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• Small Pieces From 2002-08-13 •
Um, where is the post I posted here earlier today? Anyway, I thought I had psoted an advance notice, taken from Scott Rosenberg's weblog, of a Salon dual-review of two books, one of which is Small Pieces. But that post doesn't seem to be here. Maybe I fucked it up. But the article is up now, lead story on salon.com -- an excerpt:
But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and "network effect" growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors' eyes were transfixed by the business's convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became "advertisements for myself" for the masses. "Communities of interest" -- devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates -- formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid.
It's this story that's addressed by "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. "Bamboozled at the Revolution" is trade-magazine reporting; "Small Pieces" is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger's musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli's chronicles of boardroom chaos.