Boing Boing, Gaping Void and Johnnie Moore have all posted on Ben Hammersley’s presentation at Reboot in Copenhagen last week. Here’s a slide from Ben’s Power Point deck.
Mr. Moore reports:
He gave a great talk called Etiquette and the Singularity, including the notion that the first blogger was Sir Richard Steele back in 1709. Steele wanted to circulate his opinions so started writing a thrice-weekly letter which was widely distributed by street urchins.
He called it The Tatler and it mutated into what we’d now call a dinosaur blog (ie magazine). Ben went on to talk about how at the same time, people started dressing in ways that made status less easy to determine and spent a lot of time talking in coffee houses. A parallel for the freebooting conversations for which we now have the internet.
I like this way of thinking about blogging. Not as something extraordinary and techie, but as something simple and innately human. Back then, conversation led to The Enlightenment. Maybe we can have another one of those today?
