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Sunday, 17 June 2007 |
Can you handle blogging your heart out never to be heard beyond a tiny audience? I guess it depends on your intentions. For example when a 22-year-old college student can get Iman, catwalk model and David Bowie's wife, to wear shoes in response to a blog post, small or large audience, perhaps it has all gone too far.
But unless you fear being dragged to the army barracks to discuss your blogs, the academic world is awash with blogomania, whether it is "blended learning" in Prague, a newly launched blogosphere in South Africa or academic blogging for Godot in Calcutta. And as usual on this still rolling rollercoaster it's all change all around.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks with Wired magazine about how "wiki is not paper" and how the fragmentation of wiki knowledge bases has started: "My favorite example is the violinist Yitzhak Perlman. Well the Wikipedia biography is quite comprehensive. It's very good. It tells all about his history, the awards he has won, all about his career playing the violin, but somehow fails to omit the time he came on Sesame Street. But that's in the Muppets Wiki. In fact it's the only thing in the Muppets Wiki about him. It says Yitzhak Perlman and it says 'famous violinist' and 'he came on Sesame Street. Here's a picture of him. And here's what he did when he came on the show.' And that's all they care about because well, they are not a general-interest encyclopedia. They are the Muppets people."
With researchers predicting half the world's 6500 languages could be extinct by the end of the century, debate has emerged on the impact of digital media on this phenomena. Will the linguistic plane flatten because we all want to communicate in the network and translation technologies are proving just too slow? Or has the Internet arrived just in time to store, encourage and develop languages of all forms and types? Ubu.com advices that we take a moment to contemplate this while listening to Bernard Heidsieck's 1974 sound poem Vaduz (mp3), in which countries and cultures form a series of concentric circles around the capital of little Lichtenstein.
Another option for a comforting break amidst the busy physical, digital and vocal space that is 21st century media is confirmation of what we always knew all along. |
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Academic Blogging 
