Postscript

This will be the most honest thing I've ever written here.

All semester, I’ve been posting about online identities, online communities, and online reality, and I’ve tried to be intelligent and enthusiastic while doing so. But I’ve also been censoring myself. And for this last post, I am going to stop and try to be as authentic as possible.

Digital technology and social media might be in the process of intensely renegotiating cultural discourse, but they are also breaking the world. The real physical offline living world.

A few years ago, I would have been really interested in the potential for social media to be used for social change, in how the internet changes social discourse, in the stuff that Nigel talks about here. But now, I have trouble consolidating those ideas with who I've become. I can still talk about the social implications of Twitter or Chatroulette, but it feels like I'm writing on a superficial level because, fundamentally, I believe that modern technology is based on flawed premises. It will not save the world.

I am aware that I am extremely privileged to have access to a computer and internet, and I actively participate in social media as part of my day-to-day student life. But I don't think it's ultimately an honest way to spend my life. And I'm uncomfortable when further technology, like the iPad or Pattie Maes' Sixth Sense, are released, making our lives increasingly digitally integrated and increasingly virtual.

Technology has an intense biophysical impact. Even the small laptop I'm writing on has a history that traces through bitumen-thick Athabaskan river to the violence in Congo to the immense factories in China to the long shipping lanes cutting through the plastic-swollen ocean.

Yet technology also has an immense culture impact. While the internet is connecting us in new ways, our alienation from the natural world is accelerating. Our identities and languages are becoming more and more abstracted from our landbase. We are becoming further and further committed to a social reality that is inherently unsustainable, and there is an ecological crisis intensifying around us.

Wikispaces

As a student, I've tried a lot of different online platforms to facilitate collaborative work, including Google documents, Facebook groups, Doodle polls, Officezilla, msn chats, and Skype calls. Online collaboration has never worked as well as meeting in real life. It's hard to negotiate ideas and get everyone to participate.

This was also true on wikispaces, when we tried to pull together our alternative campus tour through page edits and a discussion board. A lot of ideas had been posted, but there wasn't any direction on how we were actually going to work on the project. Eventually, we had to meet offline.

But I think that wikispaces is very useful in sharing and organizing information. The class wiki worked really well as a central location to collect ideas, resources, discussions, etc. The wiki format has a kind of democracy that's absent from other collaboration software (ie institutionalized Courselink)- the ability to edit and participate in any page.

Ironic.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is kind of a cool concept. I use to just achieve carefully selected¹ links, into carefully organized folders. I probably averaged about one bookmarked page every few weeks.

But now, Delicious has actually changed my pattern of behavior while surfing. I’ve been actively seeking out pages I don’t have time to read in order to save them for later. It’s given a sort of purpose to link-hopping because I’m directing pages into my future, to read when I have time or to share with friends.It's a good tool.

And it's also been interesting to look at how my tag cloud has grown and changed over time. And the idea that I'm slowly indexing the internet, tag by tag, is kind of cool.



Anyways, you can see what I've been up to here:
http://delicious.com/abbywilson

¹Very carefully selected. If you tried to save everything that was remotely interesting before, you'd end up with folders and folders of scrolling links in your browser's bookmarks menu. Very inefficient.

More Twitter

I've finally found a way to use Twitter that doesn't make me feel self-conscious and boring- I've been retweeting news headlines! I've been trying to do it in a thematic sort of way, choosing news that has to deal with social media, and actually, I've found that the more often I update my status, the more new people I have following me. It's kind of cool.

And yet, I still feel like I'm forcing myself to use Twitter. Microblogging itself isn't that compelling to me, especially when other sites (ex. Facebook) supply newsfeed that has more options. I can see Twitter's uses for citizen journalism or celebrity gossip or gauging general option¹, but I'm just not interested in participating. I suspect part of the problem is that almost nobody in my social network is using Twitter. It feels like I'm talking to myself and wasting my time.

And yet... I still haven't figured out what exactly makes Twitter so engaging for other people, but I suspect it has to do with the level of possibility. Unlike Facebook newsfeed, status updates go out to the entire world. Posts are abrupt, but they're also conservatively anonymous and, to some extent, given equal attention. Twitter really could be a manifestation of synchronic social discourse. Which is pretty epic. Who wouldn't want to join in?

¹ Ann Coulter was a trending topic for a while in Canada. Some very antagonistic tweets were coming out around whether or not she should speak at the U of Ottawa.

The Pirate's Dilemma

I feel like I should say a word or two about Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma.

Mostly, I didn't like it.

1) It was based on a naive understanding of the nature of capitalism. Mason seemed to envision capitalism as an intensely innovative force driven by healthy competition and renewed by subversive youth cultures. This assumption sets the precedent for The Pirate's Dilemma, and, I would argue, is a very mainstream-conservative conception of capitalism. I prefer Joel Koval's definition:

"[Capitalism] is a spectral apparatus that integrates earlier modes of domination, especially that by gender, and generates a gigantic force field of profit-seeking that polarizes all human activity and sucks it into itself." (159, The Enemy of Nature)

The book was unable to successfully contextualize social media because it was based on a naive ideology. And, no matter how excited you get about it, 'punk capitalism' is surely just as much an oxymoron as 'green capitalism'.

2) The entire book seemed to be written in the spirit of selling youth culture for capitalist appropriation. It was a marketing pitch, not an honest defense of DIY counterculture. Sure, Mason was advocating for web 2.0, but he was doing so on the premise of profits-to-come. His enthusiasm was tiresome and ultimately seemed superficial.

I just couldn't get excited about it.

More Improv Uploading

I figure that the more material out there, the better.

So here's another one. Recording using Garageband, edited with iMovie, and shared via Youtube. =)