Our Digital Persons: Blogs and Google

This weeks readings were Anna Notaro’s “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?” and Cory Doctorow’s Google fiction “Scroogled.”

In “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?” Anna Notaro suggests during this period of never-ending technological advances and the expansiveness of Internet, that we are entering a time where the blogosphere is not just an alternative but, instead, is the new public sphere. Notaro reminds us, however, that we are often clouded by a naïve excitement in the hope that the internet will be an ideal agent for social change and “true” democracy, but we must wait to see if it will live up to its potential.

So how do blogs play a key role in this idea of public discourse, professionalism, and political communication?

Navigating Virtual Cities

The Greek poet Simonides was famous for building memory-places: stories turned into architecture, the original information spaces. Doug Engelbart expanded upon this idea of information-space and brought us the interface: a translator of the zeros and ones of computer language into the words, concepts, images, and associations of human language. Interface maps the virtual cities of the 21st century.