Re: [xmca] Re: [Mind Culture Activity] Andy Blunden changed the groupdescription

[Christine Schweighart <schweighartc@gmail.com>]

Hi Michael,
I remember you mentioning the 'Bonanza' example in explorations of *
experience/ing*. The archaeology of threaded
Asynch-but-sort-of-a-bit-synchronous discussion boards do offer
possibilities which the 'private broadcasting' on facebook doesn't.  I
liked that you mentioned
 ' Because it is not open source it needs to go through a circuit of closed
communities, where individual communities take information and spread it to
other closed communities.  So each time information moves it is a conscious
decision and a judgment.'
Though I'm not really familiar with using 'groups' - using closed and open
groups-  to communicate and organise stuff separate personal walls 'in the
moment' and with anyone on facebook are features for when sub-groups
arrange events yet not all their social circle are going/involved...for
example students in Halls of residence have different closed and open
groups for all sorts of film watching/and other motives in their
situation.  'Pages'  seem more broadcasting- and seem less useful for
activity, though using Facebook as  medium is part of everydayness -
orienting one another to the 'Bonanzas'.

I was thinking about aesthetic active in communication and serendipity in
Facebook rather than the tools of archive and storage and -- oddly-- came
across the notion of FLUXUS - which I wasn't familiar with, and the idea of
'correspondence  ( mailbox)art'  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art
Which seems to follow from fluxus attitudes

http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/swin:9624
How this might be shaped by the constraints of rules in Facebook is
interesting! Here are a few loosely (cryptically random?) links:
A different Morozov article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/11/salman_rushdie_and_facebook_s_pseudonym_policy_.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/facebook-data-privacy-rights-regulation
John Naughton gave the UKSS keynote this year and reads Mcluhan too ,
here's a link to his blog:
http://memex.naughtons.org/why-the-medium-really-is-the-message-in-a-digital-world

'In the moment' is not about storage and retrieval, but  form and content.
For example right now I appreciate that Gmail has the facility of saving
drafts as I type by default, it prioritises 'now' and the close before and
after- so no accidental backward click as I navigate to look for URLs
whilst doing my  typing  produces a loss of the message text.This short
horizon focus is suited to ' tasks-at-hand' , my other web-based  mail
packages e.g Microsoft Outlook don't configure this way by default.
However, I have discovered that Gmail uses an automated reader of the
content of the messages that I am writing, to produce adverts relevant to
me... that was disconcerting! Yet as  'medium'  tools change thinking -
it's becoming aware of how and using them  - (in my example in student
experience/ing) that is related to the using of Facebook and the xmca
listserve.
Christine.



On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:

> Hi Christine,
>
> An interesting post (though I didn't find the NY Times article that
> interesting).  I agree with you that Facebook is not Open Source under
> almost any definition and that bothers me (I tend to go by the definition
> of Stalder and Hirsch and Eric Raymond.  Christopher Kelty dislikes Eric
> Raymonds definition.  I have some very large reservations about Christopher
> Kelty's definition - so Open Source I think is becoming more ambiguous).
>
> A second argument you can make I think is that the xmca thread has a
> different archeology than Facebook.  Threaded discussions were the original
> communicative tools of the Open Source communities Raymond talks about such
> as Linux, and I would argue the forerunners of today's interactive blogs.
>  Facebook is a Social Networking Site dependent on Web 2.0 technology and
> emerged much later.  When they did emerge with MySpace as one of the first
> it was basically an attempt to re-establish social networks on the Web that
> existed in the concrete world.  For that reason I believe they reflect the
> rule systems and such of the concrete world far more than say blogging
> sites.  But you can't really use them to build anything unique or even
> develop unique communities.  For that reason I have been hesitant about
> Facebook and its benefits.  That's changed for me in the past few months.
>  The good thing about Facebook is that information can be spread very
> quickly, to thousands if not millions of people at once.  I'm not sure I'm
> getting this right, but McLuhan talked about hot and cool media.  Hot media
> is individualized and based in individual experience (relating to the
> cyberflaneur the guy in the Times article was talking about).  Cool media I
> think is able to reach many people simultaneously creating a communal
> experience (I think one example was everybody tuning into Bonanza at the
> same time creating the same experience.  Facebook does the same thing with
> information.  It is not only able to spread information but turn it into a
> communal experience.  Meanwhile, each individual site can act as a failsafe
> for the information.  Because it is not open source it needs to go through
> a circuit of closed communities, where individual communities take
> information and spread it to other closed communities.  So each time
> information moves it is a conscious decision and a judgment.
>
> I don't know if you know anything about the Susan G. Komen foundation, but
> what happened here in the United States was extraordinary.  It is a
> charitable foundation for breast cancer research that had a very strong
> reputation as a good place ot raise money (whether deserved or not).  The
> foundation made a blatantly political move that many thought would hurt
> poor women.  The information flew around Facebook, alerting literally
> millions, and constantly updated.  The Komen foundation was completely
> changed in the space of forty-eight hours - something I  would not have
> thought possible even a year ago.  Of course you can't build a response to
> the information using Facebook, but many people went to interactive blogs
> in order to do that.
>
> This is all to say I guess if xmca made a push for a major presence on
> Facebook what appeared on Facebook would be very different and not
> necessarily anti-thetical to the e-mail thread, and maybe even
> complementary.
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Christine Schweighart
> Sent: Sun 2/5/2012 10:49 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: [Mind Culture Activity] Andy Blunden changed the
> groupdescription
>
>
>
> It's an interesting moment, university students use facebook quite a lot
> for 'banter' and to exchange views about SOPA, 'anonymous' and many other
> aspects - within the environment they are concerned about. Wasn't there a
> thread a little while ago - the 'occupy' discussion- that explored this? If
> I contrast  the 'co-ordinatingthrough ICT' in mass communication, with the
> communication in activist activity in the emergence of post-franco
> democracy in Spain ( where there was strict measure intended to control
> public gathering, and the numbers of people joining together in public,
> including the streets) - then there is not even the ghost of resemblance in
> today's limited capacity for collective 'activist' activity.
>
> More than the technology being 'intolerable' , there's the concept of
> social activity - highjacked into such social relation... in either/or
> conduits enforced in the application - it's not open-source, nor is it
> wiki-like - where the rationale for form can be accessed [ although this is
> increasingly specialist, and 'wiki-editing' tendenciies are under scrutiny
> too]. Same goes for  any forms of discussion on 'Linked-in' :who does what
> with the content and what knowledge of networking is used for what etc.
> I've found that people tend to export useful threads into a pdf / a wiki
> orsome similar other form, but still tap into the connectivity that the
> applications enable ( for better /worse).
>
> Rather what is being achieved in these different forms is  what single
> Institutional ( e.g university ICT provision etc) IT technical support
> doesn't underpin /maintain. XMCA being a notable exception..
> Christine.
>
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>
> > Well, Christine, the author argues that what Facebook will do - is
> already
> > doing - is make life "intolerable"!
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On Feb 5, 2012, at 7:38 AM, Christine Schweighart wrote:
> >
> > > Facebook has potential for opening to people who do not know about xmca
> >  ,
> > > just through the topic of the group -through curiosity.  Perhaps this
> > > article might be interesting to read to think about what Facebook might
> > > 'do' that  the listserve wouldn't?
> > >
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
> > > Christine.
> >
> > __________________________________________
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