Sen No Sen

Wed 12 Jan. 2005

7 Comments »

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1. wow now that’s a cool project. i wonder to what degree all this anarchy is workable? seriously … there is a risk as communication becomes more distributed, as the voices of record slowly fade away that we’ll be left in societies where millions of small conversations happen to the exclusuion of any overarching national or global understanding. is that a good thing or a bad thing? certainly the current situation is far from ideal, but the US election is a good example of what can happpen: the discourse of ne group becomes totally removed from that of others, so in the end the same “facts” mean completely different things to different people. how does a world like that run? and more importantly, can it run peacefully?

   Comment by mackinaw — Wed 12 Jan. 2005 @ 03:01 pm

2. wiki, & political documents

   The ever industrious sen no sen posts about the wiki EU Constitution that has been put up online, ready for wiki annotation. (For those that don’t know, a wiki is an online document that is editable, realtime, either by anyone at all or by selected pe…

   Trackback by dose — Wed 12 Jan. 2005 @ 03:01 pm

3. Not anarchy really - but more loosely coupled, for sure. While this may be far from ideal - agreed, yet workable nonetheless.

   I think that there are many more advantages than disadvantages to the increased distribution of communication across so many fronts. In overcoming the susceptibility to complete control and corruption posed by the old centralized model new challenges are certainly created. However, these are of a different order. Managing the information overload, for instance, is an essential skill that is becoming more and more critical. Along with the greater distribution, of course, we also need to focus on connecting these disparate conversations taking place all over. Hyperlinking, while not a panacea, is a mighty force - as weblogs have proven.

   I’m not convinced that the US election result was due to over-fragmentation in the public discourse, as much as the advantage of an enormous concentration of power still able to dominate the media and influence perceptions on a massive scale.

   Perhaps I am being too optimistic in believing that things can only get better. Yet despite the difficulties we face with ever greater distribution of communication, I wouldn’t want to slow down the rate of change one bit.

   Comment by sennnosen — Wed 12 Jan. 2005 @ 09:01 pm

4. up until the US election I would have agreed with you… but afterwards, i think this cartoon, sadly in my view, may refelct the reality: scroll down to last one. it’s true there is powerful centralized media, but there are also lots of individual people who agree with what they are hearing. the left likes to think of this group as a bunch of duped fools. eg: for the left the “fact” is there were no wmd in iraq and saddam was not a threat; for the right the “fact” is that even tho there were no wmd, saddam was a sworn enemy of the US, who, if he had had wmd & enough firepower would have used them against the US. both are probably true, yet as motivations for action they are incompatible. i spent much time reading stories in the alt-press about this scandal and that scandal, and this or that bush outrage. but you end up weaving a reenforcing informational cocoon around yourself, and I sometimes check into foxnews.com to see what the right is thinking. it looks very different.

   the long-touted canard about liberal bias in the press is probably true in some sense (though i always laugh when i see the ny times referred to as a left-wing newspaper), but its all a matter of perspective. similarly university campuses probably have a liberal bias compared with the general population. on campus, i’m sure there is a liberal bias in uni philosophy departments, and a conservative bias in MBA departments. they spend all day looking at totally different sets of data, so of course their bias will be different; and they will likely interpret even the same data differently. you evaluate your data based on set objectives, if your objectives are different (maximize wealth vs wisdom), then your interpretation of the data will necessarily be different.

   anyway the point is that the blogosphere and distributed media will tend to increase the conection among disparate like-minded people, in small networked communities; but it will also reduce the communication (i think) among communities that think differently. the left will rely on their info sources; the right their, and so on… its hard enough to keep up with info sources i like, without having to read info sources i don’t like to keep my understanding of the rest of the world! so we will all be looking at different sets of data, and shaping our interpretation of the world accordingly, and differently. compare this to a time when everyone in the US got their news from CBS, NBC, or ABC, all of whom could be counted on to deliver a similar message; or Canada for instance where a country was built in large part through a national discourse created by the CBC and a somewhat standardized education system.

   this is not necssarily a bad thing (not at all!). our CBC and education system didn’t do much good for the displaced and decimated first nations of canada, for instance! and nbc, cbs, abc have inspired Americans to support many wars of questionable morality.

   but it is a problem that we should at least be conscious of, that the risks of losing lingua franca in society as a whole is real, and while that will have many democratizing effects, it may also, I suspect, have some negative consequences-the powerful as is their wont, will surely find ways of exploiting the resulting digital babel to their ends. that’s why they’re powerful!

   again this isn’t an argument against distributed media, far from it, but rather outlines a challenge to progressives to find ways ensure that what comes out of the process is better that what went in.

   I think i’ll post this on dose!

   Comment by hugh — Thu 13 Jan. 2005 @ 08:01 pm

5. he effects of distributed media; here is a slightly adapted version of the comments i made here : I am a recently-recovered US political news junkie (blogging of cours […]

   Pingback by dose :: digital babel & the meaning of the election — Thu 13 Jan. 2005 @ 08:01 pm

6. Hi, I’m Gavin Bell, one of the people who is putting together the European Constitution website, it is a work in progress at the minute, if you want to join in, then visit betageek.co.uk and get involved.

   Comment by Gavin Bell — Fri 14 Jan. 2005 @ 03:01 pm

7. text of the Constitution in pdf format. Good value! Elsewhere, as previously mentioned here, there’s also the European Constitution Wiki which deserves a lot […]

   Pingback by Sen No Sen :: The EU :: January :: 2005 — Sun 30 Jan. 2005 @ 07:01 am

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