conflux
The New York Review of Books
He's Got Mail
"There are many examples showing how hard it is to predict the speed of technological advance or its effect on social or commercial life. Space travel. Cloning. Cures for cancer. The search for clean or renewable energy sources. The sense of apprehension in the last days of 1999 arose from the fact that while most experts believed the "Y2K bug" would not shut down computer systems, no one really could be sure.
The most dramatic recent demonstration of this problem involves the Internet. A respected engineer and entrepreneur, Robert Metcalfe, who invented the networking standard called Ethernet, predicted in 1995 that as more and more people tried to connect, the Internet would "go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.""
11:18 PM 0 comments
0 Comments:
[ rhetoric ]
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
Feed [03.21.00][ search ]
[ outbound ]
wired
/
slashdot
/
tomalak
/
techdirt
/
bblog
/
webvoice
/
news.com
/
premium blend
/
techblog
/
the register
/
nyt technology
/
salon technology
/
ananova
/
msnbc
/
cs monitor
/
economist technology
/
silicon prairie
/
siliconvalley.com
/
corante
/
mediachannel
/
ojr
/
editor and publisher
/
hbs
/
marketing profs
/
business 2.0
/
red herring
/
fast company
/
darwin
/
a & l daily
/
nyt magazine
/
economist
/
reason
/
edge
/
ny review of books
/
[ schwag ]
look snazzy and support the site at the same time by buying some snowdeal schwag!
[ et cetera ]
valid xhtml 1.0?
This site designed by
Eric C. Snowdeal III
.
© 2000-2005