My post yesterday, The class system alive and well and now online, was tweeted by Dave Winer (@davewiner) and he has oodles of followers so my site, at least that post, had a major spike in traffic. By major spike I mean in the context of the modest traffic I usually get. I was glad he tweeted it not because I dream of huge numbers but because if you write something you hope someone will read it. (But numbers are nice!)
That aside, it reminded me once again that I really need to clean up my sidebar, like that blogroll which hasn't been revised in a long time. With the way things are evolving these days, with Twitter, Facebook and all the others, is there much point in a blogroll anymore? Oh yes ... I forgot. SEO and all that Google ranking stuff. (Is one of the effects of the evolving internet(s) that writing has become a pain in the editorial backside?)
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I read Cory Doctorow's Transparency means nothing without justice from The Guardian and think his point is a good one. It's one thing to be transparent but quite another to do something about what transparency reveals. I tweeted the link. Then, immediately after, I tweeted:
"On the other transparency hand ... is what we're seeing what is really happening? What are we not seeing?"
What is visible isn't always all that's going on. That's why people refer to "context." What happened prior to and subsequent to an incident? Sight is also not the only sense we have.
I'm not taking issue with the need for transparency. I'm just trying to say that seeing something as it happens or happened doesn't necessarily tell the whole story. And often we dichotomize a situation (good guys vs. bad guys) and it frames the way we see it and relate it to others.
In other words, just as the article says transparency is not a panacea -- it needs follow-up in order to achieve justice -- what transparency means requires some defining because what we see must be interpreted.
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I don't usually listen to podcasts (I'm not sure why) but I did yesterday when Nick Carr's post Is Twitter making us stupider? had a link to a podcast he did with InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson. It was interesting to me because he speaks a bit about what his next book will be about.
What I was particularly interested in was what he had to say on a subject I wonder about: how community, both online and off (he spoke primarily of online) tends to be exclusive rather than inclusive, which is what my post yesterday touched on. I don't think he spoke in terms of "community." What he spoke of is what I think is one of the aspects of community and one we see online quite a bit: hearing what we want to hear. We gravitate to like minds and like views. In the polarization that results we start seeing positions getting more dogmatic and their articulations increasingly strident.
It's a suspicion I've had for a while. In Carr's book, when it comes out, there will hopefully be some references to studies that indicate if this is the case.
Or not. 
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