Municipalist

The Sunday Read: Twitter and the 'isolation obsession equals socialization' argument

Here is an intriguing New York Times magazine piece seeking to define/defend Twitter. The piece's key concept: Twitter feeds our need for "ambient awareness." It's a smart piece, but in the end, a huge stretch. But it did add to my understanding of some key concepts here, concerning the values and world views of the power Twitterers out there. As well as of the constant and often tortured defenses of such a weird tool.

The defenders say this: Twitter, which so easily allows you and even encourages you to briefly but constantly inform your online 'followers' of what you are doing at any given moment, from each sandwich made to every light bulb replaced, has tremendous value simply because by 'tweeting' details of so many inanities, you are actually reaching out to the world, and providing so many people many more ways to get to know you. By adding up all the tiny moments. And by doing so you thereby create community.

Does this make any damn sense to anbody?

So what this argument comes down to is: Total and complete navel-gazing self-focus is a positive value. The most narcissist generation in American history has created a tool the entire existence of which is predicated on narcissism, of course, but touted as a way to inspire the opposite of narcissism: community.  And the defenders of this tool claim that said narcissism now deserves to be included under the now ever-larger term: "social media."

Obsessional self-focus equals community creation.

Isolation equals socialization.

Where have we seen this linquistic trend before?

The Sunday Read: Can crowdsourcing work for government?

First, an inspiring defense of the larger concept from Yaron Koren:

To me, the clearest demonstration that aggregation works is just the success of democracy as a system of government, compared to all the others that have been tried. Plenty of systems of government have billed themselves as the rule of an enlightened elite over the uneducated masses, and they've all failed, sometimes spectacularly so.

And here from the Washington Post is a good example of the concept at work, as a (private sector) group tries to launch "the first 'crowdsourced' restaurant, conceived and developed by an open community of experts and interested parties." The piece is beneficial for those in government as it explains some of the usefulness of these ideas, as well as some of the hackneyed ideology. Government should take note.

The Sunday Read: Blogs do not suck

Andrew Sullivan explains it best: We are all just "Web DJs."

The Sunday Read: The Web to the rescue

How social networking saved New Orleans, by John Fontana, Network World.

The Sunday Read: All Google, all the time

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, the Atlantic Monthly July/August cover story:

"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

If Your Users Fail, Your Website Fails, Regardless of Intent or Design, by Scott Karp, at Publishing 2.0:

"On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs."