sig-o-matic
 ...as I read I realized, "this would make a good .sig..."


Over time, any functional specialization tends to forget its relationship to the larger social context it was created to work within and serve. Instead, it concentrates on developing an inner sanctum of specialists who talk among themselves in a private language inaccessible to outsiders.

In the meantime, the time of our lives, all we have is intuition and stories to try to make sense of the world, to provide some sort of vision of where we're at and where we may be headed. But that's not so bad. As a species, it's all we've ever had.

True voice is not just the ability to speak, but the ability to speak effectively.

In contrast to mass media, the net has liberated audiences and markets to seek out what _they_ are interested in.

Everyone needs an outlet for that part of themselves that usually isn't allowed to speak at all.

To speak from the heart is to become who we truly are, and that's always risky, or at least surprising.

...intellectual capital has little to do with ownership today, and everything to do with invitation, access and enthusiastic bottom-up community involvement.

The most successful branding campaign ever carried out was the branding of brand itself--getting human beings to accept the implicit assumption that all value is monetary, that everything has a price in dollars and cents (or currency of your choice). This largely unconscious theory of value is what defines and drives consumerism, in which identity is determined by what you have and can get instead of by who you discover you are or may become.

This time of change is not any time. This world not any world. It is ours and we are here today, as never before, to chronicle and celebrate its wonders. To take it back.

The corporation pretends to subscribe to values it does not and cannot understand. Human values. Like love, like trust, like camaraderie and joy. These are things we genuinely value, but they have been devalued and denatured to advance the very different interests of the company. In the process, we are not only losing our language, we are losing our lives.

It's easy to forget that one of the primary uses of hypertext--the tangled web of stuff the web is based on--is to enable learning, which begins with establishing meaningful categories, connecting like to like.

...the best conversations, the ones people gravitate toward, are based on stories. Stories, like conversations, don't have targets, fixed goals, Q2 objectives. They circumnabulate their subjects. They explore. They don't have mission statements. If pitch is the epitome of broadcast, the story embodies the essential character of the web.

We may not be able to say with much certainty what the ultimate 'objective' truth about the world is, but on the Internet we've given ourselves and each other an increasing measure of liberty to say what it feels like to be living in whatever version of this world we can manage--the freedom, in fact, to say whatever comes into our heads.

...democracy is still a highly tentative experiment. There are plenty who feel we'd be better off if we had just the true stuff. The real stuff. The official version. Then everyone would know what was going on. Only problem is, this is called fascism. If not for the Internet, we might be there already. But even before the net--yes, kids, it's true, this stuff goes way back--there were people who didn't give a flying fuck about the official version. Artists, they're sometimes called.

Boring is dangerous.

Information is halfway between matter and spirit....what I mean is that information mediates the spirit in which we perceive and value the material world.

The problem with materialism is not that it loves the world too much, but that it does not love the world _enough_. If the dictates of business are causing the exhaustion of planetary resources, something is clearly wrong with its system of valuing matter.

While dogma tends to limit and shut down the nature of the possible, contradiction and uncertainty enrich it. We have a name for people who deal with confusion without trying to reduce and simplify it, who enter into an open conversation with the world. We call them artists.

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All quotations copyright 2001 by Christopher Locke. Quotations can be found on pages 4, 8, 11, 26, 31, 32, 37, 50, 57, 59, 78, 104, 158, 159, 180, 208, 209, and 212 (respectively) of the 2001 hardcover edition published by Perseus Publishing.

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