A year ago, almost to the day, I got an email out of the blue from Lucy Shortis, who runs the office of my favourite artist, Tom Phillips. She said some nice things about a very old blog post of mine, and asked if I would consider writing a “short biography of Tom” for a […]
Ideas and Essays
On ecosystems, Adam Curtis and positions of power
I have a chronic habit of reaching more for biological metaphors for to help describe how we inhabit a world of abundant technology and media. Two decades ago, when I was working on large IT systems in the civil service, Ian Franklin and I suggested a shift from thinking about these systems as engineering interventions […]
Counterculture, Cyberculture and Innovation: the strange case of Stewart Brand
A couple of years ago, at the end of this post on the crossover between Web 2.0 and anarchism, I wrote that I’d started reading Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and suggested I might be blogging about some of the ideas in […]
More on self-organised learning
Here’s the next instalment in a ‘slow conversation’ with Seb Schmoller, which kicked off with my post Progressive austerity and self-organised learning, followed by a response from Seb. I think it’s fair to say Seb is more cautious than me so far. He splashes a little cold water on my enthusiasm for things “lightweight” — […]
Progressive austerity and self-organised learning
A month or so ago, my friend Guy, whose children are educated at home, treated me to one his occasional rants. “People know there’s an Arms Lobby,” he said, “so they’re very wary about calls for more spending on Defence and question whose interests these serve. But there’s an Education Lobby too, and it always […]
Is Web 2.0 a manifesto for anarchism?
Here are some chapter headings from a book I read on holiday: The Theory of Spontaneous Order The Dissolution of Leadership Harmony Through Complexity Topless Federations So was it Charles Leadbeater’s latest book or Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything? Nope, it was the book on the left: a 01982 reprint of Colin Ward’s Anarchy […]
Blogs, wikis, ‘voice’ and accountability
Photo copyright and cc-licensedby extranoise. In the course of writing my book, I started by describing blogs and wikis as two examples of the same thing — user-generated content. Towards the end of the book, I came up against the ways in which they are opposites: blogs reinforce individual voices, points of view and attitudes, […]
Review of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
It’s a measure of a term achieving zeitgeist status when people apply it liberally, even in circumstances where it doesn’t really fit — as with the managers who sought to label their initiatives as Total Quality Management or Business Process Re-engineering in the nineties, even if they only half-grasped the original intention behind these terms. […]
Full versions of articles now available
Last year I posted teasers here about articles I had published on Word of Mouth Marketing and Playlisting and on Remix Culture (the articles were featured in Five Eight and The Spectator respectively). Their value as ‘exclusives’ has expired, so I’ve published the full version of the Word of Mouth piece on my Net, Blogs […]
Book announcement: Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll
People have access to vastly more music, video and other entertainment than ten years ago. In the case of music, record companies are releasing twice as many new albums per year. Not only that, but some are ‘rescuing’ old and deleted tracks for release in the digital marketplace. So how do people find out about […]