The GameNeverending alpha-test ends tonight. If you’re a player, you may want to try to get onto the server, sign the yearbook, quaff some absinthe, and look forward to The Big Game. . . .
Margaret points my attention to the CNN story on a site that aims to nominate a saint to be patron of the internet.
Several quick reactions.
First, I thought this was already well underway and that the smart money favored encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, among whose distinctions was his encouraging Christian religious to study Hebrew (I like Isidore because he served as the eponymous patron of the main charcter in Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist, but that’s just me).
Second, I grow weary of religious news comprising only this sort of two-headed frog story: “aren’t those religious people funny?” You’ll never see a CNN story on a breakthrough book on Trinitarian theology, or midrash, or the Temple of the Tooth. Plenty of “Face of Jesus Seen on Big Mac,” but precious little serious, thoughtful analysis or reflection. Sure, the weirdo stories are more entertaining—I understand the bread and circuses factor at work here—but it’s exasperating nonetheless. Wouldn’t it be helpful to see some serious reflection, for instance, on how very remote George’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq departs from anything resembling a “just war” as the Christian theological tradition has defined it? How about “How George’s maniacal determination to visit war on Iraq looks to the Dalai Lama” (himself a media celebrity), or from a Confucian perspective, or any of a thousand other worthwhile features?
Third, I’ve been multi-tasking so much that I don't remember what else I was going to say.
Fourth, someone asked for more Hi-Ho links. I went further up the directory chain and came up with these: one, two, three, four, five, six more.
Wonderful Seb Paquet posted a formal paper on “Personal Knowledge Publishing” a while back, and I wanted to get back to it today. That’s the way it goes, being behind in life; I’ll actually write about authority one of these days, too, though by then the Tutor may have forgotten he asked me to.
The first half of Seb’s essay considers weblogs. The first sections of this half concern the definitions of weblogs and the history of weblogging, and I’ll pass over those, in part because I don’t think I know enough to add to Seb’s review, in part because anyone who ever comments on the history of weblogging seems to invoke the wrath of somebody who feels slighted (everyone invented weblogging, all at once and seriatim, everywhere, sooner or later) (but not me—I haven’t invented it yet, though I hope to someday).
My temerity engages with the third question, where Seb discusses “how weblogs foster quality.” Seb makes a virtue of what we sometimes identify as a drawback of blogs: where we sometimes decry the ways that blogrolls and links lend themselves to popularity contests, Seb notes that these mechanisms serve as a continuous, dynamic mode of peer-review. Seb’ quite right there, although I’d flag the question of who counts as a peer, and what the criterion for review might be. If this is a peer-review system, it’s a distinctly populist system, with all the strengths (open, unruly, anti-elitist) and weaknessses (low-common-denominator, unexamined criteria, nouvelle-elite) of that approach. The populist peer review disarms various institutional A-lists, bringing highly-cerdentialled people like Seb into conversation with people who don’t know what they’re talking about (like me)—but it tends, as Anne reminds us, to institute a new A-lists.
We may atake a half-full/half-empty view of this, but neither view should occlude the other. We can’t afford to see only the ways in which hypermedia provide yet another way to reproduce venal schoolyard power law distribution of poularity and status, lest we neglect the ways that hyperusers circumvent, defuse those patterns. Likewise, we can’t afford to romanticize the infinite frontier of hypermedia, or power will squash us flat.
Seb doesn’t go either direction, as I read him, but points out that the hyperlink constitutes a way that blogs make metadata about the value of linked-to sites.
In section four of his essay, Seb identifies four “uses of weblogs”: selection of material, personal knowledge management, conversation, social networking, and information routing. I see all of these in blogs, and yet I tend to respond uneasily to the possibility that a careless reader may take these as definitions or laws about what what one may use blogs for (and the notion of “using” blogs seems slightly off kilter to me, too). So long as we acknowledge that these are categories that come readily to mind, not distinct canonical divisions of applications, then I’m fine. I could probably think a few more, if I put some time into it.
Section five explores the textureof innovation in weblogs, of which he cites aggregation and blogging ecosystem tools as examples. This sounds fine to me. Section six wraps up with some sound suggestions for further reading.
Then Seb mnodulates into the “Personal Knowledge Publishing” half of the essay, which (I reckon) may be the beating heart of his specific interest. He distinguishes PKP from “k-logging,”—by-passing the intra-organizational emphasis of k-logging in order to focus on the ways in which PKP affords the opportunity for an individual to address the world with reflections deriving from her or his research and expertise. He cites as examples Lawrence Lessig, Ray Ozzie (who hasn’t updated his site since last November), Jill Walker, and others.
Seb’s evidently aiming at a specific, relatively narrow phenomenon: certified scholars/leading practitioners writing a blog that involves their special interests, as a sort of incremental, casual complement to more professional publications. How useful, though, is the segregation that this definition effects? Doc Searls: PKP-er or not? I’ not sure, on Seb’s definition. Doc blogs out of his personal knowledge of the information and technology industries, but it’s not at all a matter of research expertise—but then, Ray Ozzie’s blog wasn’t that different from Doc’s, and Lessig’s blog often divagates into personal matters.
The problem doesn’t arise form thinking about the specific mode that Seb’s culling; it arises, I think, from supposing that the blog itself constitutes the PKP genre. What about a “personal knowledge posting,” which then comprises a greater or smaller proportion of a blog’s postings? This might also relieve some of my qualms about the research/expertise angle. In light of Seb’s earlier point relative to popularity, vaule, and linking, the field-status of PKP seems a shade trickier than Seb would suggest.
Seb sets PKP in the context mostly of scholarly academic communication. He compares blogging to other modes of communicating research: conference papers, small-group conversation, web-publishing academic papers. In this context, Seb appreciates the greater fluidity of the blog, its capacity to serve as a filter and amplifier (ignoring less important information, and highlighting especially valuable perspectives). It cultivates richer relationships than the mere exchange of volleys at large conferences, and serves as an informal sketchbook of one’s ideas (with feedback from interlocutors, especially if the writer enables on-site comments).
Moreover, blogs attract attention to ideas and writesr that may be less well-known, indeed perhaps only just emerging into the professional discussion. Rather than waiting around for referees and panel-pickers to recognize the worthiness of the blogger or her promising idea, the blogger can disseminate ideas and receive attention without the limitations imposed by institutional organs for restricting knowledge.
All these things Seb gets right. The paper’s academic provenance provokes me, however, to wonder about the twilight areas between the PKP stars and the mere bloggers who participate in the rest of Blogaria. From my own experience, I find that I have taken part in illuminating, challenging discussions on theology and on postmodernism (my areas of specialization, perhaps even “expertise”), but that few if any of my conversation partners have themselves been theologian/postmodern theorists. Those conversations shed light on my interests in ways that more strictly academic conversations don’t, and they draw me into conversations where I’m clearly out of my depth (in which others have charitably answered me with more respect than my expertise merits).
This element of PKP blogging, I think, would complicate and strengthen Seb’argument. It would complicate Seb’s point by introducing more variables (and less academically reputable ones, as well); it would strengthen his argument by amplifying the reach of the knowledge in question, drawing “knowledge” outside its academic captivity and cross-fertilizing it in the discursive wilds with conversations from outside institutional hothouses (and Seb explicitly points to these, even as he emphasizes the discourses of knowledge that bear an academic imprimatur). One of the hyperbolically important dimensions of the hypermediatric moment, I suspect, involves the ways that hypermedia generate a both-and riptide of communication. Many will prudently stay ashore, where the powerful currents can’t touch them; many others will incautiously paddle out and suffer the consequences of unanticipated crosscurrents; and some will learn to adapt, to negotiate the ins and outs of hypermediated discourses, and they may ride an oceanic catapult to quite unanticipated destinations.
If Seb’s essay does its work, maybe his cautious readers will more readily receive and appreciate reports from those strange coasts—but that will involve suspending, disrupting, their academically-constrained imaginations to a somewhat greater extent than Seb indicates.
That’s too much said already, as Margaret points out. How does this sound to you?
Tonight Trevor and Susan joined Margaret, Pip, Si, Jennifer and me for a night out at Lucky Platter to celebrate the Disseminary funding. (not on the Wabash Center’s tab, I assure everyone.)
We had a delightful time, gabbing and trading history, and arguing theological points, until the server sized up the group and handed the check to me, the guy with gray hair, so now I feel as though I must look like father to all of them.
Then we headed back to Trevor’s office where he showed off his stationery collection, and I retrieved my file of old stationery, comic strips that appeared while I was teaching college ten years ago (remember when Mark Slackmeyer realized he was gay, in Doonesbury?), and little family publications that the boys put out as part of their home schooling. I woin’t utterly alienate my children by quoting them, but we quaffed and laughed and watched Hi-Ho animations like this, this, this, and this.
Now it’s late, I’m groggy from the sips of sherry at Trevor’office, and I have to get up early tomorrow to go to class. Nothing more profound tonight than the joy of good friendships.
Did anyone else notice the “0 comments” down where we sing out our plea for suggestions on who might be able to give us some legal help for the Disseminary? I did.
I’ve gotten myself into a couple of arguments, simmering along in the comments pages of Jonathon’s and my blogs. Over at Jonathon’s, I’m working out some of what I’d have said here about copyright. Jonathon helpfully cited the Economist’s use of Macauley’s argument against perpetual copyright. Jonathon compares a writer’s poem and a craftsman’s table, and regrets that he can’t keep a poem as long as he could keep a table.
My response to Jonathon points to the difference between “keeping” a poem and “keeping” a table. Jonathon can obviously keep his poem in perpetuity, so long as he doesn’t want other people to know about it. Once he enters the poem into public circulation—once he offers to share it with the public—he can’t dictate terms for that sharing in perpetuity. The question at stake is, how long can he exercise control?
Shelley speaks up for lifetime control—not out of economic reasons, but out of respect for the author’s expression of innermost thoughts. She just doesn’t want a derivative dork making hash of her prose.
I’m stubbornly unpersuaded, as author of tediously plain essays and books that do not at all express my innermost thoughts, as obsessively careful writer whose sermons express as precisely as possible what he thinks about the topic, as copyrightholder whose standard of living responds very pronouncedly to any chnages in my royalty checks (though not by any means so pronouncedly as, say, the author of several O’Reilly instructional books on foundational technical matters). Once I decide to turn loose my expression on the world, other folks will do plenty of things with my texts few of which will be governed by concern for my innermost thoughts. If my thoughts need that degree of protection, I can jolly well not release them to the public (as, for instance, I never told Tom what I really think of. . . oh, now look what you made me do!).
So in controversy number one, I remain obdurate. This has some to do with my postmodern streak, some to do with my theological streak (remember that thread about recycling sermons from long ago?), some to do with my concern for sharing in general, and probably the rest derives from my being a stubborn cuss.
In controversy two, I haven’t gotten far enough in to be stubborn yet, but the conversation has delightfully joined Anne’s circle of discourse with the Blogarians who visit here. Does the persistence of regrettable power relationships online belie the hopeful tenor of some pro-Web discourses?
First, we should be clear that we’re not interested in starry-eyed, un-nuanced acclamations of online life, or bitter denunciations of flamers, h4x0rs, and anatomical photographs (sorry, I’ not going to attract hits by describing what parts of the anatomy were being illustrated). What we’re pursuing is the question of whether A-list behavior falsifies the claims that online interaction might hold out positive possibilities that, on balance, outweigh the idiocy, or (alternatively) that no matter how lovely the possibilities, bad behavior drives out good.
On that point, I mostly defer to our ailing champion, David Weinberger. Since he’ sick abed, though, I’ll speak up on his behalf to say that I suspect we can devise and sustain persistent salutary connections online in new ways that would have been significantly less workable and durable under the limitations of physical interaction. As Trevor points out, the conversation itself suggests that thoughtful interaction can encounter resonances and echoes that amplify and enhance the conversation as we link to one another across the [fragile online] barrier of unfamiliarity. And you know that can’ be bad (yeah, yeah, yeah).
I spent much of last evening and this morning working through Jacques Derrida’s exquisite Monolingualism of the Other and a draft of a colleague’s article drawing on that essay. It was deamnding reading, but quite powerful and illuminating, as I usually find JD (sorry, Frank).
This morning’s email delivery brought a note from Eric pointing to a white paper he and Andre “e Want More Baby Pictures” Durand produced on PingID’s approach to federated identity management. To those who decry Derrida’s dense prose, I submit that Eric and Andre are no pikers, themselves. I’ll work through this, Eric, but in small pieces, so as not to give myself too severe a headache.
Speaking of baby pictures, Gary’s photo of Cameron in a Tigger suit transcends the “cute baby” genre—and Fiona’s graceful shoulder complements Cameron’s lovely eyes.
If it be granted that holding a positive outlook toward the Web’s unfulfilled promises differs from a “utopian” assessment of the Web, I think David Weinberger has plenty of ground on which to resist Anne Galloway’s imputation that the Web is just another state of nature, red in tooth and claw, where virtual lives tend to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (he said, mixing his Hobbes and Tennyson).
At the same time, I’m curious to see if the author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined has a specific response to Galloway’s perspective on the dystopian side of the internet coin.
Well, not really “duelling,” but alternative anyway. Dorothea concocted a beautiful version of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; then Steven Garrity figured he could do it, too.
I prefer Dorothea’s convenient table of contents on the left, and her shorter line length; I prefer Steven’s choice of colors and larger type (I publicly concede that I’m in line to make the transition to bifocals, but I’m not there yet).
It’s just terrific, though, that we live in a world where (with the author’ permission, or offline) we can choose the appearance of the book we’ reading. Too cool!
I’ve been asking around behind the scenes, and people have had some helpful ideas, but so far nothing’ really come around on the legal front—so I’m throwing open the floor for suggestions, nominations, or even volunteers relative to the Disseminary and our copyright/license.
Here are the variables:
If someone knows a legal professional who can help us set this up, please let Trevor or me know. We’e itching to get started, but we’d like to be able to say we have the legal loose ends tied down nicely.
This has been a productive week for online type designers in the shareware-freeware community. Manfred Klein released several designs, of which European Typewriter (his alternative to American Typewriter) and the mixed type-and-picture-font Preventive War Question seem the most useful (Karla’s Strokemen stands to help those looking for illustrations drawn by a child). Nick Curtis offers two more stylish designs, the heavy Drumag Studio and the light, curly March Madness. Dave Nalle at Scriptorium released Linthicum, an antique design with diamonds cut out of the upper-case characters. Then Diane DiPiazza released four new faces, but three (Rudeboy, Get Thee Gone, and Yuppie Fraud) are of a sort I don’t use much: letters cut out of or superimposed on shapes. The remaining typeface, Promises, is an oblique face with rounded corners and a white drop shadow. Of all these, I’m probably most likely to use European Typewriter, DruMag Studio, or March Madness, but it’ a treat to have so many typefaces to choose from.
Last evening was getting stressful for me (as it apparently was for Le Prêtre Noir, as well). Fr. Bojangles doesn’t write out his sermons; he evidently retains a gift for spontaneity from his years in radio. I, on the other hand, was mostly a reader whenever I was on radio, and I write everything out, and I edit between services, every time. If I didn’t, I’d digress, lose track of where I was headed, choose words carelessly, say things I didn’t mean—a whole litany of homiletical shortcomings that drive me batty when I hear other preachers doing them. So I have to write sermons out.
The annoying part of composing sermons rather than improvising them comes when the Holy Spirit declines to make its power felt on the first draft, or even the second draft some days, and occasionally not even on the third. Fr. Bojangles knows he will never be hung out to dry; I’m not quite that certain, and have been known to wake up at four AM, throw out the completed sermon I finished last night, and compose an entirely different sermon before the eight o’clock service.
I can’t quite say I envy Fr. Bojangles his comfort level with extemporaneous preaching; I’d have to be different in numerous ways for that practice to fit me at all. I do envy the greater simplicity of his being able to go to bed without sweating out which would be just the right synonym for “oily.”
The sermon went fine this morning, though I had much less time for composition than I’d have liked. The Anti-Racism Training left me groggy and blocked, and careful composition was the last thing I wanted to do last night. Having no evident choice, I ground out about a sermon’s worth, saw why it wouldn’t do, went back and scratched a few paragraphs, listened to Margaret’s helpful advice about leaving out the comparison of Paul to postmodern queer theorists (I was preaching on circumcision), saw how the thing might hang together if I adjusted a few spots, and only then did the words begin to fall together into place. It definitely would’ve been nicer to get that head of steam a little sooner in the process, though.
Between Margaret’s and my two-day vacation (ten blocks from home) and my current two-and-a-half-day Anti-Racism Training adventure I preached Thursday night, and was comfortable enough with how things went for me to leave my sermon out where people might see it. It went like this. . . .
So many things—so many things, sisters and brothers—so many things are impossible that certain days I marvel that we can get out of bed in the morning.
Can the world ever hear the good news that we who follow in the way of the cross are not out to force our faith down anybody’s throat? Can the church ever learn to overcome facile dichotomies between traditional orthodoxy and liberating liberalism? Can peoples who have known in their flesh and in their hearts the chastening rod and the stony road of insult and oppression attain a spiritual freedom that heals wounds that are centuries old and new every day? Can that extraordinarily peculiar race of dominant peoples, those who have learned to think of themselves as normal, as white, as straight, as participants in a social hierarchy defined by male dominance and the economic upper classes: can straight white guys ever understand, understand, I mean not just feel-your-pain say they understand, but can we even begin to understand, see the light, recognize where the problems lie, who we are, who anybody else is, how to move ahead in a world that isn’t ours to own, to fix, to decide when we’ve done enough and on whose behalf? Can we get there?
A straight white guy—okay, to be more precise, kinda warped, not exactly straight—that kind of white guy dares not presume to tell anybody else whether we can get to the end of our struggles. That only aggravates the problem.
And yet I dare not keep silent, because even in the worst of days, when white batters black into slavery, when man shackles woman into her place, when a particular love dares not speak its name, even at the most wrong-headed pinnacle of every phobia and -ism we can name, it does no one good for some folks, even for the oppressors, to be utterly silenced: that only re-inscribes us in a cycle of suffering and self-justification, only gives some sorry dude an excuse for why he didn’t get the call, why he’s the real victim, only invites us to perpetuate for another aching generation the wretched divisions that derive not from God’s creation of a harmonious plenitude of diverse human creatures, but from our sinful parody of God’s creation by which we institute separations of race, gender, caste, sexuality, even orders of ministry.
And since you called me here to speak—and not just to be silent, as I might more safely have done—I will try to bring here a message that I think I’ve heard from the saints, from Augustine and Athanasius, from Catherine and Julian, from Sojourner Truth and William Stringfellow.
That message runs like this: Those reconciliations, those recognitions are not possible on our own strength. No white guy’s gonna fix it, nobody ever’s gonna be the final person who gets to adjudicate when some “we” has overcome sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism, and so on and so on and so on. Those weaknesses lie not within our strength to heal. Any time you hear, “I know the guy who has the answer—he’s out in the wild side of the city,” or if they say, “I read her books, she’s in the library,” y’all better not listen. That’s the impossible part.
The other part of that message runs this way: The only path toward reconciliation leads by the way of love, true love, one-step-beyond love, love not like the love with which I love Margaret, or even Monique*, but the love that reaches to somebody I’ve never met, someone who thinks I’m a danger to the church, a threat to humanity, someone who thinks it’s worth bombing me into surrender or clubbing me to a bloody pulp, the way of love that teaches me that I can’t see my own faults clearly enough to confess them truly, that I need your help, and God’s grace, to learn how I go wrong. And God offers that grace freely, and we as a community knit together by a shared faith that’s bigger and deeper than anyone’s individual doubts or affirmations, as a community across bounds of time and geography and race and gender and class. As we shared faith we share that grace—or as a coincident assembly of suspicious strangers we share nothing, nothing worth partaking in the first place.
I live by your faith. We learn and love by God’s grace. Together: because when we make room for God, lightning flashes from the east to the west, from the south to the north, from the Castro to Lynchburg Virginia, from the Ladies Room to the Gents’. Then the truly Human One can be seen, laughing with us, loving us, weeping, giving up human life so that we can become divine.
And that’s not just “possible”—that’s true.
[*Monique Ellison is a Seabury alumna, class of 2002, who was saying mass for the evening; I was just preaching. Monique was a treat to work with while she was here, and she delights us by coming back to visit from time to time.]
The Happy Tutor challenges me to write about authority after my adventures in the lands of forgiveness, identity, authenticity, postmodernism, and so on. It’s a deal—but not for a few days, as I’m in the middle of a multi-day Anti-Racism Training program, and have to preach tomorrow. But the topic fascinates me, and is one that Margaret intends to tackle in her own scholarly work one of these days. I’ll come back to this.
In consecutive entries from Eric Norlin:
At 7:18 in the morning, he volunteers, “i'm feeling frisky -- so what the hell -- I'm claiming Sainthood.”
At 7:32, a scant fourteen minutes later, he disarmingly observes, “i don't really get many moral qualms.”
Eric’s persistent response to those of us who ask why regular people need digital identity as much as Big Corporations do, has been “identity theft.” He’s absolutely right that this is a frightening topic about which we’ll hear more and more. One question we need to answer, though, is how digital identity enterprises solve that problem? Some DigID solutions risk aggravating the problem, since once a malefactor obtains my DigID they presumably now have access to my credit, my bank accounts, and so on. Now, each schema will differ, and of course any with which Eric and Bryan are associated will already have covered that problem, but Eric (should I call you “St. Eric”? “St. Eric Sans Qualms”?) needs to keep that aspect in the conversation—not just invoking identity theft as the bogeyman (are there bogeywomen? do they get upset about being left out?) that scares us into adopting DigID.
I’m pretty worked up about the Disseminary, but just look at Trevor! Here’s an ordinarily placid guy who’s all shook up about this chance to work together toward what he rightly recognizes as a really cool project.
I know that at least one or two web-design types sometimes meander through this blog, and I’d warmly appreciate a few seconds of advice from them. Trevor and I have to plan this site from the ground up, and it would help a lot if someone with experience and insight gave us a few tips on how to plan a site for the long run—structure, design, the macro-design sort of thing. We need to be ready if the site takes off, without presuming too much at the start. The last thing we need is to re-work everything from the ground up because we didn’t make our plan soundly at the start.
What should we keep in mind?
Après Edit
Shelley emailed me some helpful questions:
Q: “Are you talking appearance or server-side design issues?”
A: Not appearance, just now, but definitely server-side, structural issues. We’ll need help with appearance issues, but just now I’m especially concerned about the server end of the site design. Plus, we’re very likely to take advice about the server side, and more likely to be stubborn about our own taste in appearance issues. We should get off on the correct foot by showing ourselves cooperative; maybe it’ll become a habit.
Q: “What you might want to consider doing is setting up a separate area and start documenting what you hope to ultimately do with the site. This, then, will allow your friends to attach comments/trackbacks and give all sorts of advice about site structure and technology as well as design.”
A: Hey, that’not a question! But it’s a terrific idea. We should work on that one.
Q: “And what do you hope to do with the site?”
A: Well, we tried to answer that at the sketch of our plans, but we also don’t want to lock ourselves into a very closed design.
Q: “Do you see an interactive element to it?”
A: Well, partly—in the sense that we expect a Moveable Type installation, with multiple authors, comments and so on. We don’t anticipate having large numbers of authors dropping in and out sporadically.
Q: “Want multimedia?”
A: Sure! You got some?
Q: “In addition, what kind of security settings will you need? Will you need to have sub-sites that are password protected? Will you have multiple authors?”
A: Right now, I hope not anything more sophisticated than the usual password protection. But you surely know more about this than I do.
Thanks, Shel!
Today’s my blogiversary, and I almost passed it by. Indeed, I would have missed it altogether, had not Mark Pilgrim’s citation of e. e. cummings’poem “anni(verse)ary” rung a bell: “Wasn’t my blogiversary coming up sometime?”
I’ve seen so many January bloggers, so many people who started within the past year-and-three weeks; Halley, Phil Wolff (evidently, from BlogTree), Jenny Levine (!), and I know I’ve seen other bloggers from my neighborhood observing blogiversaries recently: Jonathon, Mike, and Pascale (I saw you on BlogTree, didn’t remember you when it came time to scribble down my entry) (I’ll edit this line to add your names in when you point out whom I’ve forgotten).
It’s been a very full year, lots going on that I didn’t even blog, lots of wonderful gifts that blogging has brought. I’m quite convinced that what I’ve learned in the last year made a pivotal difference in getting last summer’s Teaching and Technology Conference off the ground, and in getting the Disseminary grant approved. Thanks very much, y’all; you’great friends.
From the Wired.com story on the way that Microsoft scooped out Firefly’s vital innards (thanks, for the tip, Tom!), gobbled them up still palpating and alive, and then threw away the husk:
Microsoft said that the company would welcome any constructive suggestions from Firefly community members."When they provide us with some actionable suggestions, we will be looking into them," Miller said.
Presumably Miller didn’t mean that Microsoft actively seeks out ventures that would incur the risk of liability suits; but perhaps they’re so confident, they don’t care whether their programs are actionable.
Today we bade farewell to the Best Western, had a smoothie for brunch, ordered a copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom at a neighborhood independent bookseller, and rejoined our family. Jennifer is here, back from her studies at Union Theological Seminary (“your degrees now, before we go out of business”), and she and Pippa had been enjoying some serious duels over cards and matching-tiles.
I went straight in to work and had two meetings right away, in my half-day at the office. Got a little done, including installing the OpenOffice package—a very cool arrangement that works just as it should except that (I should’ve connected the last dot, but I didn’t) its OroboroSX X-Window environment doesn’t access the typefaces that are available to the Aqua environment. And since I’m such a fussy type about what my documents look like, that’s a deal-breaker for me.
That being said, I was knocked out by how easily the installation went, how smoothly everything functioned, and how I disliked the way the open-source implementations deal with menus. It took me ages to find the commands I wanted, and in some cases I just never found them. I’ll play with it a while longer, but until they release a full-Aqua version I’m back to conventional OS X applications.
It’s amazing what even a small break can do.
Margaret and I try to have a mini-vacation once a term (try and too often fail). We go to an inexpensive hotel right in downtown Evanston (in fact, our room overlooks the church where Josiah will have his drama class this afternoon), close enough that if any need should arise, we can be home in the blink of an eye. But we make arrangements for the kids to be overseen, and then slink away and spend forty hours or so all by ourselves. I can’t recommend this strongly enough, probably even for those who are unmarried, without children; at least for us, the change signalled by our lack of immediate obligations and availability makes a world of difference.
It is frustrating that Martin Luther King day comes precisely at this point in the year, because this makes the second year in a row that we’ve scheduled our mini-vacation for the earliest available two-day gap in our calendar, only to discover after we’d made our reservations that Seabury was planning a special observance of Dr. King. I feel stricken to miss a seminary function, and especially one for a figure as important (and atypical of the usual round of pallid English ecclesiastics whom I do love and to whom we customarily dedicate our special seminary functions). The announcement of the special MLK service was made after the reservations, though, and we’ve been waiting a terribly long while to get away, so we went ahead.
So yesterday afternoon I fired up AOL, and hopped online to check our email and glance at the comments on my blog (thanks very much—Trevor and I are still walking on at least a thin cushion of air). Logged off again quickly, because this hotel charges for local calls longer than thirty minutes.
Then we went out, had a lovely vegetarian dinner, picked up some snacks and a DVD because we didn't like television (or available cinema, though we’re planning to drive out to see Adaptation this afternoon), watched the movie, and were getting ready to retire, when I heard the familiar “beep-beep-beep-beep-beep” of Ellen Feiss (not, as Margaret keeps insisting wittily, Heidi Fleiss) alerting me that I had email.
But I had logged off AOL hours ago.
A cold chill ran down my spine, as I began calculating how many minutes had elapsed since I thought I had logged off. I unplugged the modem cord. I examined my running applications to see which might have said, “Okay, we know he’s offline now, but if the modem would just kick in and connect us to the ’net, we can get some work done.”
Then I noticed that my wifi card had picked up a signal; somewhere in the hotel, someone was using an unprotected wireless hub, and when AirPort noticed it, it dutifully logged on and checked my email. It was a weak signal, and I’ve lost it now (back to the thirty minute log-in interval, which is just as well, considering the point of this minivacation), but for a sweet few minutes I was piggy-backing onto the net courtesy of a generous stranger.
Now, back to breakfast and vacationing. . . .
I was feeling a little distant from bloggery, thinking about a variety of topics that have been nagging at me. Maybe I’d blog about them, maybe not. Who reallly cares?
But I just got a note indicating that the Disseminary has received its initial funding, that we’ll be able to start up this experiment in technology, pedagogy, theology, and open-source knowledge, which kinda turns my day around. Whoopee!
This means that some among my patient and generous readers will be called on for help. We’ll need to consult a lawyer relative to our specific use of Creative Commons licenses; we’ll need to consult someone who’s an expert on eBooks and mark-up; we’ll need help migrating our web sites (with archives and redirects?) to a different server; eventually, we’ll hope that Highly Placed Bloggers will help us get some media coverage (but not now, since we don’t have anything to show anyone); and as always, we’ll benefit from helpful advice from all over Blogaria. You know who you are. But now, we’ll just crack a bottle of Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider or Sutter Home Fre or just good old ginger ale to share with all our friends and supporters out there, and dream exciting dreams of changing the course of online education.
I don’t feel like thinking deep thoughts today. I spent much of the day just clicking around Blogaria, and now I’m weary, and the church’s Annual Meeting is tomorrow (sigh), and I think there’s more to be said about authorship and copyright than is coming out from my highly-esteemed authorial colleagues Shelley and Jonathon, but I doubt I can say it carefully, so I won’t say anything at all rather than risk swallowing my ankle. Got that?
Tens of thousands of people were willing to freeze their extremities to try to send a message to George W. today—is there a chance he has a clue how hideous a path he’ taking?
Manfred Klein has some new typefaces up: versions of Wallbaum (Baumwell), Rockwell (Wellrock, one named BodoniTown that doesn’t remind me of Bodoni in the least. Bastardus Sans seems strong, though the illustration suggests that the upper-case B may be too light. I probably won’t have a use for the ornamental and pictorial selections this week. Those are the only new freeware designs I’ seen this week.
Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.
Doc links to a column by Arnold Kling, in which Kling makes the provocative claim that “Content is Crap.” Kling’s point is that Big Media publishing is necessary to filter the bottomless oceans of dreck and distribute the refined, pure water of worthy cultural productions to consumers. (I think his use of a water-treatment system metaphor is not accidental, here, and Doc would promptly rebuke Kling for identifying us consumers.)
Kling writes for an official tech publication, so his writing is, by definition, not crap (it’s already been filtered). Still, he gets a number of things wrong. First, I think, water treament plants usually don't reroute sewage to homes as drinking water; don’t they generally redistribute treated water (not “filtered”) to the ecosystem (back into lakes, rivers, and so on) where any residual impurity may be diluted and filtered before entering the drinking-water system?
Second, the Creative Commons is not (as Kling supposes) primarily about opportunities to self-publish; vanity presses have been with us always, and will continue to abound. The Creative Commons is about resisting the notion that our cultural work ought not be available. The Big Media model of copyright involves constructing and preserving an artificial scarcity of access to cultural work. Lessig and the Commons allow that some sort of artificial scarcity benefits all, since it establishes an interval in which those willing to pay for access to the work must reward the composer/writer/whatever for that access; the Commons stands against prolonging that artificial scarcity for a variety of reasons, but at least partly because whenever a social system rests on artifically-sustained premises, that system suffers from intrinsic weaknesses. that then require additional artifices to reinforce. All that artificial scarcity and security isn’t a market force—it’s a restriction on market forces and is designed to produce a particular outcome, in this case an outcome beneficial to Big Media.
In response, the Commons says that the market and the people are best served by minimizing the artificial overhead of shoring up scarcity, and permitting genuine market forces (what people will pay for “filtered” and packaged works, what the true costs of reproducing versions of the work might be) handle the rest. I’m looking out for my chance to go to a neighborhood bookseller and to buy a hard copy of a book I just read; I want the packaging and the benefits that go with it. That’s the Commons at work.
Third, Kling supposes that the Commons thinks of everything to which one might apply a license as “gold.” It would be easy enough for him to check that claim, without bandying about opprobrious characterizations of “naïve ideology” (indeed, that’s one of the things we hope for in a filtered medium such as the column of a professional journalist). Kling, however, flatly asserts what he could easily have found to be wrong. The Commons doesn’t presuppose anything about the quality of what is licensed; the Commons represents a commitment to making publicly available as much gold and as much dross as it can, and allowing readers, listeners, and even columnists to make use of it as they will. Of course, not all people are willing or capable of making fine distinctions—but that’s not the Commons’s problem, that’s a problem for editors.
[As a non-believer in “the market” and “market forces,” I have a hard time making this argument in public—but Kling’s cavalier representation of the Commons so irks me that I’m willing to sound like a genuine capitalist for a few moments. Now we return to our scheduled hippy-communal programming.]
I was feeling Mark Pilgrim’s pain; for some reason, one of my hot buttons is wasted effort, especially effort wasted in what can fairly be perceived as a righteously selfless effort—for instance, whipping a web site (and a motley train of followers) into standards-compliance. Mark and Dorothea are certainly the ones who convinced me of the importance of attending to standards, even when I don’t manage to sustain rigorous compliance. They make a compelling case, and I consider compliance a goal for which I’m answerable.
And although I don’t fully understand the semantic web—I tend to see the fluidity in semantics as more interesting than predictability, so a strictly rule-governed mark-up practice seems unduly rigorous to me—yet my respect for Mark is such that I’m willing to spend time trying to figure out what’s going on, and to order my mark-up appropriately. So when I read that Mark was packing it in, I was hurt on his behalf, and frustrated as someone who wants to understand as much as he can about the mark-up he’s committing.
Shelley has a chill-out message for Mark, Dorothea has sensible thinigs to say about standards and change in response to the discussion thread over at Liz’s place, and Zeldman makes what seems to me the soundest case of all: separate the strict mark-up of the deliberately backward-incompatible XHTML 2 from the different mark-up path that XHTML 1 takes. I envision some problems with supporting parallel standards; still, Zeldman clarifies the divergent vectors at which the two generations of XHTML aim so that they do indeed seem to represent separate endeavors. When we try to force new, incongruous guidelines and goals onto an enterprise that has devoted considerable intellectual and emotional energy into the previous guidelines and goals, we lose goodwill from the people who are most willing to help us. They may come back, but we’ve squandered a tremendous source of energy and enthusiasm.
Kinda like, in a different way, what Larry Lessig feels like tonight. Actually, it now appears that he cut out some of the more introspective questioning that the entry originally expressed [Lessig, in a confusing move, has now preserved the text of the once-excised blog. In case he changes his mind yet again, the words that once touched my imagination are posted at the end of this blog.]; where once he questioned his vocation as a professor of constitutional law, he now restricts his blog’s comments to his bewilderment about the five justices who voted against their otherwise-expressed principles, without explaining what differentiated this case from the cases in which they’ve upheld restrictions on Congress’s prerogative to infringe on states’ rights.
Both Mark and Larry feel the wounds of authorities who changed the rules capriciously, and in so doing the authorities betrayed the trust of articulate, active advocates for the rules they represent.
Lessig:
Harvard Professor Roberto Unger ends one of his first books by describing us, the professors, as “priests who have lost their faith but kept their jobs.” I remember loathing those “priests” as a student. They have the right to lose their faith, I thought; they have no right to keep their job.Next week, Tuesday, I am to teach the first class of the semester in constitutional law. Who as I am not yet sure.
I must have been the last guy on the block to find out that the Supreme Court missed the boat on Eldred v. Ashcroft. No, pardon me; Trevor didn’t know when I passed him in the hall this afternoon. I only found out when Mary Hess emailed me.
My first reaction—as so many others’—is for Larry Lessig to lighten up on himself. No doubt I’d feel the same way, especially if a prominent attorney was quoted as ascribing the loss to me. Still, Lessig has not only made a brilliant case for a notion that seemed counterintuitive to seven Supreme Court justices (this untrained eye sensed that the majority were sticking to their relatively unnuanced reading of the relevant clauses, but with an uneasiness that suggested the suspicion that they missed something important). He made the cause of copyright limitations, yes “copyright limitations</