Cambridge University fellow Daniel Williams asserted that in a time when people choose beliefs and then look for rationalizations to support them, a marketplace for rationalizations emerges, “a social structure in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs.”93

Consider the flow of a story today. The net turns the narrative form inside-out as web sites, blogs, and social-media feeds start in the middle, with the latest in tales and conversations on top of streams that may never end, whose beginnings cannot necessarily be found. Perhaps that is a truer representation of reality: life as messy process

To extend McLuhan’s already stretched bodily metaphors, now that all may speak, we have moved from the age of the ear (orality) to the eye (text) and now to the mouth (networked discourse). Our challenge is to bring our abilities together in coherent conversation, informed by what we hear and ask together. For if all speak and none listen, there is

It is necessarily elitist in description: dismissive, paternalistic, insulting, sometimes racist. The mass, said Carey, “is a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible. We cannot see the mass. Crowds can be seen; but the mass is the crowd in its metaphysical aspect—the sum of all possible crowds.… It turns other people into a conglomerate. It

“Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it

David Weinberger, the smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that connects everyone and their knowledge.3

I propose to shift our focus away from the conversation we do not want to the conversation we do want, a conversation that finally includes those who had been excluded from mass media’s version of public discourse.

I say that if the news needs a user’s manual, then the news needs repair.

Print, its culture and economy, gave birth to the concept of content: that writing, ideas, and creativity are commodities to fill a product, a publication, which can be sold. Print led us to the notion of creativity as asset, to the law of copyright and the doctrine of intellectual property, building a fence around the commons that was