FILLING UP YOUR HEAD WITH NONSENSE

I sure hope that my memory is not finite, because I now know about more stupid things said, printed, or published in the past year than I ever wanted to know. I can't remember phone numbers, but I know who made what gaffe, when. This is the intellectual equivalent of all those advertising ditties that you absorbed watching countless hours of television during your childhood. double your pleasure, double your fun, with doublemint, doublemint, doublemint gum.

In the final chapter of Does America Need of Foreign Policy? (great book, btw), Kissinger notes that the next challenge with respect to information technology is education in analysis. We've solved the collection problem. Now we just need to know how to stand toward the information we've collected.

Here's one excellent bit of analysis. In some respects I agree with David Adesnik, though ("yeah, whatever").

My new rule for dealing with the on-line world:

The basic unit of analysis is not the isolated statement.

Statements are irrelevant outside of a) the arguments and b) dialogues of which they are a part. These dialogues include reactions, responses, retractions, apologies, and clarifications.

PS: Of course the rule is not "new" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's related to the concept of speech-acts as discussed, for example, by Habermas. Thank God that references to isolated silly statements haven't crowded out my (already dim) recollection of books that I read in college and grad school. . .

PPS: Well, post-update, I agree with David less, but, so what? Look: if you want to use an isolated comment to prove something broader than the fact that there was an isolated comment somewhere, you're overreaching and fundamentally silly, in my view. I have not been immune from the temptation to engage in this kind of facile criticism myself, but, frankly, after returning home from a wonderful weekend in SF and realizing that I had seven gazillion unread blog posts (according to Bloglines), and no desire to read any but a fraction of them, I have less tolerance for all of this stuff. And Matt Stoller's article is better than anything I'd say, anyway. Read it.