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Tuesday, February 5, 2002
But seriously, folks 
| | One correspondent just observed that my occasional seriousness "goes a little beyond fun." Like, am I sounding dangerous or something? I dunno. |
| | Of course if this wasn't fun, I woudn't do it. And if it wasn't serious, I wouldn't do it either. |
| | So I'm sorry: you're gonna have to have it both ways. |
Vanity on hold
| | "Due to the enormous popularity of our new products, the normal wait times on our help line have increased. Our estimated wait time is now... nine minutes." That's what Eudora's help line keeps telling me, over bad Chinese restaurant music. The Voice is that same insincere rent-a-dude you hear on about a third of these systems. His voice is so deep he must have a larnyx the size of a water culvert. "If you would like to leave a message..." Well, I left an email message yesterday and all I got was a useless automated response promising an eventual human one if the automated one proved predictably inadequate. That response hasn't arrived. "Personal attention takes time. Thank you for your patience while we provide this level of service to other customers..." Fuck. |
| | Okay, credit where due: they said it would take nine minutes, and it took about that, I guess. Seemed like five years, but hey. |
| | More credit: the help worked. I needed to relocate my old Eudora folder to my personaldocuments directory. I forgot this was Unix. And I shoulda known, too. |
| | Suggestions to companies everywhere: |
| | - Don't insult tech support callers with suggestions they leave messages or send emails or look on the Web site, or press * for Frequently Asked Questions or any other stuff they've probably already done already or they wouldn't be sitting on hold.
- Get rid of the insincere voiceover guy. Just say "We're sorry this is gonna take some time. We're guessing around __ minutes."
- Add "Press X to mute the hold music" to the menu.
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Dept. of Redundancy Dept.
| | In case you don't read long posts and missed the link in the long piece below, go straight to George Lakoff's Metaphors of Terror. It's about as deep as Deep Shit gets. Also one more reason why George is my guru (or, since we're both from New Jersey, my fuckin' guru). |
Another jackhammer at work
| | Now Dean has a doppelblog too. Says he plans to merge them. Or something. |
It's a flat/round world after all
| | First, a pointer to The Connectivity Infrastructure, which is a piece I wrote for the Linux Journal site. It's about what "we" get and "they" don't, and it picks up on a number of threads various bloggers (and other sources of authority) started spinning early last week. |
| | "We," of course, are those who get the clues several among us wrote about in Cluetrain three years ago (yes, it was that long ago). "They" is everybody who continues to operate under the illusion that the institutional world is still a top-down place. Again, the prevailing condition: |
| | A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarterãand getting smarter faster than most companies. |
| | But it's not just companies, of course. It's news organizations, schools and governments too. |
| | What we said in Cluetrain was deeply offensive to the sturdy notion that knowledge is some kind of "content" that flows down from top to bottom, from the few to the many, whether the pyramid is journalism, business, or education. |
| | Those last two are going to take a lot longer to die, so let's turn to the topic that's closest to home here in blogland: Journalism. |
| | As I write this, I hear Dylan singing: |
| | There's something happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? |
| | And now, with Radio Userland, Dave and his cohorts have turned blogs into bludgeons, supplying writers with $39.95 jackhammers custom built to pound Journalism As Usual into the dirt. |
| | The question is, why is it still there? |
| | The obvious answer is the conservative one: JAU is an institution, after all, and these things by nature are big and tough and tend to last a long time. As Craig Burton once said (about a big old company), "It's a snake that circles the world. It'll take a long time for the tail to know the head is dead." And, of course, some of it deserves to live. There's a legitimate market for good journalism, and the media that carry it. Just not for some of its conceits. |
| | The reason those conceits stand is largely conceptual. We literally conceive institutions in hierarchical terms. They have verticality built into the way we understand and talk about them. |
| | Read George Lakoff on Metaphors of Terror. Without ever realizing it, we see buildings as heads, which is exactly why Osama and his boys shot us through the biggest head they could find. (And we felt it, too.) |
| | We express that verticality in our BigCo buildings, in our BigCo org charts, and in the subtexts of expressions like "who are you to say..." It shows up in the caste systems that comprises every institution, the honors it bestows, and the silent potocols it can't help but trust. |
| | But there are new reputation mechanisms in place now, with Google's bots constantly mapping their connections. These mechanisms may have their hierarchical aspects, but they aren't especially vertical. Yes, I have a good reputation and a high profile on some subjects; but if I stop writing tomorrow, it will be as if I pulled out my own batteries. You'll find me on Google, but I'll be receding into the nether pages. Same is true for the rest of us. |
| | "I sing the body electric," Whitman wrote: |
| | The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you, or within meãthe bones, and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,
O I say now these are the Soul! |
| | The Net is an electric body too. Whether it's as round as the Earth, or as flat as the planet looks on its surface, it's not a safe habitat for terminal elites, no matter what the're about. |
| | We are an electric body, and we won't support any more pointless pyramids. |
Rahul Fu
What's a little PR among friends?
| | Hey, Chris & Leo! Maybe you could lean on John Dvorak and the TechTV people to put a bunch of serious bloggers on Silicon Spin. And if John wants to be a stick in the mud about it, something on Screen Savers would be cool, no? |
| | By the way, John is one of the guys who does get stuff (and gives it too, with the best of them). He's coming from the mass market mentality on blogs. His thinking goes, "if the majority of blogs are purely self-indulgent, then blogging must be about self-indulgence." If he thinks blogs are only about vanity, he misses a lot of boats. |
Which means he still doesn't get it.
| | John Dvorak's piece on blogs is finally up. He likes them and lists five "obvious possibilities" why "Web log addicts" blog. Nowhere does the word "journal," "journalist" or "journalism" show up in the piece. To him blogs just lower the threshold for "vanity sites." Their main upside: "far fewer cat pictures." |
Mesh Fu
| | Kevin Marks writes, pointing me to a wider kind of wireless: Mesh Networks. Looks to me like yet another network, kind of like Ricochet was, only without the centralized infrastructure. I think the best bet for what I yesterday called Condition B is to transport TCP/IP over the existing digital cell phone system by adding efficiencies to that system. |
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