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Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Exploring the Stupid Frontier 
| | As opposed to a smart network. Like TV. |
| | TV is a smart network. The Internet is a stupid network. |
| | I'd credit the source by linking but I'm too stupid to remember where I read it. |
| | There is no money in the stupid network. Despite what Doc Searls says. |
| | In the future - say, this afternoon - the stupid network will be peopled exclusively with bright people and the smart network will be peopled exclusively with stupid people. |
| | All the really bright people will be poor. And all the stupid people will be rich. |
| | Hierarchies - of which the smart network is an extension - depend on the stupidity of people. |
| | I am of the stupid. And I love a good hierarchy. I really don't like to think for myself. Turn the key and go. I like that. I'm lazy and stupid. Tell me what to do. I'm a good soldier. I'm not proud of that, I'm just saying. I just like to get from point A to wherever without thinking about it. |
| | And I'm not being ironic. I really am stupid. If all the world's a stage, I am the Fool with a paid subscription in the orchestra but with no vehicular means to get to the theatre and wherever is closing tomorrow. |
| | I dunno what he means when he says I say there's no money in a stupid network. I do agree with Don Marti that Information wants to be $6.95. There's plenty of money to be made at $6.95. Most of the world's goods cost less, I'll bet. Which brings me to this:::: |
| | The stupidist conceit of the software business is that commodities are bad. |
| | If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food. |
| | There's plenty of money to be made in — and on (or choose any other preposition) — commodities. You just have to think smart about the stupid stuff. Is it that hard? |
A bad habitat for unkind cuts
| | I was 22 when I got my first job at my first newspaper, in suburban New Jersey. Among my rookie duties was writing brief summaries of accident and arrest reports that I'd go through at the police station on the way to work. Sometimes I'd go out to the accident scene or to the junkyard where a wrecked car had been taken, and shoot pictures. It was a small paper, so I functioned as both reporter and photographer. |
| | The work was boring and occasionally sickening, but every once in awhile I'd throw some humor into it. "Tree hits car" would be a typical headline. I got some positive feedback, so after a while I started getting carried away with the funny stuff. |
| | Then one day I got a letter from a reader who told me how unfunny any accident is, if you're one of the participants. In this particular case I had also made another error that should have been caught by the copy editor, but wasn't: the age of the driver was under 18, and I had put the kid's name in the paper, which was a major no-no. It sobered me up. |
| | There's a time an a place for everything, my father said to me, when I recounted the lesson. Another of his favored clichés was Everything is a matter of time and geography. |
| | What I got sober about was the geography. There was, I realized, only the illusion of distance between writer and reader — and worse, the illusion of editorial elevation above the reader. That letter brought me back to Earth. |
| | I read yesterday in Sheila Lennon's blog that the Orange County Weekly is going through a similar come-uppance. In We've Lost that Self-Righteous Feeling, music critic Jim Washburn reflects on the passing of Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield, whose last emailed words to a friend were a bitter recollection of what Washburn calls "some uncharitable things" said by the paper. |
| | Then Washburn recalls his own instruction in critical manners: |
| | I once slagged off Steve Goodman in a review, mocking his "perennial opening act" status. What I didn¹t know was that he¹d risen from his sickbed to do that show as a favor to the promoter when another act cancelled at the last minute. Goodman was in pain, dying of leukemia, was soon dead, and my review was the last one he ever got. |
| | People can drop dead at any time, and that¹s no reason to gild their talents. But it should make us more cognizant of what we write, and whether we do it to be truthful or because being snide might make you look cool. Again speaking from personal experience, being a rock critic is a pretty unhip job, and there¹s a tendency to want to seem hipper by dumping on other people, or at least distancing yourself from things that may be even less hip than you. |
| | What strikes me about Washburn's piece, however, is that there is still a sense of distance — one that's very different than the one we sense here on the Net, where what we write is syndicated immediately into countless news aggregators, where every reader is an email or an instant message away, and where a high percentage of readers are also writers. There may be a sense of physical distance, but that's about the only kind. There's immediacy here. It's personal, even if we only know the blogger as, say, Brian at bmoeasy. With a few notable exceptions, this sense of proximity, of sharing an almost (though not quite) social space, has an effect on manners. That's why I beleive, on the whole, that we're a bit more civil here. |
| | [Sheila's post, by the way, includes many links to Steve Goodman goodies.] |
| | [Later...] I suspect the author of the Arcata Eye Police Log has a more neighborly relationship with his subjects than I did as a geeky kid in New Jersey 32 years ago |
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