Legacy Thinkers, the Bryan and Clive Show, foxes go hedgehog

Your essay today: Is the digital different?

Even if you don’t indulge, your life has been changed. At every turn you are told to get online and buy. Increasingly, shops are being seen as mere adjuncts to websites. Lots of things out there in cyberspace — this newspaper, for example — are just plain free, and most things are a lot cheaper. Web 2.0 is in your head and your pocket whether you like it or not. It will change everything.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, to start with, it is historically ignorant.

“The internet”, says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, “is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Edgerton is the world expert in tech dead ends. Fifty years ago, he points out, nuclear power was about to change the world; then there was supersonic passenger flight, then space travel. The wheel, he concedes, did change the world, as did steam power. The web is not in that league.

Good grief: not as powerful as the wheel? Hasn't perhaps changed the way we search, think, write, conceptualize, trust? Web 2.0:

...destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual. Clive James is no web-sceptic. He runs a superb website — CliveJames.com — and he regards the internet as “more of a blessing than a threat”. But he is wary of this focus on the individual.

Nothing to do with no such thing as society; or the past 25 years of Business School Dominated Politics? Then, at last, some self-understanding:

I know that this article — it always happens — will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it. I will be called a Luddite.

It is the cultists who threaten the web. They are the ones encouraging dreams of a utopia of the self. They fail to see that the web is just one more product of the biology, culture and history that make us what we are. In the real world, it is wonderful, certainly, but it is also porn, online brothels, privacy invasions, hucksterism, mindless babble and the vacant gaze that always accompanies the mindless pursuit of the new. The web is human and fallen; it is bestial as much as it is angelic. There are no new worlds. There is only this one.

Wonder if the Wellcome Trust, with its commitment to open source research is cultist? Wonder if the BBC's digitization of its entire archive is cultist? The Internet Archive? Obama's use of the Interent, before, during and after his Presidential victgory? Sneering because we can't think? The Internet at its best is about thinking so that we don't have to sneer at old ideas. Or men.


C- could do better. Try reading Isaiah Berlin on Two Concepts of Liberty. It might help your thinking. Available online, I believe.

Labour's Listing List?

But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet.

Jack Thurston goes long on that LabourList thing.

Rupert Murdoch: some editors are forgetting the bond with readers

"My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.

Murdoch on "complacency and condescension" in the newsroom.

White Spaces not Just Newspapers' empty advertising slots

The FT on "White Spaces".

...the applications would span “everything from enhanced home broadband networks, to intelligent peer-to-peer devices, and even small communications networks.”

Another FCC commissioner, Jonathan Adelstein, claimed the new spectrum would support a “third pipe” to the home, a new channel for broadband to compete with existing services from telecoms companies and cable operators.

And a third, Deborah Tate floated a number of potential uses, including this: “Communities of users may find they are able to communicate seamlessly through mesh networks rather than traditional phone lines.”

FCC on "White Spaces."

Web-obama

"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

Ironically, it was McCain who first saw the internet's potential in a presidential race, running an experimental set of targeted banner ads during his doomed 1999 primary battle against George W. Bush. But eight years later, Obama finally teased out the net's full potential as an election tool.

The campaign's commitment to online organizing took shape during the primaries, when it hired online director Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's web-heavy 2004 campaign, and lured Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com.

From Wired.

Cass Sunstein calls these information "cascades"

Politico gets into the Obama tech story too today:

...the campaign’s best hire: Facebook founder Chris Hughes, 24, and other members of his young Internet squad. They built one of the most vibrant and interactive Internet fundraising operations in history. The computer wizards also came up with the idea of buying Internet ad space on billboards embedded inside online games. Talk about real world meeting the virtual one.

Forget the Jon Stewart show...this is Obama

Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday's election.

"I think what was recovered in this campaign is the sense of what leadership is, and what the role of the technology is, so that you get the best out of both," says Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at Harvard who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training system used by the Obama campaign. "The Dean campaign understood how to use the internet for the fund-raising, but not for the organizing."

From Wired.

Does the Google Generation Think Differently?

"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email."

Gary Small on technology and the brain.


Mr. Small is the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA.

"We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution."

5000 Days old, Kevin Kelly on the next 5000 days

Worth a viewing.