As both all of my readers know, I prefer to receive most of my news, not to mention culture, from Scotland. Yeah. Anyway, here's a nice little piece from Scotsman.com, bringing you "Scottish news direct from Scotland," and you get it scot free, Scottie! Anyway, it's called "A Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Unsung Heroes." A sample, you ask?
Without [Ted] Nelson the internet would not exist.Without [Tim] Berners-Lee only a few academics would use it.
Without AS Douglas et al computers would not be as massively popular as they are.
Without Jennifer Lopez the world would never have had to endure Gigli.
Guess which one's a multi-millionaire.
It's not, perhaps, as grounded in the understanding of the Net that characterized Steven Johnson's article a couple of months ago on Googleholes on Slate, but the concept here is the same. When we engage with our networks at the level of individual user, as most of us do, there are inevitable distortions that emerge from the aggregate patterns. One is that Lopez appears exponentially more important than Nelson, Berners-Lee, and Douglas put together. Another is that, according to Johnson, search results skew from "general information" to commercial sites. Guess which category is more likely to produce multimillionaires.
When I'm stalling on my first book, I'm thinking carefully about these kinds of network behaviors and what implications they hold for rhetoric. That's book 2. Wait for it.
hey, collin, you have at least three readers. . . . & probably a lot more. i'll bet i'm not the only one who wants just to read and not write. why do i like blogs? because other people write them, and i can giggle or grimace and then go away.