One more thought about ordinariness and its connection to the extraordinary arising from Reboot.
Ben Hammersley is a lovely presenter the blogosphere’s answer to Eddie Izzard (what was the question?) including the fetching dresswear.
He gave a great talk called Etiquette and the Singularity, including the notion that the first blogger was Sir Richard Steele back in 1709. Steele wanted to circulate his opinions so started writing a thrice-weekly letter which was widely distributed by street urchins. His stated intent:
…wherein I shall from time to time report and consider all matters of what kind soever that shall occur to me, and publish such my advices and reflections every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in the week for the convenience of the post. I have also resolved to have something which may be of entertainment to the fair sex…
He called it The Tatler and it mutated into what we’d now call a dinosaur blog (ie magazine). Ben went on to talk about how at the same time, people started dressing in ways that made status less easy to determine and spent a lot of time talking in coffee houses. A parallel for the freebooting conversations for which we now have the internet. Check out the pdf of the whole thing.
I like this way of thinking about blogging. Not as something extraordinary and techie, but as something simple and innately human. Back then, conversation led to The Enlightenment. Maybe we can have another one of those today?
