And if you’ve written on your blog that you’re not exactly happy, isn’t it a lovely thought that people will decide ‘oh, they might like a cup of tea or a beer’?

You think it’s weird that we don’t mention the fact that we’ve leanrt stuff about each other online when we meet in person (and I do – I always wonder how to handle it), you should try (partner) dancing with people after you’ve announced on the internet that you hate a particular move or will only dance to a certain type of music. Talk about mutual discomfort, confusion and miscommunication!

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/10/google-earth-wh.html

crazy how different people from different theoretical orientations arrive at the same question regarding authenticity.

Just briefly wanted to add to the mix the other dimension of the problem of textual ‘authority’ in relation to what I clumsily referred to as distributed online ‘presence’. Call it collective intelligence, or distributed *production* – that is, even though we experience our ‘personal’ online activities kind of locally and, well, personally, how does all this stuff collectively produce something quite distinct from what we *think* we’re doing, even when we *think* we’re sharing knowledge, or making friends, or whatever? These questions become more important when we encounter enormous scale, I guess, and the politics of scale for our disciplinary expertise (our authority to speak about any of these matters from a concretist, grounded, contextualised, local viewpoint) is also affected. Mark Elliott in his recently completed PhD uses the term “stigmergy” to talk about this (http://mark-elliott.net). He posted the other day to the iDC list:

“The crux is that encodable networked media provide for the coordination of distributed, individualised contributions which may aggregate into emergent, system level behaviour such as collaborative filtering (Digg, Reddit), content creation (Second Life, YouTube) knowledge aggregation/generation (wikis, Wikipedia) etc. An important distinction to be made here, touched on in the previous posts, is that while this phenomenon achieves democratic-like outcomes, it is qualitatively different from ‘democracy’, in that its participants needn’t be associated with or form constituent groups to advocate for or with. Instead, they act solely as individuals, with those individualistic actions contributing to emergent outcomes which provide ‘use-value’ for the participants and others.”

Anyway, I guess what I’ve been wondering is the extent to which blogging, however it is practiced, contributes to or continues to resist this model?

ooooh, this post explains for me what your research is about, or at least gives me a better idea. I so didn’t know.

Authenticity, in the sense of a real/fake distinction through which to judge examples of something? When is anything real!?!?! lol! I think this is a really good example of the power of simulacra (in D’s sense, not B’s sense). It doesn’t matter if what you write or what is archived is true or not and relevant or not, as its force has particiular effects. Phantasms of loneliness may make people realise their own loneliness…

It’s interesting that those offers were made without acknowledgment of what you had written – there’s a weird dynamic there.