Übersicht Letzte Änderungen Letzte Änderungen in der Umgebung KurzAnleitung Blog RSS

InvolvementCycle

For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.
Paradise Lost

It goes something like this:

But then, there’s this avalanche: This avalanche of collaboration.

It starts to eat at the soul, and causes all these weird attention problems.

You start to float, in this weird dimension of information. You stop seeing words, and it becomes a sea of letters.

You feel, physically, like you want to throw up at times. You are stretched thin.

And you can think to yourself.

You see nothing, and then you start seeing new things-

Really impressive, interesting things.

So,…

You write about them.

(loop.)

The Involvement Cycle, and Poor Technology

Our poor technology plays some role in the InvolvementCycle.

In particular: There are a lot of annoying logistics involved in getting involved online.

Think “InstantMessaging.” “InternetRelayChat.” “E-Mail.” “Wiki.”

At some point, everybody who participates has to learn the names for all these things – things that they already did in RealLife. You have to setup your system so that you can hang out with your friends. You have to learn wiki languages. You have to configure your DNS, and Apache, if you’re hosting wiki. You need to keep notes, so that you don’t forget. There’s all these little details that you have to put together in your mind, and cement into your mind, in order to interact online.

Even ideas such as “Saving pages,” “Caching,” “Preview,” – they are all these things that we have to work around.

All of these details make it hard to interact online, and make it cost something extra, with every transaction.

This plays some role in the cost of the InvolvementCycle. They all add “friction” to our interaction. And, presently, it’s all very clumbsy.

The technology above is all being developed, improved upon, changing. We’re just at the beginning of figuring out how to use all these things. We’ve had “E-Mail,” for ages, and it too is still improving. We’ve got intra-email protocols for automating mailing list subscriptions, HTML mail, spam filter systems, all sorts of stuff. The room for improvement is vast. Everything is a moving target. That means: We’re likely to have all this high friction for a long time to come. (The argument can even be extended to the telephone.)

However: I do not believe we should think that the InvolvementCycle comes from technology friction.

The Involvement Cycle, and Social Software

SocialSoftware is going to make the InvolvementCycle more common. If people cannot relate now, they will in the future.

SocialSoftware is technology that “sucks people in” to talking about the things that they are interested in. Wiki is an example of SocialSoftware. It “sucks you in” by it’s low barrier to entry – you just hit the “edit” button below, and add your two cents. Then you can either wait around for a reply, or get an e-mail later on, telling you that someone replied to something you said. (WikiFeatures:MailedUpdates.)

This can be both good and bad.

It’s good in that it’ll pull the passions out of people. People who might otherwise be watching the Television, and occasionally look at the Internet, might be yanked into being active on the Internet, and find that their passions are provoked. They could discover the people that they didn’t meet before, because they were lost in the disconnected life of Suburbia, and had only a TV to relate to.

But it’s bad, in that we need to figure out the cycle, and come to peace with it. Or, break from it, either to a better, more even relationship with the InternetHiveMind?, or to break out of technology all-together, for good. It presents a problem and an opportunity.


CategoryLifeOnline?

Diese Seiten lokal erstellen: RealLife InstantMessaging PatrickAnderson

Sprachen: