As unprofitable as it may appear, I wish to return to the issue of web as place, as classless discourse environment, imagination, dream, rhizome, ocean, temporal wormholes, etc.
I want to return via one small piece of David Weinberger's thought about blogs:
Grassroots person-to-person journalism that substitutes multiple viewpoints for the pretense of objectivity.
I've already raised a couple of questions about this here. The salient issue for me is:
Substituting "multiple viewpoints for the pretense of objectivity" prompts one to ask, where do these multiple-views occur? If, as one might suspect, they occur between rather than in, on, or at web sites, then how can one cite - point to - them? If they are in no particular place, what does that say about the place-ness of the Web?
Kevin Marks responds that team blogs offer an instance of addressable multi-view (multiplex?) locations on the Web, and this of course is right. Except that every time one succumubs to the stabilizing seduction of spatial analogies, someone like Kovacs comes along with a vision that explodes all analogies of stasis, all fixity:
I'm calling the net the ocean. Big-ass sites like Metafilter or Yahoo are ports, smaller ones are anchorages, bloggers are sailboats, and their web logs are their ship's logs. We meet, reef up, party down, separate and go on our merry wandering ways. We record where we've been. We talk about what those places have meant to us. There are living things swimming around down there, deep in the darkness. EmptyBottle
Or Rogers talks of links as dreams, or Ward reminds us of the delusional surreality of nouns, the negating force of friction:
Arguments are like that. They don’t always end up in pleasant places. I think it has to do with rigidity. Enough friction, and things liquefy. It’s a dissolution of identity, a scary thing for those who prefer rigidity, comfort, and closure within their own dimensions.
The thing is, we're always in motion - "surfing," or whatever verb you wish. Surfing at least evokes the wavelike tensionality that drives one to move, to not be stuck, as if that would cause us to sink into some abyss beneath the waves.
Those are pearles that were his eies
A web, after all, is the extension in space of something other than itself, something that wishes to sense its environment. Bloggers know the quickening, the shudder rippling through their neighborhoods that propels them to move, to seek the source of that pulse of which they are the echo, to turn to it in apprehension and then, perhaps, turn upon it with epideictic retorts of praise or blame, or to say, "look there," and point.
The web is not only about the storage and retrieval of discrete collections (or as Kovacs says, ports), though such spatial representations are undeniably there. Analogues of space and place will not capture the thing the Web is doing: the uncertain motion of attention to things in motion - the unaddressable calaboose of the spider,
cruisin' and playin' the radio
with no particular place to go.
1:21:14 PM 
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