That said I am very conscious of the temporal rhythm of my own life, to
echo Jordan Crandall's post. I definitely pace myself by e-mail. Over the
past 6 months I've developed an unwillingness to let it dominate my life,
but it is still very much my synchronizing pulse. Consequently, I find
myself viewing the Blast! list more and more in accord with that pulse. I
let the list sit for 3 days, then I had some 15 posts to try to sift
through. Would that I could react to all of them, do justice to all of
them. But I am unwilling, and even if I was, it would very shortly become
impossible. Too many threads, too many things to react to, in a life where
many other things happen in a day. As John Beckmann said, the e-mail
simultaneously brings us together and pushes us away in many separate
directions. I find myself attempting to achieve a sense of context and
continuity... I try to get a "lock" on a subject. Like a fighter pilot
monitoring a radar screen, waiting to fire a missile. Like others, I'm
possessed of a disparity of intellectual tools with which to acquire the
lock. And as I become more conscious of my time, my synchronizing pulse, I
read faster and faster. The number of posts I can "lock onto" becomes less
and less. Still, I pile up 7 or 8 that I'd like to deal with. Then my
desk becomes filled with 7 or 8 e-mails that I can't view simultaneously.
I leave the final stages of synthesis to brainpower alone, lacking any
mechanical means to deal adequately with the situation. I simply hope that
I can remember 6 posts about the Slab City, correlate its emptiness to VRML
landscapes, find relevance to the synchronous / asynchronous / isochronous
pulses of architecture, and even work in an erstwhile Object-Oriented
metaphor.
Alas, tonight I cannot do it! So I would like to offer a bold proposition
to all the list members. Instead of discussing things according to
whatever suits our fancy of the moment, can we work out some ***GOALS***
for this list. Why goals? For me personally, because I'm here to extract
something of intrinsic utility. Every hour that I spend on this list
*discussing* (say) virtual world spaces, is an hour that I could (should?)
have spent *implementing* virtual world spaces. Yet some of the ideas
developed here could be of immense use to my work, particularly if those
ideas were strongly focused and refined. I know that the notion of "goals"
or "utility" may not be important to some of you, and certainly, "utility"
is not the only way to organize one's intellectual pursuits. That said, I
wouldn't mind taking a straw poll of what people's goals are, and how
people feel about the idea of working towards a common goal rather than a
series of disparate conversations. Maybe some form of democracy or other
enlightened cultural construct could operate here?
One advantage of "goals" is that we can take turns spelling them out. That
way, we all synchronize on a similar template: "Hi, I'm Q, my goals for the
list are X, Y, and Z." Once people have spelled out their goals, maybe
some form of consensus on how to proceed will arise. And from there,
perhaps we can decide upon a particular "site" to focus the conversation
on?
As far as "who knows what, we don't share a common academic language"
issues are concerned, here are some things that worked once upon a time on
the vworlds-list:
0) Always focus discussion on a concrete working problem. No abstractions
without context.
1) If the working problem requires background material, conjure up a
weblink to it, so others can read it.
2) People should take the resposibility to read some of the background
material on the working problem.
3) Don't expect people to keep up with discussion AND read lotsa offline
material. Offline materials must be kept short. There is a burden to keep
the context of the discussion contained within the forum itself. People
should be able to track "most" of the discussion simply by reading the
e-mail archive.
To be more specific, vworlds-list was (is) a forum for the artistic
possibilities of VR, free of any technical constraints. Some of the
working problems we used to focus discussion were: "multi-user simulation
of Shakespeare's Hamlet", "spatial implications of an M.C. Escher
universe", and "psychological / theatrical devices of Salvador Dali." I
feel we actually "got" somewhere with these topics, as we focused on each
one exclusively for an extended period of time, and much more was pulled
out of each than a simple breadth-wise discussion would have allowed.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every