[-empyre-] emergent canvas? distributed canvas?

[Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no>]

Brandon wrote:
> Perhaps we can tie this back to blogs as well.  I know quite a few 
> ppl here use blogs for collaborative research/creation, and I wonder 
> if they could comment about how the tool affects their process...
>
> Jill? Katherine?  Jason?

Ah. See, this is probably more to do with the net than specifically 
with any particular technology. Could do it in a MOO, a mailing list, 
email, nato and other shared canvases, blogs, wikis, etc etc... And 
just by mail or whatever in the days of yore, when networking was 
offline.

I find sharing a space for writing a wonderful way of thinking 
together. I've shared a blog with a colleague when we were co-writing 
an essay, and though I have no idea whether or not anyone else read 
it or not we got a great deal out of it. Writing to each other and 
sharing and changing each others words was very productive, and 
knowing that the other person would change and use whatever we wrote 
meant that we let ourselves be weirder, knowing that the other person 
would reel us in if necessary.

MOOing (or I suppose any form of chatting) together for a 
collaboration can be great too: chatting away you can be quite clever 
almost without knowing it, and  you correct and build upon each 
others words. Afterwards the log can be edited into a succinct block 
of text for whatever purpose.

At the moment I'm really interested in how individual blogs have 
their own ways of connecting. I'm reading Steven Johnson's very 
entertaining book Emergence, which talks about self-organising 
systems, like slime mold, that disgusting orange red slime you 
sometimes see on the ground in a forest. And when it's cold, it's 
gone. Well, it's not actually gone, it's just that all the individual 
cells sort of decided to go hide. Individually. When conditions are 
good, they all send out little signals (chemical I think) and tell 
each other hey, let's meet up! and so they do. There's no leader, as 
biologists though a few decades ago. They're all equally 
un-intelligent. But together, well, they can, um, make slimy patches. 
Actually they can do more: a bloke in Japan *trained* slime mold to 
find the quickest way through a maze a couple of years ago. That's 
just weird.

Anyway, the point of all this is that that kind of distributed, 
self-organising emergent system which is made up of lots and lots of 
barely-intelligent individuals (like slime mold cells, or some would 
say, bloggers), is a fascinating way to think about blogs. Or lots of 
other network stuff probably, but let's stick with blogs for now. So 
rather than having a shared canvas, blogs start off all individually 
- and perhaps a canvas emerges? Or perhaps there's a distributed 
canvas?

It's definitely a different way of collaborating. You don't have a 
leader, or even really a shared space. And yet discussions do, well, 
emerge.

I think this might be where Johnson's going in his book, cos I spied 
words like "SimCity" and "Napster" towards the end, but I'm only up 
to page 32 so I'm just drawing my own conclusions here ;)

Jill

(a happy member of the blog borg)
--

Jill Walker / Dept of Humanistic Informatics / University of Bergen / 
5020 Bergen / Norway
http://cmc.uib.no/jill
jill.walker@uib.no