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| Tuesday, February 20, 2007 |
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Shorthorn 
Flickr fixed
| | ... a problem I noticed but didn't blog about. Fortunately. |
We are all authors of each other
| | One problem: I avoid using the term "social media". I don't like it, and I don't even want to know what it means. I may talk about blogging and podcasting and syndication and tagging and stuff like that. But I never think about any of those things as "media" and rarely visit their "social" nature (though I am sure they have one). |
| | I don't use the term "Web 2.0" either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it's the name we'll give to the next crash. |
| | It's natural to want to lump technologies and practices together into categories that bear Greater Significance. But for some reason we still drag along the limiting concepts that the new stuff should help us escape, no matter what we call it. |
| | For example, this paragraph: |
| | The way we consume and share information will only continue to change until it completely transforms from one-to-many to many-to-many. |
| | I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I thnk of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers. |
| | Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you. |
| | What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. |
| | The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.) |
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