If the scale of interaction is from tribal to small town, will we eventually have tribal elders on the Web? I have the impression that most people posting are younger people; but eventually these people will be older and more seasoned-perhaps some individuals will be become genuinely wise.

By Danny Yee on Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 09:59 am:

The analysis of the traffic to my web site in note 4 in chapter 6 is flawed. dannyreviews.com did receive about 1.35 million page accesses by humans in 2000 (1.9 million in 2001), and I do review about 50 books a year, but accesses are just as likely to be to reviews written five years ago. Also, about half of all views are of various index pages. The result is that on average individual reviews are viewed around 1500 times a year, not 27000 times!

By Kirby Urner on Wednesday, August 14, 2002 - 11:20 pm:

Humans are better at perceiving connections than
any algorithm we know to code, although when it
comes to MEMEX-style keyword searches, Google is
really pretty good. However, its algorithms
in part depend on tracking searcher choices, yes?

It's a cell-silicon hybrid -- humans and their
motherboards working in tandem, each doing what
they do best.

Sure, the keyword searches are critical, but with
web technology, we avail ourselves of that human
sense of relevance and relationship -- so far
unduplicated by any intelligence (except one we
sense inwardly, yet deeper than our everyday
consciousness).

By dweinberger on Thursday, August 15, 2002 - 10:05 am:

Kirby, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I just posted something to my weblog on a related topic, coming at it from the angle of end user licenses:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/archive/2002_08_01_archive.html#85347753

By dweinberger on Thursday, August 15, 2002 - 10:18 am:

Danny, Ack! That's the problem with being a humanities major. I'll fix it in the next edition (if there is one). In any case, it doesn't affect the basic argument of the chapter, and the footnote acknowledges that the numbers are tough to compare, although, of course I'd rather have the numbers also be right. Thanks for the correction.

By DanClouse on Friday, May 23, 2003 - 06:48 pm:

This week I as I read this chapter of SPLJ and came to the line about "causality that runs backwards"(128), I couldn't help but recall an old grad school comp-lit chestnut, Jorge Luis Borges's essay, "Kafka and his Precursors" (orig. published in Spanish in 1951, now available in the recent Selected Non-Fictions anthology ed. Eliot Weinberger).
The line, "The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future," is often quoted in discussions of literary history's odd causality. Kindred notions abound in Borges's essays on narrative, like "Narrative Art and Magic".
The well-read remind us that T.S. Eliot and Emerson in "Self-Reliance" express similar views.
Backwards causality is a useful notion for accounting for lots of different aspects of human life, isn't it?
Thanks for the interesting book.