Building Bridges June 13, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, meta-blog , trackbackNancy White comments on my previous article “facilitators and blogs” saying:
“I hope we can move more towards bridges because I am of the belief that
there is no one tool based solution,
that its how we use the tools that matter and, finally,
that tools are designed for groups, but experienced by individuals.
We need to find a way to negotiate, when appropriate, between the individual and group experiences.”
So I’m considering some of the ideas which have been posted recently in the online facilitators group and the ongoing discussion about approprite use of online tools within ultraversity.
I’m reasonably convinced by the view that some people prefer one tool while others prefer another and that these personal preferences are strong enough to have an effect on participation in different forums. Whether it’s just familiarity or some more inherent preference is not important, since writers will vote with their keyboards anyway. The effect of this can lead to isolated pockets of communities, perhaps with a common interest and knowlege but each sticking to their own partial view of the online world.
We can either accept this as “each to his own”, disregard the dilution problem “there’s always plenty more where they came from”, we could try to force everybody to move over to the one perfect tool (which doesn’t and in all probability never will exist ), or we can indeed try to build bridges.
As an ideal to work towards I quite like the vision of One Big Soup
I’m also taken with small pieces loosely joined
The only thing that slightly worries me is like, isn’t this what we started off with in the first place anyway?
The internet was designed to host a number of protocols such as POP3 and SMTP for email, NNTP for newsgroups, IRC for chat, FTP for file transfer, http for hypertext and a couple of others like finger, archie and gopher which we don’t use anymore. And it all fitted quite neatly together, so that you could reply to newsgroup posting directly to someone’s email address if you wanted, put a mailto: link on your web homepage, advertise a collaborative FAQ in your sig. You had a wide choice of software which fitted in with this scheme - email clients, newsreaders, web browsers, ftp clients and HTML editors so you could take your pick.
Then what seemd to happen was that two seperate pressures came to bear on the situation. Commercial interests wanting to engineer fenced off areas to keep their own users locked in started the trend to privatise chunks of internet communications through pasword protected website communications, proprietary services and broken standards. Alongside this there was a perceived need to simplify access for a wider public, replacing the ever so slightly ‘techie’ nature of the tools with push button clicky webby stuff that trades off ease of initial familiarty for a restricted functionality. Webmail instead of proper email, bulletin boards in place of proper newsgroups. Java chat instead of IRC. Incidentally I still maintain that one of the most critical developments was the change from pay-per-minute dial-up access to always-on flat rate internet deals.
So now here we are trying to put it all back together again using groups, Blogs, Wikis and incompatible webfeeds. And as fast as we are innovating and trying to keep it out of control you can bet there are powerful interests beavering away at developing ways to stifle, contain, segregate, corporatise it all.
So there, in a sense, we have it.
3 Comments
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is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
In a way I guess we are re-inventing wheels, but blogs are very different from what went before. The classic but cheesy Home Pages with pictures of peoples’ hobbies, families and cats. And working in a wiki is a very different process to emailing a Word document around… And with newsreaders of old (usenet), the quantity of news was fixed… whereas with todays (RSS) newsreaders, you can weave together a personal newspaper…. Oh an because FTP is just a file server, todays web-based file libraries can have meta data associated with files, and multiple presentations and routes to information.
So whilst a lot of todays technologies seem familiar, they are very very different….
And that’s before we get onto the one thing that was missing way back when… Google…
So it’s revisiting the wheel at a higher level then, perhaps - negating the negation in hegelspeak. I agree that blogs seem to enable something new to happen, in just a few months this one seems to have become central to my online presence. ( How do I export everything to make a backup by the way? the MT help didn’t )
One thing I’ve just learned is that I need to make a side bar index which points to entries which have ongoing conversations happening. That should help overcome what I perceived as a problem with blog discussions ending prematurely as new entries appear and the occasional comment on old entries getting overlooked.
Love the Ultralab South Wiki by the way, can we have one oop north for Ultraversity please?
Andy, I’m glad you are still thinking about this — I’m mildly obsessed by it, but wanted to drop one more stone into the pond (I think the damselfly photos inspired the metaphor).
There are times when we need the bridge. There are other times when the network itself is a very sufficient and effective bridge. I think the distinction is important and over the years the evolution of web patterns demonstrates we can use it in many ways.
Still trying to get my head around this.