bibliomeme I
Bloggers gravitate towards bloggers who thinking along the same lines. After literally years of checking out a broad spectrum of blogs on science, creativity and the arts, I suddenly realised one day it was the British Bloggers who were thinking and writing in a way I recognised and felt comfortable with: not exclusively, but as a general rule. I decided to put UK blogs on norfolkskies blogroll, as I found them, in order demonstrate to myself this 'two countries separated by a common language' {the majority of blogger being American} idea was true. Though not keeping the blogroll regularly updated, I do tend to stick to reading UK blogs for this reason.
An example: Brain Micklewait tends to post photographs of architectural features in London. But his comments are, to me, quintessentially British or, shall we say, English. No American would say the same things about photographs he had taken in London. Obviously? There is comfort to be obtained from reading someone who comes from the same cultural milieu. And from feeling one can contribute meaningfully to this meme pool, which is not so easy for me with foreign blogs. True, not a unique observation, just something I realised rather late.
Brian's site did not load today, but in Googling for him I came across One Man and his Blog, who in his two sentances seems British. The JPEGs and the blogroll give it away. Maybe he got the pic idea from Brian. It is not difficult to understand why 'pic & comment ' has become popular. Anyway, the blog is the perfect home for this method of communication!
Random Acts of Reality is the blog of a paramedic working in London. Though not, so far, having found a paramedic blogging from downtown Manhatten to compare with, it is clear, me being English, that he writes in an unmistakeably English way about what he sees and does.
The money quote (a phrase I don't like but it's succinct) :
Human endeavour is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community. A small group can innovate rapidly and efficiently, but this produces a subculture whose concepts are not understood by others.
Coordinating actions across a large group, however, is painfully slow and takes an enormous amount of communication. The world works across the spectrum between these extremes, with a tendency to start small-from the personal idea-and move toward a wider understanding over time.
An essential process is the joining together of subcultures when a wider common language is needed. Often two groups independently develop very similar concepts, and describing the relation between them brings great benefits. Like a Finnish-English dictionary, or a weights-and-measures conversion table, the relations allow communication and collaboration even when the commonality of concept has not (yet) led to a commonality of terms.
Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila [2001] discussing the Sematic Web.
People have an instinct for conglomerating ( coagulating!?) - with people who think - or they think think - like them. They might to start with spread out very wide on the web but eventually they narrow down to a core from which they can they expand out from.
...
Sandra
with with her dislay off bookshelves has done what I though of doing long ago, but dare not because of the jumble of books in what can charitably described as a rough order. Perhaps frightened this might be extrapolated to the state of my mind?
The meme is The Sheila variations. Make sure to read the comments to both posts.
posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:40 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home