I took my dog for a five mile walk this morning, to celebrate my headcold starting to go away and the first blue sky in about a week. The temperature here has been drizzle and high forty degrees for way too long. It was a great decision. The dog and I are both pleasantly exercised, and my brain is on fire. I understand podcasting now, what a worldchanging phenomenon it is. And I have a head full of ideas about legal information, the broken way we perform legal research and the system that might displace Westlaw and Lexis in the next five years. It was a great way to start the day.
On a lark as I was heading out the door, I grabbed my mp3 player. I had loaded it up with a bunch of interesting lectures -- Barry Schwartz, Frans de Waal, Clay Shirky, Thomas Barnett, Bruce Schneier. I'd already listened to de Waal and Shirky, and I'd liked it, so thought I would listen to the others.
But it turned out that I was mistaken. I only had de Waal, Shirky, and a couple of lousy experimental music tracks I'd downloaded. I was disappointed as I scrolled through the selections on my cheap little mp3 player. But I already had it in my ears and so I decided I'd listen to Clay Shirky again, because after all I'd been mowing the lawn when I listened to his talk before, and I'd thought it was kind of cool, and, you know, I was already on my walk and it was there, so why not.
And so I listened again to the talk about the categorization of ideas, and something really cool happened. I understood the implications of his point way more deeply than the first time I'd heard it. I was listening to the talk the second time in a more relaxed way. I already knew the gist of what he was saying, so I could think a little more about his metaphors, and I could think more broadly about what other examples applied. Plus I was walking along, relaxed, looking at the sky, when my brain is used to free associating and daydreaming and wandering.
What Clay is talking about in his lecture has huge implications for legal research. If I were Westlaw and/or Lexis, or someone who's interested in toppling those dinosaurs, I'd have Clay on the phone right now. I think what Clay is talking about has huge implications for lawyers and how we search and find information, and how we share metadata about that information. I'm still thinking about this, but may post something more about the substance of those ideas later.
But the point is, the idea of podcasting is really big. Now that I've started listening to podcasts, I see that. It's not just that I can choose what kind of audio, produced by whomever, to listen to in my spare time, thus disempowering the mainstream media. I already understood that as a social phenomenon. But there's a lot more to it than that.
The podcast format, and the quirks of that format, make it more likely that I'll listen to something like Clay Shirky's talk more than once (even if it was by mistake). And when you listen to something, especially something challenging and complex, more than once, you are able to absorb it differently. You can understand it better. That's important. It's also important that you can concentrate on information in a different context. You can listen to ideas when you're driving, or walking, or mowing your lawn. I know that something happens to my brain when I'm away from my desk -- I have more loose associations, more whimsical thoughts, more creative energy. The idea of a podcast is that you can hear talks and absorb new ideas in these contexts, and it may make possible a whole new kind of understanding. It's very cool.
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