The fabric of the blogosphere. Reading Brian Greene's New York Times op-ed on the inherent subjectivity of time in a quantum, relativistic universe, I couldn't help be struck by two thoughts. First, Greene fails to mention Peter Galison's excellent recent book on the very same subject of time simultaneity.
Second, and more important, Greene's vision of “kaleidoscopic” time perfectly describes the messy, intersubjective, constantly changing yet enduring nature of information in the emerging blogosphere:
As David Weinberger taught us in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the Net has deep metaphysical implications for our conception of the world. We're all used to thinking of the Web as the revolutionary development, and it certainly was. But while the Web dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and accessing information, it kept the static and impersonal page metaphor of older media. Weblogs, aided by syndication mechanisms, remove that crutch.
Some day we may look back and identify the rise of blogs, not the Web, as the decisive development that changed our relationship to information… and to each other. [Werblog]