Category Archives: The Human Condition

In which a choice is made

This is, perhaps, the best illustration I have seen so far of what Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus is about -- at least the best illustration in comic strip form.
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Cognitive Surplus and The Shallows

I am cur­rently read­ing Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I’m about a third of the way through it, and I hope to post a few thoughts here when I have time to set them in electrons. I also bought The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I will read imme­di­ately after Shirky’s book. I imag­ine that [...]
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Web 2.0 Suicide

TechCrunch car­ried a story this morn­ing about a new site called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The site does just what it says, almost. You give the site your social net­work­ing cre­den­tials and it auto­mat­i­cally starts delet­ing your friends and con­tacts and posts on Twitter and Facebook. Once you start the process, there’s no stop­ping [...]
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Blogs and Web logs

John Naughton, on the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for Web and writ­ing for print: The other dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for print and writ­ing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘fin­ished’ and dis­patched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a [...]
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Citizen journalism has a cost

Normally, I’m pretty gung-ho for social media and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism. I really do believe that jour­nal­ism isn’t some high-and-mighty, elit­ist pro­fes­sion. Real peo­ple with drive and curios­ity can report news and write analy­sis, regard­less of their educations. As such, cit­i­zen report­ing is a good thing because I gen­er­ally think “the more infor­ma­tion to work with, [...]
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