- Wesch on context collapse
- Wesch on learning as life, not just preparation for later life.
- Campbell on Meaningful learning and Cognition prints
I think our habits of candour and intimacy are changing in response to the internet because it functions like a one way mirror.
I think we still imagine a specific kind of audience for our writing, participation, or media online, but the mechanics of technology networks and the persistence of our works in public searchable space mean that the audience can be a changing thing, access over time, shifting context due to linking to the item from different related materials, and scale of response to something we have posted online are all a part of how the audience can shift, and can shift the meaning of what we have contributed.
I feel like this is different because it feels more like a fluid collective presence than the kind of interactions we have offline. Online audience is also more likely to happen between people who have never met
ie the correspondence itself has to carry all the meaning.
i am self conscious about writing openly it feels like a kind of persistent live to air broadcast.
Wesch's video of so many people taking up the meme and all doing a dance at their computers is an example of what I mean. Each dancer was contributing something frank and personal, they were all intimate moments sent to an infinite audience or no audience at all.
For me there is a kind of directness in reading text online which shorts out for me if i read something and then the author is not online or not alive: It changes the mutability or 'in the round' ness of the text i am reading.
Offline cultural participation in our cities is also in a changing state. A graffiti group participated in the Adelaide Fringe Arts Festival. We made throwies at a workshop which were LEDs strapped to magnets
which you could attach to buildings to make a sign or shape. Kids and children-at-heart made them and put them around the city, meanwhile in Perth a graffiti artist was arrested.
There is also something timeless about posting something to the web -something said once can reverberate long after a person has had a change of heart or mind. That can be expensive for future prospects because there is no division between the private person and the employable citizen in open web search.
During the recent NZ election both parties tried to trash each others' reputations by making
something unhelpful rank as the top link which appeared when you googled for their name.
This would take a considerable effort so was not a small trivial mischief - they must have spent a fair bit of money or time on it. In a context like that the kinds of things which are 'close' can be very loud and some kind of impersonal or unfriendly.
There is another aspect of intimacy which is changing and that is the tension between apparently addressing a known f2f audience and presentation where the comments are being twittered or live blogged. The presenter may not be aware of their context in this way either.
Some face-to-face meetings are traditionally private and handled with few participants, employer, employee meetings, challenging meetings where we might be trying to negotiate for an agreed outcome or commitment between people present. These kinds of events may be diluted by the kind of partial inattention which can happen when someone'has their thoughts elsewhere' when is it important to have the audience known. How does that kind of intimacy differ? Is it still important?
Is it unrealistic to assume traditional characteristics of intimacy in any digital context when the pixels and
bytes travel openly and can be simply replicated and sent on?