Saint Schwitters

 I'd like to talk about this.

I say I'd like to talk about it but it's not that easy.  It slips and slides through your brain's fingers because it is just so frighteningly complicated.  Oh, hold on a minute...  no it's not.

You see it is essentially an ill thought-out notion, dressed in the garb of academia and presented as 'interesting' and even important, perhaps a little like it's author.  To speed things up a bit I'll précis it for you:

There was a German painter called Kurt Schwitters.  His largely experimental work has been a huge influence on such movements as Pop Art, Post-Modernism and multi-media art installations.  The author and originator of the above talk begins by stating Schwitters should be named the "Patron saint of the Social Web" because he did collages and  "rejected the idea of completeness" which apparently mirrors exactly what everyone does on the internet nowadays.

In the written introduction to the piece the author concludes:

While Isadore of Seville is mooted as the patron saint of the internet (based on completeness and determistic processes), let us respect Kurt Schwitters as the patron saint of the web

You'll notice Schwitters has already been demoted to a lower case patron saint but promoted to saint of the entire web now - not just the social bit.  Unless the author just forgot to include the word 'social' and randomly formats names on a whim.  He definitely misspelt "deterministic" though and it's worth following the link for Isidore too, not least because one discovers he spelt that wrong as well, but also because his reference for this Sainthood is an obscure Catholic Church in Mississippi.

Are we getting an impression here?  A picture of less than rigorous research?

So, any road up, our restless, dynamic, ever-changing Web pages were anticipated in the 1930's by Schwitters because he did collages and "rejected the idea of completeness".

That's it!  Painless really.  So is this a useful paradigm to help us move forward to Web 3.0?  Or is it simple, witless and wholly redundant.

My three year old niece once pointed at the television and exclaimed "Daddy!".  Except it wasn't Daddy, it was Simon Cowell - who does, it must be admitted, look a little bit like her Daddy.  We eventually convinced her that Daddy and Simon Cowell were two different things even though they had certain superficial similarities and she accepted it.

At no point was there talk of canonising Cowell.