Pace

old media
Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody argues that new social tools are important for society in many different ways. He says here that: one of the great frustrations of writing a book as opposed to blogging is seeing a new story that would have been a perfect illustration (hence the new blog: Here Comes Everybody). I suppose this just illustrates how slow traditional forms of writing and publishing are in comparison with the fluid world of online activity. We always end up writing about what was happening last year. But then again, blogging’s not always at the cutting edge. I’m always apologizing for posting about things I’ve missed (ie things that are old news for some), and that’s curious – the headlong pace of late modernity - it’s a bit like the time-compression phenomenon on email. Just because someone can reply in the next minute we expect them to. And so we often behave as if email isn’t an asynchronous medium when the reponse time is slow. So I’m not going to apologize for pointing to the special issue of JMC on social networking – after all it was only out last October!