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Friday, March 15, 2002
Intermediate the Love 
| | BLOGGERS ARE TURNING the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution. |
| | Good stuff, yet Jenkins also positions bloggers as "intermediaries": |
| | Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard. |
| | Which only makes sense if if everything is mediated — when the whole fucking world is about shipping shit. Problem is: it isn't. There's a difference between shipping and sharing. When Chris Locke posted a pointer to this piece, nothing moved from Chris's site. And nothing's moving from mine while you read this. Neither Chris nor I have "intermediated" a damn thing, in the implied sense that we've "passed something along." We've shared it. Big difference. Knowledge is both personal and social. It converts from one to the other when people share it. |
| | So try this on for size: blogs aren't media. |
| | They're journals. Deal with it. |
Working with Murphy
| | Fought the computer and the elements all day, connecting sporadically from four different locations. At one point I sat outside the Starbucks at Yerba Buena Gardens, plugged into a power outlet hidden in the flowers, freezing my ass off in the blowing wind. |
| | The bad news is that clearlly the TiBook needs its case replaced, plus who knows what else. I'll go by one of the Apple stores tomorrow to see if I can turn it in — and hopefully get it shipped back before I leave town again next weekend. Fortunately I brought a backup FireWire drive with me. |
Proving that in 2002 it's still possible to have a tech conference that's oblivious to the Net.
| | If I had the time to explain, I'd take too much of it. But the short of it is: I'm busy writing about SXSW and the Embedded Systems Conference for Linux Journal right now. Finding the connections I need to do the job right has been a bear. I dropped and bent the case of my TiBook last night, rendering it inoperable until I bent it back close enough into shape that everything but the CD/DVD drive works. And I've been hunting all over for a Net connection. Thanks to the ESC, Moscone currently has the connectivy of a parking garage. So I'm finally jacked in wirelessly at the Starbucks that squats conveniently atop the North Hall. The next thing you read from me will probably be over at LJ. |
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