In her PhD work, Lilia Efimova has been one of my teachers and thought partners, starting from the summer she spent with my family here in Seattle while doing a fellowship at Microsoft Research. In the post Blog as Edge Zone, Lilia gets to the heart of what has been drawing me lately in my thinking and slow, personal research.
…blogging supports creating relations with unknown and unexpected others, often across various boundaries.
While many of us struggle to define “community” or “network” or “group” I keep on getting the sense that the important changes, fundamental changes in the way those of us online live our lives, are happening in the margins in between and across boundaries. Yes, we belong to tight bounded communities and broad reaching networks. But it is how we navigate across them, and connect, disconnect and reconnect with ideas, content and people in those transversing practices.
Lilia has done a great job of describing what I have been “sensing” from the perspectives of blogs. I think there are similar things we can describe around different online interaction tools and the practices associated with them. We can examine this from the quintessential change these tools and practices create in our ability to “be together.”
In February, Barbara Ganley, Laura Blankenship and I will be exploring this with a session we’re offering at Northern Voice. We will dance the limbo, talk about being in limbo and look for patterns for making the most of this boundary crossing and all the unnamed places in between.
I had hoped to write more about this, but lately work keeps me away from that loose time I need to write these things. So this is a little bookmarker out to the world.
Let’s think together.
I have four “serious” blog posts half edited and I haven’t found the focus to complete them. So why not veer wildly…
This dovetails in with something that came up last week at the