Ain’t been round since you know when…. Time for a holiday/birthday miscellany:

1. The HD broadcast of carols from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge on Christmas night was deeply moving. Here’s technology for you: Dolby Digital surround sound put me into the deep, detailed ambience of this magnificent 16th-century chapel, and the music was immersively wonderful; hi-def TV from a satellite dish made the candle flames as beautifully hypnotic as they were when I first visited the chapel in 2002.

It’s all about the technology. It’s not about the technology.

2. Last night’s episode of House, M.D. was extraordinary. The dialogue was razor-sharp and very, very quick. The typically exotic medical malady was clearly a device to enable larger questions of love and fidelity, questions that spread through the entire show in an artful and disturbing way. The show’s ongoing fascination with mammary glands was so over-the-top (sorry) that it began to seem not so much exploitative as ironic, though this continues to be the show’s least defensible obsession, in my view. And there was a crystalline little acting moment when we discover something about Cameron’s past–but more than that I should not say.

3. My kid brother, thoughtful as ever, got me Rob Jovanovic’s new book on Big Star. In it I read Peter Holsapple’s tribute to the college radio station that turned him on to Big Star. It was my college radio station: WFDD-FM, in Winston-Salem N.C., the NPR affiliate at Wake Forest University. I was an announcer on that station from late 1976 through May, 1979; I served as Student Station Manager during the 1977-78 academic year.

Holsapple specifically praises the “Deaconlight” late-night free-form shows, and while I have no idea if he ever heard mine (I did a ton of ’em and loved every minute), I am delighted to think that the station played a significant part in nurturing the fascination with Big Star that would come to fruition over the next three decades. I know I played my share of Big Star on Deaconlight: over the years, I probably played every bit of the first two albums twenty times. The book and DD’s great Deaconlight site (thanks, DD) have inspired me to dig through some of my old tapes to archive this bit of personal history before it–or I (it’s my birthday, after all)–crumble into dust. I just wish I’d been a better announcer at the time.

What to my wondering eyes should appear than this news from NORAD: Ringo Starr will help track Santa (or Father Christmas, as he’s known in the UK) once again this year.

Merry Christmas, Beatle Peatle everywhere. Happy Crimble, and a Merry Goo Year.

In the wake of Martha Burtis’ haunting blog on, among other things, the promise of online communication, I’ve followed some of the links in the trAce article Martha cites. I too am interested in Walter Ong’s work in orality, so you’ll understand that I was delighted to find a website called “Remembering Walter Ong.” Among its many treasures, the site includes both a full-length lecture by Father Ong and an interview in which he explains how he sees himself and his work.

To hear at last the voice of the man who thought and wrote so richly about the experience of orality is a very stirring thing indeed. My thanks to Sue Thomas, Martha B., and Jonathan Druy, who runs the “Remembering Walter Ong” website.

Interesting bit of synchronicity here: just a few days after my Wikipedia/Wikinews blog, there’s a story in Technology Review about Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the Wikipedia. Turns out Sanger is an epistemologist. A-ha!, as Spenser would say.

It’s an interesting article. The discussion of “nonbias” and the “revert wars” (what a noun!) reinforce my sense of Wikipedia’s basic philosophical underpinnings, further strengthened by the revelation (to me, anyway) that one of its prime architects is himself a professional philosopher. Yet even the trained philosopher seems to evade the assumptions behind his own creation. Early on, the article suggests that Sanger no longer doubts the possibility of certain knowledge. By the end, however, that possibility seems either rejected or bracketed:

To build a public encyclopedia, you don’t need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. “What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.”

Cheery and humane sentiments, but they beg the question. If one doesn’t have faith in the possibility of knowledge, why would it matter if human beings are able to work together or not? How would you even begin to define or assess “working together,” or “human” for that matter? And if human beings are able to work together to, say, poison the environment, or destroy entire civilizations with a few missiles, how can faith in the possibility of human cooperation be a foundational assumption, a fundamental necessity, an implicit ethical absolute?

From Denmark, no less. (I love the Internet.) It’s the first time I’ve seen Lessig speak. Noted with interest:

1. He’s a very effective public speaker–almost a preacher, really.

2. He’s carefully choreographed a series of mini-pull-quotes–think words?–for his PowerPoint (or whatever) accompaniment. The effect is theatrical as well as rhetorical. Sometimes it’s a little distracting. It’s never boring.

3. Think of the strange, counterintuitive thing this webcast represents: a freely disseminated videorecording that resides on a computer at the University of Southern Denmark, on the other side of the world from me, a video that I can summon and see on my desktop when I like. After all these years, it still seems a marvel.

4. And what is this thing that I see? Why, a sage on the stage! a lecturer! that thing that was supposed to be either a) dead or b) on death row! Yet such is the skill of the speaker, such is the interest of the content, such is the dramatic presence of the event, that it’s plain that the lecture per se need not engender passivity or promulgate repressive pedagogy. It may even foment critical consciousness. Paolo Friere has nothing to fear, here.

Viva voce!

Bryan Alexander blogs on an interesting Technology Review piece concerning Microsoft and Google. There’s a conceptually rich dichotomy here, especially as it becomes clear that issues of indexing and retrieval–essentially, librarianship–will be at the cutting edge of networked computing for some time.

A colleague at my university alerts me to the “BOB” awards just announced by Deutsche Welle, an organization he describes as roughly similar to the BBC World Service. Here are the categories (quoted from the site, with descriptions where needed). The site notes that prizes were awarded “by an international team of blog experts.”

BEST BLOG
Absolutely everything about the future winner of this category should be perfect – it should tackle poignant issues, have a great design and even better writing.
BEST SUBJECT
In the category of “Best Subject,” Weblogs will be honored that deal with a single issue and provide excellent analysis, original information or service.
BEST DESIGN
In this category, we will be rewarding sites with clearly structured, functional and topically suited design. The blog should also be aesthetically pleasing, leaving no desire unfilled.
BEST BLOG INNOVATION
The award for most-innovative Weblog is intended for excellent and helpful portals, technologies, software and other innovations that foster the growth and advancement of the blogger community.
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/ARABIC
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/CHINESE
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/ENGLISH
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/GERMAN

I’ve looked at only a few of the winners, but already it’s been fascinating to get an international perspective on the blogosphere.

As an old DJ from way back (thirteen years on the air, last broadcast in Feb. 1989, and yes I still miss it), I’m fascinated by the podcasting phenomenon. It’s sometimes called “Tivo for radio,” but that only captures the selective-recording and multiple-channels aspects. I’m more interested in the fact that everyone can now be his or her own radio station. Time to dust off the tonsils and see if I still have the “radio voice” I had fifteen years ago. I’m confident I still have the face for radio.

Here’s a piece on podcasting from the Boston Globe, and here’s the Washington Post iPod news roundup (registration required) that led me to the BG piece.

Remember when you used to be able to get to the end of the Internet?

Good pull quote from the “What questions are no longer asked, and why?” question:

What if we don’t know how to think about the tools we are so skilled at creating? What if we could learn?

Perhaps knowing how to think about technology is a skill we will have to teach ourselves the way we taught ourselves previous new ways of thinking such as mathematics, logic, and science.

–Howard Rheingold

Fair warning and full disclosure: the work-in-progress nature of this blog is even more, well, “in progress” in what follows. I just couldn’t help it, and isn’t that what blogs are for?

I continue to find some of the meta-content on Wikipedia of intense interest. Wikipedia is a collaborative public information site. Its wiki design reflects its commitment to the idea of consensus, not necessarily at the level of every specific piece of information, but certainly at an epistemological level, and also (I’d say necessarily) at an ethical level. That is to say, the Wikipedia implicitly argues for the existence of external reality, even if questions about the conditions, reliability, and verifiability of our access to that reality are more-or-less bracketed, as they typically are in this discourse. Wikipedia also implicitly argues for the human ability to transcend ideology, and against the Foucaultian idea that discourse is nothing more (and nothing less) than the circulation of power. While I wouldn’t say that Wikipedia is entirely a child of the Enlightenment, I would say that it is faithful to many of the items in that creed.

It’s the latter argument that fascinates me today, particularly because it’s counterintuitive in this instance. At Wikipedia, authors are not named. The effort is intensely collaborative. The entire site seems to reflect exactly the kind of paradigms that inform some strands of postmodern thought, especially concerning the Internet. And yet … the Wikipedia has just launched a new project called “Wikinews.” Launched in November, 2004 and still in its beta version, Wikinews’ mission (ah, another agency word, even if the agent or agents go unnamed) “is to create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events.”

Now things get even more interesting. The Wikinews article on Rachelle Waterman, the blogger who is now charged by police with the murder of her mother, occupies a special category called “Articles Under Review,” and it features this disclaimer:

This article is currently under review.

For readers: This article is currently subject to change or removal, and we make no guarantee whatsoever for its content. You may want to wait for the final published version before citing it as a source.

For editors & writers: Freely edit the article in accordance with content and style guides. During article review, please provide detailed edit summaries and/or comments about the quality, neutrality, accuracy, legality, writing, and comprehensiveness of the article. If the article passes review, replace the {{review|…}} tag with a {{reviewed}} (at bottom). If after 7 days it does not pass review, use {{reviewfailed}} tag instead.

What’s interesting here is that “currently subject to change or removal, and we make no guarantee whatsoever for its content” would seem on the face of it to apply to every single Wikipedia article and also to Wikinews, which I would argue is a current-events version of Wikipedia. Aren’t constant change and no guarantees the very conditions of postmodernity? Perhaps … not … quite. This “special case” category and others like it, such as “protected” or “needs additions” or “needs cleanup” (e.g. the Wikipedia entry on the historicity of Jesus), in my view reveal the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underlie the entire site. (I’d develop this notion here if I had time right now, which I don’t.)

The really interesting tidbit, however, is the article-under-review disclaimer’s link to the “neutrality” article. Clearly the Wikipedia/Wikinews administrators (even democracy has administrators, it seems–and I’m not objecting) believe that neutrality is not only possible but important. That’s not to say that anyone can be completely neutral. “Completely neutral” is a straw man, in my experience, attractive to those who want to mount pure Foucaultian arguments or to hide their own primary and debatable assumptions behind narratives of inevitability. The question, instead, is whether any kind of neutrality is possible. Can one be fair? Can the Wikinews article on Rachelle Waterman be written to explore points of view more than to argue for one point of view over the other? If not, then why review it at all? If so, then review becomes a necessary step in the process. Not total objectivity, then, but not trapped in the prison of the self.

My point is that the Wikipedia implicitly rejects the belief that we are all “trapped in the prison of the self,” and that it has to reject that belief because otherwise the idea of the Wikipedia project as it is currently enacted at Wikipedia.org is absurd. I would also argue that radical philosophies of solipsism or their interesting variants in philosophies of pragmatism make the very idea of ethics an absurdity, but that’s material for another blog.

Yet my own blog entry on this topic must end with the humble recognition of a striking fact: as of this writing, the “neutrality” link in the Wikinews “article under review” disclaimer leads to an article that has not yet been written.