I want to quit-and-restart my browser (it’s getting congested, so I’m going to by-title link to three posts I read yesterday that I would use Kevin’s “link +” tag to indicate my positive interest in. First, What David Weinberger Would Have Said at E-Tech, if he hadn’t yielded his slot to make time for Joe Trippi to answer some questions. For a long time, I’ve seen one of the great benefits of online interactivity as our capacity to complicate the aggregate-thinking that rules broadcast media; it’s not that the same rules don’t apply, or that everything has changed, so much as that several significant elements have changed, such that “sameness” has changed (if I may venture that cryptic formulation, for which I already imagine a vigorous objection from at least one reader). And Mike Sanders’ comment about the magic number 150 points toward this; online interactions admit of such a variety of degrees of commitment and participation that maybe 150 isn’t the mystic threshold any more.
I also wanted to point to Frank’s post about the disintegration of Constitutional freedoms in Iowa. I’m darkly pessimistic about human government in general, so it’s hard to surprise me; still, the notion that such gestures come from a political party that likes to trumpet its patriotism, its adherence to the Constitution, its inheritance from the Founding Fathers — that just beggars my imagination.
There was a third link, but my browser hung up before I could retrieve it. I’ll try to dredge it up later.
Posted by AKMA at February 10, 2004 09:35 AM | TrackBack