psychogeographical

Tash's lovely post about spaces in children's books got me thinking about a few things. It seemed to chime nicely with the fact that the entire world seems to have recently divided itself into pro and anti-Twitter camps. On the one hand embracing it and on the other pulling it down as a load of self-regarding old nonsense. Which of course some of it is. But really most of it is a brilliant thing. As long as you're using it for the right reasons. Which is not a way of saying there should be a protocol about these things. But recently I've seen a deluge of tweets about how to generate as many followers as possible and been followed by people who profess to have that interest. Which seems to totally, totally miss the point. I'm not sure what the value of artificially stimulating a community of interest. But maybe that's just me. Also, while some people may find it weird to follow others who you haven't even met, to me that's one of the most liberating things about it. You can glean interesting ideas, insights and that kind of thing. It's a headspace reporting tool as much as a here-I-am-now-and-this-is-what-I'm-doing one. Like Matt Jones says better than I can, there's a certain kind of ideal fuzziness involved. A sort of imaginative space about your physical space and your activity within it. And this brought me back to distributed personality and my half-baked attempt to tackle the overlap between social networking and active remembering. That got me on to the apps I've put on my phone like Toy Camera and RJDJ, and how much of an interpretive act is hardcoded into active remembering tools like these. Which brought me back round to Tash's post. Because it seemed like creating these interpreted and modified bits of content and putting them together into a meaningful, narrativised whole was completely to do with the imaginative act of reinforcing the little zone of "you". Assemble the creatively visualised data you have and these places and traces made permanently visible are a big part of who you happen to be in a sequence of moments, closely or disparately connected. They trace who you are becoming by how you capture stuff that would have otherwise disappeared. Full of details as intricate and complex as the houses belonging to the Onceler or the Moomins. Just maybe less realised in such a concentrated space. Not sure exactly what it means. But it felt interesting enough to write something about. So then. Yeah. (Oh, by the way, I pulled the pic off of Matt's Flickr stream. Lovely, eh?)