Surfing the Zeitgeist
I’m writing something at the moment about the paradox that we are awash with confident Forrester-type analyses of all aspects of the digital revolution yet none of us actually has a clue what’s really going on beneath our feet. Manuel Castells has a lovely phrase to describe this state of affairs. He calls it “informed bewilderment”.
Geekdom as a state of mind
As someone who is fortunate to have many non-techie friends, I am often struck by their bewilderment at the pleasure I get from technology, and especially that sort-of-aesthetic thrill one gets from seeing something done really neatly — what Slashdot readers would call ‘cool hacks’.
Example 1: Last night I downloaded a beautiful little application called the Salling Clicker. What it does it turn my Sony-Ericsson T68i Bluetooth phone into a remote control for my PowerBook — so I can drive iTunes (or, more importantly, Keynote) while walking about. It’s a lovely, elegant application and it works perfectly and I’m thrilled with it. But already I can see my friends wrinking their noses in disbelief. “You’re excited about using your phone as a remote control!!! How pathetic is that?” I can understand their disdain, but it doesn’t lessen my pleasure at seeing something done so well.
Example 2: I use my PowerBook for all my work, most of which involves writing. The writing tools available on the Mac — from OSX TextEdit to MS Word to Dreamweaver — are marvels in their way. But actually they are too elaborate for what I do most of the time, which is to write plain text. So I’ve been hunting for a Really Simple, Fast and Efficient text editor for a while. Now I’ve got one — Haxial TextEdit. By the standards of the OSX interface, the program is incredibly crude. It even breaks some of the rules of the OS X GUI — by having its own File etc. menu bar for example. It has its own fonts which are crude by comparison with those of OS X applications. It looks damn ugly and has no formatting capability — all it does is put text on the screen. In fact, it looks like something derived from the early days of time-shared Unix machines. But it’s incredibly fast and gives instant word-counts so is just what I need for stream-of-consciousness note-taking. I love it!
Which only goes to confirm, I suppose, that I’m just a geek at heart. Sigh.
Blogs have legal protection — at least in the US
Wired story. “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily. “One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they’re not just selling information — they’re selling reliability,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren’t necessarily selling anything, they’re just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn’t exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward.”