Brad DeLong: Introductory Remarks:
I would very much like to thank the Kauffman Foundation--President McDonnell and Research Director Stangler for giving me the keys and letting me drive this; Shelley Wertz, Bob Strom, Mette Kramer, and the entire Kauffman communications and support teams that have made this possible.
This year, I want to go meta. I want to focus not quite so much on what economic and financial webloggers should say but rather a bit more on how they should say it.
All forum attendees here at the conference has gotten into the weblogging business in large part out of idealism; to some, but varying, degrees out of frustration; out of entrepreneurship; and out of overoptimism: idealism that a great deal could be done to raise the level of debate and discussion in the public sphere on issues of economics; frustration that the channels and filters of communication and discussion as we have inherited them are not ideal; entrepreneurship in a demonstrated willingness to try new ways to place themselves between those who have information and those who need information; and overoptimism that doing good work outside of normal channels will somehow be rewarded by a benevolent universe.
Thirty-five years ago my father bought my family’s first personal computer. Eighteen years ago my former roommate Paul Mende told me: “Hey, this World-Wide-Web thing is revolutionizing scholarly communication in Physics via the http://arxiv.org/ web server. You should check it out.” Fourteen years ago I noticed that both of my mentions in the then-most recent Foreign Affairs had come not from things I had published but from things I had thrown up on my website.
Twelve years ago I decided that somebody should go all-in and attempt to win the intellectual influence game via the strategy of always-putting-something-new-and-interesting-up-on-the-web. And as a guy with tenure at an institution that seemed to me to be the global optimum, I was one of the few people in the world who could do so with no significant possible personal downside risk.
And today here we all are.
Everybody here has shifted a great deal of their voice out of standard print and standard media into a form that bears at least a close cousinship to "weblogging". Everybody here has at least tried hard to significantly raise the level of the debate on matters economic. Everybody here has, I would argue, succeeded in significantly raising at least their corner of the debate above what it would otherwise have been. Everybody here has managed to do a great deal to disrupt and evade the dumbness filters that surround us and so much impede communication and education.
We all seem to have come remarkably close to maximizing the win, for some value of “maximize” and “win”--at least for ourselves if not for our institutions and our causes.
But the struggle is ongoing. There is still an enormous amount of headroom.
How do we keep maximizing our collective personal win? What are the tools, networks, and communities that we are going to use and deal with in the future? How will we deal with the other communities and modalities of communication on our borders. We, of course, seek total universal domination. Is that realistically attainable? If so, how? If not, for what should we settle and how should we settle for it? And how do we maximize the societal win?
Thus all six of the Forum's panels are about "opportunities and challenges for webloggers" in or provided by, respectively:
- evolving internet technologies,
- evolving educational technologies,
- financial news--where people are actually willing to pay,
- mainstream news--where figuring out how to get people to pay is quite a puzzle,
- organizations outside the media that wish to figure out how to use the internet megaphone, and
- our universities.
Everybody here has something to say--face-to-face here, addressing the world via livestreamed and archived video, via twitter, via their respective weblogs, and over whatever other modes of communication they can imagine. We seek as much speech as possible. Our hope is that by bringing this group together in one place for one day, we can supercharge the related distributed dialogues that these forum participants engage in every day in the moveable feast that is the global weblogging community. We hope not for consensus but for interesting disagreement. And we enthusiastically welcome additional during- and post-forum virtual participation from both those here in Kansas City on April 12, 2013, and those who are not.
A final word: In a fit of conference organizer over-optimism, I have crammed much more into this day than can possibly fit if there is even a jot or tittle of deviation from programmed schedules. Therefore: chairs will rule their panels with rods of iron affecting those who do not keep to time limits, those questioners who begin to make speeches, and those answers that begin to wander. Moderators are encouraged to, in the words of King Reheboam, chastise those who fail to respect the discourse not with whips, but with scorpions.
In the 19th Century Kansas City could claim to be the best place to be (outside of California) in the trans-Mississippi, as transport was best where the railroad bridge crossed the Missouri. Thanks to Google Fiber, in the 21st Century Kansas City can make a similar claim as the place where the bridge crosses between meatspace and the Cloud. Opportunities and challenges unique in America. All of us at Kauffman are very proud to have here, as moderator for our first session, the Mayor of Kansas City, MO, the Honorable Sylvester "Sly" James.
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