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Tuesday, May 14, 2002

E-Mail Notification Management
"I like to impose this extra bit of protocol on myself, to underscore that every e-mail is a significant act."

Jon Udell is one of the few writers who takes a real interest in how our emails work, how groups work online. His column "Tangled in the treads" for Byte always has a good take on this or that aspect of online collaboration. I don't always agree with the details (or understand the hi-tech stuff) but "that every e-mail is a significant act." is a fine principle.

This article is about his first look at Outlook.

[20:41 | wl | permanent link

Sunday, May 12, 2002

Salon.com Technology | Use the blog, Luke

"The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times -- but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links."

The noosphere will not be built by the NYT. The shape and flow of the networks of links is not just a big wide web, there are forces in various directions - there dynamic, a struggle for outcome. Blogs are part of the benign side. A force for freedom of expression.
[02:31 | wl | permanent link

Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan): The Machine Stops Literature Annotations

Another prophetic writer... hit on the idea of movies and email before WW1. Upholds the notion that we are better off not living vicariously with the ais of machines. Does he have a point? Makes me think of the Lunig cartoon of the family watching the sunset on TV while it is happening outside the window.

Maybe there is a point to it. As in: Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918

119. Trees

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain. 10

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

But what if we reversed the idea:

I THINK that I shall never see a tree lovely as a poem.
In a poem the tree becomes sacred.

We spend a lot of time here in space looking at words - and somehow that seems important... to be in the noosphere. We value nature but travel to see art galleries.

We make God in our image of God.
[02:04 | wl | permanent link

CMC Magazine: Technology as a Psychic Phenomenon
"Nevertheless, there are relationships, significant but covert, between the psychic and the technological. The key to this relationship lies in McLuhan's idea of the "extensions of man." The psychic and the technological represent two forms of the human attempt to abolish the constraints of time and space. We can, in fact, say with reason that technology represents the material expression or analogue of certain alleged psychic powers."

In this 1997 article Grosso, in the end, dismisses the thesis. It seems to me that the trouble with techno-spiritual thesis like most religions is that it is taken all too literally. When that happens, as in this item, the essence of insight is lost. Resurrection is a potent notion - taken too literally it becomes the debate about ontology and the miracle is lost.
[00:07 | wl | permanent link

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