notes & links

Access to Inforamtion in an Age of Social Media (link to podcast)
Nora Young - CBC

Nora Young used to host CBC’s Radio One program Definitely not the Opera, and there were definitely a lot of people in the crowd who had very fond memories of her tenure as DNTO’s host. Her talk was really everything that you would want in a keynote - it was well-written, well-read, opinionated, thought-provoking and occasionally controversial. That said, I didn’t like it all that much. It touched on a lot of issues about the epistemological significance of social media that I find very interesting and important. But as is always the case when a keynote speaker talks about something that I’ve been thinking a lot about - they can’t get into it as deeply as I want and I just get annoyed.

In this particular case, I thought that she was talking about really interesting issues about what the social aspects of social software technologies mean for discourse. She talked about the impact of social and collaborative publishing tools on the authorial voice, and asked whether these tools result in a lack of responsibility for ideas and understanding. If we create knowledge togehter, then who is responsible for what is created? And do all of the rough edges get smoothed out under some kind of majority- rules scenario. Where is the individual point of view?

The problem is, that she blasted right past the point where the discussion was interesting, and spent most of her time at the apocalyptic end-of-knowledge end of the spectrum. Personally, I just don’t find either end of the extreme all that interesting. I prefer to stay in the - “okay, this is the world we have, what can we do with it” - area. And I suspect that Nora Young would be a really great person to have that conversation with, when she wasn’t doing a keynote address.