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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
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 Tuesday, February 20, 2007
started 2/20/2007; 3:47:53 AM - last post 2/21/2007; 4:39:31 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 
2/20/2007; 7:47:53 AM (reads: 15489, responses: 4)
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Shorthorn 
Flickr fixed
| | ... a problem I noticed but didn't blog about. Fortunately. |
We are all authors of each other
| | One problem: I avoid using the term "social media". I don't like it, and I don't even want to know what it means. I may talk about blogging and podcasting and syndication and tagging and stuff like that. But I never think about any of those things as "media" and rarely visit their "social" nature (though I am sure they have one). |
| | I don't use the term "Web 2.0" either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it's the name we'll give to the next crash. |
| | It's natural to want to lump technologies and practices together into categories that bear Greater Significance. But for some reason we still drag along the limiting concepts that the new stuff should help us escape, no matter what we call it. |
| | For example, this paragraph: |
| | The way we consume and share information will only continue to change until it completely transforms from one-to-many to many-to-many. |
| | I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I thnk of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers. |
| | Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you. |
| | What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. |
| | The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.) |
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Dan Brekke - Re: Monday, February 19, 2007
2/20/2007; 8:23:25 PM (reads: 900, responses: 0)
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Love those last four graphs. How old-fashioned. How essential to who we are and how we live.
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Eric T. MacKnight - writing to inform, and be formed
2/21/2007; 1:46:21 AM (reads: 920, responses: 0)
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Hi Doc,
Three or four years ago I wrote a piece (here) that picked up on something you had written, and I sent you a copy. You were kind enough to link to it and reply, telling me I should be blogging. I thought, who has the time? Not me. Then Jon Udell wrote about 'professional blogs' and caught my ear, especially when he suggested that people who work full-time shouldn't be expected to write every day on their blogs. So I shifted my .Mac homepage over to a WordPress blog, and began.
Now I've got my Grade 8 students blogging, here and I've just written a piece reflecting on that experiment and where it might be headed, here.
All of which illustrates pretty well, I think, what you mean when you say, "When you inform me, you form me."
Thanks.
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John Quimby - Re: Monday, February 19, 2007
2/21/2007; 7:55:34 PM (reads: 902, responses: 0)
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Dang, that's good.
For me the experience of gaining understanding about what's happening in online media is very much what you've described. I see myself becoming a case of, "E Pluribus Unum" which is standardly defined as, "out of many, one." I like a more literal translation that reads,
"from a pluarity, unity".
A plurality of knowledge, thought and insight become unified in me and this in turn gives me the authority to communicate with others who may not have been "authored" yet themselves.
All the more reason to check your sources. You could end up poorly written and worse - unread.
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Karim Tahawi - Re: Monday, February 19, 2007
2/21/2007; 8:39:31 PM (reads: 912, responses: 0)
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Doc,
I understand and agree with your point about "an accessory to our humanity". However, to gain wider adoption and hence fulfill the potential of these new communication tools to make things better for the world, we need language hooks so things don't get lost in translation. I think social media is pretty good but if you wanted to go with, as you seem to imply, "informed authoring" or as a hybrid (and perhaps more on point) "informed social authoring", so be it! There is no denying the social aspect of what's happening because we are engaging and connecting with each other as we bring to bare our unique and "informed" perspectives.
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