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Jorn Barger

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Jorn Barger in 2005

Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is a United States 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.

Biography

In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Freud and James Joyce. Before graduating (a year early, as valedictorian), he decided his life's goal would be to solve the riddles of the human psyche. He spent the first half of the 1970s rejecting traditional approaches to psychology, one by one, with Jiddu Krishnamurti providing the ultimate rationale for a pathless approach.

In the late 1970s, he developed a new 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 cybernetic psychology, or "Robot Wisdom."

In 1979 he discovered a set of semantic primes that could be combined to describe hundreds of nuances in human behavior. He called this system "Anti-Math." In the early 1980s he compiled a database of behavioral nuances in the form of a long poem called "Brainfeathers," and then discovered that the basic structure of the poem was identical with Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800.

Barger is an expert on James Joyce and artificial intelligence (AI). His resources on James Joyce are extensive and are referenced in academic websites. He has referred to Joyce as an early pioneer of artificial intelligence and as the master of descriptive psychology. At one time Barger worked at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the leading AI researcher Roger Schank, eventually departing over philosophical differences.

An active participant in Usenet during the 1990s, he wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce. In 1994 he formulated an "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa."

Weblog

On December 17, 1997, Barger began posting short comments and links on his own Robot Wisdom website, thus pioneering the "weblog" as it is known today. His site soon included interlinked weblog sections titled "Fun," "Art," "Issues," "Net," "Tech," "Science," "History," "Search," and "Shop."

One of the first weblog controversies revolved around his political comments and the wording of his weblog's headlines linking to articles concerning the history of Judaism, policies of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some participants in a 1997 Web forum discussion Barger moderated on these issues accused him of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

By 2000 he felt he had exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began instead to explore the timeline format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource. Meanwhile Robot Wisdom was evolving to include information and essays on James Joyce, AI, history, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends, among the topics Barger covered. 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.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Barger posted a FAQ essay in the soc.culture.pakistan forum at Usenet reviewing conflicting statements by President George W. Bush, the New York Times, and the Jerusalem Post regarding Israeli casualties at the World Trade Center. His Usenet essay, which closed by calling for a "teach-in on Judaism and on the Middle East," drew accusations of conspiracy paranoia and anti-Semitism from several blog commentators.

Previously a long-time resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. Several bloggers initiated an outpouring of concern and speculation in early 2004 when Barger had not been seen online for some months. However, Barger had been known to take unexplained absences from the Internet before, and his departure turned out again to be temporary; Robot Wisdom returned in February 2005.

In June 2005, according to writer Paul Boutin in a brief Wired magazine item, Barger had allowed Robot Wisdom's registration to lapse and could not afford to reregister it — he was broke, unemployed, and sleeping on the floor of a writer friend in San Francisco, California. Reportedly, Barger said that he was planning a move to Memphis, Tennessee, and that if he needed to panhandle for cash he had a sign ready reading "Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime." Barger denies that Boutin accurately described his financial or housing situation.

References

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