We the Media

I originally wrote this entry on August 4, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The full content of Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media, is now available. The book discusses weblogs and more.

I would say the title is exaggerating the power of web-logs.

As I've noted below, the vast majority of the public relies on the common mass media (e.g. TV, Radio, etc.) as source of news, views, culture and more.

WSJ's RSS feeds

I originally wrote this entry for blogs.sun.com on August 3, 2004.

The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of business record, has finally rolled out their RSS feeds as of last week.

If you have access to the electronic WSJ, you may also want to check out the following article by Thomas Weber: Blogs Help You Cope With Data Overload (WSJ, July 8, 2004, B1).

Here's a list of blogs and descriptions provided by Weber in his article:

• 
  GENERAL INTEREST: Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) is one of the Web's most established blogs, and one of its most popular, too. By "general interest," I mean of general interest to your average Internet-obsessed technophile. The focus isn't explicitly on technology, but expect it to skew in that direction -- over a recent week, posting topics included robots, comic books and a cool-looking electric plug.
  
• 
  ECONOMICS: EconLog (econlog.econlib.org) offers a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling both newsy developments (the real-estate market, taxes) and theory. It also includes a list of other good economics blogs -- there are more than you might think.
  
• 
  GADGETS: Engadget (www.engadget.com) can be counted on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels each day on digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and more. When it isn't the first to stumble across something good, it isn't shy about linking to another blog with an interesting post, so it's usually pretty up to date.
  
• 
  POLITICS: WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com) has stuck with an interesting concept for more than a year now. It's actually three blogs in one: separate side-by-side journals tracking news on the 2004 elections from the perspective of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
  
• 
  TECHNOLOGY: Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog). OK, this one's about politics too. More specifically, it covers the intersection between regulation and technology. Its author, Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on copyright, privacy and other challenging topics in high-tech society.
  

Hyper-Learning or Hype

In the second essay in his book, On the Internet, Hubert

Dreyfus focuses on the following question: How far is distance learning from education? Answering this specific question leads, by extension, to answering a more general question: Can we learn anything on the internet? The reason I draw that conclusion is that much of "distance learning" is going to be powered by the internet.

Dreyfus' answer to this question is: it all depends!

First, he notes that learning has many stages:

• The novice can understand tasks decomposed to their context-free features. The teacher says: Here's a tennis racket. Here's the handle. Here's the head. You hit the ball with the head, not the handle.
  
  
• The advanced beginner learns some of the more subtle features through examination of examples and exercises. The teacher says: Look at how this champion or that champion of the game plays it. Try this move or that other move.
  
  
• The competent goes beyond the beginner. The beginner is missing what is important in any given situation and finds it tedious and nerve racking to perform, wondering how any one could master the skills. A competent individual is more involved and discerns what is important in any given situation. The tennis player knows when to come to the net and when to keep his distance.
  
  
• The proficient has reached a stage where intuitive reactions have replaced reasoned (or calculative) responses. Situational responses become more important than the performer's theory of the skill. The tennis player comes to the net and keeps his distance without any concern for the theory of tennis.
  
  
• The expert not only sees what needs to be achieved but "thanks to his vast repertoire of situational discriminations, he also sees immediately how to achieve his goal." The expert can make more subtle and refined discriminations than the proficient.
  
  
• The next stage is practical wisdom which has to do with exercising ones skills within a cultural context. Practicing the art of team work and programming in China, India and U.S. have subtle differences. Only through practical wisdom can one operate within each culture.
  
  

So what's the upshot?

Well, Dreyfus says that even if telepresence works really well, it is still quite hard to have a committed master-student relationship and the involvement which is necessary for gaining expertise and practical wisdom. Hyper-learning becomes mere hype. Dreyfus says that at best competence can be gained through distance learning but even that depends on how much presence can be had through telepresence . . . It turns out, the answer is "not much."

The Hype about Hyperlink

There are 4 main parts to Dreyfus' On the Internet (2001).

The first section is called "The hype about hyperlink."

It contains a comparison of the hyperlink culture (and data retrieval) with the library culture (and document retrieval). It also examines whether what we have organized through hyperlinks will really give us an understanding of what it is we want to know about.

Dreyfus argues with those who believe in incremental progress in search and useful retrieval:

. . . faith in incremental progress towards being able to retreive just those and only those documents one needs only makes sense if there is one taxonomy, like that of Aristotle or the Dewey decimal system, that captures the way the world is divided up. But in a world of hyperlinks, there can be no saving metaphysical solution. (p. 23)

Single taxonomies simply don't make sense but that requires a different argument.

. . . One thing is sure, as the Web grows. Net users who leave their bodies behind and become dependent on syntactic Web crawlers and search engines will have to be resigned to picking through heaps of junk in the hope of sometimes finding the information they desire. (p. 26)

Aljazeera on the Net

As far as I know, no major U.S. cable carrier currently offers Aljazeera English, but if you are in the U.S., you can still watch Aljazeera programs on YouTube or directly from Aljazeera.net.