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Re: Thursday, August 24, 2006
Danny's on target here. Everybody has a right to market themselves, indeed, but Mr. Winer appears to continually draw the focus to his own achievements, and ignore the contributions of others, and in a most acrimonious way. Your point about language and metaphor is well spoken. But Mr. Winer is hardly the first one to approach the web as a publishing platform, or think or talk of it in terms of flow. I (along with a large number of database pros I would imagine) have modeled enterprise datawarehousing and ETL systems in terms of capacity and flow and publishing and audience interests and needs and timeliness for many, many years. The fact that the production and delivery infrastructures have grown so cheap and ubiquitous doesn't change the fundamental dynamics all that much--people produce content, systems deliver it, and humans, using whatever metaphorically apt ontological label you prefer, humans at the OTHER end read it and respond, or fail to do so. The whole thing has become a lot more personal, and that dynamic is really one of the more interesting ones, to me anyway. "River of news" is a neat moniker, a pithy slogan, and people like that, and so it's an easy story to tell, but then again so what? (Especially so what if there's not all that much bandwidth left over for adverts, the monetary lifeblood of 'news' channels.) Into what sort of behavioral contexts will this river of news flow? And if we follow it downstream, to where might it be taking us? Who needs a river of news and where? While standing in line at the supermarket? In your taxicab? In line at the theater? Riding your bike? at the gym? I guess the on-the-go set can't get enough of this sort of water, but on a mobile screen its always gonna end up more of a trickle than a life-giving sort of river, isn't it? And in the midst of all the hype sure to follow, isn't it likely that the fundamental question which arises from this metaphor is just altogether missed -- namely a RIVER is something that supports human life. The history of civilization is closely tied to water, is it not? So the question is, is such a river of news life-supporting, in the sense of a real river, or is it not? This is a much more interesting question to me than who got there first. And i suspect it will be examined well enough, once people start noticing that in a world full of information, that river of news is drowning out other significant life-giving signals, and covering the road to higher ground. The river of news metaphor also seems to unfortunately confuse the quality of the content with the mode of delivery. News on my mobile, neato keeno, now i can REALLY keep up to date, anywhere. But doesn't a human context require some sort of perspective? Isn't understanding more significant than immediacy? Isn't context as important as connectability? And doesn't a human context require a perspective a bit larger than the 3x3 inch screen on your mobile, while you are on your way to, or actually involved in, something else at the time? Just wondering. In this river of news scenario, it looks to me like, no matter where you are, you aren't really there, are you, cause your mind and attention is somewhere else. But not to worry, Dave will save us. Next thing you know he will invent 'presence' (but spell it differently) and tell us to "BE HERE NOW", and unplug and step back. And when someone gently points out to him that this isn't really that new of a message, and he isn't all that special for having noticed it, more likely than not he will acrimoniously point out that NOW is NOW and that was THEN and so it is NEW and I really am discovering it.... oh well. i've fallen into ranthood, and gone on too long. as melissa etheridge sang it, "somebody bring me some water,..."
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