tweeting with extraterrestrials

A friend posted about Hello from earth on Facebook. It's an Australian site that's collecting messages to be transmitted to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our solar system which may support life. They give you 160 characters to write your message in, which feels like a luxury compared to Twitter. And you've got until 5pm Monday 24 August 2009 Sydney time, or 07:00 GMT the same day, to write yours. In the spirit of conversation and learning from each other, this felt like the most appropriate message I could send. What sort of a message would you send?

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?)

distributed personality

So I finally got round to watching that programme, Why Reading Matters. And what a joy it was. It told how neuroscience has shown the living brain in action, its modular nature, the connections it makes and needs to maintain. Fascinating stuff. Lots of little anthropological insights, like how reading skills developed from the observational powers tuned up from more primitive times. It also demonstrated how reading a novel opens up imaginative and empathetic abilities, which can be built up like any other muscle. I'll be slipping lots of these facts knowingly into conversations wherever I can from now on. It was also open-ended about how the internet and various technologies are changing the nature of reading. So then I couldn't help thinking about how my reading habits have changed in the last few years. At home I'm reading Watchmen and How to Win Friends and Influence People. On the train I'm reading Novel on Yellow Paper and various Twitter feeds. At lunchtime and just before I go to bed I read blog posts. If I went a couple of days without making a dent in some, if not all of these, I think I'd feel freaked out. All of which is interesting when you think about how our expressive abilities and desires may have changed. We are distributed personalities. I have my blog, my Facebook profile and my Twitter. I've not long been using Delicious, but I'm having fun with it. And there's my randombitsandpieces too. These things are micro self-commentaries, little fragments of personality gone webby. It's not easy to assemble that into a whole. That's why it's so hard to measure the way we engage with communications. But that's the whole thing, isn't it? When we're trying to think about engagement and intimacy, how do you understand what are they worth, truly? I'm not saying we couldn't or shouldn't try do this, of course not. But really, how intimate are we with the stuff we consume, even that we profess to love? And how intimate do we want to be? So, um, yeah. That's it really. (Pic courtesy of this person.)

fun!

Twittersheep (via Dave) is great. You just put your Twitter id in and it generates a cloud of frequently used words from your followers' bios. So yeah, this is mine. Crikey, there's so many Twitter things it's hard to keep up.

making mundane meaningful

So this is a very unoriginal post. I've just been noticing lots of blogging about measurement and gaming scores. Things about visualising your energy consumption. Making the invisible into a visible trace. That sort of thing. And it all feels very relevant and very important for 2009. So as a start to getting my head around it, I've set myself up over here. (Site discovered via Russell.) Now I never need update my Twitter or Facebook status ever again...

sigmund now on twitter

Yep, here I am.