John Palfrey

A fun suggestion that the English Department here offer a class a new tech-based literature course.

A sad day.  George Will, curiously enough, may have captured my feelings best in his Washington Post essay this morning.  Among other insights, Will wrote of Sen. Moynihan: “His was the most penetrating political intellect to come from New York since Alexander Hamilton, who, like Moynihan, saw over the horizon of his time, anticipating the evolving possibilities and problems of a consolidated, urbanized, industrial nation.”

Worries might be too strong a word.  Some things that I wonder about with Weblogs: 1) Is more speech necessarily better (think also about what Habermas, Sunstein, Michelman et al. have said about similar questions)? 2) Is more speech of the sort that blogs enables necessarily better? 3) Can people who use the Net really sort through all this information that we’re putting out there? 4) Are lots of people who publish blogs just wasting their time, which could better be spent on more productive activities of various sorts? 5) Is there really a material jump forward with these technologies over things like slashdot, usenet, other forms of news aggregation, or is this just a slightly better form of stuff we’ve had before — and if so, what does that material jump forward enable? 6) What are historians going to do with *so much* information to sift through? 7) Can we really make sense of what’s happening on a Net that’s truly global and unitary, if such a thing were to emerge, if speech is so fragmented with so many publishers (i.e., does this emerging architecture make sense?)?