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Friday, April 29, 2005
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 Friday, April 29, 2005
started 4/29/2005; 8:34:48 AM - last post 4/30/2005; 9:39:56 AM
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Doc Searls - Friday, April 29, 2005 
4/29/2005; 12:34:48 PM (reads: 4163, responses: 3)
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Flattening out 
| | There is much eloquence and fun in the backlash against the book and its author. For a taste, follow the links in these two posts by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. All seem to agree with this comment by Felix Deutsch in response to my Part 1 essay. An excerpt: |
| | Friedman is a terribly shallow and lazy thinker, always looking for new ways of fellating the corpocracy or jumping on a (clue)train that has left the station years ago; look no further than here for more evidence. |
| | Most of what I write in Part 2 isn't about Tom Friedman. It's about the boat anchor we call the bell curve, and why continuing to shape kids with it is The West's worst handicap in a flattened world. |
| | In case you haven't noticed, my life has been one long fight against the bell curve. I recount some of that in the piece as well. |
Checking teapots for tempests
| | ...this Virginia Postrel person's revised opinion of the iPod because of its rechargeable battery. It's a bad design because of the battery! She writes, "They're beyond terrible, and Apple won't replace them." It's clear she didn't even read the FAQ she pointed to, because that's patently false. Apple should sue her! (Doc Searls links to this tripe because Postrel is an A-Lister (and a media elite), and because she offers something disparaging about the iPod, one of Doc's latest pet peeves. "Silos bad. Flat world good.") Of course Postrel is wrong about Apple not replacing the battery, and the video she links to is so last year, in addition to being just wrong. All rechargeable batteries fail eventually. The virtue of rechargeable batteries is that they don't fill up landfills as quickly as disposable ones do. One wonders what Postrel thinks of the design of her vibrator and its disposable batteries? (Am I allowed to say that about an A-lister?) Oh, wait, yeah, she's okay with disposables, as she tells us. What car of the Clue Train do you suppose she's riding in? |
| | Actually, GD is just as wrong about why I linked to Virginia's iPod item as she is (or was) about the iPod's batteries. Not that it matters. He's still a fun read: |
| | Nevertheless, the old strategies remain and are often employed to good effect even by those who are shameless in their self-worship. One of the oldest and most universal of these is the identification of enemies to warn against and damn. This one is exploited almost universally in the "blogosphere," where the range of dangerous threats to progress, security, equality, and good taste covers the spectrum of human behavior. |
| | So-called "mainstream media" or "old media" or "journalists" have been a favorite enemy of the attention-seeking, hierarchy-climbers for some time. This was an inspired choice because it allowed the attention seeking to exploit the attention-directing mechanisms of the very thing it railed against to attract more attention to them. But social organisms are learning organisms and many of them have learned, "If you can't beat 'em - join 'em!" |
| | By the way, I like the iPod, in spite of the fact that it's a silo. Just as I like lots of things, in spite of other things. |
| | Makes me want to go read Wealth Bondage, which I haven't visited in awhile. Alas, there I find this: |
| | In any case, I am thinking of shutting, or downsizing, WB for awhile and trying something that is more difficult, too difficult for me to have done earlier, without the practice I have had here. |
As I said...
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Maarten Schenk - Re: Friday, April 29, 2005
4/29/2005; 3:43:26 PM (reads: 1025, responses: 0)
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Hi,
I wrote that article :-) Let me translate the title for you: "Weblogs vs. journalism, and why we need a new word".
Basically it builds upon what you said about watching which words to use when talking about weblogs and what was said by others in the debate between journalism vs. blogging and also the fact that most bloggers just don't do anything remotely related to journalism (catblogging, linkdumping...).
I always used to say "Journalism is a method, blogs are a tool", and when I wrote that in the backchannel chat at Les Blogs somebody replied: "Blogging is a method too". Keeping in mind that most bloggers probably don't do what this person meant when he talked about 'blogging', my article asks the question if we don't need a new word for this phenomenon.
What do you call the phenomenon whereby a group of people who are loosely connected by weblogs go after a newsworthy event and try to tell a story by posting facts and comments they discovered through various means and count on the comments to refine and correct the information they publish?
Is that citizen-journalism? Not really a good term, because the method used is not journalism. Is it blogging? No, because blogging can also be about cats etc. and have nothing to do with newsgathering. News-swarming then? Too cumbersome. Piranha-style-newsgathering? Even worse.
So there you have it, the gist of my article. Comments welcome!
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LesD - Re: Friday, April 29, 2005
4/30/2005; 1:46:32 AM (reads: 578, responses: 0)
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Steven Tulsky - Re: Friday, April 29, 2005
4/30/2005; 1:39:56 PM (reads: 615, responses: 0)
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Doc,
Re: Linux Journal article part 2:
If I'm not mistaken, "academic achiever" Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and was considered a n'er-do-well by his father, a name partner in a prestigious Seattle law firm. Now Dad runs Sonny's multi-billion dollar charitable foundation. So, if MS is run like an academic campus, it's not because BG wants to emulate his academic background, but perhaps because he wants to taunt it.
Gates Junior would probably agree with you that academic achievement and intelligence have little to do with each other--certainly that was the case with him. If he does ask applicants their SAT scores, I hope that he doesn't ask them their graduating class rank.
All that said, notwithstanding the many many people out there who are not academically talented but are in their own ways brilliant, there are also a lot of God's children out there who are just plain dumb. Sorry.
Cheers,
Steve
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