Move over, Samuel Pepys
april 3, 2000. Blogs. Weblogs.
If you don’t create them, you may not even be
aware of them. But once you encounter one that
piques your fancy, you’ll visit it often, just
as you would a good friend.
They’re "a clipping service without
portfolio," according to YAWL
(Yet Another Web Log), a website maintained by
Vicki Rosenzweig.
Or simply "a webpage where a weblogger
(sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer)
'logs' all the other webpages she finds
interesting," says Jorn Barger, whose Robot
Wisdom site coined the longer term in 1997.
No, a blog is much much more, enthuses Julia
Keller of the Chicago
Tribune. It’s a "like an independent
film on an endless loop. It's like a memoir of the
future."
On the contrary, fumes Ben Brown at Teeth,
it’s much much less. If you’re a blogger,
"you're just a dork who can't come up with
anything more than a paragraph or two to say every
day."
<>
Confused? A blog is a webpage of links, usually
compiled by one person, often interspersed with
comments. A blog transformed what was an unwieldy
opening section in print into a concise, efficient
transmission of information online.
Except for occasional review logs such as Epinions,
blogs are refreshingly noncommercial. The more
interesting sites are idiosyncratic and often
highly personal, a record of online and offline
events in a blogger’s life — a private
multimedia journal for public consumption. They
are prime examples of nonlinear thought, forming a
true web of ideas and images. And they may be the
most subversive element of our neonatal electronic
age.
Much has been made of the internet’s ability
to connect dissenters in ways so subtle that
heavyhanded bureaucrats cannot control them. And
much has been made of the internet’s capacity
for changing the way we do business. But at the
heart of this new scientific development lies a
shift in modes of thought. When you compose an
argument using hyperlinks, it’s unnatural to
speak of on logical progressions from A to B to C.
When your statements are linked not only to the
statements of other people but also to all their
ramifications, there is no way that you can insist
on intellectual property rights. There’s only an
intellectual process. And somewhere in that
process, hierarchy loses its power. To a person in
the political catbird seat, this is a pretty scary
prospect. Governments are no longer able to count
on one of their traditional sources of strength
— the control of information. Spin.
Where do bloggers fit in this schema? It’s
easy to see them as happy-go-lucky spiders, busily
spinning a shiny new web. Or actually, a wide
world of webs, each different, which — when
bound together — will create a framework that
even the most determined multi-eyed agent of
oppression cannot break. In this battle of wills,
the winners probably won’t even know they were
participants.
In the fourth century B.C., Plato warned in his
best don’t-rock-the-boat voice, "Any
musical innovation is full of danger to the whole
state.... When modes of musical innovation change,
the fundamental laws of the state always change
with them." The statement is even truer of
modes of thought (or perhaps they’re really the
same thing).
Late in 1999 John
S. Quarterman mused, "The beauty of a
blog is it doesn’t have to be good for anything.
Nonetheless, lots of people make them and lots of
people read them. I wonder if blogs are evidence
of something that an artist friend once told me
about psychology: random input is the most
stimulating." And the most dangerous to the
status quo.
--------------------------------
ALAMUT
BASTION OF PEACE AND
INFORMATION
MONDAY, 27 MARCH 2000
Forging ahead.
Trains
Another forgotten thing
remembered: the piping of the train whistle.
Harmonic, lonely, resonant (imagine the sound of a
wet finger on a glass rim, but lower and metal
edged, as if it were actually produced by the
rubbing of the wheels on the damp rails), it is a
note that fits the inherent nature of this place.
The end of the line. The beginning and end of
freight. The sounds heard at the start and the end
of the day. Like Burroughs’ drawled lines over
the moan of the St. Louis whistle (I've never
heard it. Anyone out there who has? Is it
different?) the moan of the Canadian Pacific evokes
the terminus. The place where culture
stops and nature begins.
Mines
Reinvention. When I was a kid a
bumper sticker educated us to the fact that,
"Mining is B.C.'s second industry."
Today it appears that metals and ores are out and
"human resources" and data are in.
According to my friend Hanif,
B.C.'s mining money is pouring into the "new
gold rush." Well, if Nokia can go from making
rubber boots to wireless telephones — why not?
Here at least the basic principle remains the
same. And you can argue that the industry's
reinvention is a step up the civilization ladder;
valuable humans have to be coaxed (tempted) from
their current workplaces with infinitely more
subtlety and care than raw ore.
(Valerie and I had a talk about
the subtleties of human recruiting where not
money, but the recruiter's receptivity to clues
thrown out during the interviews and the company's
willingness to cater to the prospective employee's
special needs is the chief issue. From her I
learned that stock options are also known as
"golden handcuffs." This sort of mining
is definitely sexy.)
Raw ore: Gradfinder.com
www.alamut.com
