Present - January 21, 2007 evening

Web Literacy and a New Kind of Media: The book I am now reading is The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger. This book is actually turning out to be a prequel for The Long Tail and Small Things Loosely Joined, which I have talked about in previous entries. Although I haven't formed any significant comments on this latest book yet (I am not very far into it), I was again struck by a theme that has pestered me a lot as I think about the importance of the web in joining people together. I guess I'll start with the phrase "Markets are conversations." (pp xxii). The web is absolutely a conversation for me. But I love the written word and I like to read words and I am profoundly influenced by words that I read. I really can't say that about "conversations" in the traditional sense. I barely remember spoken conversations minutes after they happen. And I rarely encounter someone who says something really important out loud. At least that is the impression that I carry around. But I have always felt like my way of approaching the world was unusual. So one thing that blogging has done for me is connect me with the sixty million people who love to blog. On some level they are all like me and this is a comfort. And it is exciting to have all these people I can try to communicate with. But this huge number of people aside, --- hmmm that is a pretty huge number though isn't it? How many people connect to the internet overall? I'll have to try to find that out. Just a quick time out to google...And the answer is about 1.1 BILLION users world-wide. There is (of course) a site that tracks and presents these stats. [Side note: both Asia and Europe have considerably more internet users than North America.] When I googled the number of bloggers, the number 50 million popped, but I am sure I read 60 M somewhere. So my point is about all the internet users who do not blog. The medium of their "conversations" is something besides the written word. I have worried that most folks do not care for writing -- even find it painful or unpleasant. How can they all be happily using the web if communication is the written word? I know it's not predominantly the spoken word or video yet because those are still emerging exchange mechanisms. So how do people who don't write communicate using the internet? I searched "web literacy" and looked over the resulting blog posts. Two things popped out at me. The first is that journalists and media organizations are who you find chewing on this issue. The general consensus among these folks is that sound and image and video are the "conversations" being traded around. [In the context of how the written word is in trouble.] That conclusion seems inadequate to me. What is the medium of communication in MySpace and FaceBook? Text and images are both used, but each are supporting players to the who I am right now that is actually transmitted to others. Digg is another example of clear conversation, but not really in the coin of any of the "media" types we are familiar with. And there is also something kind of conversational about eBay, though I can't put my finger on what it is. My professional life has been concerned with, among other things, the information that makes up commercial transactions. And I am certain that eBay is more than a mechanism for brokering transactions. The Cluetrain Manifesto makes reference to the marketplace of earlier times and that is close to what eBay is. In the same way that the computer networking folks co-opted the word "fabric" as a metaphor for aspects of networking technologies, I think that fabric is also the metaphor here. But what kind of media is that?

P.S. I have read a few blogs that address the theories of Walter J. Ong. Some of the discussion was pretty abstruse, and it was hard for me to tease out the connections to my own thoughts. But it seems that he is worried that the web is re-introducing a new kind of oral tradition that will toss us back to the early civilizations where there was a kind of glass ceiling for idea complexity, because you had to tell other people about your thoughts and once the whisper down the lane started, some dumbass would lose the key point altogether. It seems to me Plato managed to do OK in this time, though admittedly he got things written down. My point is that however "simple" this new medium will make things from an idea-complexity perspective, it is not for carrying the most abstract and complex ideas of humankind, only the fast-travelling ones. Think of most of the web being stuff being the carry-on luggage on the flight, but there is still a cargo hold where the checked suitcases that are bigger and heavier will travel. No one wants that oversize suitcase in the aisle anyway.