Not exactly a chance encounter.
I didn't get to Weinberger's article by chance, though I can't truthfully write
that I got to it by design either. The article has been in my bookmarks for quite
a while, but it didn't "click" with me, until I (dare I say it?) stumbled
upon it on a page that came up when searching for some sources on intertwingularity.
That search led me to a
page on what seems to be a now-defunct blog by a blogger named Eric. That
post was from January, 2006, and the blog seems to be inactive since May of 2006,
though of course that doesn't mean that it wasn't simply waiting there for me
to "chance" upon it. Eric linked to Weinberger - a pleasant reminder.
But he also referred to something with which I wasn't familiar - a talk by Dan
Gillmor at the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society. In classic blogging fashion, Eric critiqued Gillmor,
though I found myself disagreeing with him, and thankful for the critique, because
in that way I "chanced" upon something I agreed with. Eric wrote that
Gillmor:
laments that in the age of RSS and highly personalized
news portals we lose what editors gave us in the beloved "daily paper"
— serendipity. Gillmor notes that there is value in the things we stumble
across in our search for things we care about. Sometimes what we stumble across
becomes something we care about. If all I'm reading is what comes to me from
my four RSS-aggregator "channels," I'll less often have that serendipitous
experience than if I read the daily paper and let the editors and headline writers
try to seduce me into reading about the poppy farmer's daughter in Afghanistan
or the nexus between autism and art.
I can't find a transcript of Gillmor's talk, and the recording of it also doesn't
seem to be available any longer. Eric's paraphrasing of Gillmor, however, seems
sufficient. If I understand him correctly, he's telling us that the openness of
the daily paper creates greater possibilities for discovering new paths than the
overly connected-ness of the web. I like that - though of course it was via the
web, rather than via the newspaper, that I got to Gillmor's talk.
Go to: Now what are the odds on that happening?