I should probably keep my trap shut. But honestly.
Mark wrote another update to his question about the cluster, surprised at Torill’s remark that we don’t need to link so much to each others work anymore, in part because we have other ways of communicating as well. He writes:
[Torill wrote] “We are in positions where we don’t have to talk through the blogs. We can invite each others for lectures and speeches, and then we can do the commenting face to face.” As a scientist, I find this strange and dismaying: the first duty of a scientist is to disseminate the data. But the humanities are not like you and I.
What!!??? For goodness sake, what kind of alienating rhetoric is that? Us versus them? Lectures, talks and publishing articles isn’t dissemination anymore? Torill’s conference blogging (read her many posts from Other Players in Copenhagen today, or from State of Play and Serious Games last month) isn’t dissemination? Huh?
So, the cluster’s still here and the machinery still works — at least, if you give it a good kick.
So that’s what you were doing? Kicking doesn’t seem a very nice image, to be honest.
I don’t think we need to protect clusters. I’d rather stay open to new ideas, keep strong friendsships and also exchange ideas with many people.
I think we should just read what interests us, and I don’t really care whether that’s because of the topic matter, or because it’s written by a friend, or whatever. Perhaps “cluster” is the wrong word, anyway. Why not just accept we have loose networks that change constantly?
the sum of my parts » dissemination and communication
[…] n and communication
there is a conversation beginning/ongoing between torill, jill, and mark about such things as network strength and different ways of communicating and […]
mark bernstein
The question wasn’t the looseness of networks — it was, is this a network at all? Or has it become something else? Where are the connections amongst weblogs?
bicyclemark
Why wouldn’t it be a network then? Loose.. disfunctional.. close.. not close.. still a network of some sort. What’s the rush to define it?
mark bernstein
Well, people who study weblogs, study weblogs. Patterns of linkage among weblogs are interesting, and worth closer and more systematic study.
bicyclemark
Agreed then.
Norman
Am I alone in worrying that there’s an increasingly strong trend to spend time over-analysing relationships, to the detriment of analysis of ideas? The inter-relationship between the two aspects [despite some of the ‘excitement’ some express in ‘discovering’ that our analysis isn’t imuune to baggage we bring to the process of analysis] isn’t something unknown to everyone in earlier generations. It does seem to me, however, that society’s current preoccupation with finding ‘everything’ is relativistic, often results in higher level analytical skills not being as fully developed as they could, and should, be.