As my friends and students know, I’m interested in the way that new technology changes our relationships (not just with people, but with institutions and existing technology). One of the tenets of postindustrial / postmodern / network society is that new communications technology both fragments traditional society and enables new (non-geographic) social arrangements.
We might also hope that it can be used to keep past, geographic connections alive as parties move. To this end, I have begun an experiment with twitter. Twitter is, for want of a better term, a micro-blogging and notification tool. It enables people to let others know what they are doing. It can, for example, be used to post location (for frequent travellers), meeting status (as a form of presence management), notify of new blog posts or other activities. Updates to twitter (and notifications of others’ updates) can happen on the web, through plugins (such as the one I added to the right), by SMS or IM.
Let me know if you use it.
3 Comments
A mini chatting room and blog! It has become popular in China now though still appears new to most people, including me.
There are several similar ones in China. You can even post photos.
http://jiwai.de/
http://www.taotao.com/
http://fanfou.com/
http://www.mycooo.com/
The above websites share the similar name with twitter. Maybe we can create one called http://www.blahblah.com.cn ^_^
@Stella
Thanks for the pointers to the Chinese mini chats / messaging systems. There are also other English ones as well (including Jaiku, which was recently bought by Google). I like the idea of them because they create a ‘flow’ less intrusive and more general than text messages or IM.
Unfortunately, the real problem with the proliferation is interoperability. For the time being, unless our friends are all on the same system, its not much use. My hope is that something akin to Jabber (XMPP), or even an extension of it, will emerge that will enable different vendors to interoperate.
Indeed, one of the reasons I use and advocate Jabber is for exactly this interoperability (the standard is open and there are open source clients and servers). I use it as mach as a political action to support this kind of approach to communication (i.e., technologically inclusive). Its worked very well with email, web browsing, SMS messaging, etc. Hopefully, the same will happen for twitter style comments / messages.
Hi Darryn,
Nice to find you at last on the web and it seems you are engaging in some interesting tech chit chat. Yes I know it is my fault for being so technophobic and slow in contacting you but I’m on skype finally so we should chat soon. Have a great New Year and enjoy the UK (if you’re back there). When will we see you back in Oz?
Best wishes,
Mark