Glowrich on New Media

Where are the long and thought provoking articles?

Sorry for my irregular posting, my masters thesis has top priority. That doesn’t take away my interest in good, long and thought provoking articles. Every once in a while there’s an article that seem to nail certain aspects of a technology, media or culture in a very broad sense and takes centre stage for a few weeks in the blogosphere. Sometimes it sets a standard and gets out of the blogosphere and gets referenced even years after.
Everyone who takes his job or interest in social media, new media, technology or (digital) culture seriously knows some of these articles. I’d like to list these articles for some deeper reading and see you come up with more articles. I know I don’t have much of a readerbase yet, but hey, I believe in the long tail

• To kick things of, here’s one of the most discussed articles in recent times: Tim O’Reilly about his ‘Web 2.0′ James Fallows explores not what Web 2.0 is but what it means. Tim O’Reilly responds and has a nice discussion on his blog about it

• A recent eye-opener was from Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School about how IT is a real game changer in business.

• Another recent article that set the blogosphere on fire for a while is ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ by Nicholas Carr which draws attention on the way we read. This is actually the article that triggered my thinking about long articles.

• Interesting insights on design by Kevin Fox who helped to design Gmail and is currently working on FriendFeed.

• Lawrence Lessig who already stirred things up with his book ‘Free Culture’ now tries to ‘Wikify’ Congress. Although I am not a US citizen (I’m Dutch), this still is interesting because it seems inevitable that something like this will take off.

• Jeff Jarvis writes mainly about how journalism and the printed press is (in need of) changing in order to stay alive in this digital world. When AP tried to bully and charge bloggers for quoting AP news snippets Jarvis nailed on what level Journalism 2.0 needs to be different, especially when it is about quoting and linking to other news outlets. Not really a long article, but several short ones about the same issue. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about the same issue.

• Last but not least, Scoble. He sure knows how to engage with his audience and still deliver interesting articles. In this bit he talks about why Technology Blogs have failed us recently and how he’s going to the root of his desire: blogging about technology, no more no less.

I plan to update or link to and from this post whenever an article comes to mind, so it might be a good idea to reply and keep posted about updates or replies. So, what do you think should be added to this list?

Ok, so I got some nice input from Yuri van Geest who pointed me to both Kevin Kelly and Bruce Sterling:

• Instead of singling out 1 article, I’ll recommend this long list of Kevin Kelly’s writings

• For a relaxing summersday at the swimmingpool, it might be a good idea to print ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ by Bruce Sterling. I like the way Amazon describes it: “It’s a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures–the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians.”

• An article I just got off Friendfeed by David Cohn who has an interesting point on how a crowd of people can sort of hire a blogger to report on a certain topic for a certain time. This allows for an article to get beneath the surface of a subject, just like good reporting in news papers.