Skip to content
Login

Second Superpower Semantics

Posted by Paul Miller at 1:14pm on Monday, 7th April 2003

An interesting linguistic twist has been performed on the web in the last few weeks around the term 'second superpower', which was initially coined in the New York Times to describe the global anti-war protests. This article in The Register tells the tale well.

Comments

1
Before going for the argument in the register, you might want to read the paper The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head, which I wrote. The Second Superpower paper is intended to be a call to arms to those of us in the peace movement, building on the idea of the movement and civil society as a second superpower. This is the paper that stimulated what many think of as a rant in the Register. The Register accuses a group of bloggers of manipulating Google to get it to promote the paper. According to the log files on our server, about 5000 people visited the site or downloaded the pdf version PRIOR to Google even ranking it. Analyzing our log, the popularity of the paper was due to the blogging community picking it up, and a number of email list folks deciding they liked it--and sending the link out. Of the first 42,000 visits (by day 5), only about 3000 came through Google. There was no attempt to googlewash anything--indeed, The Register writer is the one who has conducted an intentional rhetorical battle, propelling himself into the news by making a false accusation. God bless him, however, because his intervention has caused thousands more to download the original paper. The conflict itself has been mainly for the good, since our main hope is that the movement grasp the notion of itself as a second superpower, and make it happen even more.
Posted by Jim Moore  at 2:44pm on Thursday, 10th April 2003
2
The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head is available on our server at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html
Posted by Jim Moore  at 2:48pm on Thursday, 10th April 2003

LOGIN to add comments