Anyway, the script metaphor seemed to chime in well with Cameron Marlowe's remarks at the conference about the latest personal tool - blogs - appealing to those who embrace a culture of information sharing, and also self. Which prompted me to ponder (as many others have) whether blogs are just a neat tool for the self-publicist, or will evolve into something really useful for more people... and whether multi-author blogs are a different sort of tool. (You can add other authors with the excellent Typepad system that hosts this blog, but it is a bit tedious adding authors one-by-one compared with, say, subscribing people to Yahoogroups). And how do blogs with comments differ from mailing lists or forums with contributions and comments? John Urry had a nice line at the conference about face-to-face conversations providing the opportunity for collaboratively working things out...talking through a topic. Doing that we often jump all over the place, picking up non-verbal cues from the other person as we go - which isn't the same at all in online postings. Maybe in chat and instant messaging...
So does the Net provide a new life script or more encouragement to improvise? Depends on your preference, I guess. We did start talking about personality type (introvert, extrovert)... but that's another story.
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