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Elizabeth Albrycht returns to 1990 with a thought piece equally relevant in 2006 — how capitalism is a defining process in our lives.
What propelled me to blog about Elizabeth’s post is not just the usual congratulatory effusion about yet another brilliant post by her (she has a wonderfully low signal:noise ratio), but what implications capitalism has for the blogosphere in particular and participatory communication in general.
Whilst blogging is in one sense a (probably unconscious) defiance of the underlying philosophy of capitalism — that everything is a commodity and that blogging therefore rebels against it by being a conversation not a transaction — so too one could argue that podcasting is equally a subversive element.
Yes, there is the transaction of time — the time it takes to download, transfer and listen to an mp3 on one’s player of choice — but because no money changes hands (yet; I’m sure Adam Curry has plans) and the dislocated conversational abilities of podcasts have been well established, one could argue that podcasts too are subversive.
With the advent of ajax-based calendar tools (which have been around since the late 90s but have now come back in fashion, courtesy of a new tool- and feature-set) and the potential for a Google Grid a la EPIC (when I showed that file to my Qatar clients it stunned them into silence for a few minutes), the rising of the proletariat that Marx was so keen to see happen may appear in a different guise — the rising of the participatory community, where thoughts speak louder than the image of the writer and brand equity is based on content not image management.
Technorati: Elizabeth Albrycht, EPIC, Google Grid
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