Craig Simon wrote: > I welcome this as a carefully thought out experiment in public > participation. It offers an approach to resolving the current > "DNS Mess" and may generate insights and techniques beneficial > to contestants in future Internet governance controversies. In > that sense, "we" are not lab rats running through the Berkman > Center's maze, but co-participants in a process designed to > find ways to reconcile people who carry diverse interests and > values. In all of these procedings we have been through the recent introduction of the Berkman Centre has been one of the oddest chapters in my opinion. Some obscure Ivy League graduate school has, inexplicably and magically found itself at the very heart of a world wide controversy with a unique opportunity to increase it's own prestige, to offer it's student ample live research opportunities and it's staff not only places at the front of new, eager disciples but also an unbleievable coup: access to thousands of breathing living, apparently willing adult subjects to recieve their academic piccadellos and form the basis of endless case studies, thesis, journal articles and (dread) dissertations! GLORY BE! As one of the would be guniea pigs I can only laugh at the transparent manner in which these deans and dons, their eager post-docs and lecturers have descended upon this academics El Dorado. Laugh and watch as stupid surveys, clumsy artifices, utterly unrealistic concepts are slipped into their helping efforts. I can just imagine all of the presentation, papers, conferences and books that are, as we deliberate, buring their way to publishers and journals all the Ivory Tower Worldwide. In less time than it takes for the professor to undress the sophomore we will discover ourselves immortalized in vast tomes of drollery and insight, theory and speculation. My attitude towards this kind of intervention has modified from it's original disgust and anger. Recently I can only harken back to my own, unending amusement at academic antics in my University career so long ago. All of the Department politics and struggle to be the smarties of the smarty pants, the "publish or perish" fever... the whole obtuse spectacle! Let it form an irreductable and hilarious part of the circus like procedings! They have formed a gloriously funny sub- story of the whole reeling badnwagon fiasco. As if some wonderous spin-master had brought them in to further warp and already utterly Alice In Wonderlandesque fantasyworld! And when it all inevitably goes to pieces the scene will be truely unbelieveable... spawning even more studies that allow even more dissertations and papers, windy lectures and generous endowments. Long Live Haaaavard! Viva Centro Berkman! Hip hip hoorah and let the show go on! Bob Allisat Free Community Network _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fcn.net _ http://fcn.net/allisat = http://robin.fcn.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ To receive the digest version instead, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNSUBSCRIBE, forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Problems/suggestions regarding this list? Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___END____________________________________________
