Monthly Archives: June 2007
Wiki War
An article by Stephanie Simon on today’s latimes.com tells of how wiki software has been politicized.
Christian home-school teacher Andy Schlafly became upset when one of his students used “BCE” instead of “BC” in a class report. The source used was Wikipedia.
In response, Schlafly started Conservapedia (which I will not link here out of personal preference–I [...]
Bradbury Claims “451″ has been Misinterpreted
Author Ray Bradbury told the LA Weekly News that his novel has been misinterpreted over the years, despite thousands of academic analyses over the years. I have to think this is another example of literary theory in action: Bradbury is just one more reader and authorial intention is a myth. Sure, he may have “meant” [...]
Posted in Authority Issues Comments closed
Determining the Internet’s Stability
The BBC posted an interesting article Friday. In it, writer Spencer Kelly investigates the perennial claim that the Internet will eventually collapse under the weight of its own traffic.
One quote near the bottom of the article caught my eye in particular. Paul Wood, an analyst at MessageLabs, pointed out the “perception that the Internet is [...]
Posted in Miscellany Comments closed
Authority and the Collective
What creates authority? Is it common consensus, the same way an overabundance of faith makes religion more real? Or is authority a product of education?
That’s the debate that has recently been engaging bloggers and others online. A pair of articles came to my attention today, following the article from Michael Jensen in The Chronicle Review [...]
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
“If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist”