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Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes [Paperback]

Roy Christopher , Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky , John Brockman , Erik Davis , Paul Barman , Tom Georgoulias , Brandon Pierce , Mark Wieman , Mark Dery
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Book Description

February 1, 2007
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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Editorial Reviews

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

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.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 392 pages
  • Publisher: Well-Red Bear; 1st edition (February 1, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0977697703
  • ISBN-13: 978-0977697700
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #294,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

If writing this in the first person is unprofessional, I apologize. I feel silly writing about myself in the third person.

"I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan."

My main interests are figurative language use and the evolution of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I'm more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It's where I think aloud about all of the above.

I'm an aging BMX/skateboard zine kid. That's where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to text-links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too.

My main project from 1997 to 2007 was frontwheeldrive.com. With this site, I established myself as what Disinformation called, "One of the Internet's leading interviewers of subculture and new-science icons." I was most recently assistant editor of Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky's edited collection 'Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Culture and Music' (MIT Press, 2008). My first book is an anthology interviews entitled 'Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes' (Well-Red Bear, 2007), which Disinformation named one of the most important books published in 2007, and which Erik Davis called, "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so." I hold a master's degree in Communication Theory from San Diego State University and am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. I am also working on a book about technological mediation called 'The Medium Picture', which is forthcoming on Zero Books.

Prior to graduate work, I earned a bachelor's degree in Social Science, and spent over twenty years working as a writer, editor, and designer both on- and off-line. I have written about technology, science, music, and culture for everything from glossy national magazines and regional weeklies to hometown newspapers and homegrown 'zines, and I have written, edited, designed, and consulted for such diverse organizations as Microsoft, Nike, WIRED Magazine, The MIT Press, MSN Music, ESPN, the United States Army, Xbox, and Zero Skateboards. I have also guest lectured at such universities as The University of Washington, San Diego State University, The University of Illinois-Chicago, and The University of Texas at Austin, as well as spoken at events like Geekend and SXSW. Though my work has been featured on numerous websites, in many magazines, and in a few books, http://roychristopher.com is now home to most of my writing.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Asking The Right Questions March 1, 2008
Format:Paperback
I've carried this book around with me for the past six months re-reading some chapters more than a few times and I think I can honestly say Follow For Now is just brilliant. That seems to me the only way to describe it. Brilliant interviews of brilliant people served up in a brilliant package.

First off it's a book jam packed with so much cutting edge thought you may feel like an alien extracted your brain and replaced it with a biologically engineered multi-core processor. It can also be compared to a bar in a subbasement at MIT and shooting the bull with a collection of professors, computer geeks, multimedia gurus and severely gifted students.

The problem is the aliens may never land and I don't think there's a bar below MIT filled with Road Scholars. But we do have Follow For Now and it's Roy Christopher's brain child.

These interviews were originally online at frontwheeldrive.com. Roy Christopher started an amazing website and decided to put it in book form. It's like a syringe filled with knowledge injected directly into your spinal column. Science, technology, media, music, culture, literature--kind of candy bowl filled with a cornucopia of information and everything you never thought to ask.

They say in philosophy it's not the answers but the questions that mean the most. Roy Christopher asks those questions and does all the work for you. Your job is to let it all seep in and try not to lose your mind while you enjoy the spectacular view.
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