The Conversation continues.

My first significant experience with blogging was on livejournal. At first I did it without even knowing what it was called. Regularly writing for an email listserve I was used to being able to directly converse with some pals, and on livejournal I was able to find a fairly significant group of people who were really into what we then called "Alternative Energy, Appropriate technology, and permaculture" and what we now all understand to be "sustainability".

Livejournal was sparse, and mostly a varied group of people. It was quite common to be able to page back carefull through their entire journal and read everything they had said online thus far. It was not uncommon for new pals to undertake this reading even after there were significant numbers of pages sacked away.

As the social networking aspect of the bloggosphere initially expanded how we interact and added in new textures and qualities more islands in the storm emerged for real interaction. My own experience quickly added in Tribe and Myspace.

One of the things I first noticed when I started writing concurrently about sustainability issues on the foolsguild listserver and on LiveJournal that it was imperative that I use a different sort of voice, and nearly always an entirely different piece of writing. It wasn't so much that I found cross posting objectionable it just seemed out of context to adress one audience of people as if they were another audience of people. On the one hand with my fellow members of the Fools Guild: we pretty much knew who each other were except for the incoming new people and we had already established a forum with
"The Joker" an early Xerox in house tabloid modeled somewhat after "The Buck and Mug" a longtime Renaissance Faire employee effort.

So on the one hand I had a sense of history with some of my readers. Enjoying the daily writings of my newer pals on livejournal I found an interesting contrast emerged almost immediately: I was actually often more intimate with my new found pals in sustainability on livejournal because we were together exploring this process of writing and of using an emergent form of social networking.

It was like penpals, there was an immediacy and intimacy in our shared correspondence that transcended the sterotypical idea of being alone in a room with a computer. Through the computer it felt not so much like I was "going somewhere" and rather I was hanging out with "some people".

While commenting on someones journal in livejournal it is possible to view the resulting comments almost immediately by refreshing the page. It was fascinating, it was like chat except it was larger conversation.

My experience with tribe.net was a great example of the "where" that is out "there" on the internet. For some time it was like a carnival that had come to town, and everyone you know is out there and its this crazy all encompassing small aspect of the world. It was actually possible to launch a career using the two pronged approach of tribe and myspace as evidenced by performers in my tribe such as rachel brice, The Mystic Family Circus, and Lucent Dossier. Even entire organizations such as Burningman went through phases of finding tribe either extremely useful and alternately completely annoying for reasons that often had nothing to do with the internal politics of tribe itself.

It had to do with who is "where" and if we feel like we are "there".

From the start I endorsed facebook because it had a pretty basic UI and it was Open Source. I also liked the initial demographic that were signed on back when you had to be either enrolled in a school or a corporation to use it. There was a sort of no nonsense functionality about it originally that made it a simple way to start to get a greater list of real world contacts. At the smae time as they opened up facebook I also became a member of LInkedIn and I probably tried a few others that just plain never caught on for me.

My own blogging history has been fractured by the somewhat demise of Livejournal. I am certain there is still a very active sustainability community somewhere on the service, however it seemed at odds with the addition of adds to our pages to want to continue to aggregate our efforts over there. Some of my pals from that era have stayed with me as I have continued to expand into ning and into twitter, some were sort of lost along the way.

My approach to understanding the works of someone online come from my deep roots in the online effort to make social networking possible. My first experiences with my own accounts online were at "The Well" in the late eighties, and our focus from the start was a sort of recreation of the "salon" type atmosphere embodied in the enlightenment era coffehouses and the lively art discussions held in private homes and at large outings. Our culture was entrenched in the idea that it was up to the newcomer to take the time and read back, study the source article we were all talking about and our early comments and respond accordingly. Even on my own early listserver the foolsguild, a listserver in theory devoted to the study of and the embracing of the philosophy of the fool there was an insistence that everyone stay up to date and read every single comment brought to the list by every single person.

really once our conversations got excited we created so much list to read that a lot of people left because they were cruelly called out for not following every single email and getting buried in the newly flowing firehose of information.

After awhile we all realized together that it not only wasn't possible to follow every bit of conversation on our simple shared email list it also wasn't really the best way to do it.

The best way to do it is the way you like best and works for you the best.

Thats the new rule that started to arrive around the same time that people started to use facebook more and more as a sort of real time personal water cooler.

Lately I have noticed a huge change however. Its more like a real time conversation now that it is like a pen pal relationship. Although I still follow a sort of old school etiquette about reading the previous writings and blog history of someone new that I follow there is more of a sense of just jumping in to the conversation.

It used to be if you thought about something you blogged it and moved on to the next thought. Now if you care deeply about something you must endeavor to bring it into conversation again and again in order to make people aware of your ideas regarding the subject. Its not like you can just put up a dead wood signpost page somewhere and everyone is going to come look at that and see how you think or what you are feeling on a particular subject for the most part. The flow that keeps people checking their myspaces and updating their facebook statuses is the sense that there is an active participating group of people "there" present involved in what you are saying somehow. The full presence of media sharing including video and images and music is also a large part of what makes these online destinations feel as if they are more than static flat un moving pages that are being viewed. They are alive with presence and full of serendipitous twists and turns.

Its interesting to me that the conversation has become more and more immediate. In some ways I miss the sorts of subtle threading in online conversations on services like tribe.net that made a sort of lobger form conversation more feasible and more coherent. On one of my own efforts The teahouse of the Donkey on ning I wish there was better threading to allow us to talk more at length and over time about subjects we share history and interest in.

Its a quality of texture that somehow was more fully present in the mix of characteristics that we experience as we interact with the user interface.

For the most part I am having to look more closely at the larger picture of what ideas i am working on building sharing and expressing as I use the different sns and as i interact with different aspects and communities of my greater social network.

Its a question of subtlety and scale that I think a lot of artists are pondering as the very ground we work on shifts beneath our feet in this great media sea change.