Thanks for the welcoming post Jeneane! You characterized this blog as an 'improv on the life and death of marketing', and it occurs to me that one could slightly reword that and say 'life, death and marketing, what else is there?' That paints with a rather broad brush, but since new concepts in marketing are at the heart of our discussion it wouldn't be out of line to suggest that virtually all of human interaction is, in some sense, a form of personal marketing. We learn from childhood how to be accepted and how to interact with our fellow space travellers. Our parents 'market' their view of the world to us from infancy. Now Chris Locke is pointing out the somewhat obvious yet incomprehensible event that is overtaking us... the global Tsunami of the Web... of Blogging... of recognizing and interacting with virtual entities that heretofore we would have had no means of even realizing they existed, much less communicating with them. This seems like a very comfortable yet challenging forum to me. I first read Thompson when he chronicled the Hell's Angels, which I think must have been the very first item of Gonzo Journalism. I was involved in the music business, and therefore a regular reader of Rolling Stone when the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas series was written. So much of what Chris mentions in his book seem like milestones in my own life it's kind of eiree, but pleasantly so.

He mentions things that 'get out of the box' and then can't be put back in it. I've had a name for that for years. I call it the Pandora Principle, and I most often cite it when defending the basic human right to free speech and publishing. Everyone knows the Pandora parable, wherein evil is released when she opens the box, but in my version I lose the concept of good or evil. Whatever a human being ever thinks, makes, invents, communicates or dreams of is immediately "outed". The lid to Pandora's Box is a one way portal, what goes out stays out! The Nazis tried to destroy knowledge by burning books by the thousands, but all those books had been read already... indeed to go one step further, as stupid as it may sound to say it, all those books had been written, and therefore are known to the human race at large. For someone to write a book presumes a wealth of prior knowledge (just look at the long list of citations in Locke's book), and so burning a book is about as sensible as closing the barn door after the proverbial horse is already halfway to the horizon. Onward!