My colleague Lyn Jeffery found this nice quote by Clifford Geertz who died on the 30th. From what I’ve read, his writing is both insightful and elegant. His study of the bazaars in Morocco should interest anyone interested in Smart Mobs (The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing, 1978).

The next necessary thing…is neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like culture…nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.

from Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)