[p2p-research] pushbutton web

Thu Jul 30 15:27:56 CEST 2009

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I am part of Facebook's universe, it is not part of mine. That is to
say, Facebook cannot exist without me and you and us, but conversely
Facebook benefits my existence very little beyond that which could be
achieved by the other mechanisms that I already have at my disposal.

However, I participate in Facebook knowing that a lot of my peers use it
as a source of information. Wheras I follow e-mail, they follow status
updates. It peeves me that so many of my close peers are members of the
cult of brevity, but that's their choice and they're entitled to make
it. I also follow Twitter - an offspring of the brevity cult - and post
to it irregularly. For the benefit of those I associate with, I have
Twitter posts syndicated to Facebook automagically.

The downside of this is that my Twitter-audience is generally very much
aware of the kind of things I do and understand them to a high degree,
whereas my Facebook audience generally doesn't understand what I do and
even mock it. An example of this was yesterday when I posted "Industry
2.0 core features? Post-scarcity, self-organization, peer production,
decentralization... what else?" to Twitter, and an old mathematician
friend of mine replied, "why don't you just stop speaking nonsense?"

This illustrates a certain fragmentation within my social network, which
could be summarized as "Icelanders" versus "foreigners", although this
misses a lot of subtleties.

Yesterday I got developer access to Google Wave, and the first thing
that I realized upon logging into it is that it was beyond any doubt
poised to further fragment my social network. Instead of it being only
the "e-mail", "twitter", "facebook" realms of my social consciousness,
there would be an added "wave" realm. All together now: FRAGMENTED
ATTENTION SPAN.

How to deal with this? One friend of mine made a conscious decision a
while ago to quit IRC, cancel his cellphone subscription, and blackhole
e-mails from people he didn't know. He became a hermit at that instant,
reading only list mail from one certain mailing list and losing contact
with most of his older friends. His productivity has gone up
substantially as a result. That said, his field is low level kernel
hacking, a field I haven't touched on for a number of years. My field
requires a high level of interaction with smart people, which is why I'm
on this list and many like it.

But much like kernel hacking, what I do - what we do - requires long
stretches of unbroken attention span, thoroughly segmented into spurts
of activity. Without access to these we're useless. And so it becomes a
race: publish early, publish often on the one hand, versus research well
and research deep on the other.

I'm at a loss of how to deal with this, but I'm growing of the opinion
that the value of a social technology to me is inversely proportional to
their reliance on me.

That is to say: things that need me in order to survive probably don't
deserve to.

Oddly enough, this is the same view as I took regarding pets a long time
ago.

 - Smári

Michel Bauwens wrote:
> you're right ... I won't let facebook become my whole universe at all
> ... just a part of it ...
> 
> Michel
> 
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Alex Rollin <alex.rollin at gmail.com
> <mailto:alex.rollin at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Michel
>     Bauwens<michelsub2004 at gmail.com <mailto:michelsub2004 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > Dear Sepp:
>     >
>     > this seems like an important new set of developments, but a little too
>     > complicated for me yet ...
>     >
>     > I wonder if you could have a look at it and summarize in more
>     simple terms
>     > for our blog audience?
>     >
>     > Thanks for having a look:
>     >
>     http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html
>     >
> 
>     Many are familiar with the ability of Open Source applications like
>     Drupal to provide features similar or identical to Facebook.  This
>     article focuses on several aspects of the technology tool set needed
>     to place Facebook in it's right place as an application consuming data
>     from various inputs.  The rightful place is RIGHT NEXT TO MY WEBSITE.
> 
>     My most scathing criticism of Facebook is that it makes it too easy
>     for people to forget to develop their own ability to publish and
>     aggregate outside FB.
> 
>     Alex
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> Research: http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
> 
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
> 
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
> 
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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