sardonick

Tonight marks the end of an entirely filled weekend, and really all I want to do is soak my brain in a big bucket of ice. Much more intellectual stimulation than I usually get in such a short amount of time. The cause of all this was a conference workshop on Social Software in the Academy. Dynamic people, personalities, theories… It’s at this point of mental exhaustion and computer-use-oversatiatedness that I want to turn off electronic screens and curl up in a comfy chair by a fire and read poetry alone… but I also know that, in reminiscing, it’s always these points that I most regret not capturing and summing up.

So, a short flow of consciousness stream of thoughts and subjects, to capture what I can and hopefully prompt more organized reflection later:

• social software turning the world into Small Town, where grassroots reputation matters again, more than big top-down messages the media distributes
• social software as a watershed technology that changes academics in a way that is COMPLETELY different than any technology-wrought change that even the tenured-generation professors have seen (this includes video, etc)
• and what makes this difference is the empowerment of a wide range (intergenerational, different walks of life, even, dare we say, outside of academia) of people
• questions about the future of academia because of this changing: will it shift and adapt and adopt, or will it become a hollow shell that has lost its prior authority and societal function?
• current academic reputation is maintained on a “publish or perish” meritocracy, with publishing filtered by a longstanding tradition of peer review in controlled journals. blogging allows the everyday man (or the everyday professor) to be a wide-reaching mouthpiece, allows the possibility of peer-review-by-hoi-polloi-many instead of peer-reveiw-by-few-on-the-paper-acceptance-committee
• change in paradigm as we relate to information: before it was the scent of information we would try to follow, now it’s the stench of information we’re overwhelmed with
• psychological patterns honed in the old scarcity of information world that lead to harmful/self-destructive patterns in the new world of information (book-hoarding, infornography, obsessive bookmarking, …)
• future of intellectual property in a world where content and meta-content is easy to create (do people always have the right to create metacontent? or does it ever infringe on the “rights” of the primary content creators? and should those primary content creators even have exclusive rights to ideas?)
• when content is housed by universities (e.g. campus-wide blogs) does the student or the university own the student-generated intellectual property
• what role will new social technology play in the teaching world (when are blogs/wikis the right tool for the job, when are they not?
• when professors can establish authority by means of blogs instead of the traditional paper publishing machine, what happens when competent authorities emerge who are outside academia (e.g. Thomas Vander Wal), how do they fit in to the picture
• how are those extra-academic authorities dealt with in attributions and citations?
• how are blogs and wikis (changing, maleable, created by MASSIVELY large groups or created by anonymous groups) to be attributed and cited in the academic publishing machine?
• and lastly (perhaps most importantly?) when will we get RSS readers that don’t suck?

more on any (all? none?) of these later. each sentence in here deserves at least a half day of mulling over. This will keep me busy with thought-fodder (heh like i’m ever at a loss for that) for…hmmm… half of the summer? that’s conservative.

p.s. Micro-bounty-note-to-self: I owe Leonard a dinner at Chanos if he ever codes the personal lifetime web cache that never forgets the content of a site you visit. This will be a powerful punch combo when paired with ubiquitous desktop searching (beagle, spotlight, google desktop search, msn desktop search).

p.p.s. Note-to-self-2: continue getting to know the other USC Social Software Researcher Fellows (Richard, Daniel, Aram, David, et. al)–they are both nearby and awesomely brimming with neat ideas.

p.p.p.s. More thought fodder