sitelanguage

I giggle helplessly

Timely: David Brooks Also Eats Cereal (via Ishbadiddle)
Timeless: Strindberg and Helium (via the Good Experience newsletter)

Hunters and collectors

Mike recently alerted me to Fraudfrond, a photo archive of cellcom towers disguised rather haplessly as trees. "Have you seen these things??!" asks Mr. Fraudfrond. It's a question that seems to be motivating a growing number of phonecam-blogging obsessives. Like birdwatchers of the human-made world, we notice an odd but recurring streetborne phenomenon a few times and we're off to the races, photographing every instance of it we run into, accumulating screenfuls of examples on our blogs and exhorting our site visitors to join the hunt. There are collections of abandoned bikes, stencil graffiti, subway faux pas, my own tagmobiles, and so on... As they say, "Seen any more? Let us know!"

Last May I launched a networked photography game called New York Snap Exchange, where the idea was to come up with absurd photographic "commissions" for other players and surprise others with your reponses to their "commissions." Now, as I think about how to revise the game for relaunch, I'm wondering how to design communities for visual hunters and collectors. What makes us want to track the blossoming of some super-specific visual submeme? Is it important to be (or feel like) the only person seeing what you see?

The economy of the worthwhile

I confess I didn't have very high expectations for Tuesday night's blogs 'n' politics panel "IMHO: Blogging, Politics, and Personal Voice." I figured that since it was programmed to coincide with the Republican National Convention, it would probably degenerate into either Bush-bashing (which I agree with, but don't need to pay $7 to see) or superficial buzzword-slinging about how empowering blogs are. In fact the panelists--including my favorite DNC blogger Jay Rosen, Jen Chung of Gothamist and Douglas Rushkoff--offered nuanced analysis in a humanist vein and actually managed to talk with one another and not just to the audience, while moderator Jeff Jarvis periodically interjected with bursts of jargon to remind us that this was a bleeding-edge, digerati type of scene. Late in the hour, Rosen observed that blogging forces "people and institutions... to decide what free speech is worth to them." I think he was responding to things like the Olympics banning athletes from blogging, but I heard it as a general point about the whole mixed money-and-gift economy of the web.

In the United States we typically speak reverently about our priceless right to free speech, but the majority of us don't give it much of a workout, at least in a public forum, in part because it has historically been a costly or inconvenient right to exercise effectively. For those who already have computers and internet access, blogs have zeroed out the cost of maintaining one's own, dedicated outlet for public speech. They've made free speech not only cost-free, but also travel-free and not even technically difficult. So now it's up to me: How much time will I spend writing and conversing in public, presenting ideas for anyone to access for free? Will I give up paying opportunities in order to blog more? More interestingly, will I imperil the quality of my work by habitually posting whatever comes into my head? Rushkoff remarked that as a professional writer, he sometimes thought of his blog as "instant gratification," which seemed to resonate with quite a few in the room. He can come up with an idea and just shoot his wad without doing any of the persuading, defending or refining that might be needed if he wanted to get it published by someone else. What do I lose when I "go it alone" by blogging instead of producing ideas collaboratively? Is that loss outweighed by what I gain in comments? And that doesn't even get into the issue of how much my blogging might be worth to others, or the overall value of an environment in which people blog freely.

There's an underlying assumption among creators of interactive spaces that what people do in those environments is more valuable than what they do when they watch TV. So what's the nature of that value? The blog phenom seems like a perfect opportunity for Web builders to stop trying to "monetize" every interaction and consider how the surplus of speech opportunity could enable other life-sustaining systems of exchange. Rushkoff got big ups from me when he called the interactions around blogging "ecologic, not economic." But that's just a starting point for what could be a much richer analysis. (One great example of this kind of thinking: Grant McCracken's provocative medititations on the gaze economy.)