Google’s preview of its upcoming communications megatool — Google Wave — is yet another indicator of an emerging metaphor for life and work online. I’ve already touched on lifestreams — aggregations of all of your social networking communications in one flowing stream. Anyone using Twitter and its brethren can share the ever-flowing river metaphors that come to mind when you’re reading them (or when you haven’t been reading them for a while). And we’ve been using the ‘surfing’ term when talking about on-line activities for a long while.
Our early days of discussing the web (at least mine) were about a massive library of individual pages — as if you could access any page in any book in the Library of Congress. It was massive, but more of a growing pile of pages than a flowing tide of streams. Now, it’s becoming an ocean, a river, an confluence of streams.
Librarian Eric Rumsey captures the emerging metaphor here, quoting Salman Rushdie’s vivid paragraph from Ocean of the Streams of Story (published way back in 1990):
It was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different
currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another
like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity … it was much more
than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.
Now, real-time discussion and commentary around topics is informing web searches (Google’s Larry Page has already committed to searching the ‘real-time’ web). Web traffic is no longer about visits yesterday or last week or last month, but visitors and their behavior right now. And constant expression and interaction and cross-discussion is a norm of on-line activity rather than a anomoly for power-users (Do you update your Facebook status at work? Do you monitor your colleagues’ Facebook or Twitter posts by e-mail? Admit it….).
If we are, indeed, moving from stacks and library metaphors to water and flow metaphors, that will mean our on-line strategies, energies, and activities will need to change, as well — as professionals, as managers, as community-focused organizations. Put on your life jackets, and dive in.
I’m a fan of metaphors that are precise as well as vivid. Metaphors of flowing, water, surfing, streaming, & waves work for me in describing how we use the web. They capture the sense of a ever-changing surface that one can follow in any number of directions.
But is it an “ocean”? Not in my experience. That suggests a depth that I find cannot be supported by a platform like FB. I appreciate being able to observe surface details of daily life through FB, and I like being able to connect lightly with friends and acquaintances. But I need embodied experience in real time & space in order to truly engage with the business of living & dying. Which is why I need art, by the way.
And I am not fond of the term “lifestream”. I get the “stream” part. But “life”? Life is food, skin, tears, sweat, blood, snot, shit, laughter, sex, pain, joy, and a thousand other things that can’t possibly be captured or summarized on a website. The web is a great container for our thoughts & ideas, so let’s find a more precise word for what it does, instead of reducing “life” to something that will fit on a screen.
While reading your thoughts, and Heather’s comments, I am reminded that coming up on June 8th is World Ocean Day, The actual, physical oceans, that is. The concerns this year include both interconnectedness and sustainability. Just to turn he kaleidoscope a bit for another view of the metaphor.
While I agree completely with Heather’s comments, they make me think a bit more about perception. Life seems to be something that can only be defined by the person living it (and of course, we all have our own definition). But I ask these questions: Is Heather’s definition of life accurate as of ‘yesterday’ (informed, perhaps by our parents or grandparents)? What about ‘today'(informed by us)? Will this definition still be true ‘tomorrow'(informed by our children, or theirs)?
With an extreme amount of interaction happening on the web (and whether we like it or not, replacing human contact) what will “life” look like ‘tomorrow’? How will the people living it define it? Will life actually become more similar than different to something that, as Heather says, ‘will fit on a screen’? (kind of scary, but in my opinion not impossible)
If FB’s depth is hardly that of an ocean, is there a platform (or a series of platforms) on the internet that measure up to the depth of the ocean? What does that look like? What about games like Second Life which replicates all experiences in real life (virtually)?
I stumbled on an article a few weeks ago (http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/04/study-tv-makes-you-feel-less-lonely-.html) that claimed that individuals actually feel less lonely after watching television because of “the illusion that their social needs are being met”. How does this discovery play into our conversation? If individuals feel that their individual social needs are met, is it possible for ‘life’ to gradually shift to a technology-based existence?
http://www.modernartsmanager.com