On Vox
I’ve started to post other small things on Vox now. Caveat lector: you will read about what my cat had for breakfast.
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August 18th, 2006 at 6:57 am
an obsessive (meant in the nicest possible way), web space itinerant, like yourself, must exist elsewhere… as well… myspace?
August 18th, 2006 at 7:17 am
by way if explanation, my thesis title was ‘lost in transposition’… i am interested in people who exist in numerous places: here, there and elsewhere… i with-held the myspace urge for various reasons… once it happens however there is no turning back.
August 20th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Some completely non-internet-savvy but good friends of mine started telling me about this great “MySpace” thing that they had discovered, and told me I should get on board. Some form of misguided snobbery prevented me from signing up before this (MySpace being the type of place that people who don’t even know what a strict doctype is hang out), but out of professional curiosity for what they were up to I gave it a go.
I’m almost disappointed to say it failed to meet even my low expectations. All conversations seemed to read like comment spam written in the same language that my young sister texts me in, and substantial content was very thin on the ground. I’m sure there are pockets of fantastic content on MySpace, but I didn’t come across them. Do I sound like an old fogey yet?
However, I did find the effort interesting in light of thinking about how context affects behaviour. Even in a personal online space, where we may think about freedom of expression, there seemed to be a real sense of conformity in terms of how people present themselves. MySpace and Vox have pretty similar feature sets, but their users seem to behave very differently (perhaps because each service has been marketed quite differently?). MySpace allows users to create their own templates (sometimes with ugly consequences), and mobile phone covers and ringtones allow personalisation on a certain level, but somehow I can’t help but feel that having the Simpsons on my phone still isn’t the ultimate in self-expression. Why is Vox proving popular with existing bloggers as a place to write in a different, more personal style?
On a non-MySpace note, and continuing in my videogame groove of recent times, I have noticed an odd sort of remote connection between different games that I play. In games that ask you to provide a character name, I use the name Lombardi. So in World of Warcraft, me as Lombardi runs about in the form of a great big tauren, hacking wild animals to bits and generally getting into scraps. In Animal Crossing though, me as Lombardi decorates my house, plants turnips, and posts letters to my friend Bones the dog. It’s all quite different, but the connect is not just in the name; at all times Lombardi is my avatar, a sort of third-person me (just like my blog or my Vox is), so in my mind there is a definite connect between them.
So I’m wondering now about people and systems and expression and mediation and facilitation. Is it possible to create a system that encourages non-conformity, a ruleset that’s loose enough but structured enough at the same time? I’m starting to think that play and discovery might be a route to this, but that a world of 3D polygons isn’t expressive enough. Everything old is new again: text is the future, kids.