Christopher Lydon Interviews (with Enclosures): Recent Episodes
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It is Tim Berners-Lee's world; we just live in it. But you'd never get that impression from Sir Tim himself, the man who invented the World Wide Web barely a decade ago with nary a thought of power or glory, fame or fortune. He runs the World Wide Web Consortium from a modest academic suite of offices at MIT. He's an accessible scientist who speaks warily, almost defensively, about the miracle he wrought. It is his pleasure, or perhaps his habit by now, to tell you what the Web is not.
For the famously gloomy prophet Larry Lessig, two blessed events in 2003 have forced a smiling reappraisal: the birth of his child and the growth of the blogosphere. In conversation it seemed he could not speak of one procreation without alluding to the other. In politics and in culture, in the Lessig view, after a more than a century of mass media and 50 years of television, we have stumbled on a technology that prompts more, not less, citizen engagement. In the 2004 campaign underway, he observed, "there will be a change that comes from the fact that people are participating in the construction of the political story around them. That in my view will be the most important political event in the last hundred years."
Will Hutton, the Observer columnist and author of A Declaration of Interdependence, is on the line from London. "What I think American progressives often don't realize is how fundamentally important it is for the rest of the world that America is progressive. Once it moves to the right, it pulls the whole world to the right."
"I'm a Cortez guy," Joe Trippi roared at the end of our conversation in the corner office of Howard Dean's headquarters in Burlington, Vt. As in: Hernando Cortez, the Conquistador who faced the Aztec hordes five centuries ago with just 400 Spanish troops at his side, and burned his own boats on the beach in case his compatriots thought of leaving prematurely. Horses, gunpowder and steel made all the difference for Cortez. The Trippi difference in the Democratic nomination fight has been the Internet.
Cameron Barrett's rollout of the new Wesley Clark blog confirms the news that the modern presidential campaign is, at the core, a software production house. The Clark Community Network is a fascinating and, I say, admirable piece of work. It's a very advanced exercise in simulating Wesley Clark's idea and ideal of communitarian democracy. It actually implements the Dave Winer mantra that it's not the candidates but the voters who should be blogging. (It's the same idea that Jeff Jarvis advocates for newspapers. That is, don't blog at your readers; rather turn your readers into writers by handing them the blog tool). Everyone's a blogger in the Clark space -- everyone who chooses to be. Of course everyone is a commentator, too -- their comments community-rated up, down or off the page. The campaign provides new tools, modeled on MeetUp, for Clark events. It adds a tool for fomenting Petitions within the Clark campaign network, and another tool for crediting Recruiters with people they brought to the party.
He is the blogger who wrote earlier this month: "By the time you read these words the bell will be tolling for Wesley Clark's candidacy." And thus he crystallized a contest between people who drafted Clark and those who manage him; between analog and digital politics; between the Pyramid and the Sphere, as Newberry likes to illustrate it.
Scott Heiferman, 31, has become a central figure in the new Internet politics of 2004 on the strength of his magnetic Meetup.com. With a few professional partners in programming, Heiferman built the Meetup site that lets birds of a feather find and meet each other face-to-face in their own town or neighborhood -- for any reason at all, but with earthshaking force already in presidential campaigns.
Editor in chief of The New York Times on the Web, Len Apcar brought Times majesty to BloggerCon this weekend, and a certain blog envy, too. Listen to Apcar and make your own guess how long it will be before the New York Times (the online edition) certifies the sea change in media with its own Times-style blog about opera, or art, or more likely, about the 2004 presidential campaign.
Jeff Jarvis of Advance Publications, the Newhouse empire, was the other corporate media biggie at BloggerCon, making rather a striking contrast with the gentleman from The New York Times, Len Apcar. At BuzzMachine, of course, Jeff Jarvis is himself a voluminous and often counterintiutive blogger. He's a liberal who was radicalized by September 11 and cheered the War in Iraq. He's had a newspaper career in San Francisco and Chicago. He wrote TV criticism for People magazine and TV Guide, and was the founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. In his online eminence within Advance.net for the last nine years, he has become an unbuttoned zealot about the Internet ("the first medium that's owned by its audience") and about blogging ("the highest form thus far of audience content").
For more than a decade Jay Rosen has been a frustrated advocate of people-first, bottom-up "public journalism." The premise of his project (and his book, What Are Journalists For?) was that, as an act of civic conscience, major media might abandon the celebrity circus approach to covering, for example, presidential campaigns. The idea was laughed at, left for dead after the 1996 season. Yet now, strangely, he believes we're in sight of real public journalism -- not as a matter of corporate or professional conscience but because: the tools of journalism are being democratized.
Adam Curry was born into stardom on MTV in the late 1980s. As the VJ host of the network's "Top 20 Countdown," he interviewed stars like Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, and became himself an all-around pop icon. Adam Curry today is still 6 feet 5 inches of blond Adonis, but his conversation and his work all crackle with his lifelong interest the hardware of communications.
Elizabeth Spiers has been called "the Dave Eggers of the Blogolution." A child of small-town Alabama, she graduated from Duke and took a run at Wall Street in the bubble years, tried blogging on her own and then backed into a paid gig with Nick Denton's Gawker. She quickly became the empress of New York gossip, the "snark queen" and personification of "Radical Manhattanism."
Jim Moore is more like a smarter, richer, equally earnest version of me. He had a hugely successful run in the nineties as a business consultant and critical visionary (as in his book The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems, from HarperBusiness, 1996). His on-going study of information technology and democratic development is focused on Ghana. Last April, early in the war with Iraq, Jim wrote a debut blog that drew worldwide attention and comment and bears rereading today. The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head is about the peace coalition that President Bush chose to ignore.
Cornel West is a modern Emersonian. Come to think of it, Cornel West may just be the contemporary Emerson: an adventurous Christian thinker who keeps extending the question of what it means to be American, to be modern, to be human. West is entertainingly serious and seriously entertaining. He is a moral and political provocateur, a stylist and individualist. To boot, he's a prophet without honor at Harvard, as Emerson was after his notoriously unorthodox Divinity School Address of 1837.
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee made a lot of points I hadn't heard before in a conversation this afternoon on the matter of who "sexed up" the story last autumn and winter of Saddam Hussein's 45-minute trigger on world-threatening weaponry.
The Real Live Preacher is my kind of searcher. He's a minister in South Texas who started a blog as a sort of personal refuge from his church--a confessional place where he could voice some of the doubt and confusion in his life, or so he thought.
The Daily Kos may be the rising blog among the underdog Democrats in the 2004 campaign--the Instapundit on the left side of the political blogosphere.
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also know as the InstaPundit, is the leading "warblogger."
Elaine Scarry is the author of the startling little essay, Who Defended the Country? I have admired Elaine Scarry from a distance as a completely original literary critic. Here's a little light summer conversation on a gap in American defenses that the 9.11 attack revealed. It's the matter of homeland security, seriously, without the capital letters.
Cluetrain author David Weinberger takes us back to the roots of the Web in the mid-90s to explain the weblog phenomenon of the 21st century.
Here is the sound (and thinking) of our friendly pioneer Dave Winer. This is the first in a series of conversations with bloggers about blog-world.