{ Sunday, March 28, 2004 }
I remember reading a rant a couple years ago on a mailing list about the proliferation of Raw Personal Content on the internet. RPC increased with the advent of blogging software, and now that digital cameras pervade and it's simple to create photo-blogs of digital photos, the internet has suffered a veritable tsunami of RPC.
Many people seem to worry about this. They think that standards are declining, that we as a culture are becoming increasingly trivial, that the internet is becoming what Rem Koolhas, in reference to American strip malls, calls Junkspace. They watch daytime talk shows with horror. They read online diaries with alarm. But I've always seen this as a good thing, not a bad thing. As I've argued before, all this RPC is Not Meant For You.
Naturally, the Japanese have a great word for this stuff:
In Japanese, "material" for news and stories is called "neta." The term has strong journalistic associations, but also gets used to describe material that can become the topic of conversation among friends or family: a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who just dropped out of high school; a funny story heard on the radio. Camera phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but also visually shareable.
Today Joi Ito was writing about Full-Time Intimate Community, the 4 or 5 people that are in constant contact with one another by email, IM, SMS etc. and I think that it is this core group and a small surrounding group that the creation of this RPC is intended for.
LINK | 2:15 PM | TB
Yes, but from garbage heap to compost pile, and from compost pile to great and surprising green.
SB | March 31, 2004 1:16 PMHis name is Rem Koolhaas. Note the extra A.
Frank Geerlings | April 16, 2004 6:20 AM{ Post a comment }
I remember that Ursula Franklin, a University Professor from Toronto, referred to the Internet as being not too unlike a garbage heap in one of her books. Very appropriate analogy. I think that we get a little too deluded by this image of the Internet that was created by the seminal books in the cyberpunk era...
Bjorn | March 31, 2004 12:08 PM