Wonderland

Clay Shirky is brilliant, and I have been reading his essays for a very long time¹. Recently, he has been discussing his notion of a Cognitive Surplus . Good stuff; if you have not read it, go read it now.

The headline is that if we just switch 1% of yearly TV consumption hours to ‘participation’ we get the equivalent of 100 Wikipedia projects a year (that is development, comments, authors, editors, talk; the whole corpus as it stands today).

This the Cognitive Surplus; previously the surplus was masked by mind-numbing television until we switched from just being able to consume media to consuming, producing, and sharing media.

We are in a new media landscape, transformed irrevocably from mass consumption of media due to the communication advances of the last few decades.

Those advances enabled us to erase a participation deficit. The way the deficit manifested for me was an apparent inability to be alone (so says my wife) in spite of being a person who values solitude. Before the nascent intertubes, I had no way to participate. I could (and did) watch television. But I also did many other things, including hack on computers. Only there was no sharing, no participation. Once the nascent intertubes arrived, I² and many others did participate. Our participation accelerated on the wave of Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws to transform society in ways we could not anticipate, but that we were already exploring. We still cannot anticipate how we are changing society, and we are still exploring.

If you have read this, take a moment and write your own blog entry or tweet or upload a photo/video or post a message or whatever-social-sharing-thing-you-might-do and revel in your participation.

¹ A decade?

² My first email (lost forever) was in 1982.

I am a bit late on the history meme. Here I am:

Wonderland$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
149 git
60 spec
46 ls
45 gst
42 cd
28 rake
14 ssh
8 ss
7 houston
7 gco

Things to note¹:

1. 3 are git
2. 3 are Rails development related
3. 4 are common unix commands

¹ 4 are aliases

Recently while discussing jQuery, we got onto the topic of AJAX. This prompted me to declare:

Before AJAX, we used stone knives and bearskins to make our web apps

Actually, we were using JavaScript and XML to drive our web apps, we just did not call it AJAX, and it was a very challenging task. In spite of the difficulty of building it, we stuck with it and we were pretty darn happy with our pre-web 2.0 web2.0 app; so much so that we actually had people coming by just to see our UI in action.

I went back and looked for some of our old code, hoping to find the CVS repository¹, but only finding a tarball of version 1.4. The following code is from client/script/services.js and dated August 24, 2001—although some version of this code would have existed in the spring of 2000:

BrServices.prototype.issueRequest = function (action) {
...
    var request = brUtils.newXmlDOM(action);
    brUtils.dumpError(request.parseError);
    var tryCount = 0;
    var condition = brServices.isOkay;
    var s = "";
    while (condition == brServices.isOkay) {

        try {
            s += "\n";
            var httpOb = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP"); // Was Microsoft.XMLHTTP
            s += "new: " + httpOb.readyState;
            httpOb.open("POST", brServices.brxmlURL, false);
            s += ", open: " + httpOb.readyState;
            httpOb.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset='UTF-8'");
            s += ", setRequestHeader: " + httpOb.readyState;

            httpOb.send(request);
...

Just looking at this snippet from our internal library makes me all the happier that we made the thing work at all. Kudos to Mark Judd and Brian Levine, two of our very talented small team, who were responsible for our UI.

¹ You already know this, but just in case, CVS was a source code repository that pretty much everyone used before Subversion (unless you bought one from a vendor).