You had only to watch the disparity between Techmeme and Memeorandum this weekend to see how isolated the tech and political blogospheres are. While one was in hysterics over various Palin family pregnancies, the other was apoplectic with devotional excitement over the leaked Google browser project, Chrome. Now imagine me writing that sentence a week ago.

Perhaps what all this points to is how focused we are on our present tenses - what is happening now in our narrowed world(s) is the extent of what matters. If so this might highlight some of the reasoning behind each 'sphere outburst. In the case of Palin, the focus on the family's pregnancies (both of rumor and of admission) are the topic of the moment thanks to McCain's seizure of the new, but will be long forgotten by the time voters step into their booths in the world of continual present tenses. Meanwhile, Google's "leak" of their browser project equally capitalizes on such world of present tenses since writers will masturbatorily try to associate themselves with the breaking news and subsequent fawning - allowing Google to sneak in their improved ability to track every online movement you make.

I suppose the only one here no focused on present tenses is Google itself; they're betting on the value of the future perfects.

Posted by Nathan at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the second week in a row that I've linked to Fred, but his recent entry about "enterprise Twitter" - i.e. using Twitter as a kind of back channel for employee communication - reminds me of the idea of idle talk as a critical element in post-Fordist labor. I suppose that's as close to a stereotypical sentence that I could write on this blog, but it does seem particularly interesting.

The idea of enterprise Twitter brings idle talk into the explicit grasp of the controlling levels of capitalist production. Virno, among others, seemed to imagine idle talk taking a back-channel role in post-Fordist production - an additive role, but not a forward one. Here, we see the implicit recognition that loosely related conversation within the productive environment might actually be something the encourage and promote within the organizational structure itself.

Posted by Nathan at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been out of the Swarming Media blogging game for a few weeks now. Vacationing, side projects, and summer laziness I suppose. I've also reassessed blogging on this site in general.

I started this back in late 2005 and much has changed, both on this blog and the routines that surround it. Back then, "Web 2.0" was still a term folks liked to use in a hopeful, unironic way; I had never used the term "autonomism"; and blogging seemed to be at the rare cultural convergence of newness, edginess, and broad familiarity.

Going through my feed reader today - the core of which I constructed six or so months before I created this blog - I noticed that a good 13 blogs have died in the past two months since I last went through it. Either they have shifted over to posting entirely automatic del.icio.us links or they've ceased to post anything at all; that's dead enough to call it such I'd say. Swarming Media was close to joining these ranks.

What got to me in the moments of writing the blog's obituary in my mind was straying from what Fred points to in his post closing out his chimprawk.blogspot.com URL (moving to fstutzman.com):

"I had no idea of what the blog would become, and if I knew the blog would be part of my professional identity I might have chose a different name [than chimprawk]. But I'm glad I didn't, and I think my blog's name was a reminder not to take any of this too seriously. This is all an experiment."

Blogs are a good way to maintain disassociated web-based and meat-space subject positions. Perhaps I've been letting my idea of Swarming Media get in the way of its purpose.

As of tonight, I resolve to make sure that - as Fred put it - I don't take any of it too seriously and most importantly, that this is all an experiment.

Posted by Nathan at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Nathan at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)