In Search of Jefferson’s Moose:

So a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at NY Law School (where I’ve been visiting this past semester) about the book project (“In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace”) I’ve been working on for a while. The basic idea is to re-create Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” focusing not on Virginia or the (old) “New World,” but on cyberspace (the new “New World”).
The organizing trope is the story of how Jefferson, while in Paris, had a complete moose skeleton shipped to him from New Hampshire. He was trying to show the French zoologists of the time that animals did not get smaller in the New World — and, additionally (or so I argue), he wanted to dazzle them with the sight of an animal they knew nothing of and that was truly an awe-inspiring sight. And I’m looking, among other things, for the cyberspace equivalent — the “aha moment” that gets people to think “we’ve got something truly new on our hands here.”
In any event, I go off to my cabin in Vermont (where my Internet access is slo-o-o-o-w, and where I don’t get out on the Net much), and my friend and colleague Susan Crawford does a blog posting about the whole thing, which got picked up here, and then here, and then all of a sudden I start getting email from people saying “hey, this Jefferson’s moose thing is getting a lot of play these days …” It’s all pretty interesting — and if you have any ideas for what our moose equivalent might be, send them my way …
David