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| Tuesday, October 21, 2003 |
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Reality clarification field? 
| | The Dean campaign is using the Internet to democratize democracy. |
| | The Web takes all kinds of things from the few and puts them in the hands of the many — the power to publish, trade stocks, pose naked for an audience...you name it, the Web democratizes it. |
| | What's going on here at Dean HQ in South Burllington is nothing less than putting presidential politics in the hands of the people — the power to organize, to share ideas, to speak back to the candidate. It's extraordinary, and it's just getting started. And it goes way beyond weblogs. |
| | Sounds like he's channeling Britt. Or David. Makes me wonder what's in the water up there in Vermont. Or everywhere, given the countrywide grass roots support for Howard Dean that shows no sign of wilting. |
| | In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities, with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election. |
| | And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously. |
| | It's all a matter of how we frame things up. And then how we break the same frames. |
Mine this
Aggregate agitation
| | So the top blog posts of the moment, according to Blogdex, are from The New Yorker (Seymour Hersh), Slate (Christopher Hitchens), Jay Solo, The Mirror (Jane Kerr), David Weinberger, The New Republic (the editors), Reuters, Brad Sucks and Jason Kottke, in that order. |
| | So... where's the distinction between big-J and little-j journalism here? |
| | Technorati tracks well over a million blogs, many of which are your regular publications, syndicated online. |
| | Maybe this is a demonstration of Dr. Weinberger's oughta-be-famous line, "In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen people." |
| | Well, maybe so. But I think we're dealing with a groundswell to which only the most literal meaning of the journalism will stick. We've got a shitload of journals here. It doesn't matter if most of the new ones die off. |
| | A lot of what we care about is something called aggregation. Which is cool and good, but it's intermediary stuff. I think what each of us does, if it's linkworthy, is agitate a bit. We don't just "add value" to an idea, or a subject, or common knowledge, or the drift of opinion. We .. annoy. Look back at the links on that list. One way or another, each of those posts offers useful agitation. You don't have to agree with it, but it helps to take it into account. |
| | Minds that learn are changed by the process. They can't help it. To inform is to form. As we've said here before, we are all authors of each other.That's what we mean, whether we know it or not, when we link to a post. If something is informative, it has the power to form knowledge and opinions: literally, to change minds. |
| | So every agitation is a pearl in the oyster of common yet unfinished wisdom. |
| | Or so it seems to me at 3:40 on a Tuesday. |
Intra-familial promotion
| | If you're in the Baltimore/D.C. area, make an opening in your calendars for Buried, a theater production at UMBC that is conceived, written and directed by my firstborn, Colette Searls. I know I'm biased, but I'm not the only one who thinks she's real good. It runs November 20-23 and December 4-7. |
Surfblogging
| | I'm not a surfer, but I would have been one if, at the turn of the 60s, there were real surfboards and point-break surfing in New Jersey (which, aside from artificial breakwaters, has approximately no rocks along its coast). The best I could do in those days was ride the white stuff at Mantoloking Beach on an inflatable canvas raft that was basically 2/3rds of an air mattress. I kicked ass at that. Body surfing too. The trick with both is to wrap your raft, or your arms and face, around the forward-rolling motion of the wave. In case you care. |
Expanding the medical conversation
| | I've been getting emails and comments regarding yesterday's post about anesthesiological mistakes and "day surgery," which involves sending patients home immediately after regaining consciousness in Recovery, even at risk that patients who are overweight or have a history of breathing problems (known and unknown) such as sleep apnea may simply stop breathing. |
| | I'm looking for a distributed way, not a centralized service like ePinions. I want the opinions expressed to be clearly the patient's own. |
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