Reflections

This is what I’m talking about when I say that the terminology is way over my head sometimes. Our guest speaker said “We don’t do any grey hat or black hat” and quite a few people nodded. While people were testing the flexibility of their necks I had to look it up. Same with astroturfing and sock-puppeting. Self-actualizing and coalescing. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on k…, oh, nevermind. One other thing that caught my eye was the whole Barbie thing. Clearly the capacity to be updated and to fly off in a thousand different directions is one of the great strengths of things like Wikipedia and it was great to hear Benkler talk about it once again. Back when I was a kid we had this big, thick Sopena encyclopedias on the bookshelves. And if it wasn’t there, we were pretty screwed when it came to researching for our homework. Now Wikipedia has articles and articles about things you couldn’t and probably wouldn’t find on a traditional, tangible encyclopedia. And it’s not just the Barbie/Klaus Barbie thing. Examples abound not just of that but of how up-to-date Wikipedia can be. For instance, the NFL’s fining of Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams appeared a day or so after it happened on Wikipedia’s Adams article. One of the things I’ve always loved about living in this country is that if you seek you will find. That applies to everything: good or bad, there’s at least one of it in these US of A. What brought this to mind was the fact that now the seven dwarfs (dwarves?) have their own facebook pages. So if you’re a Disneyaholic (much like the one I married) you will find a page exclusively dedicated to 1/8th of Disney’s oldest full-length feature film (it’s actually 1/12th if you count the queen, the prince and the huntsman, but I digress). At the same time, the very existence of these pages could be coiunted as a sign of American decadence, much like George Carlin denounced the waste of television airtime on bulletins about Mickey Mouse’s birthday, which incidentally is Nov. 18)

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