HeeHeeHeeHee
I was going to post a quick reference to Jon's Wirearchy anyway because he had linked to a piece by Jim Kunstler that I that sounds sounds like me on a media open season day.
I hadn't read Jon for a few days so i had missed his link to Rhizome, Communication, and Our “One-Time Shot” and his casual note that I assume is to me just dropped in. Hence the title of the post.
On the one hand it demonstrates the possibilities of open, asynchronous conversations based on an assumption that the receiving party will get the message sooner or later, on another that shared conversations mean that anyone reading his, or my stuff, will know that we link to each other fairly regularly and know what it means and, on a third, that we assume that readers can filter out irrelevant stuff and still get the story.
Incidentally, in support of all that, Jerry Michalski links to the New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg talking about an addiction to email. Klinkenborg says:
I think of e-mail as a continuing psychology experiment that studies the effect on humans of abrupt, frequently repeated stimuli — often pleasurable, sometimes not, but always with the positive charge that comes from seeing new mail in the inbox. So far, the experiment has revealed, in me, the synaptic responses of a squirrel. It is a truism of our time that we now have shorter attention spans than ever before. I don't think that is true. What we have now are electronic media that can pulse at the actual rate of human thought. We have the distinct discomfort of seeing our neural pace reflected in the electronic world around us.
Not just email but chat, web, rss and widgets, of which more anon, all contribute to the process. This post is just seeing how far I can push it. If you got to this bit, apparently quite a long way.
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