| Jorn Barger | |
|---|---|
 Jorn Barger in 2008 |
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| Born | 1953 Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA |
| Residence | USA |
Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is an American blogger, best known today as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed. The short form, "blog," was later coined by Peter Merholz. Some of his writings have been a source of controversy, provoking accusations of anti-Semitism. He has also written extensively on James Joyce and artificial intelligence, among other subjects; his writing is almost entirely self-published.
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Barger's first computer in 1964 was one of the first programmable digital computers available, a Minivac 601 designed by Claude Shannon and advertised in Scientific American.
In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Freud, James Joyce, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. He graduated a year early, as valedictorian. Around 1978 he lived for a time at The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's intentional community in Tennessee. During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800.
In the late 1970s, Barger devised a theoretical methodology that demanded hypotheses be expressed as computer simulations, and that the simulations be refined by analyzing literary descriptions of human behavior. He called this method "Robot Wisdom".
From 1989 to the end of 1992, Barger worked as a programmer at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the leading AI researcher Roger Schank, eventually departing over what Barger has called "philosophical differences".
Barger has been an active Usenet participant since 1989. He wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce. In 1994 he formulated the "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa," and was also quoted by Time arguing for clarity as a precondition of effective writing online: "It's so competitive that you have to work on your style if you want to make any impact."[1]
Barger has published (mostly via his website) material on artificial intelligence (AI) and the Irish novelist James Joyce. He has referred to Joyce as an early pioneer of artificial intelligence and as the master of descriptive psychology.
Barger is conflicted about employment and has suffered financial hardship as a consequence. He put the maxim "You can't serve God and Mammon" at the top of his site's "issues.literate" section and in December 2001 he mentioned an interest in employment by telecommute but noted his philosophical concerns: "I have a gigantic psychological block against Mammon-in-general, and no longterm ideas how to overcome it. Alternative currency? Retreat to a cave?" [2] In July 2005, Paul Boutin reported that Barger was "homeless and broke" in San Francisco, California, "living on less than a dollar a day" and that he had been carrying a panhandling sign thad read, "Coined the term 'weblog', never made a dime."[3] Barger has since dismissed the article as a piece of "libelous fiction"[4] and its author has retracted the statement that Barger was homeless.[5]
Previously a longtime resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003.[6]
As of April 2007, Barger was in El Dorado, Arkansas, and reportedly made frequent use of the Barton library.
A prolific Usenet poster since 1989, Barger started his Robot Wisdom site[7] in February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James Joyce, AI, history, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages.
On December 17, 1997, Barger began posting daily entries on his Robot Wisdom Weblog featuring "links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting" [8] and "amounted to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits" (ibid.), thus pioneering the "weblog" as it is known today. He has described his intentions in terms of exploration and discovery:
I was a very, very late adopter of the Web, not switching from lynx (text-only, Unix-based) to Netscape until late 1997. But by that point the Web had grown into a vast impenetrable treasure cave, generally in pitch blackness. I desperately wanted someone to 'turn on the lights' so I could see what was where, what treasures were there for my enjoyment.
So I determined to take on that task for a while -- to devote full time to lighting up the dark corners, building my "Net.literate" portal, and keeping up a running commentary in my weblog.[9]
Robot Wisdom's Net.literate started in July 1998, was a human-edited web directory that served as a complement to the weblog and aimed to provide the best links on a wide range of topics classified under "Fun," "Art," "Media," "Issues," "Internet," "Technology," "Science," "History," "Search," and "Shop."[10]
In Barger's view, a weblog is edited rather than written, as personal expression is secondary to the task of providing links to good reading matter. He has suggested a set of principles intended to guide bloggers towards that end[11].
Robot Wisdom Weblog acquired a large and enthusiastic following: Village Voice called it "one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web,"[12] Brill's Content claimed that it presented "news the way web pioneers envisioned it—hypertextual, wide-reaching, and exhaustive,"[13] Fast Company called it "one of the best Web logs on the Net,"[14] Feed Magazine wrote that the site was "frequented by thousands of the Net's most knowledgeable,"[15] and The New Yorker had the following praise:
For readers, the Internet is an embarrassment of riches, with thousands of pages of new text to sift through daily. Thank goodness, then, for "weblogs," sites that scour the Web for interesting prose and data. What elevates Robot Wisdom above other weblogs is the catholicity of its creator, Jorn Barger, who has a healthy appetite for everything from literature to science. The result is a world defined by Barger's curiosity, in which an article about a grand plan to film all nineteen Beckett plays sits comfortably alongside a report on post-Chernobyl cleanup efforts.[16]
The Register found that "there's no better reader on the Internet than Jorn Barger."[17]
Barger has also been recognized for his contribution to the emergence of the blogosphere. He was nominated among the "visionaries who changed the face of the Web in 1998"[18] in CNET's Web Innovator Awards for having "inspired the Web Log community."[18] A recent ACM paper of 2009[19] also discusses Barger as one of the most central figures in creating the weblog as a networked medium.
In September 1999, Barger posted one of the first in-depth examinations of weblogs, the "Weblog FAQ,"[20] and he led a weblog forum[21] between August 1999 and April 2000. In 2000 Barger felt he had exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began to explore the timeline format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource.
Robot Wisdom has gone offline repeatedly for protracted periods of time. By December 2001, Barger was experiencing financial difficulties that he announced would cause an interruption in keeping Robot Wisdom online.[2]. The site then went offline for a couple of months. Barger allowed his domain registration to lapse in early 2005, but managed to bring the site back online a few weeks later.[3] Robot Wisdom went offline again in late January 2007. On 10 February, Barger placed a note on his Robot Wisdom Auxiliary[22] weblog soliciting $10 (US) donations, payable to his web host, to help "save robotwisdom.com". By 12 February, Robotwisdom.com was online again.
Barger has experimented with Robot Wisdom as a revenue-generator, soliciting advertisements in 2000, and, in 2005, donations via PayPal.
Since October 2006, Barger has maintained the Robot Wisdom Auxiliary[22] "to supplement the Robot Wisdom link blog."
Barger, a follower of anti-zionist critic Israel Shahak,[23] first gave offense in 2000 when he asked if judaism as an ideology is inherently disciminatory.[24] Barger has also given umbrage by repeatedly placing slogans at the top his weblog that were critical of judaism.[25][26][27][28]
Barger has studied Joyce's own notebooks and manuscripts (for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) for insight into the author's own statements about his work; he has also prepared an online "shorter" annotated version of Finnegans Wake. Barger's website offers hundreds of pages of documentation for this research, although critics have noted that very little of his Joyce research has passed academic peer review. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is agreed upon by Joyce scholars and what is Barger's conjecture. Barger seemed to acknowledge this when he published his list of "50+ Joycean Conjectures".[29]
Barger has contributed one book chapter on Finnegans Wake[30] and a book review in the James Joyce Quarterly.[31 ]
Over the years, Barger has posted a number of autobiographical accounts. These include the following works:
   | "Jorn Barger missing." - Jorn Barger missing | MetaFilter |
| | "The Black is Back." - The Black is Back | MetaFilter |
| | "Robot Wisdom on the Street." - Wired 13.07: POSTS |
| | "Jorn Barger Has Left the Building." - Jorn Barger Has Left the Building |
| | "Jorn Barger Shows True Colors." - The Sound And Fury: Apr 7, 2002 |
| | "Signal and Noise: Web Surgery." - New York News - Face Off - page 1 |
| | "Technology: Fear of Links." - Salon Technology | Fear of links |
| | "On Language: Blog" - Blog - The New York Times |
| | "The Human Behind Robot Wisdom." - Interview > The Human Behind Robot Wisdom |
| | Trust or Consequences - ModemJunkie: January, 2000 -- Trust or Consequences |
| | Robot Wisdom on the Street - Wired 13.07: POSTS |
| | Interview with Jorn on webword.com - Interview > The Human Behind Robot Wisdom |
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