Sixian

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless,... See more

To paraphrase René Girard: we set out in search of the one thing we think we truly want, which we believe must be hidden under the one rock that is too heavy for us to lift. If we get something that we wanted, we believe we must have wanted the wrong thing. We go in search of a new model.

Instead, like a lathe moving back and forth to cut a spiral groove, we will continue to oscillate between believing and disbelieving the promises of technology, leaving behind an everchanging history of communication.

While finishing the book, I wrote to a novelist friend and asked him whether I sounded naïve in my approach. Of course you do, he said, and that’s the only way to write anything in a dying world. In fact, to write any book is an act of practically fanatic devotion, he said, because to write a book is to insist on the possibility of a future in... See more

Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces are going to be a big part of the ongoing marketplace revolution.  They make it manageable for small vendors to sell into S&P 500 customers that are normally out of reach and make it easier for enterprises to work with outside vendors to get the latest business products and services without having to bring them... See more

A simple interaction with a stranger at a cocktail party who doesn’t reciprocate our handshake can leave us sour all night. We may even respond with aggression when we are introduced to that person via email a week or two later.

In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of... See more

This idea of relativity is what is often left out of the narrative that the internet has broken our relationship to “natural time.” It is presumed that if we could synchronize a perfect harmony between inner and outer time, we would rediscover a sense of belonging to the planet and to each other. We are haunted by the specter of an innate, perfect... See more

Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.Who doesn’t care for care? Yet care, like maintenance, is easily romanticized. Historian Michelle Murphy argues that the “politics of care” promoted by 1970s feminists were “conditioned by... See more