Lichen, who’s had a great string of posts lately, pointed out Amy Campbell’s website, which opens with the following:

So I guess this myspace thing is going to catch on.

I resisted for a long time. These things make me nervous – myspace, messenger, emoticons… I can’t help but see it as some sinister forerunner of the complete degredation of language and of human interaction. I’m worried about a generation of people who’s definition of “friendship” consists first and foremost of an anonymous exchange of links.

Maybe it’s the way that words lose their meaning that scares me… “friend”, “buddy”, “comment” … These things used to require effort, investment, thought and emotional risk. At first I was sending a personal note, intoducing myself, with each “friend request” I made to an artist I admire. But within a week I came to realize that myspace culture doesn’t even require this… “add”, “approve”, “deny” … that’s all there is to it. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice keeps chiming “Approval and the approve button are not the same thing”….

But let’s be honest, what scares me the most is how easily I’m getting sucked in. “Friend requests” inflate my ego… Pending requests hurt my feelings … Just a little, but enough to make me worry. The amount of time I spend (and could, if I let myself) fiddling around with this thing is truly alarming.

I want my music to be delivered by hand, to people in a room, whose faces I can see. I want to make contact using all my senses… And while I realize that the improved communication methods of the electronic age needn’t threaten that, I’m afraid of the day when we can’t muster the motivation to go out and make and hear music in real life.

It’s the search for deeper meaning I feel becoming obscured. And it troubles me that my first instinct in the search for deeper meaning is to google it.

That said, I’m still hoping you’re going to click the link above and give me some approval.

see you out there,
Amy Campbell

Amy Campbell, community, inclusion, myspace, seduction, social software

…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage.

I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about libraries — only more compact and pointed — but it’s actually my father describing his position on an argument at the World History Association annual conference a couple weeks ago.

Later, I’ll probably use his words to shape my long standing theme regarding the language we use. Every field of endeavor field employs specific, perhaps opaque, terms; our challenge is to make knowledge accessible to interested outsiders, not exclusive.

In this case, however, the argument was about how we define periods of history in differing geographic contexts.

…we should give in to popular demand and accept the term “medieval” as a global historical period, not just a European period.

If we think about it, we can come up with a dozen reasons why this argument is wrong, but another moment of thought reveals that there’s really not much alternative. And, for an group that identifies itself as “the foremost organization for the promotion of world history,” would they not be failing in that promotional mission if they isolated themselves by demanding a unique vocabulary?

exclusion, history, inclusion, language, medieval, pedantic, pedantic purism, purism, Wilfred Bisson, Wilfred J. Bisson, world history

Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan’s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are:

At the end of the day, though, we need to bring the people that plan events together with the people that attend them, so that the planning happens together. Pulling massive amounts of data together and getting eyeballs doesn’t help event planners. What event planners need are tools that help them engage the attendees in the decision making process, promotion process and the documentation process of events. That’s what we aim to do.

We’ve been talking about social calendaring, but Peter’s comments obviously address a much larger concept, one that suggests the web really is turning things upside down. Now we’ve heard it from a dot-commer. We’ve heard it from the Pew Internet Project study on teens. And we’ve heard it from Jenny Levine when she talks about the “4Cs” of “conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.”

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, decision making, documentation, inclusion, involvement, jeff nolan, pete caputa, promotion, social calendaring, social software