You know, there's something about the pop-archaeologist (read: Indiana Jones) in me that always makes me even *more* interested in the little antiquated disappearing niches of the intertubes than in their more successful brethren. I guess it's that something like Facebook already pretty much has its place written in the history books. And G+ will either die or thrive, but either way there's not a lot to say about it because social media is already the air we breathe**, if that makes any sense.
But Livejournal? Or IRC? Or some esoteric little MMORPG* that's still struggling out there somewhere? Or even fucking dial-up BBS file transfer protocols (XMODEM, anyone?).
I don't know, there's always something a little bit magic about that for me. Maybe it's just kind of a Sterlingesque fascination with the obsolete, but I like to think it's a little more than that. I think it's the same part of me that finds beauty in the history of the margin. Say, the biography of a Vannevar Bush -- not your ultrastar Einstein or even your secondary tier Oppenheimer or von Braun -- just a humble bureaucrat, changing the world in such a monumental, but utterly unremarked, fashion.
And Livejournal, in particular... It captures the spirit of that millenial moment so clearly. The notion that cyberspace would be -- following in the wake of the economic and political markets before it -- a domain defined by the free exchange of rhetoric. That pseudonymous identity and reputation could be as valid as those attached to your bio body. Hell, that you could still even conceive of a separate bio body and all the while still make friends that, while you'd never met outside of these backwater digital enclaves, you would insist with a passion were 'real.' Or maybe it's just something about it's pre-YouTubian insistence on text, and the implicit suggestion that for, even if just for a brief window in time, we might all actually communicate with one another for a change. As a utopian model, it's certainly not without its flaws, but nevertheless I think it will be a rather sad day when I decide to delete my LiveJournal account. It will take a little wonder and hope out of my world when it goes, maybe not unlike the closing of Bytes. It's understandable, sure, and probably entirely too rational of an outcome, and that only make it all the more grim.
*For what it's worth, I've never even played the game, and I'm still transfixed by the notion that it exists out there as some sort of living time capsule.
**In the spirit of the vaguely Dadaist phantom that's grabbed me, I'm going to leave the footnotes in the order that they occur to me, rather than the order that they appear in the body. In any case, I'll just point out then when I googled the Dead Media Project, the wiki came up before the actual site. Living and breathing social media, indeed.
But Livejournal? Or IRC? Or some esoteric little MMORPG* that's still struggling out there somewhere? Or even fucking dial-up BBS file transfer protocols (XMODEM, anyone?).
I don't know, there's always something a little bit magic about that for me. Maybe it's just kind of a Sterlingesque fascination with the obsolete, but I like to think it's a little more than that. I think it's the same part of me that finds beauty in the history of the margin. Say, the biography of a Vannevar Bush -- not your ultrastar Einstein or even your secondary tier Oppenheimer or von Braun -- just a humble bureaucrat, changing the world in such a monumental, but utterly unremarked, fashion.
And Livejournal, in particular... It captures the spirit of that millenial moment so clearly. The notion that cyberspace would be -- following in the wake of the economic and political markets before it -- a domain defined by the free exchange of rhetoric. That pseudonymous identity and reputation could be as valid as those attached to your bio body. Hell, that you could still even conceive of a separate bio body and all the while still make friends that, while you'd never met outside of these backwater digital enclaves, you would insist with a passion were 'real.' Or maybe it's just something about it's pre-YouTubian insistence on text, and the implicit suggestion that for, even if just for a brief window in time, we might all actually communicate with one another for a change. As a utopian model, it's certainly not without its flaws, but nevertheless I think it will be a rather sad day when I decide to delete my LiveJournal account. It will take a little wonder and hope out of my world when it goes, maybe not unlike the closing of Bytes. It's understandable, sure, and probably entirely too rational of an outcome, and that only make it all the more grim.
*For what it's worth, I've never even played the game, and I'm still transfixed by the notion that it exists out there as some sort of living time capsule.
**In the spirit of the vaguely Dadaist phantom that's grabbed me, I'm going to leave the footnotes in the order that they occur to me, rather than the order that they appear in the body. In any case, I'll just point out then when I googled the Dead Media Project, the wiki came up before the actual site. Living and breathing social media, indeed.
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