Bubbles & Foam
Field Notes from the Interconnectathon
In 1995 the internet was barely a postcard. Then, our existing mental models of space and things, our relationship to physical space determined our conceptual relationship to ‘cyberspace.’ The web was a go-between. It connected people via email. People went to a site. Physical metaphors abound.
Now the interconnectathon foams. A postcard and foam are obviously different things. A postcard is a communicable moment. Foam is a mass made up of individual bubbles that can fit any container. It can be a container. Foam overwhelms my capacity for distinction. Physical metaphors give way to metaphysics.
A postcard is undeniably content that supplies a discrete context— a ‘hello’ from somewhere else. Foam is undeniably context that implies content— it is a multiple made up of things. Parsing the difference between and similarities of content and context encourages new definitions of things in space, new ways of speaking about them. The emerging mental model struggles with new language(s) to articulate and share hellos from here and somewhere else.
This is not just a thought exercise. It doesn’t point to some cool new poetry. It points to elements of resistence, impedence and fluidity in the ways we understand and communicate. The interconnectathon is not sexy because its the new mental model in town. Instead, people are the new mental model in town— how we act and locate ourselves in space independent of and within the interconnectathon becomes the real challenge. It determines how we provide ourselves with true and meaningful context. Let me try to tease this out a bit.
In 1995 Lawrence Lessig was starting to teach law and cyberspace and had yet to write his watershed book “Code”. The individual in physical space constituted a starting point for him. For Lessig the individual exists within a set of codes — legal, social, market and physical.
Legal, social and market forces are easily mashed through language (code) into web-world, but what about the physical? As the interconnectathon occurs to us — Lessig’s the pathetic dot — what is becoming of the architecture of behavioral regulation. It’s very important to understand what’s happening to meaning as the discrete postcards transform into a context of data-flow around us. My understanding determines both how, and in some ways if, I can speak to you. It determines forms of freedom in relationship, in context.
To enhance, zoom in, to swap liberal, idea-based freedom for awareness, read Black Swan not as a measure of financial markets but of social markets. Read information on data-driven housing markets not as value creation but human strip mining. Read publishing crises not as inline advertising but as sensor journalism. Why rely upon Twitter when nanobots can surface evidence-in-context. In these uses of data we can read the explicit desire for market, legal and social forces to insert forms of control. We can read evidence of the physical impact of the interconnectathon by reading Aaron Swartz.
An easy way to get at this: outside the buzz-factory where do you live? How many children do you have or want? Where did you go to high school? What is your mother’s maiden name? What books, cars, clothing, food do you buy? Who did you vote for, speak to, visit, marry? What do you make, write, design, publish? What language, new and old, do you use? In the tension surrounding your/our answers is evidence of a protected, projected and regulated space around and inside us.
I’m not advocating a disconnect weekend, or a place apart; or a personal, private DNA— though that would be quite interesting; no, quite the opposite. I’m saying the interconnectathon is not a party— it’s life. As content becomes distributed context the regulatory power of the civil world that constitues our interactions will naturally flow into it, because it is of us. We will become regulated and designed. I’m not arguing for a new aesthetics, but a new ethics.
Sobriety, understanding and acting in the legal, social, market forces of content-as-context requires physically pausing to let the foaming bubbles each individually drain to their meeting places and slowly pop — from a froth to foam, to a glass of champagne, to water. As this happens it becomes easier to swim in foam with full intention, to see context, be in our new place and fully use language within it.
Understanding where we were 18 years ago provides a starting point and sense of proportion. It permits us to see the constellation of dots we’ve become. Intentional life, saying hello to one person or a million in the interconnectathon requires awareness of its structure and our presence in it. With the resulting clarity we can more fully know ourselves and act within the foaming context— because it is of us.
