The WELL: Topics in the pre.vue Conference

pre.vue.150: New to WELL

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

Good evening,

I'm an older student at Texas Woman's University who is taking a sociological class on cyberspace. This is my very first exposure to virtual communities and I'm totally lost! Any input would be greatly appreciated! [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.149: sustainable politico-economic ethics

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

i am not prepared for starting this in a carefully reasoned way,but my primary approach is grounded on a philosophical position that is more or less anti-ideologistic. this awkward coinage in meant to be one of the summary notions for what i consider to be the problematic and now destructive perspective on human values as being based on --- without being rigorous --- a tendency to assume or assert that human beings are essentially and more or less necessarily selfish and egoistic.

This notion of the basic nature of humanity pervades a cloudy set of notions that are related in turn on notions of power, authority based on power, even when the implied hierarchy is based on meritocracy.

This is usually accompanied by a tendency to admire winning, even to the degree that, emotionally, winning is extremely important --- or even the most important thing.

Winning, historically considered, has often been associated with the notion that people who are not winners are losers, and that losers are not as significant or valuable as winners. This the familiar simple model usually titled win-lose (as contrasted with win-win, an appealingly attractive notion). One need recognize that the win-lose model, notion, or paradigm can be very attractive to those who devalue losers.

But at the moment, i am trying to sketch and rough out a whole cloud of notions, tendencies, patterns of thought, emotional and intellectual models, political models, economic models, military models, models of psychological and social domination, ideals about what is the nature of the good and the best, ways of selecting the best, etc.

This mess of models, patterns, and tendencies is one we might call the egoist paradigm, except that such a term might be taken as implying some notional object that is probably treated as something a little intellectually more crisp, or strict, or even disciplined than i am concerned about.

Some of the above description might be considered to be appropriately discussed as ontology if my intentions are showing through, but i will try to point out that the whole domain of the pair of super paradigms i will try to rush by (in order to get on with the claimed topic) are a mix that we might not need to clarify and assign to strict columns on a chart.

My main goal and therefore task is to contribute whatever i may to a further understanding that if we were to take this super paradigm that

might be given some more precise title and call it the egoist paradigm, we would be narrowing altogether too much the potentially inclusive scope of the collection of notions. this would tend to lead considerations, discussion, or anaylsis off into dense thickets of the constituent aspects of the model or clump of models.

For this reason, i have chosen to refer to this clump of notions as the ALPHA super paradigm. The exact notion of what people mean when they refer to this or that paradigm can be very slippery or can result in squabbles where intellectual wars might be waged of just what the x or y paradigm might ought to be.

The main reason i mention the vague entity of the alpha paradigm is that i am trying to enlist help in defining its polar paradigm of the same sort. I call this intended and intentional super paradigm the OMEGA paradigm.

I call it the omega paradigm primarily because it is the Greek alphabetical pole of alpha and because i grew up many, many decades ago in Episcopal churches that often had alphas and omegas in relief carved or molded all about in my restless field of vision.

So since we want this discussion to be about super import political, social, and ethical issues, i want to differentiate and distinguish our discussion a bit from mere a to z matters. I suppose that is more than a little weak as a humourous aside. My casual apologies.

So Omega super paradigm it is. Onward.

I must take a break and dash off for a bite more physically nourishing than bytes.

Later, Olin [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.148: The death of WELLgopher sort of

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

The gopher is dead, long live the gopher!

Last night, in our continuing effor to modernize our technical infrastructure without tossing the baby with the older bathwater, we sort of killed off WELLgopher.

Gopher.well.com was one of the oldest continuously operating gophers on the net. It was frozen in time, with a nice set of articles WELL members pulled together in the early 90s. They sat there, with outdated contact info and all, like old magazines in a library.

This week we reached a point where it was no longer reasonable to try to support that technology as we virtualized the www.well.com box, and all that lived there. There are times when simplification is a primary goal, and this battle to adapt dozens of old apps from the Solaris environment run in a verson of Linux on a VM made simplicity a virtue.

So gopher is gone. Fortunately, a member of The WELL stepped up to HTMLize the contents of the gopher, so we can continue to display the content, though it is now via http. I am not sure if he wants public credit for his task, so I'll let him make that choice at some point.

But THANK YOU.

It's not via gopher, but the WELLgopher content lives on here:

http://www.well.com/gopher/ [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.147: The E-Patients White Paper

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

What are "e-patients?" Who are the people who make up the e-patients group, what are their goals, and what's this White Paper they've been working on? [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.146: Business and Technology News for 2008

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

...hello, 2008! [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.145: Wishes On The Wind

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

Lend me your ear, and I'll blow you a wish. [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.144: The Writers Guild of America goes on strike!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

Wondering what's up with the Hollywood writers' strike? Then join us for a conversation with Guild member Howard A. Rodman, a screenwriter who's out there walking the picket lines, and writer/author W. James Au, host of The WELL's Screenwriters conference. [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.143: A Question for Damocles

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

Hanging questions, rhetorical or otherwise... [Read entire topic]

pre.vue.142: The Amazing Thing I Experienced Today

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

[Read entire topic]

pre.vue.140: QOTW: The interesting thing I know

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:32:00 PDT

What intersting thing have you learned? Recently or not. [Read entire topic]