You Can't Make Mistakes.

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

Wow, a month gone and I haven’t written here. I hadn’t realized that it was that long. What have I been doing all this time? Oh yah, I was—along with many others—putting together a huge community-wide event, working for myself, attempting to do some planning for my thesis, write a couple of overdue papers, et cetera. I’ve been busy.

I meant to write last week, but after Kalamazoo Pride there was still a ton of work to be done. I also took a bit of a vacation with some friends in Colorado. It was nice to get away, but it is nice to be home now, and be able to get back to work.

I am, as always, still taking on more than I probably should. We are working with Kalamazoo Pride right now to appoint a board, begin the planning and fundraising for next year’s event, and really get this organization off the ground. We threw one hell of a successful event. It was amazing. People came from all over the area. The bands were great. The food, wine, and beer were all wonderful. We had about 800 people show up at best estimate. I kept getting weepy about whenever anyone would thank me at the event, thinking of how thankful I am for all of the people who have helped us over the course of this project. It really was incredible. I can’t wait to see what they do next year. I hope that it all goes well.

As of this afternoon, I am still tired. The vacation was wonderful. Jeff, Erich, and I went to Mesa Verde National Park. It was beautiful. The cave dwellings were really amazing. We went, by accident, on a three-mile hike up the side of a mesa looking for petroglyphs which we totally missed somehow. It was still a really good time. Durango was wonderful as well. It is a beautiful area, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Driving in the mountains is one of my least favorite things to do. The kind of stress that I feel when doing that is the kind that puts people in the ground at a young age. No thank you.

My most recent project to get back into is a new online media company. John Tobey and I decided that we have some skills that we could possibly make money off of, and we are going to try. John Media is what we are calling this venture. To start off, at least, I will do web and graphic design and Tobey will do graphic design and sound engineering. We will need a video guy eventually, but that should be no problem. It is nice to work for myself again. Things are less complicated when you always agree with your boss.

Last, but most important, things are looking up for the thesis project. I am getting more research and background reading done and preparing myself to start writing more draft chapters. I still have yet to actually propose the thing, but that is a formality which will be taken care of in no time. Then it is off to Egypt in the fall.

I still believe that boredom is the first step to depression for many people. I feel that I will have no trouble with depression this year.

When I work with other people, I sometimes feel as though I am juggling tigers. During a meeting people are generally amicable, but as soon as the meeting is dispersed and everyone goes back to e-mail and cellular phones, and that is when you see nothing but bloodshot eyes, claws, teeth, rage and hunger. I suppose what separates the men from the boys in these situations is having the ability to deal with the barrage of requests, demands, complaints, problems, etc. It would be folly for me to leave that statement unqualified of course. The ability to deal with this isn’t something that anyone can learn, nor is it something that one might innately have.

Having patience is the primary quality of people who can lead other people. Sometimes the best thing to do in terribly stressful and touchy situations is to simply wait them out instead of reacting immediately. This is how I study as well. Sometimes if I am blocked when researching and writing, I will just wait. I call it the incubation method. Usually, in time, the block is lifted, new evidence is discovered, and I can continue in my studies. The same thing can be applied to organizational leadership. If someone is panicking about this issue or that, if there are demands being levied on the organization for which the reasons seem untenable, if there are personal conflicts which occur within the body of the organization: waiting is the best solution. Most of these problems will simply blow over, or if they don’t, waiting to deal with them will often will simply afford the opportunity to figure out ways to deal with these situations.

There is no good way to develop the ability to have patience. However, patience requires discipline as well. I would imagine that this ability is derived from observing our parents and other authoriy figures in youth and then reflecting and responding to their styles of interation in adulthood. I don’t believe that anyone is innately patient, though, the most patient people will seem that way. They simply learn very quickly.

Now, I have to get donuts for a meeting of tigers.