::.. Timing ..::

:: 2002/04/27 ::

Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger

[Recent review of David Weinberger's new book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, posted at http://smallpieces.blogspot.com/]

The plug on the cover of SPLJ from Daniel Pink states that David's new magnum opus is "in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan..." McLuhan is one of those authors, like de Touqueville, that everyone quotes but no one reads -- and perhaps with Weinberger around, people won't have to.

McLuhan's most similar work is, I suppose, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which shares a structural relationship to SPLJ. McLuhan names most chapters after various disruptive media, like TV, and radio, (and some other less obvious media, like money and roads), concluding with automation, the chapter where he anticipates the web. In his most famous quote, he writes "Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village."

SPLJ echoes McLuhan, from the other side of the threshold. McLuhan was writing in the '60s, in the midst of the upheaval caused by TV and rock&roll, and only anticipating the future 'global computer automation' that SPLJ deals with. McLuhan is like Moses, who came to the river Jordan, but could not cross over. David is one of us, living in this new millennium, and approaching the 'new world of the global village' as a villager, with an intensely personal voice. McLuhan was not from the village, he was a visionary of another epoch of human history, and sounds tinny and strident, like a cheap AM radio, rambling in oracular prose from an almost Olympian, etheric, macroeconomic perspective.

Weinberger is nothing like McLuhan, except in subject, and his sense of the inexorable inevitability of us begin changed by the tools we use. His tone is conversational, while McLuhan exhorts from the pulpit; he illuminates from personal example (his experiences as Everyman, his book reading club, his sensibilities about other individuals making individual choices through the web), while McLuhan paints the sweep of human history in broad strokes with a big brush, hardly ever getting into the thoughts of real people. McLuhan is -- let's face it -- difficult reading, but Weinberger is engaging, funny, and touching: a good read. Weinberger is Spaulding Grey to McLuhan's William Blake.

But even such disparate approaches can converge, as the two come independently closer to the key impacts of a medium like the web, which certainly belongs to the club of potently revolutionary communication media, like the telephone and telegraph, and perhaps in the inner circle, like printing or phonetic writing.

McLuhan presaged the world in which we live, and in the final chapter of UM:EM he sets the stage for the moral issues that Weinberger considers: "It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single, unified field of experience. " McLuhan intuits the impact of the the web, in 1964. And, even more in tune with Weinberger, he writes "We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seen to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society. [...] Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before -- but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience."

Weinberger is a man of our time, in our terms, a digital citizen, while McLuhan pointed the way into a cloudy, unknowable future like a lodestone.

There is another way that Weinberger is likely to parallel the history of McLuhan, and that is his influence both on popular culture and business planning. Weinberger's axe grinding in The Cluetrain Manifesto -- along with his co-authors -- has shaken up the mindset in the board rooms of many corporations. There is little doubt that SPLJ will have a similar, although more measured, impact on businesses approach to marketing to the new wired world.

McLuhan suggested the world would radically change as a result of a new disruptive medium, suggested the form that the change would take on society, and pronounced that this brave new world would be better than the old. Weinberger is living in the world being changed, and suggesting to us -- as individuals -- that we are each of us better off: more free, more engaged, and more likely to deeply understand ourselves and the world that forms us.

Actually, Weinberger goes further. We are better, not just better off, because of our participation in the web society. McLuhan was interested in comparing the society of his time with the society to come, and declared it would be better, but Weinberger makes it personal, because he knows that it is only through personal involvement, one interaction at a time, that we rachet up the connectivity that the web offers. It is not an invisible hand that is typing this blog review, but yours truly, investing my time and self -- sharing and interacting with the village that I call home. Weinberger understands that viscerally, because he is a denizen of my neighborhood, but McLuhan is a foreigner, a man out of time.

Perhaps we will only read McLuhan now for historical purposes, not for guidance. We can look to Weinberger for that.

order it now:: Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web



:: Stowe Boyd 4/27/2002 06:56:02 PM [link] ::
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Corrections

Well, I actually went to a site that included uigui comments (see The Wonderful World of Blogs, and they work as they should. I guess the only thing that has been hijacked has been the pages for setting up comment support. More to follow.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/26/2002 10:08:27 AM [link] ::
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The Wonderful World of Blogs

I suppose its possible you could be reading this without being aware that Timing is implemented -- on a technological level -- as a weblog, or, as the term of art has it, a "blog." In this particular case, I am using the Blogger system (www.blogger.com), but their are many alternative approaches.

In the past few months, since I started fiddling with blogs, personally, I have come to appreciate the whole scene -- first as a manifestation of the resurgence of belles lettres in the modern world, secondly as a hotbed of web-based social interaction, and third as an area of free and free form web construction.

In fooling around in the scaffolding underneath Timing, down in bloggerland, I have learned about the frailties of a system that survives by the concerted attention of volunteers, and the largesse of shoestring operations eking out a meager existence in the backwaters of the Internet economy.

As one example -- I have signed up for the "professional" version of Blogger, called (unimaginatively enough) Blogger Pro. I had thought that would mean that the service is more professional than the take-it-and-run-with-it environment provided in Blogger Amateur, but it really means that I have to be a professional Blogger (as in, "Stand back kids, this man's a trained professional!")

The Pro service offers various features not present in the Amateur version, such as sending an email whenever your blog is updated, which seems like a cool idea -- updating your avid readers with the message that new content is available. However, this feature only will send one email, the intention being that you will sign up at any of many email list services, where your readership mailing list can reside, and you can point the update email to the list server. The nice folks at BloggerPro recommend various alternatives, such as Yahoo! Groups and Topica.

Of course, I dutifully set up such a group at Topica and hacked the appropriate HTML into my Blogger template to allow readers to sign up (look at the bottom left of the Timing front page), and entered the email address for the group in the appropriate settings box in the Blogger settings. Nothing. In principle, an email should be sent every time I update my blog. Nothing is sent. And no response from Blogger Pro support regarding my questions.

Perhaps more problematic would be setting up such a contrivance -- relying on extra-Blogger services from third parties -- and then having the services no longer work. It seems that the combination of growing interest in blogging and the down economy have led to a lot of ardent bloggers being left high and dry in exactly this way. As just one example, Atomz, which provided a free service for website searching, has dropped its free service and now is strictly cash. There are still a number of alternatives, but there must have been some folks who read the Blogger Pro description of how to integrate the Atomz service -- especially since it was the recommended alternative and the only one detailed. Blogger Pro will be offering its own search ("coming soon") but in the meantime I will have to figure out how to use FreeFind or some other service.

I was also looking into comment systems, so that readers could add their feedback to my postings. There are a number of services that have been set up by blogiacs to support reader comments. One such service, YACCS, has announced that it will no longer accept new users because of the bandwidth impacts of blog comments on the server -- which is principally oriented toward other activities. At the same time, Hossein Sharifi, the creator of the service does not want to begin to charge for use. "YACCS is a something that I maintain in my spare time. And since I'm doing it in my spare time, it wouldn't make sense to start charging for it. When you charge for a service, you have to handle money, customer support, refunds, etc. It would become a full time job, and I don't have time for that." Sounds like it could be a business for Blogger Pro, though, who is charging already. Guys, can we set up a meeting?

Hossein points the direction to other services, netcomments and uigui. The former is a dead link. Either down or out. Uigui, at least this week, is not operational. Apparently, the creator of the uigui comment service (see her blog at http://uigui.net/uigui/) made the devil's bargain with an ad agency -- she thought she needed to advertise her blog to become more well-known -- and in exchange for the PR work she agreed to let the agency hijack her commenting system. Take a look at the pretty flash. I presume that a reader trying to enter or read a comment on any of the many blogs using her commenting system is being redirected to this flash, which proclaims the "May 1st REBOOT," "A reinvigoration of the Web. GMT.2PM. 1/5 2002, Curated by BubbleBathGirl. Licensed by ThreeOh."

It seems that things will be back online after May Day, after the revolution is over, but we should expect more interstitial virality of this sort. This is a new low, but symptomatic of the frailties and complexities of a patchwork world, a world where everything is always a little broken. The cost of freedom, or at least freeness, I suppose.



:: Stowe Boyd 4/26/2002 09:14:36 AM [link] ::
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