Walter's Weblog

Psyberspace
Walter's Notes & Links

Saturday, June 08, 2002

Dan Bricklin Log

Dan has a lot to say about David Weinberger's book, and has some good quotes:

This is the Web's nature, for everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason. In building a site, we are saying that we find this topic interesting and we think others will also. Sites that work make manifest their passion. So, of course the Web inevitably is a plenum of places that have meaning and matter at least to someone.

David Weinberger

Having found Dan's site earlier today, I find he has a lot of good stuff there. Added him to my list of blogs (should appear soon on the left.) His series of Writings are insightful and pleasant to read.

The quote above is from David Weinberger's new book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined". Here is the book's site, has chapters online.

The quote makes me realise how the web is as I have often said, a mirror - but it is one selected and filtered by people and what they find meaningful. Obvious, but it is one way that the world is different from the virtual world "everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason". The link to the book is great to have... more on that to come.
[15:49 | wl | permanent link

Silent Theft

A great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of dozens of resources that we collectively own. The plunder is widespread,affecting public lands, the broadcast airwaves, the Internet, the public domain of knowledge and creativity, publicly funded medicines, and even our genes. As companies quietly seize our common wealth, however, our government often fails to protect us, sometimes actually giving away our common assets.

I have not sen any full reviews of this book. Looks promising - good title :)

[14:14 | wl | permanent link

Small Players Matter

While large players and big media companies act like they are the main reason for the web and Internet and therefore should drive policy decisions, in actuality they are just "the biggest of the many small players" that make up the Internet. In fact, the controlling "stay within us" mentality some of them have is actually counter to the needs of the Internet for growth. The numbers show that the contributions of the myriad of small players -- individuals, non-profits, and small businesses -- are crucial to the vitality of the web and its value to people.

This one was in the top 40! Great to see it and also that people appreciate such clear simple commonsense analysis backed up with data.

The fact that I found it and am linking to it proves his point. Here is a moment where a country inn rises above the Hilton.

Could the big pipes however control the net?

Another thought, if we judged an individual by their job religion, race or gender we might get some idea of who they ware but it is the fine mesh in between these big trends that really matters.
[14:06 | wl | permanent link

Nodal and Matrix Analyses of Communication Patterns in Small Groups

Technical, but maybe useful somewhere - so i've linked it.
[02:17 | wl | permanent link

Paul Robinson, The Philosophy of Punctuation

Rules are important, no question about it. But by themselves they are insufficient. Unless one has an emotional investment, rules are too easily forgotten. What we must instill, I'm convinced, is an attitude toward punctuation, a set of feelings about both the process in general and the individual marks of punctuation. That set of feelings might be called a philosophy of punctuation.

I like this sort of stuff!
[02:14 | wl | permanent link

Daypop Top 40 Links

This seems a clearer interface than blogdex. They have a separate list for News sites.
[01:33 | wl | permanent link

( blogdex )

Top 25 blog links - not unlike DAYTOP's Top 40 - link coming up. Funily enough these two indexes show different chart toppers. Wired article about blogdex.
[01:30 | wl | permanent link

Friday, June 07, 2002

Web Intersections

I am having an exploration of the blog indexing situation. This site seems to provide some overview. Headlines of a sort, but they emerge sociometrically from the world, well, in this case from a handful of bloggers via tomandian. Moreno called it a Matrix a long time ago. The tools for tapping into the global sociometry - search engines do it but now the finest mesh of the net is being carefully analysed - by tools and humans.

Amazing to see how popular the Mozilla release 1.0 is today! This is great news.
[22:05 | wl | permanent link

A Picture of Weblogs

[14:36 | wl | permanent link

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

They Rule

Larger view.

They Rule is a launchpad for investigating corporate power relationships in the United States. The website allows users to browse through a variety of maps that function as directories to companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. They Rule depicts the connections between companies through diagrams of their power structures, specifically their boards of directors. (from the Whitney site)

This is Josh On's "They Rule" site currently featured at the Whitney Museum in New York. I've been discussing this work with josh over the years and I think it is a really important site. I think it reveals firstly the corporate power relationships, the power of sociometry, and most of all the power of the net in being able to mediate global networks of this kind. How else could this sociometric exploration be used? How could it reveal and organise and network the power of the opposition to the rulers? Great that it is recognised by the art world. It is truly art in the service of... (see earlier post with Hillman interview.)

Go Josh!
[16:29 | wl | permanent link

gordon.coale weblog

I do a live music webcast, called TestingTesting, from my living room. Our next show is June 3

And it is great! Now this is the future of music. Who else is doing this?
[12:50 | wl | permanent link

Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk
Howard is being blogged "live" on Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Don't think that money is never a motive force, but the Internet, the PC, and the Web weren't motivated by money. There are 0.5MM blogs, but only three of them make any money, the rest are in it for reputation, love, to contribute to the commons.

[12:34 | wl | permanent link

The Jung Lexicon

The Lexicon is reprinted here with the permission of the author, Daryl Sharp, of Toronto, Ontario. Daryl Sharp is a Jungian Analyst and the publisher of Inner City Books.

[02:45 | wl | permanent link

Monday, June 03, 2002

Shakespeare's Royal Self

by James Kirsch, M.D.

The root of all neurosis is the refusal to accept conflict consciously; once an unconscious conflict becomes conscious, it is no longer neurotic and neurotic suffering is replaced by authentic suffering, which brings about the healing of neurosis

This is by Ediger - found it in my old EditThisPage Weblog File (will post that up soon.) I like the quote and did a search for it, but only found my original post. PLUS other nice stuff.

Particularly the item linked here by James Kirsch. The cgjungpage is such a great resource! What struck me most was the quote from Jung. I am relating this to my earlier posts re Hillman and also to the nature of the NET.

The Net is an expression of the collective unconscious - like all great art. That is a BIG idea.

Art, by its very nature, is not science, and science is essentially not art, both provinces of the mind, therefore, have a reservation that is peculiar to them, and that can be explained only from themselves. Hence when we speak of the relation between psychology and art, we are treating only of that aspect of art which without encroachment can be submitted to a psychological manner of approach. Whatever psychology is able to determine about art will be confined to the psychological process of artistic activity, and will have nothing whatever to do with the innermost nature of art itself.

What contribution can analytical psychology make to the root problem of artistic 'creation,' that is, the mystery of the creative energy? . . . Inasmuch as 'no created mind can penetrate the inner soul of Nature,' you will surely not expect the impossible from our psychology, namely a valid explanation of that great mystery of life, that we immediately feel in the creative impulse. Like every other science psychology has only a modest contribution to make towards the better and deeper understanding of the phenomena of life, it is no nearer than its sisters to absolute knowledge.

C. G. JUNG

Dominique Mazeaud began a project called "The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande," in 1987. Once a month, on the same day each month, like clockwork she went to the Rio Grande river, near her home, and removed garbage out of the river. Part of her work involved keeping a diary. Sometimes the diary was documentation of the day's events and other times she wrote "prayers" or poems about her ritual.12 Though Mazeaud is not making a grand ecological impact, her art reaches out through compassion, for one day a month she coexists with the river. Her ritual is personal and usually involves herself, and the people who pass by. Personal rituals work to reclaim one's own identity, which cannot be found in today's industrial culture. There is a longing to obtain an intrinsic sense of identity within the individual. Artists are turning to interactive processes which often seem simple and down to earth, working towards finding a sense of function within the world which also heightens the sense of self. Within the current traditions, there is little understanding of ritual art forms. In Mazeaud's piece, her diary is the only commodity available. The function of the work is the interaction between artist and subject, the ending result is only known to the artist

I am adding this as it follows up on the Suzi Gablik item below. There are some important elements here.

Ritual
prayers
diary

These are the things that move us into the virtual, and that is where the gods are.

Virtual and ritual - connected?
[08:22 | wl | permanent link

Three plus top box

Whee! I have just updated the whole of the template for the blog! Simple look - white like it has been for a while but this time with a CSS - Cascading Style Sheet - which I will be able to use for all my three column layouts now.

The link above is to the info I used to learn the layout.
[06:32 | wl | permanent link

Template Created 1999. Last updated: 18 June 2002