Of You, Me, Mini-Me, Mass Media, and ... Mini Media

We think about social media, and social software (sites like Myspace.com, Friendster.net, Tribe.net) in different ways, but usually as software, or as a communication tool, online application or site. Though it was there the whole time, MySpace.com's growing presence in marketing boardrooms, butcher paper flapping on its easel as that giant sucking sound down on the street whines up to a terrible shrieking pitch as times a changing start blowing in the wind, has people truly nerve racked....
Notice that Myspace.com doesn't have "users," it has "kids." Software is for users. Kids, they have tools. Technologies. They have MySpace.com, and theirSpace indeed threatens mass media and for very good reason.
Modern marketing turns tall tales around a kind of language and grammar that, together with its images, celebs, experts, and trend-setters, can circulate messages that, when instructions are followed to repeat as necessary, accrue truthiness. Truthiness that's really a cognitive lapse of reason, a suspense of disbelief allowing us to believe these commercial messages, leading us ultimately to consume. In other words, because marketing speack doesn't come from a friend, marketing messages, and the mass media they're circulated through, have to do two things simultaneously: establish trust and believability in the source, and convey trust that they're telling the truth. Neither kinds of trust pre-exist the relationships we have with commerce, in other words, it's earned every time (and the media have become very good at it).
TheirSpace is a place where that kind of marketing isn't welcome. If the "kids" are going to launch a band, they'll launch one of their own, and they'll do it on theirSpace with theirFriends and theirWords. Marketers of course want in and want a piece of the action. They're worried that mass media may be losing its appeal in this "IM generation." Are we to believe that all it took was a crappy little social networking site to make the mass media giants wobbly?
Well, yes. Because MySpace is a tool of conversation, talk, genuine street-level hanging-out where commercial messaging is poo-pooed and laughed at. Like you wouldnt make a friend of Kraft singles would you, on a singles' site? Duh.
So I propose that add another term to our list of descriptors for social software: mini media. In fact we could nod to the grammatical necessities of urls like MySpace for fun: "MiniMedia."
Social software is a kind of mini mass media in which culture happens, as it does in the mass media, but through participation, profiles, social interaction, and so on. The critical difference being that the relationships are based on "friendship" (of varying thicknesses) and the talk is not commercial, it's just normal speech-like talk. This isn't your average software. It's a social system, it's got some amount of mass media in it, and while you may experience it through your browser, it's not just software, or web, or application.
MiniMedia, what do you think?

More soon on what a talk system and MiniMedia like MySpace means for the mass media, marketing, and messaging.

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Philosophical interlude: towards a smooth network of links

Back, not so way back, last century, debates would rage over the cutleried and flint-struck din of Parisian cafe's about positivism. The local left-bank philosophical elite, including the Pierre not there (money to whoever gets that joke!), were for dialectics. Dialectical reason. Marxism had postulated that late capitalism would encounter its contradictions and resistance. Progress is borne of the synthesis of oppositions. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Positivism, a mode of inquiry buttressed by the empiricistic scientific method, which was to find truth in the material of reality, but locating within it the rational principles of a consistent physical reality... Hegel would have sat bolt upright and smoked a Gauloises.
And I'd have snatched it away from him. Drawn a couple puffs. And coughed this out: there's a positivism in the internet, on the web, in the hyperlink... I see a smooth space of links, ratings, approvals. A there that's there for having been seen enough times that it made the cut. And contradictions, negations, and disagreements disappearing, absent stories having been buried under a mouse-trigger-happy thumbs down. It's easier saying "yes" (while not really meaning "I agree") than it is saying "no" (and here's why). What in conversation becomes a discussion -- a clarification of perspectives, positions, views, whether leading to an agreement, a peace accord, a declaration of independence or not, doesn't matter -- doesn't go the same way online.
We need perhaps to differentiate better between simple expressions of "yes" and "no" (Digg's up and down diggs) and more complex procedures. For sure, a medium built on binary code is able to handle yes/no, on/off better than "let me get back to you." Presently, a bevy of companies, retailers, marketers, advertisers alike are running amok with user-generated phraseology, user-generated documentary, user-generated protest songs and other user-generated idioms. I yearn for a day at the nature-generated beach, complete with full-on nature generated events like an in-your-face sun and the sound of waves crashing that you can't turn off, can't even turn down, except by inverting your upper body and thrusting neck and head deep into sand.
Problem is, vote yes and your vote counts as two: a yes vote, and a count me in vote. Vote no and your vote counts as one: a non-yes. The anti isn't counted. It counts for nothing. Cultures, cliques, groups form around similarities (Tartan video extreme Asia film title renters who also do their chopping with Ginsu knives purchased off the TV in the late 1980s). They don't form, and so there's nothing to record, around the non-event of a no.
Is there a philosophical bias, a positivism, online, and in our electric media? Is there a tendency intrinsic to the medium, not in its act as means of production, but in its act as recording? Does this not slowly grind down differences? (Don't come to me with Darwin now! Social Darwinism is no good thing in my book!) I'll have to think more on this one. Perhaps a world that records affirmations so much better than it records objections is not the worst thing in the world. It is only virtual, and we're not in the Matrix yet, I don't think....

...Which leads me to a flip finishing line. There's an interface dialog box I've always wanted to see used: "submit" and, in place of cancel, "resist."

my god i'm pod

I love it. Forget meta-data. Forget tagging, taxonomies, directories. This is the kind of thing that gets you to click thru to a podcast....

"Podcast 22, … my GOD I’m drunk. Get the podcast [iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes. [RSS] Add the Cycling Insight Podcast feed to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically. [MP3] Download the show (MP3). ..."

Folksonomic Value Proposition part 2 of 2

The point of all this folksonomic participation is the selection of information, capturing relevance and separating signal from noise. A network of active readers is creating a vast knowledge base that offers an alternative to search engines, online directories, and editorial sites. Attention-getting is the problem of publishing online. The medium simply doesn't offer a more efficient means of extracting value than by using popularity. Popularity, as we know, is only a hair's breadth from what deToqueville described as "the tyranny of the masses." Every vote, site submission, tag, or link increases the probability that the very-same submission will be viewed by another user, and the vote, seconded. In systems-theoretical terms, the process is auto-poetic. It self-selects from a pool of information, each selection reducing the (future) pool of information. The selections are the application of value distinctions, are the filter by which one bit of information is distinguished from another. But the moment one selection is made, probabilities that further selections will follow increase (see concepts like the power law and the long tail).
The rub of this massive reduction in selections, is that we want this, if only because it creates what can seem like a conversation. The intrinsic conformity&emdash;that members of a community are all reading the same things&emdash;focuses attention and indeed produces signal from noise. But the value that rises is shown to be valued by a community, even if that value is nothing more than a form of social confirmation/validation. This social signal differs little from that which selects the news: that it is new. To paraphrase a point made by sociologist Niklas Luhmann on the mass media: while these media are designed to observe events and record cultural memory, their memory is designed to quickly forget.
In systems theory, a system's ability to handle new information is contingent on its internal complexity and differentiation. Folksonomies and social networks tend to push up the peak of the curve, connections being thickest where they are also the most redundant. In time, I hope our ability to apply social mechanisms to the selection of information will improve. We will delineate information by its value to individual users, to expert communities, to those in related communities of practice, and so on. Selections and associations between information sources (links, relevance) will improve. Tags, which are now useful in capturing a community's boundaries will suffer less from the speed and effects of social selections. But the fundamental process by which information is selected in a social medium will remain: a reflection of a culture's self-identity, executed on the part of those whose votes serve to include them as members.


Technorati tags: social software, interaction design, folksonomy, web 2.0, tagging, social media

Folksonomic Value Proposition

Distribution x (Production/Recording) = Value

From a social interaction designer's perspective, the 2.0 web is a fascinating and somewhat confusing amalgamation of information selection and delivery, computing functionality, social interaction, individual user activity, design, and presentation, all rolled out over time through a medium whose front and back end continuously present and integrate their use. We're accustomed to polls on television, surveys over the phone, radio call in talk shows, and numerous other participatory media. But only the current web is a social medium whose particpation barrier is low enough to have attracted the highest level of intervention by certain governments and organizations. Low enough to carry talk of the most intimate and cheap kind, available enough to publish it alongside the most official decree and manifesto. A talk system whose dialtone is more up than Verizon's, whose open-ness to participant can be frustratingly open, and which records and makes available all talk such that the talk is preserved, but also sustained indefinitely. A talk system whose organization across time and space, in other words, is unique, as talk, and as medium.
This is one of a few parts on the folksonomic phenom. I'm not sure how many parts yet. Three maybe. (Not two, unless proceeding to three. Five is right out.)

Online communities vary by the intensity and richness of the relationships and activities they're built on. A typical social software service like GoingOn, which hosts profiles, discussions, posts, and which enables direct interactions can generate richer community participation than "communities" that exist by virtue of blogrolls and commentary. And it is my view that blogposts plus comments do not equal conversation; message boards would be a more accurate metaphor. Similarly, "community""would be a misnomer for the phenomenon of loosely networked blogs.
Folksonomic participation sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, and technorati.com seek to create value by aggregating individual participation. Not, in other words, through member to member communication. What one person finds interesting, when she adds it to a tagging site, contributes to shared community knowledge. The more other users submit the same interest and site, and possibly tag identification, the more this loose social system can produce "knowledge." So goes the idea.
There's no disputing that value is added during social participation, but there is some debate around what that value is, not to mention how to measure it. Tag cultures, for example, are a knowledge system that combines at least two axes of value: categories associated with web site content; and popularity. In much the same way that a lottery jackpot grows more quickly the more it is worth, social media, too, deliver content dynamically updated by its very consumption.
I'm tempted to say that social media uniquely captures participation: a means of production that records its own consumption. And whose consumption is its distribution. Only electronic media can claim this, for it's only with digital media that consumption does nothing to the original, each product being a copy already.

Technorati tags: social software, interaction design, folksonomy, web 2.0, tagging, social media

Podcasts and Podcasting on my mind

They say that hearing is the first of our senses to come to our awareness -- as our mother's heart beats through the early months of our lives. Marshall McLuhan, a mentor of mine and for a long time, "patron saint" of Wired magazine, made a career out of distinguishing media according to fundamental and primary relationships to our natural senses. His basic position: our perceptions of the world vary by the modes in which we perceive it, and cultures have preferences for the eye, the ear, the voice, the body, and so on (actually that pretty much covers it).

McLuhan wrote that Russians were incensed at our U2 over flights because they didn't like to be looked in on by spies; in contrast, Americans were outraged to find our Moscow embassy bugged from floor to ceiling, because we don't like to be listened in on. He wrote that some politicians would have failed during the TV era, that others were made by TV, an observation now famously used to describe the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

Along comes podcasting. Video blogging. Ipods that play video. Cell phones that play video. Televisions that don't play either (internet-based podcasts or videos). Media are getting mixed and mashed up in a range of consumer products, most of which would of course like to become hits, trends, and market makers.

I do a lot of walking and train riding these days, mostly to get out into the sun, but also to stick a pair of earbuds into my ears and shut out the world. (Kidding about that last part). And I'd like to share some thoughts on podcasts that pick up where this thing kicked off. To wit, there are:


Podcasts of the intimate voice. These are the ones you hear that stop you cold, no matter what you're doing, the voice in your ears literally speaking to you through those little buds.

Podcasts of the radio. These are the ones that could be on the radio, they have the music and formatting of a radio broadcast and you can tell the speakers aren't addressing you specifically. They're really annoying if you have headphones on and the broadcasters aren''t that interesting because you literally can't think if you leave them in there. These podcasts remain on your iPod as new because you never finish them.

Podcasts of the living room. These are the ones you want to share, because they're funny, accurate, familiar, and you enjoy grabbing a friend by the shirt to say "check this out." Whatever it is, you know what it is. These are the ones, too, that are the marketer's social marketing grail. (They'd like to know what it is that you know, but you can't tell them because it's like beauty: you know it when you see it.)

Podcasts of the event. These are the ones that put you in the stadium, the comedy club, on the conference floor, or in the hallway for snacks and refreshments.

Podcasts of the interview. Whether you enjoy these or not depends on the interviewer and interviewee, because an interview must be among the most hit-and-miss formats of information gathering that exists. All information is supplied as an answer to a question. If the questioner doesn't understand what his/her interviewee knows, how to approach it, with sensitivity for the person as well as a sense of the connection s/he's making with the audience, the podcast interview winds becomes more like a two-person conversation.

Podcasts of the speech. Speeches can be great podcast material, as long as the speaker's neither a mime nor a visual presenter, for the speaker is addressing an audience not unlike a radio audience. There's less danger that you will feel either like an eavesdropper or bystander, though there is a greater chance that you'll suffer memories of your sister's third grade Nutcracker ritual (meaning that this was an event you might have attended from the back row, aisle... Speakers can take a long time to get to their point, and podcasts provide us all with a virtual lectern.

Production-Consumption gap. There's a gap between production of media content and its consumption, a gap opened long ago when we ceased manufacturing things ourselves and handed the process over to industrial means of production instead (recall the Luddites who smashed looms because the sense their social threat). Now, this gap is interesting when what's produced is not an object, but entertainment. Add recording technology, and you have a fundamental dislocation of production and consumption: a slip-fault unique to production/recording media (and now also distribution media) that explains all the points we listed above.

The product is not produced in front of those who will later consume it. It is produced by participants: people engaged in an activity, talking, acting, filming, playing music, whatever it is is irrelevant. The separation of the podcast audience from the event is possible only when recordings are involved.

The consumption of media objects is also interesting: the thing consumed is consumed by our giving it our attention. (Hence the efforts of attentiontrust.org.) Giving attention to something as an audience member, but not of the live event, is of course asking for a lot. We've come to expect a certain professionalism, expertise, investment in production value etc from our media consumables. Well, as was said of the electric guitar (in relation to music and who makes it), we can all make media now. The results so far have been maddening, shocking, really interesting, even profoundly intimate and moving.

But you don't know which you're going to get when you spin the little podwheel. Here, then, enters another interesting McLuhanism, though I've made it my own and can't recall any longer how it was first put together. Attention is time, it's given over time, and while it can ramp up and cool off, approach and then ease back, get wide-eyed, glazed over, and weepy, it's only over time that it takes shape and form as a relation. Attention is user engagement; user participation (of a sort). That's why it's paid, taken, stolen, or given: attention is the new labor, and our surplus of it is as short now as our surplus of labor was when we scraped coal off tunnel walls.

Media content is informative. In fact much of it is information, and is meant to be consumed as information. A lot of podcasts participate in this economy, too. Given that attention takes time (as it takes time to pay attention), consumers get frustrated at not knowing what's coming. The dissociation of production/recording/consumption appears again and this time combines with our sensory modes (above): we get meta-information about a recording, text, tv or motion picture show, either by previewing the thing first, by using commentary given us in another medium, by hearing about it from others, so that we can gauge whether or not we want to give it our attention.

Podcasts, being often from a new source, ask more of a leap of faith; if they're no good we'll quit them (they're often free, so no big deal). Social networks and sites that rate, list, recommend and other-wise provide the meta information we need help too. Personal recommendations can be very strong influences. Fundamentally though, and unlike video, podcasts consume a great deal of our attention because they take time, they get into our head (try writing while following an interview podcast), and there's often nothing telling us where it's headed or whether the whole thing is worth it (i don't know what's on my iPod till I'm a block from home).

If you're in marketing, and you wish to market with podcasts, be they user-generated podcasts or something else, keep your audiences in mind. Because you're asking them to have you in their minds.

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Between seeing and being seen: how much do bloggers read?

I wish I had the data for this, and I'm sure somebody out there does. There's a gap between the blogger as writer and the blogger as reader, a gap I'm sure is common to any production media. Do anchors watch TV? Do film-makers watch movies? Do musicians even listen to a ton of music? The answer to that one would depend, of course. But I bet the gap is biggest among the new and highly participatory media, the ones like this one in which the barrier to entry is extremely low.

When the barrier to produce, to speak, to record, to post, to share, to present, to link, to rate, to vote, to bookmark, to blog, to comment, to download, upload, and offload is that low, participation becomes a matter of simply doing it. Not a matter of obligation to community, or of reciprocation of a gesture, or even of response to a hello. Media in which the barrier to expression is low must show a much greater gap between producer and consumer, writer and reader, photographer and viewer.

I wish we had data for this, but we don't and I suspect it would be difficult even to obtain. We'd have to know not only whether blogs were hit, but whether they were actually read. We've all become so good at distilling information from text that even "reading" might be divided into shades of attention (from the exegetical close reading to the summary provided by Google's search results). I'd like to know what the data is simply because the medium's silent. And most of us who blog don't intend to just talk to ourselves out loud. Even though most of us (and I speak for myself particularly!) may be doing just that!

From user to practice-centric design

I've been telling people lately that I think social interaction design (SxD) needs to be a distinct design discipline, or specialty, because social and communication technologies become embedded in practices. And these social practices of ours, be they about dating, getting jobs, meeting up, coordinating whatnot and so on, involve communication technology as a way of talking (producing) communication as well as publishing/listing/circulating (recording) it.
These talk systems, be they organized for socializing (MySpace.com), for jobs (LinkedIn.com), for community blogging (our very own GoingOn.com) produce and record activity at the same time. No matter how you look at it, this is weird. Until you accept that in a dissociated and displaced space-time continuum, interaction (which is two or more people communicating) can occur only if it is re-presented within a mediating medium. Synchronous or asynchronous, doesn't matter. The point is that if we cannot use our voices, our ears, our eyes, bodies, and faces, we need a secondary medium by which to express ourselves and by which to be impressed (receive) others.
Social Interaction Design argues that traditional UI (user interface design), UX (user experience design), and IxD (interaction design) fields are too user-centric. I say "too" only because social interaction design is user-centric in the plural form. We're interested in the social practices, and not the user practices, of these technologies. This isn't about splitting hairs. A user-centric approach looks for user needs, goals, and objectives, and measures the software's success in delivering on those needs. But a social technology typically has to facilitate user experiences that are social in nature and that permit users to have and present social competence. Dating sites are not just about getting dates. (It could be argued that they're about the hope and curiosity invested in dating rituals, spread out over time, more than they're about face-to-face set ups). They're about doing well in the marketplace, about getting positive feedback and interest from others, about acknowledgment, flirting, and so on--none of which fit in a cognitive model of the user.
Social software, social technology, social media designers need to think about how the tools become adopted and embedded into existing social practices. How do they intervene in the timing and organization of activities? In the presentation and reproduction of authority and hierarchy (say, in the office place, or even at home). How do they permit play, of personality, preference, interest, and relation? How do they create or facilitate new relationships; and how do they enable the surveillance of existing relationships? Orkut.com, a Google social networking site, is used to create new relationships in the US, but in Brazil apparently provides a lot of members with a chance to "monitor" their new dating friends.
Practice-oriented disciplines hold a few theoretical assumptions that would serve many designers well. One is that in any interaction situation, a participant has to know What's going on before s/he can know How to proceed. A communicative interaction then is taken not just as utterences or statements exchange, but as moves. Moves tend to unfold serially. If there's a group, there's a floor, and the constraints of speech require that all cannot speak at once but must take turns, at speaking, and at giving their attention. If we're talking about the ongoing activities of a social group, we'll see signs of membership, in speech, tokens, dress, and other stylistic expressions.
If you're in the Web 2.0 space, you probably recognize some of this in the sites, software, and tools you've been using. The approach to Web 2.0 can learn from social interaction design, if it wants to live on (as it likely will) and flourish.

Is attention over time not identity?

I remember being at a creative commons mixer a while back here in the City (SF). The guy holding the mike, the floor, and everyone's withering attention had overstayed his welcome and some of us were desperately trying to figure out if he was just too stoned to notice the audience cues (shifting, shuffling, coughing, and drink clinking figures along the bar) or what.
A slow panic then began to develop among some members of the audience when they realized that this Creative Commons mixer had not real organizing body or authority/decision-making at the event, and that he CC reps in back weren't willing to stick their necks into the floor and bring the speaker to a graceful conclusion.
Organizers began to sense the panic and themselves panicked that overzealous steeltoe booted SF locals might reign in the speaker using his microphone cord and possibly also his neck, if they themselves didn't step in.
This Mexican standoff lasted a precious ten minutes, becoming in and of itself a focus of attention for those who most definitely were stoned in the back of the room!
I, not stoned, joked that CreativeCommons and Attentiontrust ought to perhaps merge, the fact now being obvious that everyone at the CreativeCommons mixer was unwittingly, and not voluntarily, postponing the mixing part so that a reckless speaker might have their attention.
In short, the audience was granting the speaker its attention, and this "granting attention" was really the mirror reflection of the Creative Commons idea of granting permission for reuse/reproduction of works.

In other words, if:
Creative Commons organizes the willful permission to share/distribute what I produce, in other words, to reproduce...
Attention trust organizes my consumption of products and participation in production, insofar as it requires my time and directed attention

Each then describes my active participation (creativecommons) or passive participation (attentiontrust) in a participatory economy. Nothing new here. I just thought the idea that they merge in the back of a bar was kind of funny.

Now, I'd like to ask a question that popped to mind a minute ago: Is attention over time the same as identity? Should CC and AT merge into ID? Is what I make (CC), and what I pay attention to, over time, not, basically, my identity? That's how an Amazon would look at it. The consistency of my choices over time is, well, it's what I like, and therefore to any commercial enterprise, it's who I am (as far as they care).

Perhaps we could use a CC/AT/ID mashupcamp. Call it EgoCamp?

creative commons | attentiontrust | Identity 2.0

Technorati tags: social software, creativecommons, UI, web 2.0, attentiontrust, identity

I see you seeing me. Youtube.com, iTube.com, Wealltube.com

Tube or Not Tube. That is the question...

What would Marshall McLuhan say if he could invoke Shakespeare and Joyce at this juncture in the co-evolution of mass media, western culture, advanced capitalism, global consumerism, and technology? Are televisions the new extensions of man? Are 2" screens our new eyeballs? Or faces perhaps? What would McLuhan say about Survivor, Lost, iTunes, iPods, MySpace, Youtube?

He would talk about how these technologies were not just extensions of our senses, and our bodies, but electric incarnations of our society and culture also. He'd note the revolutionary potential of a youth culture in charge of its own medium--MySpace--a vocal, incisive, and uncensored alternative to mass media. Mini-me-dia to Mass Me-dia. He'd point out the ways in which an ever-present dial-tone--full-on and device agnostic connectivity--has spread like the very gases warming our atmosphere, becoming atmosphere and life-sustaining element in its own right, as our society and culture have adapted to the demands of ever-possible access, interruption, and communication.

He would claim that media are about the ways we see ourselves, as much as they are about extending our sight and enhancing our vision.

Since attending OnHollywood earlier this year, at which I got the distinct impression that a bubble was forming again (for Hollywood had rediscovered the internet's capacity to act as a broadcast medium!)... Perhaps this time it's not so much one bubble as it is just a lot of foam. Anyways, one of the bubbles I get stuck in, and try as I might I can't quite pop the concept on this one, is the viral video bubble.

For one, this is definitely a social phenomenon, and if anything at all, an example of social media. Not, as I've heard claimed, broadcast at 2". The only thing that Youtube has in common with television is 29.97 frames per second. And if you're seeing that I want your net connection. We'd miss the point entirely if we thought Youtube and TV were related for their physical characteristics. A medium is not understood by its form factors, even its modes and functions--it's understood by the social practices in which it's embedded.

The social practice that's interesting with Youtube is communication. Analysts have been right to call it viral insofar as it evokes the viral marketing of email and web marketing. But viruses pass from host to host in a biological system that doesn't involve exchanges of meaning and interactions steered towards reaching understanding. Viruses just simply copy themselves into their host. It's "communication" as replication. I don't like the term "viral" because it's a false metaphor. And if we're going to use metaphors, they should enhance our understanding of the phenomenon, not subtract from it.

If I send a friend a Youtube link, I'm saying to my friend "I enjoyed this, you will too." The act is purely communicative. The video here has no value in and of itself; it's become a token of communicative exchange. (This is the sense in which we say that it's the thought that counts; Youtube is Hallmark). It's that I'm saying, and to whom I'm saying it, that matters more than what's showing at frame 127 of the video. In most cases, a response to the effect of "that was hilarious" will do. We don't have to acknowledge/prove to our friends that we've even seen the video sent us.

What am I saying by sending a video link? Or by sending a video? I'm saying the same thing that I would say if I were sending a blog url, a book review, song, etc. I'm saying "I have you in mind" in relation to this "thing." In saying that, I'm also asking to be acknowledged. I'm saying, I don't see you in front of me; were I to see you in front of me, in fact, I might not have to show you this stupid video, because I wouldn't need to get your attention, and really, ultimately, it's your attention I want. Not just that, I wanted to feel your attention.... I'm sending you this video to get your attention. It's scratching that itch, the itch of anomie, of being "connected" to you across this space that needs more echo, needs more reflections, windows, mirrors, and light, more presence, a there for the there to be in.

We're going to look back on all this some day and Youtube is going to look as like a tv built on hypercard. Camphones will remind us of 8 bit macs. One thing won't have changed. That will be our need to socialize technologies of communication; to cut windows into the walls, to warm the rooms, put mirrors in the hallway; to hook cameras up to screens and to hang those screens in public places so that we see ourselves watching, watching Mcluhan, watching Mcluhan watching us. I see you. Now, do you see me?




Technorati tags: social software, meme, youtube.com, web 2.0, viral, videos, TUBE