{"id":1305,"date":"2009-05-29T09:43:39","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T16:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2009\/05\/the_new_flow\/"},"modified":"2009-05-29T09:43:39","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T16:43:39","slug":"the_new_flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/the_new_flow.php","title":{"rendered":"The new flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google’s preview of its upcoming communications megatool<\/a> — Google Wave — is yet another indicator of an emerging metaphor for life and work online. I’ve already touched on lifestreams<\/a> — 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Librarian Eric Rumsey captures the emerging metaphor here<\/a>, quoting Salman Rushdie’s vivid paragraph from Ocean of the Streams of Story<\/i> (published way back in 1990):<\/p>\n

It was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different
\ncurrents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another
\nlike a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity … it was much more
\nthan a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>). Web traffic is no longer about visits yesterday or last week or last month, but visitors and their behavior right now<\/i><\/a>. 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….).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}