{"id":127,"date":"2003-12-31T11:20:04","date_gmt":"2003-12-31T15:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/12\/31\/speaking-of-pregnant-pre-revolutiona"},"modified":"2012-05-04T00:06:22","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T04:06:22","slug":"speaking-of-pregnant-pre-revolutionary-pauses-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/12\/31\/speaking-of-pregnant-pre-revolutionary-pauses-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of pregnant, pre-revolutionary pauses…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

      It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  <\/p>\n

    
\nIt was an era of propaganda, it was the age of information.  It
\nwas the season of Google in the Republic of Rush; a time of sudden free
\naccess to the wisdom of the world and of unrepentant OxyContin rant on
\nthe radio.  <\/p>\n

     It was the sleepless
\nsummer of Howard the Instigator, the avenging autumn of Arnold the
\nTerminator.  <\/p>\n

     It was the season of www and of dubya, dubya, dubya.  <\/p>\n

     It was the high noon of NPR; it was the rising moon of iPods and the mp3.  <\/p>\n

     It was a time to read Ha’aretz and Al Ahram, the New York Times and The Onion, all online.  <\/p>\n

    
\nIt was a moment when Mickey Mouse, age 76, was still a Disney slave, a
\ntime when many other squeaky new voices were noisy and free: Daily Kos
\nand Atrios, Billmon and Instapundit, Doc Searls and Ed Cone, Tacitus
\nand Joi Ito.  <\/p>\n

     It was a time when “the media” seemed tired and only the bloggers were fresh.<\/p>\n

     We live at the end of 2003 with more astonishments and revaluations than we can keep track of. <\/p>\n

    
\nHoward Dean Rising is no more wondrous, really, than John Kerry
\nDisappearing: the “warrior liberal” and short-odds pick for the
\nDemocratic nomination now running behind Carol Mosely Braun and Al
\nSharpton in the Harris poll.  <\/p>\n

     It is a season of economic recovery, we’re told, and of permanent emergency.  <\/p>\n

    
\nIt’s been a month of official “We’ve Got Him” triumphalism coming out
\nof Iraq, bumping into official notices of an Orange Alert across
\nAmerica.  <\/p>\n

     The Christmas season
\nfad has been to fault heretical Howard for observing that we’re no
\nsafer with Saddam in hand; a Christmas season in which the bellicose
\nBerlusconi in Italy huddled with the Vatican around the risk of a
\nhijacked-airliner assault on St. Peter’s in Rome.<\/p>\n

    
\nOn March 18 of this year, I wrote to the Harvard Law School’s new
\nBerkman Fellow, Dave Winer: “Yesterday I couldn’t spell blog.
\n Tomorrow I want to be one!  Very very eager to meet
\nyou.”  <\/p>\n

     The man, then his Manila
\nblogging software, and for nine months his Thursday night blogging
\nseminar were encounters that shift one’s perspective fundamentally and,
\ndespite everything, hopefully.  <\/p>\n

    
\nIt took me months to learn, then forget, all those coded capital
\nletters: XML, HTML, RSS and such; to handle them as instruments
\nmarshalled in the blogosphere just in time to rescue the American
\nprivilege of democratic speech.  <\/p>\n

    
\nDave Winer pushed me to try audio-blogging and to start by interviewing
\nhim.  Bob Doyle at skyBuilders.com showed me how to edit a
\nminidisc recording into an mp3 file, and to post it on the Web. 
\nBlogging with sound, it dawned on me, could be talk radio on steroids:
\nfree, independent, global, instant, anti-commercial, substantive,
\nserious work and play.<\/p>\n

     To Dave and Bob
\nand to the cheerful adventurers in the Berkman Center where I write, no
\nend of thanks.  To the several score of interview subjects who
\nhave plunged with me in this experiment, thanks and admiration. 
\nAnd to the generous readers and listeners out there, more of the
\nsame.  In a dire time, it feels like a fresh and promising start
\nin a new direction.<\/p>\n

     Blogging is a very
\nAmerican thing, as Dave likes to say.  It might not seem so
\nstrange to our 19th Century champions of expressive democracy, like
\nRalph Waldo Emerson and his friend Walt Whitman, for example.<\/font> <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/font><\/font>
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

      <\/span>“Whitman’s
\nideal of America,” writes the poet Carl Dennis, “is a country held
\ntogether not by law or custom but by a network of imaginative filaments
\nthrown out by autonomous individuals who want to include as many people
\nas they can in their own acts of self-definition.” 
<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

     Read that again, please.  It is precisely the bloggers’ vision. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span> 
\n   In blog space I meet the spirit of Amber in another
\ndimension.   “Amber” (not her real name) was our favorite caller
\nin talk radio: learned, funny, lightning-quick, in call-in combat fully
\nthe equal of guests as facile as Camille Paglia, William F. Buckley,
\nWilliam Safire and Gore Vidal.  Amber, I discovered, was
\nthirty-ish, high-school educated, a Caribbean orphan, not quite legal
\nin this country, poor and passionate about everything.  In awe I
\nasked her once: how does she know so much about the world?  “I
\nwatch all the network news programs,” she said, “and know that they’re
\nwrong about everything.  None of them know my neighborhood.”<\/p>\n

    
\nAmber became my oracle of the other world that lives in our
\nmidst.  She embodies some of the lessons I learned in radio, my
\nfirst two-way medium after years with the New York Times and public
\ntelevision.  Lesson #1:  the country observes media more
\nastutely than media observe the country.  Lesson #2:  that
\nthe country is hipper, flipper, more constructive, more democratic,
\nmore articulate than the one-way media ever deign to acknowledge. 
\nThere is nobody quite like Amber in the blogosphere, but there are
\ninnumerable gifted variations on the outspoken theme.  <\/p>\n

    
\nNext year, by the way, Amber will have her own blog.  When we
\nspoke the other day, Amber said she is hoping George W. Bush gets
\nreelected so that he, not the Democrats, will have to clean up the mess
\nhe has made.  I said: “Amber, four more years of W. and this
\ncountry could be unrecognizable.”  <\/p>\n

     She said: “Chris, it is unrecognizable.” <\/p>\n

    
\nI don’t believe Amber’s last line.  Not quite yet anyway. 
\nThe rarest, most precious thing about this Internet moment, this
\nBlogging Era, is that in a revolutionary crisis we actually have a
\nrevolutionary vision to meet it.  The power of the web is not in
\nits hardware or its software.  It will never be reducible to
\n“wires and lights in a box,” as Edward R. Murrow foresaw about
\ntelevision. 
    
    
\nOn the contrary, the power of the web is that it models a complexity of
\nsocial networks that we would love even if we didn’t need them so
\nacutely.  <\/p>\n

     When George W. Bush’s
\nlong 15 minutes are finally over, when the scary American spasm
\nof  post-9\/11 neo-pseudo-imperialism subsides, the Internet will
\nbe the indispensable vehicle for getting the world where it had to go
\nanyway.<\/p>\n

      At the level of
\nindividuals, as blogging now demonstrates, the Internet can lift the
\nsuffocating burden of “mass” media off the expressive ambition that is
\nborn in each and all of us.  At the national level–as in Iran’s
\nreform movement, in South Korea, in the Dean campaign–free Internet
\nconspiracy can topple holy hierarchies of corruption and other bad
\nhabits.  Globally, the Internet is the main avenue and new model
\nof instant interactivity across borders of every kind.  The way is
\nopen, easy of access, inherently anti-imperial, as individual and
\nintimate as it needs to be, and also a public resource for mobilization
\non a staggering international agenda.<\/p>\n

    
\nWith a motley assortment of people I’ve interviewed–Scott Heiferman,
\nDick Morris, David Weinberger notable among them–I have come to
\nbelieve that this long-awaited Internet transformation is now
\nunder-hyped in the general marketplace of ideas.  The Web will be
\nmuch more important than television or even the telephone, more
\nconsequential than Gutenberg’s movable type.  It is not as big as,
\nsay, the first crawl of species out of the primeval ooze onto dry
\nland.  It might be as big as the development of spoken language.<\/p>\n

    
\nAmong the things I hope for in 2004 is more consideration of the
\ngrandest imaginable (including spiritual) dimensions of this transition.<\/p>\n

    
\nPerhaps because I fed long ago on the Jesuit paleontologist,
\nevolutionist and speculative theologian Teilhard de Chardin, I return
\nto him now for nourishment, imaginative scope and, yes, a kind of
\nprophecy.  In the 1930s, between the World Wars, Teilhard first
\nobserved and felt a grand coalescence underway, a stage of evolution,
\nthe foundation (not least) of Marshall McLuhan’s pop phrases in the
\n1960s about the global “electric culture” and the “global
\nvillage.”  <\/p>\n

     Teilhard coined the
\nterm “noosphere” to stand for a new “thinking orbit” around the world,
\na membrane of mind that was virtually biological, an incandescent glow
\nof shared consciousness.  As humanity builds the noosphere, and as
\nwe become aware of our group mind, Teilhard wrote, “we have the
\nbeginning of a new age.  The earth gets a new skin.  Better
\nstill, it finds its soul.”<\/p>\n

     We need more fresh writing about the Internet at that level of ecstasy.<\/p>\n

     
\nSpeaking of ecstasy: still and always I hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, first
\nand best among American public thinkers, affirming us bloggers: 
\n“Live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind,” Emerson wrote (in
\n1837).  “For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destrying
\nslavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime
\nthoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to
\nbe heard.”<\/p>\n

     And as for the presidential
\ncampaign in the year to come, and the Internet’s real debut in it,
\nEmerson again has the gravest warning and the most consoling
\naffirmation I know–all tucked into the conclusion of his essay (1850)
\non “Montaigne; Or, The Skeptic”:<\/p>\n

    
\n“Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society
\nseems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into
\nthe hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is
\nchanged, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet,
\ngeneral aims are somehow answered.  We see, now, events forced on,
\nwhich seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages.  But the
\nworld-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown
\nhim.  He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history,
\nheaven seems to affect low and poor means.  Through the years and
\nthe centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and
\nbeneficent tendency irresistibly streams.”<\/p>\n

    
\nSo here is a cheerful New Year’s Eve bet on the world-spirit and on the
\nInternet as its closest approximation in plain sight.  <\/p>\n

     Happy 2004, everybody.  It is going to be a Big One!
<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.       It was an era of propaganda, it was the age of information.  It was the season of Google in the Republic of Rush; a time of sudden free access to the wisdom of the world and of unrepentant OxyContin rant on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1340,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}