A fascinating conversation with a friend about her project brought up some things I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I won’t pretend to understand everything about her tech comm project, but it boils down to how people talk about what they do with technology, and using technology against the grain of its original intention, with an eye toward how this fits into the greater culture (sorry if i mangled this; i’m using it for a jumping-off point, after all).
Which makes me think about pornogoraphy, privacy, social networking, instant messaging and blogs.
It makes me think about Antonella, who is thinking about similar issues, and whom I found via my Bloglines, because I subscribe to my own blog there and can see who else does. Antonella and I then corresponded not only via email, but also through tribe.net, and later through our blogs, taking advantage of various communication avenues, which in turn inflect the quality and nature of our distributed discussion. I don’t think Bloglines was meant specifically for this purpose, but there it is.
It makes me think of the myriad ways people use blogs. From personal livejournal-type “here’s-what-i-ate-today” to academic to business to porn to whatever blogs, the genre has taken off in unforeseen ways. People use them in classes, for personal expression, for flirting (see hilary’s secret admirer in comments), to stir things up, to send secret messages, to spy, to play games…
It makes me think of privacy. It makes me think about Portable Firefox, which I use on my USB key to use FF on shared computers, in part to keep my history to myself, private. And anonymous proxies, and passwords, and Statcounter, which I use on my other blog to see who’s looking. Sometimes we don’t know when we’re leaving tracks. Sometimes we leave them on purpose.
To paraphrase the original question: How do we learn these things? How do you use technology in ways counter to its original intent? What super-secret things do you do, when (you think) nobody’s looking?
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