meaningful mindless chatter
She was goofing around:
"I'll leave you a comment on MySpace, or
write on your wall in Facebook, or
tag a link for you on del.icio.us",
and began flinging flickrs, Google Calendars, LinkedIns, Upcomings and Twitters --
fad upon mimeographic fad --
til she erupted into a dizzying spell of
"blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog -osphere",
and an exasperated, "but one's really saying anything!!".
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people,
-- Kevin Kelly, We Are the Web (2005)
Sometimes overwhelming and pointless and empty.
The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.
-- Socrates, "Phaedrus"
He says disciples, though, whereas our new media means democratization. We should celebrate and experiment and practice.
Discovery and exploration and browsing; moving about and looking at many things; the linked structure of the web; when you come across a link, it's a distraction engine, which, in terms of the memetic incest, is actually a great thing. It's how we get past that incest; we're brought from one site to another.
That is so fundamentally different from the basic idea of how we communicate in print; in print you're trying to cover the topic, and be comprehensive, and be done.
-- David Weinberger on podcast: Technometria: Everything is Miscellaneous
The process continues; between the lines and off the page.
comments
. . . here I am reading your weblog. Thanks for throwing thoughts and connections into the sphere. :)
-- Jenita (July 17, 2007 7:44 AM)
celebrate and experiment and practice
and
investigate and criticize,
I should add.
-- jeffschuler (July 17, 2007 9:36 AM)