Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Sheila arranges her hands on the desktop and tells us with resolution, "I've uploaded ninety percent of my consciousness to the Web". Call her a dream weaver of the Information Age.

The host of a news, culture, and tech blog called Subterranean Homepage News (see projo.com) for the Providence Journal of Rhode Island, Sheila has submitted a daily culture report since 2002. The blog title's similarity to a famous song by the bard of the Peace Generation is no surprise.

Sheila's more than blogging for blogging's sake. She mentions "Democratic Underground" and "Free Republic", on-line communities, one progressive, one not. In her domain, technology is also a vehicle for empowerment. Oh yes, and Sheila also wrote about Woodstock, the social experiment of a generation that opposed certain technologies. It used music as empowerment. Now the Net is that vehicle. It can bring us together. Ask Sheila.

Can the information revolution really bring the world together? Can Java reach Java? She interfaces with us: "Blogs and websites make an ecosystem", she says. She speaks of "tribes of consciousness." She goes on to say that convergence is a good thing, that "We can publish what everyone knows by getting many contributors." She's stretched more Movable Type 3.2 than Gutenberg 1440. And, speaking of Movable Type, she says there is a new version that allows anyone to be a blogger.

So, what's her template for the future? It seems we're getting communities of interest rather than social networks. Hm, sub-cultures. Tribes of consciousness. Where have we seen this before?

Sheila scans around at us learners. She tells of Establishment values . We sit google-eyed and hear about the extent of power relationships in the world of journalism, We learn of public-owned news sources laying-off journalists to feed the bottom line, of the risk to journalists in making negative comments about their employers on the blogs, of the expectation that print journalists will write in the voices of their papers when writing in print.

As an alternative, there is the equality of the blogging community. Bloggers write in their own voices.

Web2.0 is a concept on Web use that doesn't need downloads to browsers. You connect directly to browsers. The Web itself is the software, Sheila explains. All URLs are equal, she says.

One of her blog friends is Doc Searls, who wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is about dialogues between markets' customers and between employees within companies, and the need for companies to listen. It's about the hostility companies will meet by extending the old command and control systems.

Sounds like power relationships being turned upside down, Sheila. . It's about equality. Sheila "dropped out" as a PhD candidate, appropriately enough, to run a relief organization in Bangladesh and start a clothing factory in Gambia .

In an earlier time, Sheila and her peers tried to put a bug in the command and control practices of her government. She not only wrote about Woodstock ("Your Neighbors May be Natives of Woodstock Nation", Providence Journal, August 13, 1989). She was there.

"It was what the world would be like if run by eighteen to twenty-five year olds", she says At Woodstock it was the music that connected the tribes. In this age it is the Internet.

"Sheila, I loved your Woodstock piece. I loved the small paragraphs emphasizing the multiplicity of voices", I said, following class. "It took me fifty interviews to get that", she says with attachment to her journalist's instincts. What I most loved was that the short paragraphs (are some even that?) are like bits of info on the Web: Free-floating info - like the tribes at Woodstock. The festival was a democratic, evolving community of migrating tribes people. Maybe the bloggers are, too.

Sheila networks with us, her momentary community, again. She is democratic with us. She doesn't talk down. No power games here. She raps with us peer to peer.

On what she was doing at the Love Fest she says, "I called my summer employer on a pay phone from the New York Thruway to quit my job. That was the last chance I'd ever wear a dress suit" .

And BK ReplaceEm software creates links between gig listings and bands' pages: Sheila gives free pages, including music downloads, to bands in Rhode Island. It's like Wavy Gravy and The Hog Farm dispensing free stew at Woodstock. There was a Central pot giving out to little bowls to little mouths. And Sheila says of info: "I absorb, maybe add to it, and pass it on". . "Jimi Hendrix played those chords," says Sheila, "sounding like the bombs in Vietnam." . "The music was the background. We wanted an alternative to (the war in) Vietnam".

On freedom of speech, she tags on "I am against censorship of any kind." < insert C and K>.

Maybe blogging is the worldwide meeting of the tribes her generation envisioned at Yasgur's Farm in '69.