spimes and blogging affordances
July 11th, 2011 • library, tech
An excellent book about the design of technology and how things work is Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. It’s one of my favourite nonfiction books and it’s all about what our tools allow us to do and make us do. The idea is that technology has moved through different stages through history, affording us different roles.
From Cory Doctorow’s review of the book on BoingBoing:
Sterling traces the history of tools from artifacts (farmers’ tools) to machines (customers’ devices) to products (customers’ purchases) to gizmos (end-users’ platforms) and to the future, which is defined by what Sterling calls Spimes.
A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling’s argument.
The book came out in 2005, but as Foursquare and all the other locative services continue to gain traction, that spimey future looks a lot closer.
In regards to the specific affordances of blogging I find it funny that as Twitter gets taken up, blogging is where people are going to express their lengthy thoughts. Blogging as the means of talking out serious issues instead of just tossing off a couple of one-liners with a good hashtag isn’t something I expected when I began. But blogging is a platform for putting different subject matter into. Twitter is awesome for jokes and conversation. Way better than a blog where you have to go through the monumental effort of publishing your text. It takes multiples of seconds to log in and pick New Post and all that. So terribly slow. (And seriously, as qwerty keyboards on phones are replaced with touchscreens the annoyance of typing out anything more than 140 characters at a time does make Twitter more attractive.)
And then there’s this interesting post on how Twitter beats Google+, which twists the idea of expressing complete thoughts from a single brain further. The thesis there is that G+ isn’t a new enough medium, because storytelling there feels too much like blogging, and isn’t as collaborative as the exquisite corpseishness that is Twitter.
But maybe I’m just a stick in the mud with wanting things to come from one mind and human’s fingers (ignoring the publishing machine behind everything. I like the myth of the heroic individual that’s enabled by the culture of blogging. What about you?
I enjoyed this sentence a great deal: “I like the myth of the heroic individual that’s enabled by the culture of blogging.”
Is your idea here that with blogging, “the little guy” can have near-instant access to a worldwide audience for his thoughts? (Or at least, the world that has Internet access?) That you don’t have to please a publisher, an editor, or really anyone at all in order to publish your thoughts, feelings, political commentary, jokes, and random musings?
In my past life, I have worked as one of the “gatekeepers” of publishing, making sure that text met certain editorial standards (grammar, style, subject matter) before it was released to the public, so the instantaneous nature of publishing on the web is still a little strange for me. But the ability of anyone with Internet access to self-publish their ideas has definitely exposed me to thoughts and feelings I probably wouldn’t have ever experienced otherwise.
Huzzah for the heroic individual!