{"id":321,"date":"2003-05-08T19:34:46","date_gmt":"2003-05-08T23:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2003\/05\/08\/fad-networks\/"},"modified":"2003-05-08T19:34:46","modified_gmt":"2003-05-08T23:34:46","slug":"fad-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2003\/05\/08\/fad-networks\/","title":{"rendered":"Fad Networks"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Certain fads arrive and develop networks in a cluster of media consolidation<\/STRONG>, where gossip, local pundits, and world news sources collaborate unconsciously to broadcast a unified message of change, improvement, novelty.  Our society expects <\/EM>technology and progress to deliver improvements week to week, so it is easy for a promising fad to draw out a ritual excess of praise<\/STRONG> and hopeful predictions <\/STRONG>from all sides (though individual companies <\/EM>can lose out through envious nitpicking).<\/P>
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Air conditioning, radio, telephones, television, trains.  Computers, email, IM, mobile phones, outliners.  Some things truly settle into the fabric of reality; others decay from novelty into underuse — how poorly do we use our radiowaves and outliners today? — as the promise<\/STRONG> of novel advancement moves to a future target<\/STRONG>.<\/P>
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Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for someone living in the 1950s, dreaming of the future, to imagine our telephones, radios, televisions, and computers intertwined<\/STRONG>?  At the very least, one would expect most wealthy technologists to have these combined in a standard elegant way. But life plays funny tricks, and the present isn’t like that at all<\/EM>.<\/P>
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Enter blogging<\/STRONG>.  There are too many glorious predictions of its use and pending universality <\/STRONG>to link to the most important ones in a single sentence (I’ll try to update this with a set of links<\/U> later).  Similar predictions arose when webpage design and free webhosting arose, so a consideration of the web-design fad seems appropriate.  For example, here’s a Harvard Law debate about the novel impact of blogging on elections<\/A>.<\/P>
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In what ways did web design networks peak<\/STRONG> when it was a big deal to have a website, and in what ways are they growing stronger now that having one (as a person, as an org) is often taken for granted?  Where are the new metrics<\/STRONG>?  The analyses of how webpage creation and self-publishing have already achieved what people claim blogging will produce?  In what ways do the persisting fights <\/STRONG>among web-publishing software inform us about the future of blogging software development? [AOL apparently has hundreds of people working on its upcoming blogging component…]  How will these kinds of expression combine once blogs, too, are a fad of the past<\/STRONG>?  <\/FONT><\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
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How will the cliques <\/STRONG>of yesteryear’s web migrate to or be parallelled in a web where the default homepage is a blog?  It would be nice to think that the cleverest social scientists and network-builders were thinking about this and using these questions to guide future tool development.  What will happen once blogs, too, are the future dreams of the past? <\/P>
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As you choose your own blogging software<\/STRONG>, and your sphere <\/STRONG>of fellow-bloggers, and begin to develop a fixed collection of {people you like and people like you}, let me know what you think, and how your ideas change and solidify.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Certain fads arrive and develop networks in a cluster of media consolidation, where gossip, local pundits, and world news sources collaborate unconsciously to broadcast a unified message of change, improvement, novelty.  Our society expects technology and progress to deliver improvements week to week, so it is easy for a promising fad to draw out a ritual excess […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indescribable"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}