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    Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube

    An article in today’s SF Gate caught my eye. It’s title included the word “Webocracy,” so I knew right away that it must have to do with web 2.0, Silicon Valley, and the like. Like the term “folksonomy,” “webocracy” captures the new in something old. In this case, democracy done online, retooled and perhaps even improved. Folksonomy, similarly, refers to…

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    Pay Attention to YouTube!

    I don’t normally post the same thing to two of my blogs, but this one’s an exception. This one also differs in one respect. It’s got an extra period in it. See if you can find it. Just kidding. It’s the same. I’m on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube’s acquisition to Google still in…

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    North Korea: Sticks and Stones may brreak…

    Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me… So it’s happened. The event our administration has hoped to head off, to discourage and deter, happened anyways. Asian security policy ought now be chronicled with “before test” and “after test.” For how can Japan and Australia now maintain non-nuclear military postures? What do the South Koreans…

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    My problem with the Law…

    People who know me know that I live by my own principles. I have a constitutional (!) allergy to rules, as well as a generalized condition of avoidance (if not out-right hostility) to dogmatic principles. The law falls under this rubric. But so too do many things opposed to law. Dogmatic violence (“insurgents” in Iraq), dogmatic freedom (US occupation of…

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    Rajeev Samant at Stanford

    My friend and old dorm-mate Rajeev Samant has been flown in, business class and not the class that sits on top of the airplane, to speak to the incoming freshman at Stanford this year. That’s 1700 kids at Stanford’s MemAud. I remember that morning back in 1984, President Donald Kennedy advising us to Question Authority. Raj was one of the…

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    Difference and repetition

    In lieu of an actual post (I have things cooking but they’re not yet ready), I’m just going to post one of my favorite passages from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: “But perhaps the majority of philosophers had subordinated difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous: they had introduced difference…