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January 10, 2005
Ooooh, Teacher
Today David Weinberger blogs about the Web as a medium (which makes sense to me) and about the Web as a world. We’ve talked about this kind of topic before, so I’m nostalgically excited; maybe we’ll get into a jolly online donnybrook about it with acerbic interjections from other quarters.
The difficulty with that prospect lies in the fact that I agree with him, that it does make sense to talk about the Web as world — though as he and I both know, I maintain firmly that it’s a non-spatial world, hence unlike anything we humans have explored before. In that sense, it’s not a “world,” because spatiality constitutes an essential characteristic of every other world we’ve encountered. The hyperlinked “world” of the Web is thus radically different as well as also “world”-like; the Web may thereby teach us more about what inhabiting a world means, in ways that we hadn’t hitherto imagined.
That’s what excites me most of all: we don’t already know what we’re doing, we don’t already know how our adventures online will turn out. That’s a setting in which we can do some serious learning!
Posted by AKMA at January 10, 2005 08:00 PM | Threadorati
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Comments
That's exactly why I make my living in the Web: We don't know what we're doing--and anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken. We're in a new age of discovery! How fortunate we are.
Posted by: Dave Rogers (C&E) at January 11, 2005 05:38 PM
