Text messaging and the ritual of the gesture

Excerpt from a Skype IM today w/ Jason Lewis, old friend and fellow geek at Montreal's Concordia Univ. The project referred to involves projecting txt msg's into public spaces. The artile I sent him was just in the NYT and covered the use of shorthand in txt messaging. Aside from the article's shrug of a conclusion, the author did note that "In China, moreover, many people believe that to leave voice mail is rude, and it's a loss of face to make a call to someone important and have it answered by an underling. Text messages preserve everyone's dignity by eliminating the human voice." Which is exaclty right, I think.

Jason Lewis
the downside of working in a fast-moving field...http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1511105/10072005/lavigne_avril.jhtml?headlines=true
1/30/06 2:12 PM

adrian chan
read this and thought of your project. txt msg shorthand is a typographic intervention and interpretation in its own right. wonder if you could play with that. dunno, maybe your software converts to longhand and animates? reads a l8tr and displays Laaaater!
1/30/06 2:13 PM

Jason Lewis
or vice versa. or both ways at once, depending on the input. interesting idea...
1/30/06 2:14 PM
...
"The most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere and at any time, it turns out that we really don't have much we want to say." ...such a thin reading what "want to say".
1/30/06 2:16 PM

adrian chan
cheap ending, i thought so too. any sociologist would tell you that txt msging is a form of goffman's civil inattention. i call it undemanding attention, but there's got to be a better term. it's a ritual greeting and as such exempt from expectation that it "say" anything. we dont use ritual to say things, the ritual uses us to reproduce social habit...

Tag collections, aggregation, and mainstreaming

Just a quick thought on tagging. With all the social software and community, as well as blogging and other services embedding tagging, i wonder if the net effect may be a mainstreaming at the expense of granularity. I noticed that I often tag up sites on delicious with the most obvvious, common, and recommended tags. And i bother less now than i used to to create new ones, or to use specific ones. In part because I dont want something to get looked over, so my laziness results in a lazy contribution. Just a thought. It would be a pity if tagging cultures left behind a bunch of interesting but overlooked isolates; isolates being sites that are interesting but just never got the traction.

43Users and why are the numbers so different?

I wish I had started following the user stats on 43Urls (people, places, things) earlier. Here's where they stand today: Do the differences tell us anything? Particularly, that 43People just doesnt make sense to people? Or are the numbers a reflection of the sites' birthdates? Any insights would be appreciated!

43People.com
4,203 people in 1,099 cities want to meet 4,572 people including...

43Places.com
31,160 people in 4,074 cities are going to 8,162 places including...

43Things.com
178,249 people in 4,383 cities are doing 294,999 things including...