut with its Latin American timekeeping. When I was little I used to feel a lot braver eating sweetbreads as some pitiless grown-up had cynically misinformed me about the anatomical provenance of this delicacy.

Earlier in the day, celebrations kicked off with a pint of the West Berkshire Brewery's Decadence ale at The Pot Kiln. It seems that Maggie has become the de-facto preferred B&B supplier to this establishment, putting up foodies that have traversed several counties in order to partake of the celebrity cuisine on offer here − courtesy of V's least favourite TV chef. The pub area is quite cramped, and according to some of Maggie's more delicate and discerning guests, fills up with "yobs" (i.e. minor public schoolboys) in the evenings. There's a little row of green wellies by the door, which is a nice touch, even if they are effectively stage props.

Awana

Recovering from the first of my two birthday dinners this morning.

There's no shortage of smart restaurants around my mother's new place in Chelsea Green. There's a buzzing tapas bar called Café Bodega, a pair of pricey Italian eateries called Pelicano and Elistano (!) respectively and of course, Tom Aikens. I can remember little else about our meal there a couple of year's ago other than the fact that the chef's snooty wife was the head waitress , and that most of our fellow diners were blokes in dark suits. Not somewhere I'd rush back to.

Last night I was dead set on a slab of vaca and enthusiastically recommended The Gaucho Grill on Sloane Avenue. Unfortunately, when we eventually got there at nine we were told that we'd have at least an hour to wait for a table. "Why not try Awana next door? It's Malaysian..."
Awana opened on the site of Zen Chelsea last year. It has some of the faults of Belgravia's The Mango Tree Thai, also owned by one Eddie Lim − in particular the unctiousness of the personnel. They're the kind that compete to fill up your wine or water glass after almost every sip you take, and then return to their holding station at the edge of your peripheral vision. When I dropped my mobile a couple of them literally dived to pick it up it before I could reach it.

The tables are a bit on the small side, so the well-dressed table-waiting pack spends a lot of time fussily moving things around to make space for the arriving peppery marvels. Those wine glasses (see pic) are one of the best things about Awana. The food also looks pretty foxy too: I can thoroughly recommend the Lamb Shanks that my mother picked.

To drink I chose the Spanish red , as I do, and it turned out to be a deliciously smooth Manchego tempranillo from the Marques de Riscal. The teak interior is swishly modern, and a whole lot more sympathetic to its customers than the equivalent decoration around the corner at Tom Aikens. It must be a great place to come for an evening drink.

There was a long table full of beautiful, silky-haired young women sipping Chardonnay right behind me: probably a sort of sophisticated Hen party, though of course they might also have been the new intake for the Chelsea Buddhists' association.

Bugambilia

I read somewhere that Bougainvillea is "excellent for Bonsai". However when left alone for several months, this happens: Before /After. (Though, with all those thorns, it does make a fine additional security feature. )

Fortunately, on one of our walks in the neighbourhood, we found a man perched high up on the walls shielding the enormous property of Alavaro Arzú. He was chopping away at the former President's vines and seemed happy to be recruited to help solve our vegetation problem the following weekend.

More pics of the house here.

Hotel del Norte

It hadn't been our original intention to spend the night in Puerto Barrios, but Felipe drove us up to Izabal on a route that aimed to maximise the distance spent at cooler, higher altitudes, giving us an extended tour of southern Guatemala − a strategy I likened to an oddly inverted analog of running in the rain − given the extra hours we thereby had to spend in his car.

Still, it gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with an old friend: the uniquely rickety Hotel del Norte, where I overnighted (alone) twice in 1989. Back then it was yet to turn 100, and as far as I recall, wasn't quite so warped and wobbly. Perhaps the Salvador quake of 2000 bent it out of shape a bit more.

The receptionist gave us a choice: an 'air-conditioned' room in the modern block at the side, or a night under a ceiling fan in the grand old wooden caserón constructed in 1892. We checked out both options and discovered that the apparently sturdier accommodation featured lamina roofing which had baked up the interiors to uncomfortable levels. In contrast, room No5 in the main hotel benefitted from a sea breeze which was tempering the swelter.

Puerto Barrios sits on the Bay of Amatique, which opens into the Caribbean Sea. It retains much of the atmosphere of Belize back in the good old days before all the ecotourists turned up. The United Fruit Company, much reviled for its role in the 1954 coup, brought a degree of material prosperity to this banana-framed coast in the middle of the last century which has been steadily oxidising ever since.

The next day our Captain for the trip up to the golfete on the Rio Dulce was one Jorge Campbell, grandson of an (East) Indian employee of El Pulpo, who told us how UFC workers used to benefit from subsidised produce grown on the company's five fincas in the area. The locals also used to have a strong market for rope and textiles made from Abacá, a relative of the banana tree. Nowadays, you enter the port by crossing over the rusty rails of Guatemala's only, and now disused railway. Capitán Campbell fondly recalled the journeys he used to make on it.

Some pics of Puerto Barrios and the Hotel del Norte.

Houston we have...

I do seem to have had more than my fair share of aviation crises on the London to Guatemala run − so far two full-on emergency landings, including an engine fire and a hydraulics failure. Sure enough, some way into my flight back from Houston last week there was a strange grinding noise from somewhere in the wing bulkhead close to where I was sitting, and shortly afterwards the rear cabin filled with an electrical burning smell, which promptly set the cabin crew scurrying around with fire extinguishers.

All my previous emergencies on the Atlantic route have taken place just after take-off, allowing the pilot to jettison the fuel and return to the runway we had just left. High up above the ocean, our situation this time round had a potentially far gloomier prognosis, and the sudden sense of confinement was almost overpowering.

The most disturbing aspect of this incident was the length of time it took the cabin crew to call up the cockpit - this they did (from right in front of me) only after they had finished searching all the overhead baggage compartments, and after the pungent pong had dissipated somewhat.

Of course after this, a return to sleep was an absolute impossibility. Eventually the Captain decided to comment:

"Some folks at the back have reported a vibration. I can assure you that we have a good airplane here; everything checks out. It was probably just one of those pops you get from time to time."

Pops!

I've flown with some dodgy airlines over the years, but interestingly, all of my high altitude close shaves have come courtesy of major carriers: American, Continental and British Airways.

Earlier in the day I had a left-side seat on take-off from Aurora, affording me a great view of all five of Guatemala's major volcanoes strung out along the curved spine of the Sierra Madre, plus a smaller one I don't know by name, just over the distant Mexican border.

That flight was full of pillagers − a few beady-eyed Guatemalans on their way to plunder el Norte, greatly outnumbered by packs of North American raiders on their return leg. The worst sort are always the ones wearing matching T-shirts and shorts: "Are you with the Canadian group?" a stewardess asked one of them as he stepped aboard the 737.

In the main they come not to filch Central America's material wealth, instead they are after its souls, its new-borns, or perhaps just the satisfying sense of superiority that comes from southerly travel or work experience in a region that is nearly always referred to as down there or down here.

The pair sitting next to me were baby brigands, brandishing 'Lucas', their month-old booty from a one week visit to their future heir's native land. (Or rather a characterless chain hotel in the capital.) An uncommonly ugly and stupid couple from Minnesota, they led me to reflect on the providential nature of their apparent failure to breed naturally. There were several similar threesomes on board, all traveling courtesy of different local adoption agencies. Gone, I hope, are the days when Guatemala's orphans were purchased and exported for the spare part organ trade*, but there's still something distasteful about this kind of human traffic.

The five hour interval between flights at Houston gave me a chance to catch a shuttle to the Galeria to do some high-speed shopping, and also afforded me an opportunity to tune into the amusingly paranoid world of American talk radio. Red-staters have but a few screws and clearly most of them are loose. Sean Hannity was yapping on FOX about the Democrats' new manifesto which apparently makes him "wanna puke", whilst another right-minded commentator informed listeners that the Lonestar State is being regularly subjected to illegal border-crossings by the Mexican army and that "these incursions should be CRUSHED."

* The baby-parts allegations may well have been apocryphal, but I happen to know that a suspiciously large amount of commercial money was spent to convince the outside world that it never happened. The fact that down on the ground these chismes had some of the adaptability and persistence of Internet canards (like the one about P&G being run by Beelzebub and a board of practicing devil worshippers) certainly had significant repurcussions.

Mind Googling

A google, I learned the other day, is the number of bits one scientist has estimated would be required to represent the whole of the visible universe − ten to the power of one hundred.

The same theorist, Jacob Bekenstein, has also established that the surface area of a black hole is proportional to the information it contains (or swallows).

To calculate the information content of a black hole Bekenstein divides its event horizon into planck squares (10 to the power of minus 33 cms), supposedly the smallest possible unit measurement of spacetime − the point at which it starts to go all "frothy" − and so perhaps a candidate for the fundamental pixels of our cosmos. He therefore speculates that a sphere one tenth of a lightyear across could 'contain' the visible universe.

Any hypothesis that would digitalise reality goes against the grain of theoretical physics which has traditionally been formulated using continuous phenomena like fields. In the Newtonian paradigm , it is generally agreed that the smallest computer model you could make of the universe would be the same size as the universe itself (rather like Borges' maps that fit snugly onto actual coastlines). But it goes without saying that The Matrix has made VR metaphysics extremely fashionable again, with Oxford's David Deutsch leading the way:

"It is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment." and "Since building a universal virtual-reality generator is physically possible, it must actually be built in some universes."

One of the key challenges facing the would-be cosmological coder is the fact that there's really no such thing as empty space − which means you can't really come up with a compression routine (like JPEG) which economically encodes the void.

Meanwhile, veteran theorist John Archibald Wheeler remains convinced we live in a participatory universe where physical entities arise from underlying information content, and consciousness actively constructs physical reality through observation:

"It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom - at a very deep bottom, in most instances - an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that things physical are information-theoretic in origin."

It has for a long time struck me as interesting that both the universe and the human mind are one thing, while appearing to be something quite different. Consciousness is a fabulously complex parallel-processing system that literally thinks it's serial, while the universe is a fundamentally inderminate place that behaves as if it were determinate. (And perhaps also analog when it is in fact digital.)

Yet from the first time it was suggested that a cat might be both dead and alive at the same time physicists have generally been uncomfortable with these kinds of dualities, separating them into distinct theoretical frameworks and hoping that mathematics rather than metaphysics will one day make sense of it all.

As for the planck squares, Masami Yamasaki has spotted another kind of duality within string theory − a mathematical one − which suggests that the physics inside a tightly wrapped up dimension at the planck length is identical to that in the larger dimensions outside. This might means that reality doesn't end at that scale after all.

Lost Contribution?

What have the Imans ever done for us?

International Women's Day

Was marked in Mexico with some clever television advertisements showing an office in which all the women are inflatable sex dolls dressed as secretaries, and are being ogled and groped by passing male colleagues. The campaign is funded by the country's Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres and features the strapline "La mujer no es un objeto. El acoso sexual es un delito." (Women are not objects. Sexual harrassment is an offence.) Across the border in Guatemala recent statistics indicate that the problem goes way beyond harrassment. Around 625 women were killed there in 2005, more than triple the death toll of 184 in 2002.

Nano-beings

Stephen Hawking has famously argued against the likelihood of time travel by pointing out the dearth of gawping tourists from the future currently clogging up our public spaces. It's a compelling argument, but somewhat lacking in imagination.

Hawking has allowed "that Quantum theory allows for time travel on the microscopic basis", and given that any beings clever enough to have figured out how to go for a ride in the fourth dimension would probably also have made great strides with nanotechnology, they should therefore have solved the 'problem' of their biological physicality and encoded themselves onto particle-sized structures capable of time travel. Even if they didn't go to the trouble of sending their own conscious selves back into the past, they could send back millions of tiny devices that could even now be watching us!

My mate's Marmite

Not having grown up with it, V was for many years markedly ill-disposed towards this century-old British brewing industry waste product.

These days however, there's even talk of taking a jar with us to Guatemala. It all started with a few explorative licks of my discarded breakfast knife. The next big breakthrough was the discovery that thinly spread Marmite goes rather well inside a sandwich or pitta filled with mozzarella and tomato.

Last week a half teaspoon of the black stuff found its way into her tomato-based pasta sauce, along with the end product of rubbing two pieces of rye bread together: a worthwhile bit of improvisation.

Review Follow-Up

The New York Times would appear to have started publishing a round-up of bloggers' reactions to their book reviews - in this instance Dan Dennett's controversial Breaking the Spell.

World's Dumbest Security Question

V rang her bank in Atlanta last night to activate her new Mastercard. Asking someone of Latin American origin what their mother's maiden name is has to be the all time stupidest security question. It baffles me how this can still be going on in a country that has such a large Hispanic population. Surely someone must have twigged by now?

Reading Public

Was pleased to read Ben Vershbow's views on the merits of blogging as a process.

I took up the practice myself in 2003 because I realised its value as a way of meshing together a number of existing activities (and different electronic formats) with which I recorded and supported my everyday reading, viewing and correspondence with key contacts.

Not all of these were expressly communicative; some were unashamedly solipsistic:

• "Short notes"
• "Long notes"
• Journal
• Regular email correspondence
• Fragmentary writing

When memory and mind-space are a finite resource, and one's daily thought processes are geared towards synthesis or abstraction, any kind of external record will help to spread the processing (or "metabolising") load, as well as ensuring that much of the factual raw material that one has been disciplined to shed is retained in a more or less accessible format. In this way, implicit and intuited information can more easily be blended into the sort of output that is open to reason (one's own and that of others').

However, I have found myself having to consciously correct some of my posts to restore the 'native' one-to-one (or one-to-self) voice which has tended to defer over time to the MSM-style one-to-many mode.

The New York Times take on the Edelman/Wal-Mart's blogger outreach activities reveals some of the key pressure points right now. The MSM would like the blogosphere to conform to the channel model and to thereby assume the same responsibilities of any other one-to-many publication. The PR industy is also inclined to view blogs as a powerful new communications channel. Consequently several agencies are tentatively exploring the opportunities, some of which exist precisely because of many bloggers' reluctance to position themselves an atomised version of the old media.

Anyway, people that think that all blogs sport distinctly individual voices don't read enough of them. When I recently researched blogger comments about a product launch I discovered that well over half of those that had picked up the story had published the contents of the company press release verbatim.

Ever trendier

Central American countries like Guatemala are getting "ever trendier as war memories recede" according to this piece on CNN today:

"Ten or 20 years ago, mentions of countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala conjured up visions of soldiers and civil war..."

Perhaps civil war is a lot easier to visualise than epidemic violence lacking a indisputable set of underlying causes.

As if by contrast, Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman Sergio Morales yesterday reported a 60.4% increase in lethal violence in the country over the past 5 years (3000 murders in 2001, 5000 in 2005. ) According to WHO studies, Guatemala currently enjoys a homicide rate of 40 for each 100,000 inhabitants, where the guideline limit is 10 for each 100,000 inhabitants.

Dim Sum

In his latest book Breaking the Spell, a naturalistic investigation into our religious urges, Dan Dennett refers to his fellow atheists and agnostics as "Brights", suggesting "Supers" for the spiritually and supernaturally-minded − thereby avoiding the rather obvious implied alternative.

To save myself the trouble of actually having to read this book, I have been working my way through the growing number of published reviews. The most amusing was Andrew Brown's in the Guardian:

"Daniel Dennett writes early in this book: "I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasoning certainty that you have all the answers" - and he's not talking about Richard Dawkins."

The trouble with Dennett − very much like Richard Dawkins − is that he tends to have an unreflectingly narcisistic approach to his own lines of argument. Rather than dallying to explore the interesting territory around their margins, he drives them forward with polemical zeal. He should have no trouble convincing the already convinced, but in this instance has gamely chosen to target the unconvinceable − America's ascendent hordes of righteous Bible-belters.

Dawkins it was who first coined the term meme, now in widespread abuse. Dennett posits two distinct theories of (religious) meme transmission: The Sweet Tooth, in which the meme ultimately confers a survival benefit on the minds it inhabits, and the Simbiont, where an essentially parasitical body of ideas evolves to promote its own survival through the medium of mental hosts. (Back in 2004 I myself referred to these alternatives as the mind gene and the mind virus respectively.)

Dennett apparently also has a go at de-bugging the persistent myth surrounding the moral superiority of believers. Most of them he suggests, don't actually believe in the more outrageously contradictory and irrational aspects of their faiths; instead they profess belief, which amounts to believing in belief − the notion that there are sound reasons for having (or appearing to have) certain assumptions regardless of whether they are true or not. This may be one reason an analysis of prison populations does little to bear out the notion that believers are better behaved. (And in the US atheists have the lowest divorce rates, evangelicals the highest.)

In the Mood for Love

A similar situation originally led to my aunt and uncle getting it on. Perhaps they were less worried about lowering themselves to the level of their own errant spouses than Mr Chow and Mrs Chan.

Though I don't think it is entirely safe to assume − as many seem to − that this is a movie about the agonies of self restraint. ("The pining here is so graceful that you may be transfixed by it": Elvis Mitchell in the NY Times.) Wong Kar Wai originally shot several steamier scenes in room 2046 (a former British army building he converted into a hotel), but in the midst of his habitual pre-Cannes editing frenzy, chose to focus primarily on the painful forebearance. (Does that mean we should presume they never happened?)

When I first saw Fa yeung nin wa I didn't really know what to expect. This time I could sit back and soak up the elegance and inventiveness of the director's vision. So I picked up on the way the camera naturally adopts the perspective of a clandestine (or somewhat displaced) observer, from underneath a table or from just outside the room Mrs Chan is in, and amongst the scenes where the pair act out the betrayal that has thrown them together, I enjoyed the one where they each order food for the other as if for their unfaithful absent partner. (Neither of whom we ever see in full-face close up.)

Shigeru Umebayashi's Yumeji's Theme is indulgently haunting, though perhaps it gets a bit too much airtime over the course of the movie. Nat King Cole's efforts to croon boleros in his maladroit Spanish will always bring a smile to my face. (Akayoz oh-hoss vuurdez...) Maggie Cheung turns up in each scene with a different, wonderful, high-necked cheong-san dress.

Wong Kar Wai never uses scripts; everything is improvised. Which is why the film was shot in Macau rather than Beijing after the authorities demanded to see the finished text.

My original impressions of 2046 were "fidgety" but a second viewing thankfully cured me of that! With the 'sequel' fresh in my memory, it seems to me now that it wouldn't really matter which order you see these two films in. Wong Kar Wai ended up shooting them almost at the same time, and has said that there was a good degree of creative exchange between the two concepts as a result. That Chan helped Chow to write his pulp serials and that he had a secret to whisper into a hole seemed that much more significant. 2046 might more of a morass, but these days I think it is the better of the pair, though both are outstanding.

Limpieza Social

The Independent is the first UK quality to have picked up on Guatemala's recent vigilante spree.

As with earlier external media commentary, an explicit link is being drawn between this resurgent form of extra-judicial violence and the death squads of the civil war period. By implication, the murdered mareros are also victims of a shadowy sub-state apparatus (and all of Guatemala's problems can be securely derived from its history of right-wing politics and the lasting reign of impunidad).

Yet the article concludes by referring to the 'Social Cleansing of the Town' group in San Lucas Toliman, whose activities surely suggest something more akin to a grass-roots response to the erosion of local state authority by organised criminals.

Violence is much more endemic in Guatemala, but is it really surprising that this wave of killings is benefitting from a degree of popular support? I suspect that many people in the UK would sympathise with vigilantes targeting cells of violent extremists, even if it could be shown that they were being loosely sponsored by the state. (In Spain for example, a death squad which liquidated a number of suspected Basque terrorists was ultimately shown to have links to the socialist government of Felipe González .)

In Central America the maras are taken to represent an "enemy within" that, by virtue of standing outside and in opposition to the body politic, might be said to have renounced the protections enjoyed by other citizens. It sounds harsh and it is, but it's also a line that some Western governments have been consistently pursuing themselves, albeit in more sophisticated (and deniable) ways.

Relativistic Media

Watched an interview with Lee Smolin on Redes yesterday (it being Spain they had him cornered in a cloister) into which he tossed a musical analogy for distinguishing the fundamental outlooks of classical and modern, relativistic cosmology: whereas in the classical form musical time is delimited by the fixed, external tic toc of the metronome, in many contemporary musical styles, time is instead defined by the interactions of the individual musicians.

A weaker version of the same symmetry exists in the media. For the past decade the digital new media has largely been a more distributed version of the classical 'old' media. Meanings were still being fixed on the outside then injected via websites acting as channels into a network that wasn't yet functioning properly as a network − because its underlying organisational logic remained largely digital and serial. (Hence perhaps Ted's persistent proclamations over the period that the time has come to liberate the Web from the techies .)

Within the networks of social, user-generated media however, meanings more often emerge as a result of interactions between the nodes and there is certainly no straightforward, one-way tracking of a external media and communications metronome.