Christina Rosen reviews InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds’s book, An Army of Davids, in the New Republic. After documenting the “idiocies and dangers” of Reynolds’s brand of web-triumphalism, Rosen places Reynolds and his ilk both inside and outside the long tradition of techno-utopianism:
The old futurism celebrated the expert and venerated the scientist who could master and harness technology. Reynolds will have none of this. InstaPundit resides in a world where technology can be harnessed by any semi-literate with a PC. His hero is the guy without any expertise who can see through the palaver of elites. There’s no need to accumulate expertise through years of study or experience, because the Internet has become the great repository of knowledge and experience. You have to admire his argumentative boldness. He has taken figures who have been historic punch lines – the dilettante, the hack – and turned them into civilizational saviors.
I think this post outlines some of the problems with Rosen’s thesis, especially re blogs vs media:
Whereas the way it was written (the word ‘dumb’ was hyperlinked) did in fact provide additional commentary.
It’s quite amusing to when mainstream media (with all their cycles of fact-checking) get their facts wrong and then complain about blogosphere inaccuracies.
Reynolds doesn’t really go out on a limb with his book. Pretty much everything he says has been said before on the blogosphere (which may actually promote his point ;). The premise of “An Army of Davids” still assumes a combative arena akin to Wikipedia or natural selection through wars, conflict, lock-ins or killing off competitors. A more efficient method of evolution exists in neural processing where the contributions of each node figure into the whole according to the weight of their usefulness.
Our newborn global communication is still in the process of connecting synapses and working out a reliable information reduction method. When complete, both David and Goliath will find it more effective to work on the same team.
‘global communication’,
what is that anyways? if communication also happens through our bodies, and just being there. I think, Woody Allen once said, 90% of success is just in turning up.
if 80% of communiation is local, 90% is continental and 10% is intercontinental?
Cities already act as storage devices, and are logical places to become transportation hubs for bits too. Moving the data and the people closer together.
They reckon, only 10% of the trans atlantic fibre will ever be lit up anyhow.
Some thoughts expressed by Thackara in his book, in the bubble.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
That’s a good question. What is “global communication?”
We used to think that it was the possibility of talking to anyone, anywhere at any time without communication being suppressed by a third party. As Mr. Carr is so good at pointing out, once we achieved that ideal, everything didn’t instantly turn into a bed of roses. If unlimited connectivity were the only thing necessary, our inboxes wouldn’t be full of spam, Wikipedia wouldn’t be overrun with infighting and the e-tech bubble wouldn’t have burst. There has to be something more to an effective definition of “global communication.”
Some people, like Mr. Carr, seem to think that a solution lies in a return to the old ways of government filtering, authorship by only qualified individuals, etc. I, on the other hand, know that a solution lies in our new ability to expand neural processes to include each other. Like an infant going through the natural stages of Neural Darwinism, our global network has its hardware capability in place and now we simply need to organize it to achieve what we find most useful.
Well what Brewster Kahle is doing, seems quite sensible to me. He argues, that we are failing in our task of providing young people with the best information to study online. What young people are getting online, is just a temperal body of knowledge that is wiped cleaned periodically. The internet has no memory. Kahle is using crawlers, to go out and save the information. He is doing it in a very interesting way, using lots and lots of cheap hardware. The hardware to create a digital library now is virtually free. Under half a million anyhow. You need good people on your team however. Kahle thinks in future, IT will become very cheap, but companies may employ less people to manage it, but better people. Not like the armies of MS certification grads today. In future, the public will be encourage to explore the internals of his system, and encouraged to write their own scripts to gain maximum productivity from searching the largest online database in the world.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Another opinion of what global communication could mean here. Not regarding students, but businesses, who are used to living in ‘walled gardens’.
http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/06/27/wiki_case_study_drkw.php
Brian O’ Hanlon.
With all this talk of how brilliant the web is. Something which shouldn’t go un-said here, is the limitations in-built into the ‘Web’ as a platform for storing and linking information. Obviously the web kick started a lot of innovation and business, but it is also restricted, especially from an academic point of view. I really think, this goes back to the birth of the Internet – as a carrier for bits, rather than a carrier for information. Here is a quote taken from ‘How the Web was Born’, a very good history of how it all happened.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Quote:
”
Andy van Dam goes a step further. ‘The beauty of having the separate links database is not only that you can use the database management system to manage them, but more importantly you have multiple webs over the same source material,’ he explains. With the World Wide Web you can put one-dimensional links from your home page to any pages you are interested in. But what if you want to link from one of those pages directly to another? In the Web, you have to go back to your home page and then go out again, but if you store links in a database you can create any web of links you want. ‘So you could support multiple points of view without messing up the original source material’, says van Dam, ‘and that’s a wonderful thing’.”