My .02.. Social Technologies are a novelty in the tool space that are a opportunity for all of us, creative cultural producers and otherwise, to shift and engineer the relationships and communications mechanisms around how we interact with friends, family, and colleagues.
I was a late-comer to Facebook, but I have utilized it *extensively* not only to spread information to disparate groups of people who otherwise would not be reading or accessing the type of content pushed through the nettime list, but also to facilitate a forum for positive and constructive discussion to occur. Most of the people that are reacting to the posts are the people who you would least expect to be interested of be reading it for that matter. Nettime is a truly extraordinary engagement framework in which a lot of very interesting ideas are discussed, but it's specialization does create a considerable barrier to entry for people who might be interested but lack the ability to decode some of the ways and language we use to interpret and critique technology, media, and culture. It is a niche viritual space that isn't necessarily appropriate for the commons, which I feel social technologies address, and which I have practical experience to back up with. The fact that it is a capitalized sphere of profit, as is television, as is radio, does not necessarily disinter it from a realm of possibillities for alternative discourse. Like I said, as an experiment, I've put things up ranging from youtube clips on HAARP to Joseph Farrell interviews, to MacCluhan quotes. The fact that the people who are most responsive to the information is the surpise, and frankly, makes the tool a community builder. One of the most important principals of the Outformation Age is faciliating total awareness, total informationalization, and total presence without being known or seen. Engineering clones of ourselves that contain a semblance of ourselves which are able to sustain meaningful communal interactions with our friends, families, and colleagues, but at the same time, unable to be mined by marketing bots and research droids. Even further, thwarting the attempts at such intrusions by incapacitating the attempts at data mining. It's arp and cache poisoing taken up a few levels in the OSI model deep into the applcation layer. /*Chad Scovil13 /* TWITTER ME >> ad3ptnanosec # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
