Here's Cam on Microsoft's Hailstorm . Read the URL that comes up. Those who condemned physical pleasure were more likely to approve violence against children, the death penalty, or punishment of abortion. This interview with George Lakoff enlarges the same subject. David Weinberger's out with the latest JOHO , in which he continues to shout in the wilderness that is Business as Usual about why proprietary notions about the Web remain entirely misplaced.
Civilizations form where the rivers meet.
Cultures develop in isolation because of the fact of distance. There is nothing we take for granted more than the fact that we are thrown into the gift of the world. The world that we've carved for ourselves out of the rock and ice of the earth has always been a social world, one in which we share interests and presuppositions, and, most of all, a language. The sociality of the world has always been hemmed in by the fact of distance, a type of enforced intimacy that we take for granted. But there's no matter on the Web and thus no distance.