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| Mar May |
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I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-'70s, to take an elective course in "urban studies." The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)
I've forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design -- which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.
Jacobs' book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I'd have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.
Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].
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Congress is considering allowing the big phone and cable companies that now control most of the broadband access in the US to do something they want to do, but that has never been done before: turn the level playing field of today's Internet into a sort of class-system environment, in which packets sent by companies that pay more get preferential treatment. This is a lousy idea that, at worst, could entirely disrupt our basic assumptions about the open Internet.
The companies involved keep saying, "Trust us,we will only use these new powers for good," but I'm sorry, I don't.
The Save The Internet coalition is a good starting point to find out more and see what you can do. Farhad Manjoo's Salon piece about AT&T and the Net is an in-depth look at the issue; it's fair to both sides of the argument, but I think you'll come away from it as I did, wanting to make sure that AT&T doesn't get its way.
Also, a couple of weeks ago Kevin Marks presented the technological case for why these companies do not need the privilege they seek. Supposedly it's to make it more feasible to deliver high-quality audio and video over the Net. But, er, they can do that now, in many different ways, as Marks says.
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Last night Kurt Andersen posted a comment in response to my post below about his New York magazine article on the new Net bubble. It deserves highlighting. Andersen wrote:
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Actually, my point in admitting my ignorance in early 1994 (of the Web) and early 2000 (of blogs) and early 2002 (of RSS) was not so much the ignorance, which I don't think was at all unusual (let alone extreme) at those respective moments -- but rather how quickly in the internet realm the arcane becomes commonplace. (The phrase "worldwide Web," for instance, had appeared exactly twice in the New York Times when I first heard it in early 1994; "blog" apparently wasn't coined until the spring of 1999, and didn't appear in the Times until the spring of 2001; and RSS first appeared in the Times in the spring of 2003.) |
Fair enough. So Andersen's point wasn't to emphasize that he was unusually far behind the curve, but rather to underscore how speedily the phenomena he was catching up to would go mainstream. But I think these divergent readings of the same passage only end up underscoring my argument -- that such things look very different from the West Coast end of the telescope.
I don't know how useful it is to venture deeper into the thickets of chronology. "Early 1994" is a lot different from later 1994 in matters of early Web awareness; Peter Merholz may have coined the term "blog" in spring 1999, but the concept of "weblog" was long-established by then (I wrote in May, 1999: "A phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today"); RSS was in wide use at Salon and other places by 2000 and commonplace by 2001-2.
More interesting, to me, is the usage of New York Times reference-counting as a yardstick of prevalence. My argument was about how slow and sometimes blind the New York media culture can be to picking up on trends and practices that have already become commonplace elsewhere, particularly in Silicon Valley and the Web industry. It wouldn't surprise me that New York Times keyword counts similarly lag. I mean, RSS first rearing its head in spring 2003? I -- and a lot of other people -- were living inside our feed readers by then.
Certainly, this industry moves fast. But the New York perspective tends to see new tech and Web trends as popping up instantaneously, out of nowhere, and that exaggerates their true speed and robs us of the opportunity to understand their provenance.
The Web wouldn't have seemed like quite the bolt-out-of-the-blue if you'd been paying attention to the steady acceleration in Internet growth and awareness that had preceded it in the early '90s (a lot of people had Internet e-mail before they'd ever heard the prefix 'http'). Blogs were less of a surprise if you'd had an ear cocked to the remarkable flourishing of personal Web-based journals from 1995-8. If you checked in on any kind of frequency to Dave Winer's Scripting News in the late '90s, which a lot of us did, you couldn't help getting an education in RSS.
All of which is simply to underscore my argument: that media people ought to pay a little more advance attention to technology people. The techies' early-adoption enthusiasms serve as a distant-early-warning system -- not infallible, but valuable -- for the new wrinkle that will be a media-world craze in two or three years. I can understand how New York was blindsided in the 1990s. But there's no excuse for it today.
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