hello there! first of all: sorry for lurking around a bit, lately, we've been so under pressure for various reasons, but we will be back :)
bit i wanted to throw pressure aside for a second and say a thing: On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:00 PM, marc garrett <[email protected]>wrote: > > What I don't want is to build something with others and then finding out > that they really are not interested, this could be a problem. > > There are peers who I originally thought wanted something similar, then > realised after a while that they were not really that interested in > being a part of something collaborative or mutual, but more singular - > based around their own needs alone, rather than building something > special with others - shared. > yes, this is indeed very interesting. because different ways of being "present" online each have multiple levels of access, perception, interaction, privacy, publicity... even if we take facebook under investigation, you, the user, potentially can engave a *lot* of different streams of information that are different for type and intimacy: feeds, info, public chitchat, private messages, discussion taking place on notes and articles, things being connected to off-site destinations. the experiences are so varied and disseminated, and so large in reach and diversity that fb turns into something that very few people will have trouble in defining as "infrastructure". so, on one side, i totally agree with marc and his concerns for private and personal information/data being managed and handled by commercial entities that are starting to act like real nations (doesn't anyone of you think that Google's statements with China closely resembled the diplomatic discourse that a "classic" nation could have done?). and on the other side i am progressively (up to the maniac level) getting more and more interested in the ethnographic observation of it all, fueled with the curiosity to understand how things are moving along, how people bahave, what they desire, what they see interesting, what gets their emotions running, what turns on connections, interactions and relationships. and it turns out that it's proteic: many many different building blocks which you can't tell apart one from the other, replicated across social networks, services, portals and platforms, assembling in unique ways around an infinite variation of concepts and ideas. And each of this agglomerates (of messaging, realtime info, near-realtime communication, asyncronous sharing...) has a meaning and that each of them benefits from higher or lower levels of success (e.g.: number of users) due to a very large number of factors. the least interesting of which are also the most powerful: having loads of money coming from a commercial or venture capital sponsorship allowing you to promote the service and activate people around it. and the most interesting of them all are also the most ephemeral: the will, desire and narratives of bunches of people starting up "things" somewhere in digital time and space. i specifically enjoy the performative characterization of this. each of these action is interstitial and performative in nature: choosing a name (for domain, website...), a when/where/what/who, buying domains, learning how to use software packages, setting it up, cursing on unitelligible configuration syntaxes.. you know... and i feel that the "mailing list", especially in its "discussion list" variation, is very fitting in this scenario. It is truly interstitial (it doesn't exist, geographically or techno-geographically) and it only and exclusively lives on exchange: of mail, messages, word-of-mouth, difficult links to follow to subscribe. It is just pure connection to people. and, another thing which i find interesting, is that mailing lists are almost completely out of standard: meaning that fewer and fewer people choose them as a medium for their exchange, preferring to them all those managed services such as ning, google groups, facebook and others. it is progressively harder to setup a discussion list, if you noticed: hosting plans loose support for the scripting needed to run mailman, for example, and public services mostly offer the broadcast quality of newsletters. and for anyone that is not tech-savy, a managed group of some sort is practically the only tool left to use. i want to be beyond good/bad evaluations on this, for a second, just noticing a de-facto situation. which i find very stimulating to investigate: emails are interferences. Very powerful, insinuating, captivating, personal, private interferences to all digital streams of attention. I will give you my facebook profile page url, but not my email address. i'm worried about spam in my email but not on my linkedin. i will say some things only in emails, not on social networks. if new mail arrives, there's practically nothing that will hold me back from checking it out: no porn, social network profile, stream of micro-messages, new photo album. First i switch to my email page, then i get back to what i was doing. I may be exxagerating, but pussibly not a lot. all this possibly happens because email comes, in a way, "before" a set of redefinitions that are taking place, further changing the meanings of "public space", "privacy", "identity", "relationship", "attention" and a lot more. So, in a way, it is less about "using an infrastructure" and more about "communicating". Facebook is a highway, email is an envelope in a tin mailbox (and we possibly can imagine it this way even if it's a mail to a million people). now, for a small comeback on the good/bad: is there any way to create other spaces with this level of engagement? of potential intimacy? with this degree of peer-to-peer-managed relationships? with this level of cognitive involvement? i actually don't know, but i can see myself comfortable with the idea that it probabily wouldn't be a "platform", a "URL", something that begins with "http://"; i can probabily see it as being something p2p, something that looks like an instant messaging client, a bit like skype, a bit like emule, a bit like msn messenger, a bit like something that fits in my pocket, a bit like something that can get a voice into my head, a bit like something which i can physically feel if it is close or far. it's an interesting thing to think about. ciao! xDxD
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