Category Archives: Uncategorized

bumpersticker: Keep Your Laws Off My Ursprache

I mentioned BLDGBLOG a few days ago, pointing to a quotation from Mike Davis, and today’s entry on BLDGBLOG quotes John McPhee (another of my read-everything-he-writes authors) and includes an aerial image of the monster copper mine at Bingham Canyon UT. There’s a pointer to The Center for Land Use Interpretation, and their Land Use Database will eat a few hours of your day.

Co-incidentally, I happened (thanks to Beyond the Beyond) upon a provocative new piece in Edge by Jaron Lanier: DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. A few snippets, to tantalize:

…My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots…

…it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation…

…It’s safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong…

… The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential…

…The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.

Quite a lot to chew on, and simultaneously I’m rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem and reliving my own mid-1960s perceptions of How Things Are, and listening to Lila Downs’ La Cantina (see a video of La Cumbia del Mole, from her Web site… and there’s this too). A heady brew on a rainy Sunday morning.

If you don’t read anything else today

…read this from Stephen Downes. It distills a lot of my raggedy thoughts on ‘teaching’ into a potent draught. Many memorable bits, but I wish I’d said this one:

I gave up arguing during my abortive PhD, when I realized that there was no point to argumentation. I have since then tried to live what I believe, and when people would ask, to explain why I believed it. This allowed me a certain detachment, because it didn’t matter whether they agreed with me, what mattered is that my explanation was true and honest and forthright.

Massive

Christopher Lydon’s ever-more-indispensable Open Source did a program on The Globalization of Hip-Hop that surely whets my taste for the genre. Try this excerpt [1:50] for piquancy…

I’ve never given much mental houseroom to Hip-Hop, and never listened carefully enough to get beyond the strutting and misogyny. Hmmm. Blues has plenty of strut and mis, and I’ve spent lotsa time on its variants. Time for a rethink…

The comment threads on Open Source often amplify the audio in useful ways. Consider this, from
Rushay Booysen, for its content and its expressive flavor:

mos def hip hop started from parties but it also had a serious undertone behind that partying lyrics was also messages lately hip hop has become more concerned bout the bling about what u have on ya wrist and if u see the effects of that on kids right here in south africa u would go this shit is massive. i was just tellin my friend if he noticed the amount of brothers round the way thats been gettin gold fronts who do we have to thank for that mr hip hop himself.its just crazy how the similiar sort of commercialism is influenced by american conglomorates all round the world it all evolves from economics man music has become more politicks then actuall musical art
(one of a number of comments)

Gibsonian take on S/N

I have a lifelong habit of bing[e]ing on authors, reading everything if I’ve found some unique voice in something they’ve written, and then rereading the especially choice bits again and again. William Gibson has been one of those authors for more than 20 years, and this fragment from William Gibson’s blog is pretty tantalizing and suggests that he’s still at it:

Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal-dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

How now, blogosphere?

A posting on danah boyd’s apophenia (blog production/consumption musings) got me thinking about the gradual shift in my own blog behavior. She says

…when i think about reading blogs about tech industry, my research area or other arenas that would actually be helpful, i go into anaphylactic shock. There’s too many, it’s too overwhelming, i can’t cope, eek! I can’t even stomach blogs written by dear friends who i will talk with for hours about professional or intellectual ideas (unless they embed the nutritious material in the sugary gossip stuff). I don’t even think i’d read my blog given its content if i weren’t the one writing it…

I’ve been ascribing similar feelings about tech/ed blogs to my increasing distance from the front lines of the EdBiz, and to the absence of any specific public for whom I’m thinking and writing, but maybe there’s something more fundamental here, some sort of tectonic shift in the world of Online. I need to explore this a bit, and it might as well be a blog posting, even if it’s only for my own edification.

In my own daily routines, I read a lot of pretty varied stuff via RSS, and skim even more… but lately I’ve noticed that I barely glance at many of the feeds that I was reading carefully six months or a year ago. Some of that is just the normal/tidal flux of interests, but much of my interest in “teaching and learning” was linked to my activities in educational institutions and organizations. Now that I’m well-and-truly outside those arenas, I’m increasingly detached from the debates and battles, and I realize that what I think about or see in something really doesn’t matter to or connect with the current needs and interests of my former colleagues. Just yesterday I saw a thread on a blog that I would have sent on to several people and I thought (for the first time) “enh. who cares?”

As I review the hundred-some RSS feeds I’ve been following, I notice some patterns in attention. These days, I find myself adding feeds in areas like food (megnut on food, Hungry Magazine, Maine Foodie, Eating Asia), and paying more attention to video resources (Ze Frank, Better Bad News), but investing a lot less time/energy in tech blogs

(e.g., the Gillmors, the Winer, Signal vs. Noise, Doc Searls, malevolent design, Amy Gahran’s Contentious, Continuous Computing),

and less to the clutch of H5N1 sites I’ve been following for a couple of years

(I scan Effect Measure, but rarely click through any of the links on The Coming Influenza Pandemic or Connotea tagged H5N1, and it’s been weeks since I’ve looked at Technorati on H5N1 or my Yahoo H5N1 search).

And the Ed blogs that I used to watch so carefully are fading from my interest/attention

(including Inside Higher Ed, elearningpost, FLOSSE Posse, EDUCAUSE, EdTech Posse, Alex Halavais, HeadsPace J, Liberal Education Today, blog of proximal development. Even EduRSS has become more of a trial than an essential. All that stuff about what faculty don’t do, and what students do do, and how it doesn’t connect… I thought and wrote about that for years, without much in the way of effects or progress.

Some of these I feel a certain guilt about not-reading, and I can’t quite bring myself to delete them from the RSS list.

I find that I have very little interest in library blogs that I used to scan on behalf of colleagues

(Resource Shelf, RSS4Lib, Free Range Librarian…)

So what’s still at the core? BoingBoing, WFMU, Juan Cole for News of Fresh Disasters, anything BryanAlexander or Gardner Campbell writes (they’re friends), and similarly Brian Lamb and Alan Levine (I don’t actually know them, but feel that I should/could), and the metafolks: Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jon Udell.

Others I really look forward to for new content: Language Log, Crooked Timber, Google Maps Mania, Ogle Earth…

It’ll be interesting to see how the landscape looks in six months or so. Bet it’ll be different.

links for 2006-05-30