December 23, 2005

Help me understand, please. It looks real, and is on the Boston.com web site represented as an article from the Boston Globe

Truly astonishing if it is true .. this is what should be on the news, on CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, etc.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said yesterday that President Bush views America as a ”10-year-old child” in need of the sort of protection provided by a parent.

[snip ...]

”It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,” Card said. ”I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.”

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… exactly, that people blogging (in increasing numbers) is seen and characterized only as *a bunch of disorderly noise* by the established institutions such as newspapers, television, government and the larger corporations ?

It is more often than not money and legislation (quite often fed by money) that has bought elections and the corporate positions of power and influence, not necessarily better ideas or execution.

Top-down dissemination of information and advising us as to what we should know is not any longer the only means or model of organizing human knowledge or activities.

This is the first time in the history of humankind that the means have been available for people to publish easily and distribute what they publish widely .. and Digby makes the point nicely in this post titled Something To Believe In that the impacts of this capability include access to some very fine minds conjoined with deep interest and motivation.

And it’s only been available to us for a brief blip in time, thus far. the impacts are likely to grow.

Having said that, I disagree adamantly that the rest of the blogsphere is a bunch of screaming hysterics who engage in nothing but “agitation” or partisan catcalling. They all discuss politics — you’re not a member of the left blogsphere if you don’t — and they discuss the subject in different ways with analysis, humor, polemic, grassroots activism, criticism and historical perspective. The big blogs like Kos and Atrios have created virtual communities within the larger community for people to gather and talk about the issues of the day. And that, believe it or not, is the essence of politics.

In the Politics Aristotle said:

“That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain, and man alone among the animals has speech….[S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.”

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Much of the thinking and writing about wirearchy and the social architecture(s) that are emerging in an increasingly wired (and wireless) environment focuses on the push-backs to the established hierarchies of government and big business, who have vested interests and the legacies of legislation on their side.

By push-backs I mean the challenges to top-down models in (for example) journalism, government, and business models that don’t acknowledge or foster interaction with connected and interconnected clienteles.

There’’s another side to all this, which is made apparent in this segment from CNN’s interview with John Battelle regarding the future of the indexing-organizing-searching industry, which is the ability to enact a massive amount of centralization and control.

CNN: People are getting nervous because, what you’re looking for can be monitored. Do you think people are viewing it with a degree of suspicion?

JB: I think this is quite possibly the largest roadblock both to Google and anyone else involved in this space, which is that if it can be known, it more likely will be known. What we know now is everything that we do can be known, every footstep that we take on the Internet, using a search engine or once we’ve used a search engine and where we’ve gone — wherever we’ve gone and whatever we do there — can be recorded and it can be recorded by one central recorder. This is in the case of some of the tools now that Google and others give you, called the tool bar, which watches everywhere you go. And why they do that is that so they know everywhere you’ve been on the Internet so they can give you better search. “Oh, I see, he’s been to this site before, so perhaps I should make that site higher in the results.” That’s called personalized search.

It seems like a service to you, right? But all the information about where you’ve been doesn’t live with you, nor do you control it nor can you control who has access to it because of course the government or Google itself — or it doesn’t necessarily have to be Google, it could be Microsoft or Yahoo or anyone else — could do whatever they like with it without telling you. In fact, it’s part of their privacy policy that they will not sell this, they will not give it to third parties unless the laws of that country require them to.

Now we’ve seen the laws of various countries and the law of China is very different from the law of Britain and very different from the law of the United States. In fact, the law of the United States is a lot more like China. It turns out that after 9/11 we’ve passed a law called the Patriot Act which gives the government right to riffle through all of our stuff on line without our knowledge, which frankly as a journalist terrifies me. Not that I don’t think we should have tools to combat terrorism — I do. I just think we need a little sunlight.

We are creating these vast records of everything we do. It’s very difficult to pull those records together and make sense of them but that’s exactly what Google’s job is. That’s why they are in business. Are they doing the work of a potentially corrupt or abusive government? Yes, you can’t deny that they are. The question is will they make a stand against it at some point and/or will they make it transparent to me so I can see what they know about me and I can edit it or decide that I wish to become anonymous.

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and your personalized ways of viewing, listening and reading.

Terry Heaton has just published a remarkable year-end essay which offers us a sober and far-reaching look at what has yet to come in the way of capabilities and dynamics offered by increased connectivity speed and the massive shift from passive consumption towards interactive production.

The whole must-read essay is here:

The dark cloud on the horizon in 2006 for all of us who see the possibilities of a free internet will be actions by those with the most to lose to stifle what we currently have. This is a serious reality that we can’t overlook in the year ahead. Already, the owners of the fiber optic lines in which the World Wide Web exists want to put in controls that will enable them to restrict access in the name of profit. We simply cannot allow this to happen, but the forces who want to make it so are well-armed and powerful.

The institutions that are threatened by all this freedom will also start taking the gloves off, and legal battles and threats will surface at an increasing rate. There is simply too much at stake for this not to happen. The nature of authority — all authority — is changed by an informed public, and that is a very real threat to those who’ve made their living through the authority of restricted knowledge.

But the remarkable thing about these enormous changes in our business and our culture is the opportunities that exist for all of us. More people will lose their jobs in the industry next year, and some will be forced to learn new skills and think for themselves in a different way. It will be the best thing that ever happened for them.

There’s little about change that we can control except the way we react to it. We can fight it or accept it; it’s really that simple. Those who accept it will find a fascinating world awaits their skills and abilities. For those who continue to cling to old beliefs and old ways of doing things, it won’t be pretty.

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