Wordability » web writing

Truth = I found it on the Web

bruce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:34:57 +0000

In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of “digital Maoism”–the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule.

Lanier was moved to write about Wikipedia because someone kept editing his Wikipedia entry to say that he was a film director. Lanier describes himself as a “computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.” He is good at all those things, but he is no director. According to his essay, he made one short experimental film in the 1990s, and it was “awful.”

“I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me,” Lanier wrote. “Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I’m turned into a film director again.”

Since Lanier’s attempted edits to his own Wikipedia entry were based on firsthand knowledge of his own career, he was in direct violation of Wikipedia’s three core policies. He has a point of view; he was writing on the basis of his own original research; and what he wrote couldn’t be verified by following a link to some kind of legitimate, authoritative, and verifiable publication.

_ Simson L Garfinkel in Technology Review for Nov/Dec

Oh and the verifiable publication ought to be (a) online and (b) in English and (c) written from a neutral POV. Avoid the article if you’re trying to give up biting your nails.

Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily

Good ol’ books

bruce — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:18:53 +0000

From a blog by Sarah Horrigan, who works as an e-learning developer:

? my head is far more full of ideas than it has been for a long time and part of that is in no small part down to the diminished distractability factor. With a book you engage with the book. You don’t go ‘ooooh, there’s another book over there, I’ll just go investigate that and be back to this in a bit’. It’s you and the page. The words don’t link anywhere. Don’t animate. Don’t do anything fancy. Don’t overheat and shut down at inappropriate moments (glares pointedly at laptop). But I’m struck by how much we push forwards with new technologies and leave behind technologies which are perfectly adequate, beautiful in their simplicity and may well do an even better job at helping you make mental connections.

Skewed intellectuals

bruce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:45:03 +0000

Prospect Magazine’s annual ranking of public intellectuals generated a long list of 100 names. To establish who was truly who, 20,000 online voters then chose their top 5 and Prospect has now published the final list in rank order.

The list reflects a problem with all but the most carefully-controlled web-based surveys, the influence of fan-sites. Here’s David Herman:

Word spread around the internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw attention to their presence on the list by using their personal websites to link to Prospect

One kind of blog

bruce — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:44:27 +0000

For making detours and going by sideroads, nothing is more convenient than the essay form. One can take off in almost any direction, certain that if the thing does not work out one can turn back and start over in some other with only moderate cost in time and disappointment. Midcourse corrections are rather easy, for one does not have a hundred pages of previous argument to sustain, as one does in a monograph or treatise. Wanderings into yet smaller sideroads and wider detours do little harm, for progress is not expected to be relentlessly forward anyway, but winding and improvisational, coming out where it comes out. And when there is nothing more to say on the subject, or perhaps altogether, the matter can simply be dropped. “Works are not finished” as Val

Words, pictures, mush

bruce — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:39:03 +0000

It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.

Graeme Philipson in The Age this week.

Philipson has three main arguments, all familiar:
1. New media don’t supplant old media – the ‘people still go to the movies’ argument.
2. People are busily writing emails and reading text online so it’s only a shift of delivery: literacy is if anything enhanced.
3. as above

1 and 2 are boilerplate. What’s interesting though is 3. which just pops up as it routinely does in these pieces. All evidence from neurology and evolutionary psychology, the careful arguments of people like Walter Ong – all the evidence, that is, which shows that for rational beings, language is both unique and essential is lost on these people. Maybe because the serious discussion takes place in books.