An Interview with Me

Halley has just run an interview with me.

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ISP Earthquake

Doc mentions that he drove through an earthquake last night, and that he maintains an Earthlink account. That leads, of course, to the following puzzle:

Q: What do you call an ISP in an earthquake?
A: Earthblink

And, irresistably, we are led to:

Q: What do you call an ISP that over-controls its customers?
A: Earthclink
Q: No, that’s not what I was thinking of…
A: CompuSerf

Next thing you know we’ll be posing puzzles like these:

Q: What do you call an ISP for a fading superpower?
A: America on Decline
Q: What do you call an ISP for cats?
A: America on Feline

But then we grow ashamed of ourselves and stop. Please.

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Getting Personal

Jeneane wonders (as I did in the recent issue of my newsletter) why we bloggers are getting so personal and so attached: ” Why so passionate over some words in a template? Why do I feel like I’ve known these friends all my life?”

Her partial answer: “Since I’ve shared most of my life, even if compressed and scattered, here on allied, I feel that somehow you all have lived it with me.” Definitely. But why have been willing to share it? And why has it connected so deeply? It might be due — paradoxically — to the anonymity the Web affords, although it seems to me that since anonymity can be merely an excuse for irresponsibility, we’d be better off thinking of it as the opportunity to have a fresh start. The Web is our blank page.

And then there’s the fact that The Web that Matters — the network of people we care about — is self-organizing so we tend to hear from the people we touch and are ignored by the people we don’t. That’s why the blogging world isn’t aflame enough for the likes of John Dvorak, but it’s also one reason it’s become so important to us. We’re pulling one another into deeper and deeper water. “See, Halley just did a cannonball off the deep end and she’s fine! Why don’t you give it a try?”

The rush we’re feeling over being able to speak in public about matters we formerly kept private is temporary. It will become the new normal soon. At that point it will be integrated enough into our understanding of ourselves that we’ll carry it over into the real world. And although we will lose the rush of novelty, we will gain the steadier warmth of wider and deeper friendships.

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MiscLink

Peterme links to a provocative article conceiving of narratives as spaces rather than as threads. Peter is interested in the nature of space both real and cyber and his site is always an excellent resource on the topic.

Dana Parker, “DVD Diva” and editor of the DVD Report, recommends a page opposing the Senator Fritz “Dumb as a Hollings” Hollings’ bill that gives Walt Disney direct control over all content.

Julianne Chatelain points us to a project that uses the banner ad as a political art form. Click on the “Collection” button. (You’ll need Shockwave). And, at another banner-art site she points us to, there’s a fancypants UI that uses a 6-story building as a visual metaphor. (Be sure to type “Y” to get past the home page.)

Brian Millar has a funny aggregated reply to spammers. It begins:

Dear [email protected]

Thank you for your concern about the size of my penis. But I like it just fine, thank you and over the years I have discovered my own ways of enlarging it…

He goes on to politely turn down the offers to make $12,000,000 in expropriated Nigerian funds, to view hot coeds in their new off-campus apartment, and the rest of the sad daily litany.

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Friedman and Facts

Thomas Friedman’s latest — Global Village Idiocy — stands firm on one fact: For a significant portion of the world, the Internet spreads serious misinformation. Especially where only a small percentage of the population is hooked up to the Net, the rumors and lies that appear there — e.g., that 4,000 Israelis in NYC had advance notice of the 9/11 bombing — are taken as gospel simply because they were on the Internet.

As always, there are lots of ways to disagree with Friedman. For example, as some bloggers have pointed out, the Web is interactive and self-correcting. And the overall effect of Friedman’s article will be to fan the anti-Net flames among those who know no better. But I think we are up against a hard fact: a journalist with a track record at doing the thing that capital J’s are good at — getting their facts relatively straight — tells us that the Internet at this stage of its development is being used to spread dangerous lies that are not being self-corrected.

So, what do we do with that fact? Since I’m in no position to challenge it, I accept it. But how the Internet operates when 5% of a population have access to it is not a good indicator of what will happen when 50% or even 25% are hooked up; with 5% filtering, it’s more like the broadcast model. And while some of us have argued that, as with any technology, the Net tends towards certain values, those tendencies can certainly be over-powered by other interests. Perhaps the Internet will function in some cultures primarily as a way to reinforce prejudice and spread the lies people are eager to believe. I obviously hope not and ultimately think not. But these are facts that haven’t yet happened.

We should thank Friedman for reporting the current state of affairs in some parts of the world. We should acknowledge that he has his facts straight. And then we should look to the blogiverse for the discussion of his facts to keep us from generalizing too hastily. IMO.

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New Issue of JOHO Published

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Sharing the WiFi: A Controversy

Glenn Fleischman responds to my citing of David Isenberg‘s article about DeWayne Hendricks’ concern about the messiness of sharing The Spectrum. The question is whether we’re headed towards a “tragedy of the commons” where overuse of wireless connectivity makes it useless to everyone. Glenn, who knows this stuff cold, says that the market will work this out and that Hendricks’ proposals will be unnecessary (and are possibly self-serving).

This is sufficiently over my head that I default to believing the smart people I like personally. And if Glenn and Isenberg disagree, I will simply refuse to believe anything ever again.

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Two Reviews of Small Pieces

The LA Times gave SPLJ an excellent review yesterday. Woohoo! (Note: It takes a free registration to see it.)

Also, Richard Pachter of the Miami Herald just weighed in with a very positive review.

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The Surfin’ Pope

I hereby acknowledge I am a Jew and thus am using up some of the precious world supply of chutzpah in responding to a communication from the Pope.

The Vatican has put out a message today. The heart of the message is this:

The Internet is certainly a new “forum” understood in the ancient Roman sense of that public space where politics and business were transacted, where religious duties were fulfilled where much of the social life of the city took place, and where the best and the worst of human nature was on display. It was a crowded and bustling urban space, which both reflected the surrounding culture and created a culture of its own. This is no less true of cyberspace, which is as it were a new frontier opening up at the beginning of this new millennium. Like the new frontiers of other times, this one too is full of the interplay of danger and promise, and not without the sense of adventure which marked other great periods of change. For the Church the new world of cyberspace is a summons to the great adventure of using its potential to proclaim the Gospel message. This challenge is at the heart of what it means at the beginning of the millennium to follow the Lord’s command to “put out into the deep”: Duc in altum! (Lk 5:4).

The Pope is way ahead of many others, including Leading Businesses, in seeing the Net as a new public place — actually, a new place for a new public — rather than as a lower-cost broadcast medium. And yet the broadcast model of evangelism still holds sway: the Church is in the business of propagating a “message,” albeit put quite beautifully (“out into the deep”) That explains why the Pope sees the Internet primarily as a way of making initial contact: “How does the Church lead from the kind of contact made possible by the Internet to the deeper communication demanded by Christian proclamation?” There is not much recognition that the Net needs to become not just the knock on the door but also part of the continuing faithful relationships we humans have with one another. Nor is there any hint that the Internet threatens the hierarchical organization so evident in certain religions we could name, naturally favoring a more rabbinic approach in which seekers congregate around those who demonstrate learning and wisdom and faith.

While the Pope concludes by urging “the whole Church bravely to cross this new threshold, to put out into the deep of the Net,” he does so in the context of the Internet as something that “causes billions of images to appear on millions of computer monitors around the planet.” The implication ultimately seems to be that the Church needs to deliver the right content, metaphorically replacing pictures of Anna Kournikova with images of Jesus.

The fact that the Net allows conversations as well as the delivery of content shows up as a danger:

The Internet offers extensive knowledge, but it does not teach values…Moreover, as a forum in which practically everything is acceptable and almost nothing is lasting, the Internet favours a relativistic way of thinking and sometimes feeds the flight from personal responsibility and commitment.

Relativism need not be what we learn from our encounters with others. Respect and open-mindedness are more likely given the fact that the Internet as a technology teaches us one value more deeply than any other: the joy of being connected … which in some parlances is more accurately termed love.

The Vatican’s enthusiasm for the Internet as a tool for world peace and evangelical outreach is impressive. But this papal communication is oddly mute about the implications of connecting each of us — even, eventually, the meekest and humblest — one to another, unmediated and direct. To me — someone outside of the Catholic church and thus unreliable as a commentator — it feels like an important moment of denial in an otherwise surprisingly warm embrace.

Happy World Communication Day.

[Thanks to Peter Kaminski for pointing me to the Pope’s communication today.]

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Book-in-a-Sentence(tm)

AKMA:

My resistance to binary approaches to complex problems stems from my conviction that simplification generates more advanced cases of the very problems it’s invoked to resolve.

Wow. That one unpacks into a book-length volume, doesn’t it?

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