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Web Monitor

16:34 UK time, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: The end of uncool, agressiveness at work spotted and a new discrimination.

Brian Eno• Cultural commentators love talking about what's cool and what's not, but that with the multitude of choices available, we could be seeing the end of uncool:

"There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all 'now,' in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness."

Of course, this means that all of Mr Eno's 1970s and 1980s back catalogue - his "old" music - is now not uncool.

• [] on the how to handle stress at work starts with the provovative "Change a word and I'll kill you". At first glance, it looks like the sub-editors have tartly taken him at his word and left in words that were not intended for publication. But Guardian twitterers (, , and ) insist that the aggression was a knowing joke from Mr Crace to jump-start a piece about aggression towards one's colleagues.

• claims to have found a new ism - fairyism. That's discrimination against fairies. He charts how fairies have systematically been beaten down in storytelling becoming smaller and smaller, and eventually being depicted as inferior to humans:

"The western fairy is now too impotent to matter, and has become a character in a new myth: the myth of human supremacy. Adults no longer have anything to fear from fairies - and therefore have nothing to learn from them.
However, Peter Pan is just that: truly modern. In it, the fairy is entirely subjected to human power. Today, in films like Ferngully, Shrek, and Hellboy 2, fairies are dominated by humans, and the new myth of human superiority and fairy inferiority is perpetuated."

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