blog (January, 2007)
citizen.re.organization
Citizen journalism, citizen medicine...
[Physicians] don't have the same investment in our health as we do, and they can only devote so much time to each case.
This makes me think of blogs as opposed to mainstream media. A mainstream journalist devotes a limited amount of time to a story, then moves on to the latest, more "newsworthy" thing. [...]
"The old, Industrial Age paradigm, in which health professionals were viewed as the exclusive source of medical knowledge and wisdom, is gradually giving way to a new, information-age worldview in which patients, family caregivers, and the systems and networks they create are increasingly seen as important healthcare resources." (Dr. Tom Ferguson, aka DocTom.)
-- Jon Lebkowsky, Empowering Patients With Information Technology (WorldChanging)
It's just what happens when it's easier to share information. But, individual empowerment is dangerous to some:
I suggest that the noble amateur is itself part of an ideological construct; it's part of the idealization of innocence, of authenticity [...]; it's a dangerous romanticism. It's dangerous because one of its unintended consequences is the undermining of authority, the undermining of mainstream media, the undermining of expertise.
-- Andrew Keen, Interview on Tech Nation (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (check out Lessig's scathing review))
Undermine: dig beneath the foundations and make them shake.
Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of anthill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony. More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change.
Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy
And, a different sort of bug:
given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
(Linus's Law according to) Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
eye and I and I:
perethuvaedayana : 10,000 eyes, high, with full knowledge
-- Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages
properly passive
"Any one who frees himself from the crudest materialism readily recognizes that as a legal term, "property" does not denote material things, but rather certain rights. In the world of nature . . . there are things but clearly no property rights.
Further reflection shows that a property right is not to be identified with the fact of physical possession. Whatever technical definition of property we may prefer, we must recognize that a property right is a relation not between an owner and a thing, but between the owner and individuals with reference to things." (Morris Cohen, 1933, "Property and Sovereignty")
This becomes unmistakable if we consider intangible property, which constitutes an ever increasing part of the capitalized assets of corporations. "[T]he essence of private property is always the right to exclude others." Corporate private property rights exclude individuals and communities from access to commonwealth and power.
-- Corporations and the Public Interest (PDF), Karen Coulter selected articles from Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy from the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD)
People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes.
...Celebrating amateur culture; by which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing, and not for the money.
[...]
You can't kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it.
We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground
We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them "pirates."-- Larry Lessig, How creativity is being strangled by the law, TED Talks
how I read, online/offline
I've noticed more than a few people that don't usually read magazines in real life like to read them on aeroplanes. (I won't make broad, sweeping generalizations about most being women.)
Maybe it's because the content is bite-size chunky, and they fit well in the seat pocket?
Even if the subject is non-trashy, though, magazines themselves are trashy. Or at best, recycley, which is preceded in preference by reducey.
(I still read books, but) I don't read the newspaper or magazines; I read from the web. I'm not iPhone hip, though, and still rock the off-line, often. I used to print out web-reads for off-line consumption, but I've made another step in paper-less. (The soapbox I'm standing on is 100% post-consumer recycled cardboard.).
My new-school/old-school combo is an aged Palm Pilot with Google Reader and del.icio.us, and Plucker.
Here's my online/offline web-reading strategy:
- Browse the blogs and news feeds I read with Google Reader.
- Kick stuff that looks interesting off to a new (Firefox) tab -- using keystroke
ffwith the Google Reader Quick Links Greasemonkey script (or Better GReader Firefox add-on.) - Mark everything else as Read (keystroke
A,) close Google Reader, and sift through the opened tabs. - Consume what I have time for, and tag longer items for later in del.icio.us as to_read. Using the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension, keystroke
CTRL-D (CMD-D)then typing the tag name does it all. - Use Plucker to grab all of the pages at 1-link depth from my del.icio.us/to_read list, and convert them to a Palm-readable format.
- Sync the Palm
- Read tagged items at leisure, on- or off-line.
No trees, no inks, no waste, no shipping!
No big glossy pictures, either, (yet.)
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.
info consumption, attention, denial
I've been wondering why the Twitter bug hasn't seemed to have caught on in Cleveland yet -- or at least not in my circles (btw, me, ok.) But maybe it's better it hasn't.
Aaron Swartz on junk-food's information equivalent:
Everyone in America knows that it's easy to accidentally find yourself stuffing your face with junk food when you're not paying attention. But no one would seriously maintain that junk food is better than fine cuisine. It's just easier.
The same goes for reading stories on Reddit or your friends' pointless twits about their life. Looking at photos of sunsets or reading one-liners takes no cognitive effort. It's the mental equivalent of snack food. You start eating one and before you know it you've gone through two cans of Pringles and become a world expert on Evan Williams' travel habits.
-- Aaron Swartz, Everything Good is Bad For You (Raw Thought)
I criticize reality TV as being the fast-food of entertainment, but MySpace and blogreading can prove just as fruitless.
Ultimately, it's intention and attention. How are the feeds in your newsreader feeding you? How do you take it inline and offline?
where old media meets new
I hope that we will see, in the next few years, some much more ambitious experiments about how content gets created and shared in a group of people in an effective way.
I suspect that it won't be two things. I think that it won't be simply practices and standards that were created in formerly physical media applied to online stuff. [...]
But I also don't think it will be another thing [...] like YouTube, where you have masses of people creating content, sharing it, and sort of bubbling up the hot stuff. I think that those sorts of things are very much an artifact of simply not having been able to do that before, that the thrill is going to wear off that in a fairly short period of time. I think that we are seeing that, in fact, large numbers of people doing bits of content don't always actually lead to very good content, and that there is some model in there which is a sweet spot as yet uncreated, where the curatorial excellence of old media meets the freedom and versatility of new media, and we have a whole new form born.
-- Alex Steffen, Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging (NetSquared)