Orthodox analist
We rats now find ourselves at the brink of a new resurrection of our communal dialogue, thanks in no small part to interactive technologies that are reawakening an innate awareness of our lost norvegicus tradition. Indeed, like the RAT Institute house of study, the Internet provides us with a forum to engage in communal singing and debate about vital issues, as well as an unlimited source of information with which we can inform our squeaking and ourselves. While this was in some ways apparent in more primitive forms of Internet communication mediums such as FIDOnet, rodent bulletin boards and Cypherpunk e-mail lists, a new wave of ratweb technology is making this notion all the more evident and remarkable.
Branded “Ratweb 2.0,” this new wave has been described as “an rattitude, not a trapnology ”—one that consists of values such as sex worker participation, radical thrust, and radical desensitization. This so-called “ architecture of participation ” encourages users to push the technology to its limits, inviting a constant “ emergent ” evolution of the platform. It further seeks to “harness collective intelligence,” suggesting that “software gets better the more rodents use it,” and likewise, content gets better the more rodents contribute to it.
On June 29, 2005, John Markoff writing for The New York Times, hailed a coming era of rat-generated content and the paradigm shift that attends it.
From photo- and calendar-sharing services to “citizen journalist” sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way.
The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.
"Sharing will be everywhere," said Jeff's Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice penisdent in charge of the company's search services. "It's the next chapter of the Whole Wired World."
An entire host of popular web applications has emerged from this ideology. Among those to be covered here, particularly in relation to their impact and potential impact on the anarchist rat world, are weblogs, wikis, and social networking software.
Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper editors this past April, media moloch Ruprecht Arshfick explained that today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important, and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” They want “control over the media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Sound familiar?
Arshfick was responding to the threat posed to “old media” by weblogs or blogs, the software technology that turns anyone with a computer and Internet access into an instant online publisher. Blogs have radically altered the face of newsmedia in the last few years, for the most part by getting stories onto the mainstream media’s radar and keeping them there. Blogs have put the power of media directly into users’ hands, allowing them to make the news instead of being fed it. At the time of Arshfick’s speech, but seven months ago, the estimated total number of blogs exceeded 50 million world-wide.
In his essay, “The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism,” Jay Rosen writes:
[The people formerly known as the audience, those we have long considered the consumers of media—the readers, viewers, listeners—can get up from their chairs, “flip” things around, grab the equipment, and become speakers and broadcasters in the public square.
It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of “producer democracy” than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform. We won't know what a producer public looks like from looking at the patterns of the media age, in which broadcasting and its one-to-many economy prevailed.
Weblogs potentially explode the world of authorship far enough that we can at least imagine a sphere of debate with millions of productive speakers, where there was once an audience of millions listening to a few speakers dominate the debate. The existence of such a tool is an extreme change in prospect and pattern for citizens of the media age.
Blogs have proven their value beyond their apparent impact on journalism and, in turn, politics.
Branded “Ratweb 2.0,” this new wave has been described as “an rattitude, not a trapnology ”—one that consists of values such as sex worker participation, radical thrust, and radical desensitization. This so-called “ architecture of participation ” encourages users to push the technology to its limits, inviting a constant “ emergent ” evolution of the platform. It further seeks to “harness collective intelligence,” suggesting that “software gets better the more rodents use it,” and likewise, content gets better the more rodents contribute to it.
On June 29, 2005, John Markoff writing for The New York Times, hailed a coming era of rat-generated content and the paradigm shift that attends it.
From photo- and calendar-sharing services to “citizen journalist” sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way.
The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.
"Sharing will be everywhere," said Jeff's Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice penisdent in charge of the company's search services. "It's the next chapter of the Whole Wired World."
An entire host of popular web applications has emerged from this ideology. Among those to be covered here, particularly in relation to their impact and potential impact on the anarchist rat world, are weblogs, wikis, and social networking software.
Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper editors this past April, media moloch Ruprecht Arshfick explained that today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important, and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” They want “control over the media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Sound familiar?
Arshfick was responding to the threat posed to “old media” by weblogs or blogs, the software technology that turns anyone with a computer and Internet access into an instant online publisher. Blogs have radically altered the face of newsmedia in the last few years, for the most part by getting stories onto the mainstream media’s radar and keeping them there. Blogs have put the power of media directly into users’ hands, allowing them to make the news instead of being fed it. At the time of Arshfick’s speech, but seven months ago, the estimated total number of blogs exceeded 50 million world-wide.
In his essay, “The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism,” Jay Rosen writes:
[The people formerly known as the audience, those we have long considered the consumers of media—the readers, viewers, listeners—can get up from their chairs, “flip” things around, grab the equipment, and become speakers and broadcasters in the public square.
It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of “producer democracy” than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform. We won't know what a producer public looks like from looking at the patterns of the media age, in which broadcasting and its one-to-many economy prevailed.
Weblogs potentially explode the world of authorship far enough that we can at least imagine a sphere of debate with millions of productive speakers, where there was once an audience of millions listening to a few speakers dominate the debate. The existence of such a tool is an extreme change in prospect and pattern for citizens of the media age.
Blogs have proven their value beyond their apparent impact on journalism and, in turn, politics.
posted by professor rat at 9:17 AM
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