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cybering
Wednesday, May 31, 2000
Another choice for participation online is the diffused self. Rather than have a central page or project, surf around and leave markers of your approval, little hints of your presence. There's a program called 3rd Voice that allows you to leave graffiti comments in the margins of webpages you've visited, and other people with that program can read them. I thought it was a neat idea and wonder why it hasn't taken off.
You can sign peoples' guestbooks, you can contribute a dick to the dicklist, you can create dialogue with your web heroes on their discussion boards (or get closer with email one-on-one), you can get a cutting-edge moniker and be a regular kibbutzer on slashdot. You can join 'table talk' at salon and contribute as much text as the regular paid writers, sort of like getting your letter-to-the-editor published in the paper every time.You can review books on Amazon so well that people look for your wisdom. At Epinions, they've codified this desire. Be trusted! Be an 'expert'. Make money!
Or you can participate just by needing information. Post and ask about the best tape deck. Or buy stuff.. Ebay or psychic readings. Or you can become a Force in chat. Some rooms have the most rigid hierarchy since feudalism, with certain people only allowed to be funny, scathing, or knowledgeable. Capitalize on this and become a chat guide or channel elder; go corporate and call it 'community building'. Be one of the guys in sexchats who kicks the vulgar and repetitive. It's a power trip.
All of this reminds me of those people who compulsively call talk radio shows. The advantage of the 'diffuse self' online is mutability. You have web presence, but nobody's quite sure when or where. You can shed that skin and reincarnate. People who've committed to their own sites can take them down, but still don't have quite the latitude for a totally new persona, especially if they work in the web industry. The disadvantage is feeling fragmented, losing track of what you said to whom where, and forgetting all your passwords and login names at all the sites you've signed up for. I was once told that big cities attract borderline personality types. The anonymity and culture of a city lends itself to people who have to cut and run.. from jobs, relationships, apartments. Online is a bit like this, but people do tend to 'return to the scene of the crime'. If I had a dollar for every time someone dramatically quit a discussion group, their weblog, or their regular chatroom 'forever', only to resurface under a different name, or even the same one, as if passionately typed pixels hold only the same degree of commitment as their brief incarnation on a screen.
posted by nixie
Wednesday, May 24, 2000
How do people choose to claim a space for 'self' online? Early on, one made one's mark with comments to bulletin boards and discussion groups. The homepage was a unifying 'place', but how much to reveal or who one thinks one is talking to are vague and fuzzy. Lately, I've been noticing a backlash against the unified self-pages in the form of collaborative, focused projects. I also admire and find incomprehensible the people who are so committed as fans or hobbyists that they construct comprehensive compendia of their interests to share with the world.
Here are some paradigmatic self-projects online. Compare and contast. Naked Stories:Naked Eye.
Ironic testosterone.Cocky Bastard
Goofy testosterone:Ben Brown.
Vulnerable:Jellyfish.
Frenetic links.Honeylog.
Focussed Sharing.Subterranean Notes
Notebook-style.Alamut.
Erudite and obscure.Abuddha's Memes.
Fragments of self ---Random Access Memory-- a shared memories site.
Lists.The Listology.
Fictitious Journals.Drowned.
Obsessive Links Curating:Kick Bright's Links
Rabid Fandom: Brad Pitt Lover. (sorry BradPittisCute which I listed before suddenly vanished).
posted by nixie
Tuesday, May 23, 2000
Been thinking about some online-specific issues... like... IMs (instant messages). IMs are their own form of communication. They're not *like* talking to someone face-to-face; they're not like phone. And one-on-one messages have an entirely different dynamic from group chat (which is a bit like being in a bar in a cartoon and being able to read the bubbles over everyone's head). IMs are tricky things.. the tone can change on a dime; they're prime venues for control and avoidance; the rhythm and silences can sometimes serve as blank slates for projections of fear, longing, anxiety, love. The words are very often not at all the point.
Been thinking about the language of online. language both reflects and shapes experience. We 'surf', we 'link' we 'freeze' we 'crash'. It's an extreme sport language for such passive typing.
And.. cybersex. there's very little interesting writing online about cybersex. There is one 'academic' essay that is dated, naiive, and poorly researched. There are a few joke pages.. either the 'make sure the kids are in bed/ have towels on hand' type, or the 'cybersex is easy.. she's talking about Rwanda.. you say "god that turns me on"' etc. variety. And there are agony message boards of the "ask susi" variety where people argue for or against the 'realness' and morality of the interaction.
I've also heard so many cautionary tales, mainly from women. How this one woman was ready to leave her husband until she called her cyberlover at an odd time and his mom picked up the phone.. he was 16.
What I've not heard is honest or insightful talk or writing about the dynamics of cybersex. What makes it good, what makes it bad, what creates emotional intimacy or distance, what boundaries are actually transgressed and how this does or doesn't carry over into life.
This is meant to be a team blog. Actually, it's meant to be an ezine, but I added the blog format so people could contribute insights and observations without the trauma of 'writing an article'. Also, fresh content keeps the site from becoming moribund.
So.... please contact me if any of these issues float your boat. I can add you to the blog team, or accept your essays. artnixie@aol.com.
posted by nixie
Saturday, May 20, 2000
From Pursed Lips, this Salon article on Gorian culture online. Gorian is a role-playing subset of bdsm; the community's Bible is the science-fiction fantasy series of Gor books, and its adherents range from those dabbling in ":::: lowers eyes and blushes ::" to people who live a Gorian lifestyle of master-slave fulfillment. Personally, whether in chat, role-playing sites, or MUDs, the sort of cliche-stylized medeival serving-wench-meets-Xena-the-warrior-princess typed actions and self-descriptions (her long raven tresses fall forward over sparkling diamond-blue eyes, her sheer tunic barely conceals her heaving bosom), annoy the shit out of me.
Also been thinking about mediated culture in broader terms of self-definition. On the web, technology drives content... not just in a 'tools' sense. What is possible creates the 'there', and, more deeply, shapes our expectations of what *can* be there. On an interface level, tabs and and survey boxes begin to look like natural forms. The rectangle is the limiting plane of thought. On a content level, the database/list nature of stored information gives rise to amusements like random-whatever generators. (random surrealist poetry generators, elizabethan curses, haiku, quotes, zen koan). It gives rise to quizzes (are you a geek, a bitch, a goddess, blue, green, a buffy or an opie, how long will you live? watch the death clock!). It also supports the sort of juxtaposition/ absurd conceptual art projects like... visiting every denny's in the world (here we are in Sri Lanka), posting gifs of one's beat-up auto in spots of natural wonder, the desert payphone, the cam on a random street corner. Found art; that exquisite corpse, random object genre of modernism, now gone techno-pomo in increasingly predictable ways.
How many times can rows of dancing gifs be amusing?
It's not that the content is inherently banal because of the generative technology, it's that our consciousnesses are actually changing to expect certain types of online possibilities. Chat is gibberish until it becomes second nature, and then, incredibly repetitive because of the *types* of comments that *work* in the format. (pithy one-liners, obvious and salacious puns, sarcastic dismissal).
But, just as with the advent of television, there's real-life spillover. Not just in the sense of retro-nostalgia for one's childhood programs, or pop-culture references to tv shows and commercials, but in how we *see*, how we type behavior, our expectations of material possessions, beauty, hipness.. The format of conversational styles, information presentation, hypertext connections and hyperhyped events on the web shape how we see and what we expect to see and experience in rl. The actual playing out of this is just now evident in people, say, under 20.
Back to the Gorian folk. The internet allowed this sub subculture to exist, in realtime, if not realspace. Rather than a bunch of isolated wistful fans, there's an international community playing out a fantasy, even living a lifestyle. The *expectation* now of anyone with a serious hobby, enthusiasm, or fetish, is not isolation, but rather an abundance of riches. Into growing orchids? There's a bulletin board. Into bestiality? Take your pick.
This is a fundametal change on two levels. The first is the much-touted power of the web to find commonalities and allow support and discussion of heretofor arcane pockets of human experience; the second is a leveling of experience. It all exists on the same screen.. browse amazon with your live-nude-girl video chat in a corner window. Read erudite commentary on Joyce and with a click return to your demolition-intensive video game. Juxtapositions of content in the same format, with somehow the same emotional valence or level of involvement in your rl 'self', there typing. This echoes the content possibilities of juxtaposition that those 'randomizers' employ.
Something about the uniformity, the 'wash', of qualitatively, 'morally', emotionally, intellectually.. diverse information-experiences IS the 'new' in this 'new media'.
posted by nixie
Thursday, May 18, 2000
Brig Eaton of brig.nu offers these thoughts on the weblog community explosion/ implosion.
"as i was waiting for my email to ponderously
download on my 21k connection, i thought about
how dead all the weblog mailing lists had been
lately. part of the reason i've been getting so few
emails lately. i started to wonder whether the
weblog community had disappeared.
after the 10 minutes of torture were done, i found
that mike had posted a similar thought.
it got me thinking about the parallel between the
blog community and businesses. specifically the
growth of a company from startup to huge
conglomerate and the loss of community as this
happens. admittedly this isn't always the case
anymore, but here's what i've experienced.
when a startup has less than a 100 people, it's a
close knit group. like cheers, everyone knows your
name. everyone is brought together by a unified
goal of making the company successful and
everyone communicates with everyone else even
if they don't work together.
after the company tops a 100 people, you pass
more and more people in the halls and say "who's
that? do they work here?". what was once a close
knit community fragments into many smaller
groups, but there's still a link between these
groups through the original members.
i think ~400 people is when a company hits the
problem phase, due to the explosive growth that
has happened, there is no longer a true company
culture or community. each individual group has
it's own culture and associates less and less with
the others. original team members have moved
on, removing the links between groups. companies
tend to either collapse at this point or develop a
new culture which unifies the employees in some
way.
do i really need to explain the parallels between
this cycle and the weblog community's cycle?
weblogs surived the explosion, and re-unified
under two very loosely knit groups based on the
tools used, blogger or editthispage. and then an
even more loosely knit grouping above that of
"people who blog". the original sense of connection
of coming together with people who know what you
do, understand it, and do it themselves is gone. it's
like having a connection with people who have a
web page, everybody has one, so there needs to
be something else to tie you together. each little
community has that connection, but there is no
connection between these communities. you can
now visit a weblog and eavesdrop on a
conversation between community members, most
of which you don't know and most don't know you.
having a preference for very small startups, it's
not surprising that i preferred the "old" community.
in the same way that i find it sad when a company
becomes too big, i feel sad over the loss of the
small close-knit weblog community.
which is not to say that the new smaller
communities aren't good places to be, but...
"Sometimes you wanna go...
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came…"
_________________________________________
The egroups weblogs reborn and weblogs2 discussion groups have been talking about fragmentation within the community, the E/N people, the commercialization of weblogs at news sites (several newspapers now have professional bloggers), the line between blogging and journalism (ie; is the quest for legitimacy 'selling out'), the 'history' of the community (someone pointed out the online diarists community has both an oral and online history project), and waxing nostalgiac about manageable communities before the storm; BBS, usenet, the well, etc.
If you're part of a chat, mailing list, discussion group, webring etc. community, I'd be very interested in some writings from the viewpoint of a participants' experience of community formation, cohesion, and fragmentation. I was especially interested in the spinoff of a sysops-nostalgia discussion on weblogs reborn... all these people with their homemade, patched-together systems, pre-the hype and money culture of the net.
Here are some topics to get your wheels turning:: how has your participation in
online communities changed over time? how has running a site affected your
life? what sorts of relationship dynamics have you observed online and how do
they play out? has your gender, race, or culture impeded, helped, or been
irrelevant to your experience? have you found yourself needing different
computers for different tasks or mindsets? how do you participate-- chat?
mailing lists? surfing? weblogging? feedback to online magazines? How has your
level of technical expertise affected what you do online? Have you subscribed to
any porn paysites? Have you experimented with alter personae, anonymity?
have you gotten paranoid or really into privacy issues?
Here's a kernal of an idea that I'm working on.. that blogging has changed my life.
It's turned me from a passive to active participant, it's forced me to delineate my
ideas more clearly, it's shown me how repetitive and limiting my depressed
thought and life habits were and challenged me to move on from the
same-old-shit. It's given me a different idea about intellectual property (I was
formerly more stingy) and about levels of revelation/ exhibitionism. And there's
been this odd phenomenon whereby I fantasize 'a public'.. readers whose
expectations I'd like to satisfy. And this turns out (like dream images) to be
projection, having not much at all to do with either the number or motivations of
actual readers.
All of these ideas need more thought and better expression; most people who
run sites have touched upon them in their own work.. so I'm offering a forum for
us to share.
posted by nixie
Wednesday, May 17, 2000
The blogging/ journaling/ webcam explosion seems to be counterintuitively coinciding with the privacy/ paranoia hype. Yesterday I read of law enforcement types cautioning against webpages for new babies, which might lure babynappers. This apb news article details the lawsuit against an online information broker by the parents of a young woman killed by her stalker.
In Texas, a student goes to meet his internet sweetie who is only the alter ego of a man who then shoots him.
The cases are quite different, as the first stalker had been obsessed with his quarry since junior high and knew who she was. The online component was in obtaining her social security number from a datrabase service, and thence her workplace, where he killed her. He also maintained a Geocities page on his obsession and plans.
The second case is one of those.. 'can any of us trust our judgements' ones, as this guy had an email relationship with a woman whose pic he had, his family and friends knew, and yet she didn't exist. I've read those 'online safety' things about meting in public and making safety calls, and yet I've met a lot of online friends and not followed guidelines because I trusted my judgement.
And yet gabgab has her cam and journal and bloggers (even women) give real names and personal info. In fact, you can hardly GIVE your cam images away these days; I don't know how the girlpaycams survive; maybe their loyal follwings. Is there some mechanism at work here that the more one reveals oneself the safer one is; whereas any form of 'hiding' is invitation to stalk? Or is it all the luck of the draw. You hit someone's special spot of insanity, by a phrase, an interest, an image.. and voila..
Yet, why does 'the internet' make everyone see lurky pedophiles and strange socially maladept losers in every interaction? Newspapers have published birth announcements, pictures and names of schoolchildren, names and ages and pictures and even locations of newsmakers... Artists want publicity. I get excited if my events are correctly listed and my name spelled right. But would I post performance times and place on my blog? Why does it seem more likely that a stranger will show up with nefarious intent than that a local person who picks up one of my fliers will simply look me up in the phone book and camp outside the door?
posted by nixie
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