dave at stanford
Dave Winer spoke at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's lunchtime series. The talk will be archived here soon. There was a great turn-out keen to learn from the master, and the master taught well -- mixing genuine and useful insight with an idealism that is too rare around here.
Law students begin life as idealists, and there's an obvious and powerful idealism in the Winer's arguments. I'll point to my favorite parts when the talk is posted. Meanwhile, I was happy to tell him that the Center will be copying his experiment at Harvard next fall, and offering a blog for every entering student in the law school. Turow's One L, or even Alex Wellen's Barman will be nothing in comparison.
| Permalink | technorati
Comments (5)
Hey now. Not all of us at the talk were Stanford Law students. Med students are just as idealistic! (But sadly, barely any of my classmates have a clue what a blog is. But I'm still preaching the gospel.) Thanks for hosting the event, Professor Lessig.
In a relatively short stint at a large West Coast law school, arriving there as Dave was starting his fellowship at Harvard, I tried to evangelize weblogs and self-publishing. Perhaps Stanford's experience will guide them.
Law school students start out as idealists, but come out as corporate tools. At least so argues Granfield for Harvard Law school.
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/career/phd/social-networks-grad-school
... Granfield considers the career preferences of Harvard Law students in light of the odd observation: there is a disjunction in that many students enter wanting to work on issues of social justice, and become even more radical during their tenure (Granfield 1992:46), but leave to become corporate lawyers (Granfield 1992:48): only 5% enter government or public interest organizations upon graduation. A possible explanation is that through the law school socialization students become cynical about the ability of law to effect positive social change. This happens through the intense socialization and being taught how to win an argument on either side (Granfield 1992:58), which disorientates many who came to law school hoping to find "justice" -- those with a firm conceptualization of justice aren't so shaken....
Granfield, Robert. 1992. Making Elite Lawyers. New York: Routledge.
I have been reading your blog with a keen eye for a while now, thanks for posting and thanks for hosting. I enjoyed Dave's lecture and am looking forward to the next.
I do have a question... which I started to ask towards the end of the lecture. I think it came out kind of disjointed, so I will post in the hopes of clarification.
Professor Lessig, you had asked Dave what two scenarios could/would be looking forward into the blogging future. Forgive me if my paraphrasing isn't completely acccurate. You asked for one optimistic and one pessimistic. He gave an optimistic outlook, which foresaw a world where the blog had facilitated the availability of information at a much finer level than we can currently get from a limited and filtered set of media outlets. E.g. instead of getting the weather for San Francisco, we could get the weather for the Inner Sunset neighborhood or the Mission area of the city. This of course being valuable as rarely is the weather the same in those two areas.
I believe in this outcome, but what I am unclear about is the path that leads us to this outcome. My question was and is, in short, what is the capitalists angle? Or what incentive does the establishment have in taking steps in this direction?
My experience has been that the establishment is far better served by the status quo and will work adamantly to maintain it. We have seen this all around us, for example the Record Industries efforts to stall the mainstreaming of digital audio.
I would love any thoughts on this from either you or Dave.
Prof. Lessig, thanks again for your blog and for facilitating the lecture on Monday.
Richard, we already have that. I have an RSS feed for weather in the suburb of Boston that I live in, and I can also get a report for Cambridge, where I work. Further, it comes to me in an incredibly convenient form in RSS. Check out rssweather.com. Their incentive? Not sure. Maybe they're not sure either. But I am getting the info nonetheless.
BTW, in case you're wondering, it's 13 degrees, Farenheit.
Ouch!