Mark Bernstein

When people write papers about New Media and The Web, they often cite Vannevar Bush's 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”. We had a 65th anniversary panel about the paper at Hypertext 2010, at which I was the designated heretic. My position is that Bush’s paper is essentially a popular science article. It gets some things right, some wrong. It’s cavalier about its sources – especially the very important work of Emanuel Goldberg, which Bush knew and which was entirely forgotten by everyone in the field for fifty years before Michael Buckland rediscovered it.

We can point to other precursors, too. H. G. Wells, for example, wrote The World Brain before the War and tried hard to fund a foundation that would manage an open-source microfilm encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. But the really astonishing prediction is not Bush’s but Murray Leinster’s 1946 short story, “A Logic Name Joe”…

http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul10/ALogicNamedJoe.html

The idea of an unbiased article is in my opinion just an illusion. In reality truth is a negotiation between different stakeholders and some form of settlement at the end where each side can somehow get away with.

I personally find the next posting of the author much more revealing [1]. It is a discussion on how much meaning one can find in a simple sentence such as "____ is a Jewish-American politician" all the way to the suggestion that some by "tagging all the Jews in Wikipedia dream of a time when those lists might be of service to the police."

Just goes to illustrate how much subjectivity can be infused into a few words that are in itself unquestionable facts.

[1] http://www.markbernstein.org/May13/WikipediaAndTheJews.html

They're second-class outlets. A blog author can say whatever they want; their posts are first-class elements in Google's corpus; the medium encourages stand-alone writing instead of meaningless squibs.

The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:

http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr0401/Whyblogcommentsarebad.html

The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.

It should be noted that the link is to a supplemental, providing running updates on the response to Mark's series of articles:

Infamous http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Infamous.html
Thoughtless http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Thoughtless.html
Careless http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Careless.html

As such, it will be hard to read, appearing like a rant when taken on its own. A better place to start will be with the above articles, which provide context for the Reckless post.