Blogs and Power Laws

Will blogs go the way of all media? Will a few dominate?

Well, it has already happened. So called “power laws” seem to apply to blogs where a small number blogs get lots of attention and most very little. See Clay Shirky’s (soon to be a LOTR character) Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, a short paper on the subject. He suggests that the very success of a few may change things – they may be percieved eventually as mainstream and cease to be considered blogs.

CBC radio today also had a thing on DNTO (Definitely Not The Opera – one of Peigi’s favorite shows so I hear it too) on blogs. They pointed out how marketers are creating blogs to promote products. The death of blogs! (Mind you, calling the death is getting to me – is anything left alive?)
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Open Source Knowledge

Could knowledge be open?

Wired has a good story in the Nov. 2003 issue about Wired 11.11: Open Source Everywhere. It charts some of the open projects other than source code projects like the Wikipedia and Stallman’s Project Gutenberg. These are mostly open publishing projects, but what would it mean to open the development of knowledge the way code developers do? Could we turn a project like TAPoR inside out so that all could see the workings of the project and participate?
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Anger and Polarization

Are Americans getting angry and is that anger driving a polarization of the electorate?

The Angry American by Paul Starobin suggests that we are getting angry (conservative anger towards Clinton, anger towards Bush) but that this is good and shows we aren’t cynical. A cute point, but he doesn’t deal with the problems of anger politics – the willingness to contemplate any means to achieve an unexamined end. The partisan politics and willingness to spend too much on politics.

Whitaker’s Autopoiesis

How can Maturana’s theory of “autopoiesis” be applied to understanding computing?

Randall Whitaker has an extensive site on Autropoiesis that provides a background and discusses in depth many of the concepts. See Self-Organization, Autopoiesis, and Enterprises. Whitaker is interested in how autorpoietic theory can be applied to enterprise computing – groupwork, human factors, and information systesms.
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Is Humanism Dead?

What does it mean to say Humanism is dea?

Such a statement could be historical, in the sense that the Italian Renaissance movement called Humanism is over. See Humanism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

More radically it could mean that the values of humanism are no longer shared. What would these values be?

– The return and admiration of the classics and classicism.
– A focus on human achievements and expression, especially those in a self-conscious tradition that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
– Preference for practicies of dialogue and academic organizations over practices of science and professional organizations.
– Preference for interdisciplinarity or antidisciplinarity over specialization and professionalization.

Are these values no longer shared? Have we moved on?

If we have, it would call into question the relevance of Humanities Computing as that application of computing to humanistic disciplines. Could HC be an interested extension of a dead tradition?
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Maturana and Languaging

Are there alternatives to the piping model of communication?

Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition has been suggested to me as an original work that crosses biology, cognitive science, and information theory (not to mention applications to philosophy and literary theory.) In a paper by Maturana called Biology of Language:The Epistemology of Reality he looks at “languaging” or the relationship of saying and observing.

They to understanding dialogue as more than just the piping of messages from one system to another is that we observe our own sayings (and writings) as we create them. There is a folding back of the message to the sender that recursively changes the sender and what is being sent as it is sent. In other words we listen to ourselves speak as we speak while simultaneously watching the reception in the other in order to manipulate the saying in real time.
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