Ultimately, the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.  Consider the similarity between what is involved in creating and using a tool and the sequence of narrative.  Even the chimpanzee picking up and peeling a twig to "fish" for termites requires the mental projection of a sequence, including an initial desire, several actions, and successful feeding.  The sequence becomes more complex where more tools are involved, or when the same tool is used in several ways.  Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities.  Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time.  Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes.  Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience.  In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

-- David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

Proof of Clive's theory that history now happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as videogame: the Zidane headbutt game. Created, of course, by someone at an Italian address. I was heartbroken by the awful end of Zidane's game, and career. But even I have to admit that it's a pretty amusing piece of Flash.

The Internet doesn’t destroy the boundaries between the professional and the amateur: it just complicates them. You see that in the way Markos Moulitsas is getting depicted in the mainstream press as DailyKos becomes a political force to reckon with in Democratic politics, and you see it in the complex knots the networks are tying themselves into trying to figure out what they stand for in the age of YouTube and Rocketboom. You also see it in the rise of perhaps the first true YouTube stars: the Two Chinese Boys. When I was doing research about online video earlier in the spring, everyone I talked to who had used YouTube recognized these boys immediately: their dorm room lip-synching to American pop hits is ridiculously endearing and, especially given their fondness for Yao Ming jerseys, globalizationalicious. It’s not surprising that they’ve already been tapped for a “viral ad” by Moto . I was, however, surprised to learn that they’d recently graduated from art school, with sculptures of themselves mid-performance submitted as their final projects. Maybe I’m imposing my own ideas of what it means to be an art school student, but it does change my sense of what their videos are about when I know they were made by two people already spending all their time thinking about artistic production. What had previously seemed adorably naive now seems no less adorable, but more thought out and more pointed. My sense of them as amateurs-gone-pro has changed to one of pros-in-training-gone-pro. Which is a rather different thing, you will admit. I’m also, I’ll admit, really tickled by the sculptures, which seem simultaneously to be a celebration of their bizarre pop-cultural achievement and a send-up of it. Are these boys the next generation Gilbert & George? We shall see.