I've got nothin' but questions for you today — I'm in hardcore restless questioning mode this week. Nancy White and Lilia Efimova liken blogs to mushrooms: "independent individuals on the surface, but interconnected underground." How will the next set of social software tools successfully promote both individual identity and expression, and foster connectiveness? How will they provide flexible spaces in which existing strong ties can be strengthened, existing weak ties can be transformed into strong ties, and new weak and strong ties can be formed? Now that we know we can find everybody and link them together — now that we can share spaces unencumbered by geography — what do we want to do while we're there? We're storytelling and sharing in lots of different mediums now, and that won't change, but what else can we do? Where are the social spaces that will help us play at creating mirror worlds, help us dream, and enable us to truly collaborate and build new things? What do we want to model these spaces on — will we cling to metaphors for physical spaces, or cut loose and construct curious, glittering Borgesian worlds in the spaceless statelessness of our new world?
Individuality, interconnectedness, and dreaming of Web 3.0
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. I agree that you are asking the right questions. I have been using my blog at http://blog.informationrenaissance.com as a test bed for my friends & family to find out various "states" about me. In other words, I post my 10 most recent Del.icio.us entries (http://del.icio.us/stardog1970), I link to my Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mazpix), I can include my AIM name, as well as, my Audioscrobbler feed. It is my personal aggregator that people can come to & see in a snapshot all the online activities I'm involved with.
Additionally, I believe that RSS will facilitate the unshackling of conformity to re-creations of real-world metaphors. This disintermediation will allow people to realize that the concepts of local storage are legacy & they now need to think of how they can access their stuff from anywhere and at anytime.
P.S. I love this blog.
3. Peter - I like your answer. Yes! :)
Matt - thank you for your thoughts and the props! I share your fascination with RSS. It's the ultimate remix tool that's helping shake things up and free our minds from the tyranny of the static. It's a dynamic, mashed-up, location-independent world and our tools are finally beginning to better reflect that.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb dybwad
4. Barb, great to read you! I share many of your questions. In a voice conversation with some colleagues 3000 miles away yesterday, we talked about this "thing" - some base that each of us had, that would allow us to pull in and integrate any variety of "tools" and "stuff" across the various communities we belong to. Etienne Wenger talks about the challenges of "multimembership" and it shows up in our struggles to bridge across the different tools and platforms adopted by our communities. I sense RSS is at the heart of this, but there is more. RSS helps us pull in the information. What helps with sense making and action taking and how can we plug in?
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Nancy White
5. Nancy -- most excellent to hear from you, as well! I struggle also with this "multimembershipped-ness" and how to reconcile that with having some sort of central cohesive identity. the tools right now do a good job at capturing my multi-modeness and my various interests, but they don't do alot to represent the core of what is me, I feel.
I think you're also right that RSS won't be enough in and of itself. I think we need some good visualization tools, some good re-factoring tools, and some intelligent agents that can help tell us things about ourselves that we're not noticing because our conscious efforts are so often directed on certain paths that we literally miss the forest. I want tools that help me see the forest while I'm plunging through the trees.
Thanks for stopping by!
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb dybwad
1. I don't have the answers. If I had a short answer it would be "Yes". But, these are exactly the right questions.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Peter Caputa