Over on my relatively new unbook site, I’ve posted an even newer essay about social media, “Crazy Together: Searching for dialogue in the age of social networking“:
The thing about Twitter, and other online tools, is that it seems all really just like talking to yourself out loud in a public place. If you happen to be a stand-up comedian, that might be cool and entertaining. If you happen to be Hamlet, it might even be a literary device. But if you’re not, then it seems not much different than being crazy.
And yet, there’s this persistent feeling that something is going on that isn’t the usual. Somehow, it seems that, in spite of everything social media has progressed from merely one way broadcasting, through into an exchange of dialog, and even has the feeling, to those using it, of being a dialogue.
This is essentially the first essay of this kind that I’ve completed, from the many I’ve started, since leaving graduate school. It uses the theory I developed in my Master’s Thesis in an examination of dialogue in online environments. I was inspired to this mainly because of the main title which I developed in a posting a couple of days ago to an online community organized around Dave Gray‘s new work-in-progress “Marks and Meaning, version zero“. After that, I kept thinking about it, but then another colleague posted a response that really helped trigger, as a catalyst, the rest of the essay. Over the last couple days, the essay has really tumbled together out of my brain.
It felt really great to me to do this, and to have it come to me so quickly again. It’s been so very long. I don’t know if the motivation to this will last, but it feels a bit like coming out of a coma. (Has it really been so long since graduate school? Have I really been so turned off to my own work by the experience? Is it possible that I’m finally past the recovery stage?)
The commenting is broken over there on my unbook site because I’ve messed with the theme so much, but you can at least check out this new essay. Also, you can actually check out my Master’s Thesis and another essay about landscape and mapping while you’re there. Both my thesis and the other essay had not been published publicly before now, even on my academic pursuits page.
Although commenting’s broken so they kinda aren’t really unbooks after all right now, if you’re interested in what ‘unbook’ means you might check out Dave Gray’s post about the the unbook movement, unbook.com’s about page, or the CommentPress theme at The Institute for the Future of the Book.