|
| Thursday, December 13, 2001 |
 |
Perspective 
| | Mac will get open-source software to consumers' desktops faster than all the open-source software projects ever dreamed up over a six-pack of Jolt Cola. |
An archy of a 'nuther kind
| | So where are these imaginary earthshaking geek outlaws who laugh in derision at mere government? Well, they do exist, and they're in Redmond. The big time in modern outlaw geekdom is definitely Microsoft. The Justice Department can round up all the Al Qaeda guys they can wiretap, but when they went to round up Redmond, they went home limping and sobbing, and without a job. That is a geek fait accompli, it's a true geek lock-in. In 2001, Microsoft has got its semi-legal code in every box that matters. They make those brown-shoe IBM monopolists of the 1950s look like model public citizens. |
| | Thanks to David Scott Williams for the link. He's away from his blog at the moment, so I'm blogging on his behalf. |
What do you take for a case of journalism?
| | The traditional, good qualities of a news source are reversed on the internet. You can't judge internet, and especially blog, journalism by its relation to mainstream news. The standard simply does not apply. |
| | I also think that human beings are talking, social animals, and there are breeds of humans to can't help indulging in the talking out loud we call journalism. Rollo May said writers were different from other creative types because they suffered the illusion that the world really needed to hear what they have to say. |
| | Blogs make it possible for many more of us to suffer that illusion, and to make a Thing out of it. But I submit that this is the Good Thing we call civilization. Have you noticed that on the whole we're more civil here than in newsgroups and forums? I don't think it's just a coincidence. |
More than a nut
Here's a whole company with pointy hair
Live from the Elbow Room
| | Jennifer, who is getting comfortable with the Blogging Thing, says this about the upside of it all (in response to Mike's running question): |
| | One of the points I see in blogging is to try to reach people, and to get them thinking and talking. And debating. Or arguing. I don't feel the need to reach thousands or millions (or even tens) of people. If I know I've touched just one person by something I've said, or introduced new possibilities to another, or made a connection with a delightful, intelligent, creative, or fascinating person whom without the Web I never would have heard of...It's worth it. |
| | That's kind of where I'm at with it too. There's also a sense of constituency, more than of audience. Although I'm a born performer (as I suspect Jennifer is too), I don't feel like I'm on stage here, or even behind a microphone (although I've remarked before that this feels more like being on the radio than anything else I've done). It's more a sense of being among friends, even though I haven't met most of my blogging buddies in physical space. In this respect it's like some of the best forums and BBSes and newsgroups I've been part of (Denise Caruso's old Buzz group on AOL was amazing back in the 80s, as was Compuserve's Broadcast Professionals Forum, on which I was still technically a sysop when Compuserve cut me off for no reason a few months ago). |
| | But there is something going on here that feels much more nascent and uncontained than any of those other models. I think some or it is the collective curiousity and knowhow of journalists — both amateur and professional — at work. What Mike is driving with his questions enlarges what we know. It's not just about me. And I get the sense that so far we only know a small fraction about what's really going on here. |
| | For Blogging, rap's emergence is not only instructive in this historical sense, but in the larger, sweeping emergence of voice. In this context, voice emerges out of silence and seems to discover some untapped anger at not having been heard before. This anger/rage/annoyance brings the "self-centeredness" that is evident in so much blogging. Hopefully, blogging's evolution will be similar to rap's in that it too will eventually reach literary levels of self-recursive structures (some already does).... |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
