The Debate over Quantity vs. Quality: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Nicholas Carr's Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" presents a polarizing view of the effect of immediate 24/7 internet access connectivity.  The usefulness of the internet is central to the question of open access versus authoritative and verifiable content--the problem of content quantity vs. content quality. The spirited responses to the article by Clay Shirky and Larry Sanger are captured on the Edge's Reality Club blog.  Clay Shirky and the open access individuals see the question in terms of filter failure, not necessarily information overload.  Information is going to continue to grow, so avenues to manage content become important.  He gives a good talk on journalism and the public good, and why pay walls do not serve the public, in contrast to Steve Brill who is trying to leverage government to seek an antitrust exemption for media pricing.  Larry Sanger argues for a more authoritative and verifiable approach to content containment.  He argues that our "grasp and respect of reliable information suffers" at the hands of too much opinion and not enough verifiable content.  He is not suggesting open discourse is not welcome, but he believes expertise and professionalism is necessary.

The question of content quality has broad ramifications in many areas such as government, politics, news information, and others.  The debate over content quality seems to break into the two competing paradigms of amateurs vs. professionals that the Wikipedia founders split into.  Laws and copyrights protections for professionals do not necessarily square with amateur participation.  Interestingly, Nature magazine did a peer-reviewed study of science entries on both Wikipedia and Britannica and found that they both had "similar degrees of accuracy in their content."  In an effort to narrow my argument, I may look to education as an area where verifiable content is essential.

Opening Up Academia

Brun argues in Chapter 13 "Educating Produsers, Produsing  Education" that academic institutions must lead change with some combination of traditional and new approaches.  Academic publishing and peer-review are already well established processes.  Brun suggests that institutions may have to shift their emphasis from in-house development and production to include the service of quality assurance both internally and externally.  He cites the examples of the science communities' sucessful open source projects.

Unloading the Wife and Keeping the Mistress

*The following is not part of a class assignment.  I was exploring how other types of writing appeared on the page.

After a carefully considered plot, we unloaded the “wife” and “mistress.” Got rid of her straight out—sold her in a crass bidding war at the top of the market—like a demeaning pirate hocking her ‘larboard side’. The archaic etymology doesn’t matter near as much as its emotional content. And my love of all things Darwin including our beagle named after the Voyage demands the connection. Larboard refers to the port side of a merchant vessel on which they are loaded. Apparently calling out larboard in the wind sounded too much like starboard, so the Captain of Darwin’s HMS Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, taught his crew to use the term port side instead of larboard, and the use of port side officially replaced larboard in Navy vernacular. The best part is that the larboard side is marked by a red navigation light at night. How loaded it that—and here we were selling off my entanglement.

Unlike Anne Fadimen in her familiar essay on “Moving,” I did get into bed with our “weekend country home.” Ours was a clerestory ski chalet among the “Big Trees.” It was a full on love affair. As these tangled things go, I was ready to unload the “wife” long before I was ready to give up the “mistress.”

By strange coincidence with another of Fadimen's essays, we too inherited our “Piece of Cotton” with our new liaison. Perhaps Fadimen unearthed an unwritten rule that says the colors flown at one home should permanently remain as part of its provenance. We flew our flag whenever we were in residence with the lady. While my husband and I unloaded the car, the first thing the boys clamored to do was race to the closet to secure the flag to place on the deck railing. We were barely to the top of the stairs with our heavy loads, when the boys pushed past and set the door-harp a-tinkling in their race to be first. The warm tones of the harp string announced our arrival, but the flag signaled their own personal claim. We carried out the flag ritual for nearly seventeen years. I’m surprised no one looted the place when it was so clear when it would be safe. Gradually the time between door harp notes grew longer—their announcement barely specified a score—and capturing the flag became another outgrown blanket.

But like any lover who is not ready for the end, I held on to the fantasy the place inspired. The hiking, the fly-fishing, the skiing, the snowed in history-channel marathons, the roaring fire, the pine and the cedar, the eating and playing and talking out on the large deck, the summer creeks, and the reading. My beloved reading. Up early with a cup of coffee in my favorite chair while everyone slept in for hours. Oh, the glorious serenity that was all mine. Not a mom here, nor even a wife. No shoulds or musts competing for my attention. Just freedom and respite. Room to be. Where I in fact became more of a mom and more of a wife. Our second one may plug his ears to this fact, but I carefully constructed this affectionate nest…the inviting feather beds and turned down comforters…the giant redwood table for Yahtzee, Cribbage, and more…the hand-made bunk beds with my “transcendentalists” set alongside…my comfortable “come join me here” denim furniture bought before the trend…and the playful dark green carpet with domino dots of color inviting their tummy tracks. Yes, the cabin was my boundless place—my "Mother Road"—my inspired Route 66 stretching across the US.

Such thought and care went into the place that I became rather a pain about sharing it. Not to over do the whole lover trope, but I really did fuss over it. I loved everything from staining the deck to hammering the warped winter boards to selecting another book for my inner Muir. I meant to have people enjoying it, and I felt really generous at first. But when friends or relatives borrowed it and then broke things or took things and failed to arrange things the way I left them, I’m ashamed to admit that I quietly collapsed their calendar. It wasn’t just that their infractions added to my list of responsibilities; I felt betrayed like discovering some damned lipstick on a collar. I knew someone had been there, and they were diminishing my experience of the place. It irked me that they had time to enjoy it while I was busy with routine affairs.

I sensed my time with it was slipping. The roof was leaking they reported back to me. One forgot to turn off the water at the spigot a few days ago. Another just broke open the garage door after forgetting his key that my enthusiastic Dad made for every family member without my knowledge. The other that did remember his key broke it off in the door. No I didn’t know the coffee maker was broken. Adding insult, our boys were naturally growing interested in other commitments, and our beagle tethered my excitement. The cabin was losing its appeal. I sensed the end. Our oldest was going off to college soon, and the time was near. We had always planned to sell the cabin to pay for our boys’ college education.

Perhaps it explains why I broke down in “blubbery” tears when the new couple who out-bid the others by a large margin—saying they loved the furniture and wanted the cabin just as it was and were willing to buy everything including the dishes—simply junked the flag at the end of the driveway atop their moving box refuse. How could this be? Didn’t they see the possibilities of the place held in the symbol they were tossing aside? After September 11, I had even driven up to the cabin to procure the flag to fly at home for a time after our national loss.  My attachment to the place and this symbol-of-my-affection was so strong that I was unprepared for their callous disregard. I broke down into heaving tears. The soul-turned-inside-out type normally reserved for the loss of a loved one.

I was uncharacteristically mad. I did the whole scorned bit. I refused to turn over my favorite pieces of furniture. I threatened to not sign the final deal. We thought we had arranged a proper transfer like we received when we first bought the cabin from another family who had to sell it because their daughter had cancer. We promised to honor their home and make it a happy place. I wanted that ritual too—I felt I needed it to let go—not this top bid hustle. I hadn’t yet understood the college good byes that were complicating the mess. But I sensed their approach. The loss seemed a double blow. While the sale made our son’s college education affordable, and I do not begrudge that for a single moment, it also marked the end of his needing me to help him zip into his fat snowsuit, to warm his sore frozen fingers in my hands, or to tuck him in with Twain’s Book for Bad Boys and Bad Girls. I was utterly unprepared for this loss.

In Class Notes on Research Plan

I am interested in Tim Berners-Lee call to authenticate or verify web information. I wonder what type of systems are being devised, and I wonder how verifiability effects the collaborative community.

What types of systems of verifiability are being proposed?

• peer-review processes to authenticate data
• publication standards
• library standards

Brun's Plump Sets of Human Knowledge

If Bolter gives us the historical perspective of organizing knowledge in traditional forms of production such as the library and encyclopedias, then Axel Brun in chapter 6 “The Palimpsest of Human Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond” evaluates the online forms of knowledge that account for the community aspect of creating and maintaining knowledge.

Brun gives a thorough discussion of the changing approaches to content that result from “produsage” communities such as Wikipedia that create and participate in content as well as police or maintain it.  He argues that fixing content into a stable form that is typical of traditional production models undermines the community presence and dynamism of Wikipedia.  The value of “produsage” communities comes from the process of discussion that includes the systematic rules and regulations as well as the community’s enactment and interpretation.

Brun argues that the process of re-mediating the content functions like a historical palimpsest of an overwritten document that carries traces of prior versions.  Yet this over-writing process also fundamentally changes the relationships between text creators and users.  The territory of knowledge is now fluid and changeable without fixed positions or canons of knowledge.

Governance

Brun then discusses the inherent problems that arise from these new knowledge territories.  The first is the question of administrative and community governance.  The shift from hierarchical administration to ad hoc forms of community governance is a product of keeping their structures openly accessible to maximize community participation.

Accreditation

The problem with maximizing community participation then becomes the problem of accrediting users and creators of content.  Brun argues that if Wikipedia and "produsage" forms do not want to appear as anarchic chaos then authors expertise or content evaluation forms may need to be included rather than relying on content source alone such as the way some foreign sites already incorporate into their structure.

Towards and Against Stability

The evaluation of content and contributors then begins to look more like stable forms of production.  Brun argues that stable release models of open source software design provide a working analogy to remediate instability.  However, as "produsage" acts like more stable production, then casual collapse can happen as corporate production takes over.

Finally Brun addresses other open forms of knowledge on the internet such as travel discussion, opinion content and the like.  He argues that the Web is the ultimate open participation network, and the smaller communities of Wikipedia or these other collaborative content forms alter the conception of knowledge to include the deliberative processes as well.

Bolter's Hope for Alexandria

In “The Electronic Book,” the fifth chapter of Writing Space, Jay David Bolter presents the history of how various technological forms of writing, from the earliest forms of papyrus rolls to the evolving processes of codices, illuminated manuscripts, and paged books, affected their structural organization and their conception as complete and closed structures.  With the advent of new electronic books that add immediacy with links to other texts, forms or devices, Bolter argues the idea of a book is being refashioned from a closed to an open structure.

Bolter further argues that the open structures of electronic books that synthesize or add knowledge through links are more similar in function to the way encyclopedias or libraries are structured.  Both represent the desire to collect all knowledge into a single space—encyclopedias functioning to condense knowledge—and libraries functioning to amass knowledge.  They attempt to make verbal knowledge accessible by organization and control.  And Bolter presents a thorough history and analysis of their evolving forms as an analogy to understanding the changing nature of electronic books.

Encyclopedias

Bolter recounts the history of encyclopedias that evolved to control knowledge in periods of both textual scarcity and abundance.  Encyclopedic order was an attempt to capture and summarize the important authoritative texts and to make them available to a larger audience.  As knowledge became widely available, the encyclopedia also performed a bibliographic function that made them more manageable. 

The history and rationale of encyclopedia organization from earlier associative hierarchical and topical order to the later neutral alphabetizing and indexing order is presented.  Most importantly in the electronic form, the encyclopedia merges the two historical forms of order into a system of references that include both the alphabetical as well as the associative topical or outline of ideas.  Including the distributed nature of the internet, the electronic encyclopedia presents a view of knowledge as changing collection of ideas.

Libraries

Bolter then relates the way libraries control knowledge by collecting books or texts into one conceptual or physical space, and he describes their organizing principles as being developed for utilitarian purposes.  Their call system is organized topically but is more widely known as a library shelf address.  The computer catalogue re-orders the structure into subject, title, and etc.  And they are becoming hybrids of both print and electronic forms.  Bolter argues the physical space is still relevant as the shelf allows browsing relationally, while the library itself serves as a monument to preservation of a public writing space.

As libraries become more digitized there are collections of full-text databases organized by communities with shared interests. The future hope of course is the passion for all books being organized into a universal library of Alexandria. Bolter concludes by arguing that digital technologies make libraries and their systems of order more relevant as they make cyberspace navigable and inhabitable. He sees the idea of the book as the metaphor for man’s knowledge as fundamentally evolving to include multiple and developing relationships.

Determining Trust on the Internet

After reading Axel Brun’s chapters five and six on Wikipedia and considering it in relation to the internet's Tim Berners-Lee's article on "Web Science" originally found in 2008 Scientific American, I am interested the web-tech community's call for “engineering layers of trust and provenance into Web interaction” at the same time they argue for open access. The tension between the collaborative system of knowledge represented in Wikipedia and the call for verifiable information along the likes of an electronic library in the public domain that is sustainable, searchable, stable, and linked is a challenging problem.

Potential Areas of Research
The three areas of research that might be interesting are 1) What systems will be used to authenticate verifiable information? 2) What are the ramifications in terms of free speech and free access? 3) When is verifiable information required and what is the effect on sustainable communities?

"Toward a New Alexandria"

In her New Republic article, Lisbet Rausing asks today’s educated and engaged public to imagine such an electronic library that opens up scholarship to the public in an open web environment.  She argues for open access to entire fields of scholarship to the general public in the manner that the scientific community has embraced open access and scholarly collaboration.  It is an interesting read, and here is an excerpt:

We guardians need to do this for the public's sake and for our own. Right now, projects to open up scholarship mostly pertain to the natural sciences, and mostly concern present academic work. Twentieth-century scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences is lacking. Authored by academics hoping not for monetary gains, but for renown among their peers and influence over the public, and financed by means of taxes and charitable gifts, this incomparable treasure trove is locked away from society by “The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998” (also known as the “Micky Mouse Protection Act”). It is an ironic fate—a second death, if you will—for the great refugee scholars of Europe. Think only of Erwin Panovsky, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Gödel, Marc Bloch, Ludwik Fleck, or Simone Weil.

Look at JSTOR (if you can). There you find the evidence-based, source-critical foundations of sociology, anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, classics, Oriental studies, theology, musicology, history of science and so on. They are all closed to the public. It is wonderful, of course, that high-energy physics and string theory are open to all. But is it not ironic that we have opened the gates only to that scholarship which few professors, let alone members of the public, have the cognitive capacity and appropriate training to grasp?

The opportunity costs for society are self-evident. But what about the opportunity cost for scholars? For example, the public has set itself the task to rewrite knowledge for the public domain through Wikipedia and the like. Should not these sites be hyperlinked with JSTOR? By excluding the public from their scholarly literature, academics make it impossible for amateurs to use sound research methodologies, critically examining evidence by cross-referencing and source analysis. Scholars then critique the public’s output for not being sufficiently academic. Academics commonly refer to the occasionally wobbly scholarly standards of Wikipedia as proof the public does not wish to pursue scholarship. Might it not instead prove that they do not let them?

Y Chromo-Tomes

Boys...such a discordant mess, though I really love their songs.  Like Anne Fadiman in “Coleridge The Runaway,” I too find myself enamored by the charms of those Silas Tomkyn Comberbache’s I know.  And I have spent my share of sleepless nights being “affrightened by, as a terror of itself, a self-subsisting separate Something.”  My little S.T.C. sleeps in Poughkeepsie when he is not calling from the ER.

He’s fine now, but you can imagine the terror when a tear-sotted stammer and a heaving breath admits over a far away phone, “Mom...sobbing choke...I made a mistake.”  Good lord, how can this be?  It’s only three in the afternoon—not trouble time.  I had just hung up the phone hardly an hour ago.  We were talking about classes...his upcoming trip to Ireland...Dad meeting him in New York this weekend...tickets to see Christopher Walken on Broadway...some dark comedy about losing hands...the Rugby Club reserving the boxing room for some last minute fun.


That’s right.  Boxing room.  Two fights.  Both lost.  Dropped straight down.   Eyes to the back of their sockets and blood pouring to the ground.  One half hour completely gone.  Yes Samuel, “O my God!”   Then the EMT comes on the phone, assures me that he will be fine, good hands and all that, and they need his insurance information.  They ask me to e-mail it to them.  That would be better.  And I’m trying to type out little numbers that I can hardly see, while they’re telling me what Saint Something-or-Other they’re taking him to.  The whole sound is unbelievably jarring.

It’s not as if I had no warning about our younger one.  I still remember watching him on the playground after school...shaking a can of soda as hard as he could...piercing a hole...letting it loose right next to the yard duty lady.  Then he proclaiming to the Principal that he knew full well it would get him in trouble, “but it was worth it just to see the can go!”  As Coleridge says, this is my “vista of infinite possibility."  But my goodness is this boy adored.  

You just can’t help it.  Like Comberbache, he is kind and generous of spirit, and outrageously funny.  He has a gift for language because he's never met a person he's not interested in talking to.  He sings in German and now swaggers in Russian that his advisor cautioned him against until succumbing to his relentless pursuit.   I gave up the advising role a long time ago.  Actually, I gave up believing my advice would be taken up.  I keep trying, and he keeps trying.  On the important things he listens, but fun presents his problem.  The interesting thing is that he is steadfast in his respect for rules.  His base clef anchors his treble.   Oh, but those variations.  Someone should advise his advisor.

Be safe with Yeats, Kristofer. I love you...Mom

The Browser: A Great Big Thought Process

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? –David Gelernter

Assessing Navigational Strategies: "I want it NOW!"

What do we know at any given moment when the stream-of-content flashes so fast it may as well be considered subliminal?  How do we capture the moment worth considering?  Are we becoming a culture of headlines without any content?

The Browser is a content aggregator trying to get out in front of the data swarm to pause or suspend—the valuable moments worth considering—from a stream of authorial content.  What it delivers is fresh, high-quality "best of the moment" content from well established sources.  What it adds in value is lively, "best of the moment" videos, blog musings, interviews, and book reviews.
 

Organization

The challenge of any navigational strategy is how to capture the right content stream—how to get that ticket exactly right.  The Browser captures and organizes articles, videos, and blogs from top publications around the world culled from over 250+ RSS feeds.  It is structured into three distinct columns for articles, blogs, and video.

The overall site is further tabbed with topical themes and world regions to suit the global discourse. The linked articles and blogs have their own writing spaces in their active comment sections that add to the discussion. The site solves the data overload problem with clear organization. It is not just another social communication tool like so many others.  It is a thinking space.

"We must remember there are many more important things, many more important things . . . off hand, I can't think of what they are, but I'm sure there must be something." 

- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Interactivity

The Browser is now a hybrid space for reading, viewing, and writing. With continued use, the site has evolved beyond being just a navigational strategy or content aggregator of high quality "Best of the Moment" media. It does perform that function quite well by capturing high quality, free-to-read content prior to subscription gating.  However, the editors transformed the site from a passive reader to a thoughtful discussion space of interactive reading, viewing, and writing when they added video and blog columns.

In the “Browsings” blogs, there are thought-provoking discussions taking place from a number of fields that do not make traditional media spaces.  I believe the value added to the site will be in these interactive spaces.  It is a relatively new site, but the editors seem to have settled on a stable format. The tabs are another interactive feature to sort the material. 

Viability

The viability of the navigational strategy relies on a clear editorial vision and an ability to evolve—perhaps even to code or take cues from the searching habits of its users.  If they get their algorithm correct they can know far more about their users and provide "best of the moment" content selected their reader niche.

However, that requires a great deal more data gathering than many users prefer, and they run the  risk of giving readers perspectives that accord with a narrow community of readers. It undermines their stated goal of providing content that makes you think and examine your views.

So editorial vision remains key to the value added to the site. For now, the site is accessible free of charge as they try to get out content in front of  pay walls and copyright considerations.  Time will tell whether they are truly a thought space or whether they will turn the site over to a corporate pay model and destroy its innovation with ad space.

Writing Space: In the Box or Out  
In its current hybrid form, The Browser blurs the distinctions between reading, writing, watching, and thinking spaces. I agree with Bolter that it has become difficult “to decide where thinking ends and the materiality of writing begins, where the mind ends and the writing space begins…the writer may come to regard the mind itself as a writing space. The behavior of a writing space becomes a metaphor for the human mind as well as for human social interaction” (Bolter 13).  It hard to know anymore whether we live in the box or outside the box.

I view thinking as essential to the writing process, and I have come across a number of reads that have altered my thinking.  I find myself forwarding articles to friends and family who then pass them along. It is an affirmation of the site's impact. Their was a recent PBS show on the nature of human learning, and it seems our ability to share is fundamental to the learning process.  This site is a testament to that notion.

Assessment: Reading is Writing

The Browser's organizing principle is “Give us 15 minutes of your time, and we will give you everything that matters in the world.”  Their fifteen is worth a good sixty. The editor is the former deputy editor of The Economist, and he has a keen eye for capturing the strongest writing on the Internet. The selection of videos are clever and timely and the addition of the blog column "Browsings" has increased the already strong discourse.

I have come to the conclusion that all forms of reading and viewing on the Internet are in fact interactive forms of writing.  When content is generated by forwarded RSS feeds and twitter recommendations and when search algorithms track all Internet activity, the action of clicking, forwarding, or linking spells out a virtual "yes" and registers the promotion of a page. Behind the scenes, each click of activity is analogous to a recommendation on "Digg."  It is all so mysterious...and the algorithms are proprietary.

A Stone for Jonathan.

Getting back to you...two papers later,

Your comment that there is an implicit agreement in virtual communities that rely on trust as essential for developing community seems spot on to me.  Connectivity may link individuals, but it does not re-create those essential feelings of belonging to a community or self-identifying with it.  The important thing about trust of course is that it is earned through behavior—yours and mine.  It takes time.  And a lot of good will.  People build community.  People self-monitor each other, more or less.  Trust gets broken.  People learn to play nice.  Or not.  The power of the "troll" label holds some sway.  They can be deleted and banned.

On balance, the challenge of community is as Yeats says, "to lessen the solitude without destroying the peace."  So community is an opportunity to explore yourself.   If I'm going to join in a community, I have to be willing to be accountable for myself.  That's the hard part for me.  I don't always want to spend the time.  Knowing myself is where the work comes in.  The idea of exploring and developing self-knowledge is as old as years, but I fear we are being handicapped by constant connectivity.  So I work against the current and advocate time for quiet reflection, for reading.  A good read is a perfect handshake—a moment of meeting—not bone crushing—and certainly not limp—more a smile in your eye.

Self-Exploration

My older son, who is about to graduate college, has had very little rest.  He has worked every break in five different states to craft his resume.  But at the beginning of this process, he recognized the need to be selective and take work where he could explore his interests.  He recognized the need to choose.  And that takes a lot of self-knowledge.  He is a big reader and recently finished a diplomat adventure yarn, Eastern Approaches that has inspired his decision to go on an adventure this Spring Break.

In the spirit of self-exploration, I sent him an American Scholar article, “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz, addressed to West Point Plebes.  It's about self-knowledge developed from focused concentration. Here is an excerpt that you may appreciate:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube...

You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself togetherinto a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way...

“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself...

I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

In Search of “Big Pudding”

I admit it, I like “Big Pudding.”  It’s a term we’ve coined in our house for big brains, big ideas.  Now there are lots of types of pudding, and I'm the first to mention my small portion.  But the truth is I enjoy clever people who know more about the world than my pitiful scoop.  They tease and sharpen my thoughts, and I view thinking as an essential component of my writing space.

One of the more satisfying aspects of the media onslaught is access to this “Big Pudding.”  Creating meaningful insight from the global world requires multi-disciplinary thinking.  The internet captures some really intelligent writing, but there is a lot of noise.  The challenge is how to find the right complement of “Big Pudding” authorities who correspond to your interests--who move your thinking and writing to the page.

I’m currently interested in the new navigational strategies being developed to capture the moment amidst a torrent of media--ways to cancel the clamor and tap the right amount of “Big Pudding.”   For convenience alone, I gather most of my news and information from the internet.  My toolbar reveals that my daily internet reading is booked with three national papers, a couple of online magazines, and a number of websites like 3quarksdaily, Big Think, or Arts and Letters Daily.  It has become rather cumbersome, and I rarely get to the lot.

However, I recently discovered a site called TheBrowser that filters content into what they call an “intelligent general reader.”   Their byline is “The World in a Window.”  And their slogan is, “Give us 15 minutes of your time, and we will give you everything that matters in the world.”   The site was developed in late 2008 by the editor Robert Cottrell, formerly a journalist for The New York Review andThe Economist, along with founding partner and economist Al Breach.

Creating Global Discourse

The Browser serves as a writing tool for staying informed and creating insight into the global context in which we write.  It is structured into topical themes that cover the full cultural conversation.  The site organizes articles of top publications around the world culled from over 250+ RSS feeds.  The linked articles have their own writing spaces in their active comment sections that add to the global discourse.  The responses often go beyond a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" pronouncement.  It is not just another communication tool like so many others.  It serves up some serious “Big Pudding.”