Destination blogs vs. en route twits
I'm not making much headway with the thought about the web and temporality. This might be relevant, or emulate bupkis:
Blogs will become something else. People are putting down roots that will require further software extravaganzas. One day you'll come to a blog and it will be like Second Life, except that blogger's life. The blog will be their home. You, avatar-neighbor, will go and visit Frank Paynter, or Brian Moffatt, and certain rooms will be open -- the library, the kitchen, in Frank's case perhaps a tractor ride -- avatar citizens will expatiate in the agora, and this will be very Web Arabicnumber.0.
It will be even more emphatically spatial than what we have now.
For the temporal (an aspect of it, anyway), for now it's Twitter that suffers the pressure of the moving arrow of time. The form -- 140 keystrokes that allow for verbal blats longer than mere acronymic ejaculation but too brief for anything like a discursive paragraph -- seems at first to deny all expectation of sense, certainly to deny anything like conversation. Until one realizes that it's not much interested in conversation. Other media are for that; Twitter is for non-sequiturial pinging, phaticking, sidewalk saluting, rendezvousing, emo-ing, screamo-ing, some nano-slice of your moment, then moving on, as your 140-character noodle dwindles down the timestream, getting lost amid the thicket of updates from others that continuously crowd in.
A blog might offer a flaneur's attending stroll through a land-, citi-, or idea-scape; twitter, more temporal, emits the dopplered odd yawp from a passing bus or subway.
Blogs will become something else. People are putting down roots that will require further software extravaganzas. One day you'll come to a blog and it will be like Second Life, except that blogger's life. The blog will be their home. You, avatar-neighbor, will go and visit Frank Paynter, or Brian Moffatt, and certain rooms will be open -- the library, the kitchen, in Frank's case perhaps a tractor ride -- avatar citizens will expatiate in the agora, and this will be very Web Arabicnumber.0.
It will be even more emphatically spatial than what we have now.
For the temporal (an aspect of it, anyway), for now it's Twitter that suffers the pressure of the moving arrow of time. The form -- 140 keystrokes that allow for verbal blats longer than mere acronymic ejaculation but too brief for anything like a discursive paragraph -- seems at first to deny all expectation of sense, certainly to deny anything like conversation. Until one realizes that it's not much interested in conversation. Other media are for that; Twitter is for non-sequiturial pinging, phaticking, sidewalk saluting, rendezvousing, emo-ing, screamo-ing, some nano-slice of your moment, then moving on, as your 140-character noodle dwindles down the timestream, getting lost amid the thicket of updates from others that continuously crowd in.
A blog might offer a flaneur's attending stroll through a land-, citi-, or idea-scape; twitter, more temporal, emits the dopplered odd yawp from a passing bus or subway.
Labels: avatars, blogs, community, second life, spatial, temporality, twitter
posted by Tom Matrullo at Monday, October 15, 2007
3 Comments:
I know nothing of temporality other than this from wikipedia: "the present moment emerging only from where our projected future is curled back into a past."
Which hits me as I try to write a resume. Make root. Here I am and here is how I arrived here.
Some make it from point A to point B in an arc. For others it's a whirlwind or a cyclonic depression. Rather than destinations, places, they're more like weather systems. something to be tracked, forgotten about, recalled, witnessed, feared enjoyed, ignored.
Blogs to me are much more like that. Seasonal, transient, without roots.
Less arrival. More getting there.
I'm fulfilling the bupkis aspect for you, Tom. Maybe Frank can supply some relevance.
bmo - yes, blogs are, were, did seem, may once more seem again, "transient, without roots" - I think they did for me from the getgo up until Google made it possible to actually find archived stuff, so that it was no longer essentially thrown away. This changed something for me.
As for the bupkis, I'm wrong about Twitter. It can have conversations. At least Dave Winer thinks so.
Some employers insist that employees create a Facebook account, and post blog entries on their corporate site as a condition of employment. This is common in a certain employment sector which purports to comprise the cutting edge which promotes these technologies; and furthermore, isn't that twee twee twee, to wit.
Post a Comment
<< Home