Hyperlinks as Conversation
Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin...
notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
William Gibson 1996 Observations of the WWW
In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. ... notesWWW is emergent, we see consuming information as work, Beavis and Butthead are meta in that we are watching someone watching TV. Lots of good stuff here.
The Web is a Social Tool Not a Technological One
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. notesIt is meant to help people to work together ultimately, weaving us together.
Digital Culture Turns Everything into One Book
The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, ther...
1 If we are allowed to mashup everything into newer expressions so that the original sources are lost and we cannot reference anything, then we essentially have only one book, just like North Korea.
Jaron Lanier's Suggestions for Taking Action Online
Every save-the-world cause has a list of suggestions for “what each of us can do”: bike to work, recycle, and so on.
I can propose such a list related to the problems I’m talking about:
Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.Po... notesThese are habits you can adopt to maintain your individuality. Seems like good advice for lots of people on Facebook and other sites.
"Net of a Million Lies"
And so it went. Tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of points of view. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing. notesVinge's galactic internet is a rumor mill, predicting the emotionally-charged falsehoods and tribalism that would appear on today's internet.
Reading Comments on the Internet Feels Like It's the End ...
Watching an unbelievably beautiful video of Hubble probing the edge of space: unfathomable 17.000 comments, but half of them inane, gross, with atrocious spelling, insults from childish name-calling, immature outbursts, vicious moronic bullying to outright gibberish insanity. Reading YouTube comment threads can make you sense the end of the world as we knew it.
How sad, but I guess one doesn’t have to look?
...
The Internet brings the promise of connecting it all.
But it could also conne... notesA shared sentiment, the idea that reading youtube comments robs our faith in humanity.
How Novel is the Internet?
Before the Web we were already used to sitting in front of electronic boxes for hour upon hour. The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes. Of course the things we do on the Internet are different from those we did (and do) in front of the TV. But it’s important to remember that they are only different; they are not new. Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your hor... notesMarshal T. Poe makes a persuasive argument that, despite the tremendous possibilities it puts before us, we end up using the Internet to do the same old stuff we were doing before the Internet, only more conveniently.
