Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes - Softcover

Roy Christopher; Paul D. Miller A.k.a DJ Spooky; John Brockman; Erik Davis; Paul Barman; Tom Georgoulias; Brandon Pierce; Mark Wieman; Mark Dery

4.08

25 ratings by Goodreads

9780977697700: Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0977697703 ISBN 13: 9780977697700

Publisher: Well-Red Bear, 2007

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Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dalek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more. Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

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About the Author:

Roy Christopher (roychristopher.com) is the founding editor of frontwheeldrive.com, which established him as what Disinformation editor Alex Burns called "one of the internet's leading interviewers of subculture and new-science icons," and Scott McCloud described the site as "nicely designed and packed with ideas (a rarity on both counts)." Christopher holds a master's degree in Communication Theory from San Diego State University ad a bachelor's degree in Social Science. He's currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Review:

This book is an exotic plant with roots sucking nutrients from the skulls of the most interesting people on the planet. Prepare to be pollinated. --Mark Frauenfelder, founder of boingboing.net

The prophetic aspects of Roy Christopher's Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes are often more conceptual than could be found to be accurate. The book probably won't be in any canon, and it won't stay around because it's pretty (although its cover is worthy of some attention, provided below). But Follow for Now is likely to stick around, if only due to its efficiency. Christopher has long been regarded as an insightful (and sometimes inciteful) inquisitor of Internet-age antics. He produced eight years of interviews with the illuminati on six main topics including science, technology, media, music, culture, and literature for his former website frontwheeldrive.com. In Follow for Now, he provides a powerfully selected, edited, and organized collection of forty-three of those interviews. The result is notably impressive and concise despite its broad reach.

The interviews are nominally organized by those same six topics, though Christopher acknowledges (xii) that many selections could fit in more than one section. They cover seven years, beginning in 1999, as the excitement of the five-year-old Internet Boom peaked and its financial tides shifted. Most stray far from anything computerized, and some bear no explicit connection to anything Internet related. They vary almost as widely as Howard Bloom's suggested list of possible interests: "pop songs, ancient Egyptian graffiti, Shirley MacLaine's mysticism, neurobiology, and the origins of the cosmos" (37). Nonetheless, or perhaps because of it, they represent a time period when everything seemed fast, connected, and in flux, and billions of individuals were each at their own center of it all.

The snapshot includes voices ranging from Howard Bloom (a pop music PR star who's become a biological science fanatic) and DJ Spooky (an aspiring science fiction writer who's become a hip hop music star), to Howard Rheingold (the virtual anthropologist who interpolates the present through a futuristic lens) and Bruce Sterling (the etymological founder who extrapolates the present into futuristic fiction). Follow for Now thus drops sufficiently many known and intriguing names in its table of contents (and on its cover) to stay on the shelves of both snooty philosophers and free-thinking subculturalites for decades. But the nuggets those names provide are intriguing enough to justify that stay, on those shelves and others. In short, the content is as intense as the cast... --Ellis Godard, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies

Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is a collection of interviews put together by Roy Christopher. It features a glowing cavalcade of cyber stars, talking on technology, culture, media, and science. Interviewees include Bruce Sterling, Doug Rushkoff, Brenda Laurel, DJ Spooky, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, and many others. Oh, and ME. At 400 pages long, with interviews conducted over seven years, this is a fascinating group snapshot of key thinkers of the webbed world. Oh, and ME. --Gareth Branwyn, StreetTech

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