I was reading a post on Joi's blog about blogs and googlewashing and whatnot, and had a thought...
The funny thing about blogs is their lack of historicity in the minds of so many people. Blogs are just the confluence of a bunch of odds and ends with about as much great earth shattering newness as, say, DOS or the html/www was. Sure, they turned the world on its collective head, not because it was doing something special, but because it wasn't. DOS was lobotomized Unix. Html lobotomized SGML. Blogs just plain lobotomized *.
As with all killer apps like this, the deal is that they don't stretch anyone's paradigms, or challenge anyone's cosmologies, so they can become ubiquitous... be adopted by the treadmill of the pundits who make up the rolling wave of the A-lists, and in the end, not cause much change to the way things are at all.
It doesn't mean that they're not useful, valuable or fun. Just that they're not much more than that.
I am always suspicious of anyone who gets the notion into their head that they've come up with a solution to a problem. Not that I don't want to hang out with them, or be their friend, but unless you realize that solutions create problems, not solve them, I gotta wonder what you're smoking.
Posted by jason at April 5, 2003 06:33 PMThe question, then, is who do you think was trying to solve what problem?
Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky at April 5, 2003 06:47 PMYa. That IS the question. I blame Steve. But it isn't his fault. I can't be more specific on a Saturday night.
Posted by: jason at April 5, 2003 07:39 PMI find it rather disappointing that you play down the character of blogs. Were you thinking on a scale of generality that no technology could possibly meet, or were you assming that a couple of years is enough time to evaluate it. I do not think that Blogs have hit the high point in their diffusion curve yet, so it might be a little early to say they are just useful.
futhermore, the idea that every solution simply creates more problems is nothing but a jedi mind trick of the pedagogue to get young minds thinking outside the box of tech determinism. Some solutions are just that, plain and simple, and others open up new areas of complexity to be filled.
Which one is a blog? Beats me, I don't post anything.
Posted by: thoughtfreely at April 7, 2003 04:45 AMHey hey. Young Skywalker.
I don't mean to put them down, so much as put them in their proper place. You know how pro-blogs I am, even from just hearing me rant about them.
Blogs are amazing. I've spent lots of time with them. They are the next big thing. They have changed publishing and communication. They have resurrected text and writing more than any tool in the past 30 years.
But that doesn't mean they haven't got another side. Blogs are a 'killer app' because they're so reductionist. They take the infinite possibilities of a web page and reduce it to a journal. They take the atemporality of a web page and reduce it to a chronology. They impose a single paradigm of communcation on an otherwise infinite space.
That's a problem, as much as it is a killer app.
As for the Jedi mind trick. I love the way you put it. But I was serious. It may not cause a problem for you, but probably does for someone else. With blogs, for a quick example, they increased the opportunity for communication, as long as you limited the form that that communication takes, in terms of both kind and language. Before blogs, people were less restricted by languages used than they are now. And they were less restricted by genre. These are just temporary glitches, but nonetheless...
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DATE: 01/26/2004 03:55:43 AM
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