Hmmm… There’s a Twitter account that purports to be from the man himself. The tweets are like a caricature of the Digger’s views as represented by Private Eye.

He/It has 140,751 followers at the moment.

I wonder…

From David Pogue.

LAS VEGAS — If you just peek into the huge International Consumer Electronics Show, you might think that it’s mostly a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones.

But if you really take the time to look — if you walk all 15 miles of exhibit halls — you’ll discover that, in fact, you were right. C.E.S. really is primarily a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones.

Newspapers love lists — partly because they believe that readers love them too. Maybe they’re right: one of the most commented-upon and recirculated pieces I’ve ever written was about the top ten websites, even though, in a way, the idea of there being a “top ten” of anything on or related to the Net is kind of absurd. Still, when asked, I had a go at nominating ten good books about the Net.

At dinner last night someone mentioned that a local village had changed the name of its village hall to “the People’s Hall”, and it suddenly made me think about how some words lose their resonance as society changes. “The People’s Hall” has a whiff of Marxist — or at any rate socialist — ideology. Likewise, nobody talks about “workers” (as in, say, the Workers’ Educational Association) any more. Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard anyone use the term “socialism” with approval? Or “progressive”? And then it just so happened that the next item on my iPod playlist was that wonderful satirical song by the Strawbs — Part of the Union.

LATER: I remembered something Ross McKibben once wrote about Margaret Thatcher:

Her fundamental aim was to destroy the Labour Party and ‘socialism’, not to transform the British economy. If the destruction of socialism also transformed the economy, well and good, but that was for her a second-order achievement. Socialism was to be destroyed by a major restructuring of the electorate: in effect, the destruction of the old industrial working class. Its destruction was not at first consciously willed. The disappearance of much of British industry in the early 1980s was not intended, but it was an acceptable result of the policies of deflation and deregulation; and was then turned to advantage. The ideological attack on the working class was, I think, willed. It involved an attack on the idea of the working class – indeed, on class as a concept. People were, via home ownership or popular capitalism, encouraged to think of themselves as not working class, whatever they actually were. The market thus disciplined some, and provided a bonanza for others. The economy was treated not as a productive mechanism but as a lottery, with many winners. The problem with such a policy was that it created a wildly unstable economy which Thatcher’s chancellors found increasingly difficult to control, and in which many of the apparent winners later became aggrieved losers.

In that sense, we’re all living in a world — linguistic and otherwise — that Thatcher created. Which means, I guess, that I will just have to go and see the damned movie.

Kodak RIP, originally uploaded by jjn1.

The news today is that Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy and there can’t be a photographer of my generation who doesn’t feel an incredulous shudder at the prospect. It was an iconic company, and its products (especially Kodachrome) attained near-mythical status. (I mean to say, how many other commercial products have inspired a Paul Simon song?) Business school students will see the company’s demise as an illustration of Clayton Christensen’s idea of the Innovator’s Dilemma. Stranger still is the discovery that Kodak was a pioneer in the digital photography field (it built the first digital camera in 1975), and indeed its only current prospect of escaping bankruptcy seems to rely on selling its portfolio of patents, some of the most valuable of which are in digital imagery.

My hunch is that because the film-retailing and chemical processing sides of the business were so profitable and successful, those involved in that carried most weight in the company, and the engineers working on digital simply couldn’t persuade senior management to pay attention to a technology that would eventually cannibalise that core business. In a way, the same thing happened with the music industry when MP3 and the Net came along.

Today also brought news that Eve Arnold has died at the great age of 99. It sent me to Magnum (of which she was the first female member) to look again at their carousel of her most famous images. (The BBC also had a slideshow which includes the lovely picture of her sitting crosslegged on the ground shooting with a Leica.) The Guardian had a lovely piece by the film-maker Beeban Kidron, who became Arnold’s assistant at the age of 16.

“From Eve”, she writes,

“I learned: how to pack a suitcase – with a dress you could wear to a palace and shoes to run a marathon if required; how to look at pictures – for metaphor, form and truth; how to work – until it was done; how to be kind to your fellow artist – judge the endeavour not the result; and how to be a friend – through thick and thin; and how to laugh – uproariously and often.

I haven’t worked for Eve for more than 30 years – that privilege resides with Linni, her long-term colleague and assistant. But she became my adviser and friend. And when my son was very sick shortly after he was born, she did the one thing she knew how to do – she took his photograph – breaking her own rule of no baby pictures. It is one of those pictures, along side one of her with Marilyn, that adorn my office wall. “

The photograph shows the last roll of Kodak film that I possess.