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.
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 (hence the Hip-hop) and the evolution of technology (hence the media theory). 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 (see below). 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, 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 Interactive. 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.
Other interests include disparate sub-genres of unpopular music (mostly Hip-hop), philosophy, media and literary theory, and various other social sciences. I can be found attempting to stay on my skateboard at the local skatepark or parking lot at least two evenings a week, and rock climbing at least as often. I'm also infinitely intrigued by dinosaurs, dumptrucks, bunny rabbits, and the moon.
