The Future of the Web

Is Alan Cheslow's blog a new form of blogging?

Or will my next blog be Twistori like, a sort of FriendFeed lifestream in perpetual motion, automaticaly scrolling...endlessly flowing on line.

If my life is transferred into an online scrolling lifestream matrix soon, I wonder how I will be able to manage all this information by following others feeds, without losing too much of my "productive content creation" time?

Already I can hardly manage my Friendfeed lifestream because I'm overloaded by too many feeds from people I consider interesting.

Is the future of the Web [or online information systems] above all, in aggregation and filtering?

Below is an interesting poll from the New York Times article, published few months ago about how people are spending [wasting] their office time.

According to this poll, if we could decrease our online distraction time (or "interruptions" such as reading mails, following others lifestream feeds, chatting, etc...) and the time we spend on searching information , we could increase our "productive" time by 43 % .

And even if aggregation and filtering systems do not eliminate our need for distraction, at least, we will feel a little less lost and overloaded by gathering all this streaming online information.

The question is who can we authorize to aggregate and filter for us?
To be really reliable, this machine has not only to simulate our own value system [reflect our need for security] but also has to be able to push us beyond our intellectual safe zone [make us curious and able to accept the Alterity].

Conference in London on October 29, 2008: "Can we bored with Debord?"

I've just stumbled upon this note by Alan James Bullion at Facebook which attracted my attention :

"The Autumn 2008 season of Conversations hosted by Rethinking Cities opens with Alan James Bullion posing the question: "Are we bored with Debord? What can we derive from his concept of drift in the modern city?"

It is forty years since Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” triggered civil unrest in the streets of Paris.

As the leader of the political art movement known as the Situationists in the early 1960’s, Guy Debord was a proponent of the ‘derive’, to walk through, was to understand the city and its class struggles.

Alan Bullion is the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for Sevenoaks poses the question: "Are we bored with Debord? What can we derive from his concept of drift in the modern city?"

This Conversation will take place on the evening of Wednesday 29 October 2008 at the Royal Commonwealth Society, Northumberland Avenue, London.

Click here to register for this or other Conversations

Even if Debord's ideas are shaped in a different historical context, I think this topic is not at all anachronistic and that we can still learn a lot from him.

Read on line The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord translated in English here or in French [original text] here or take a look at these short videos from a video documentary about Guy Debord's Situationist movement and you will see why.


Situationalist International - Part 1 of 3




Situationalist International - Part 2 of 3




Situationalist International - Part 3 of 3




"The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.

The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.

At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real. " Guy Debord : The Society of the Spectacle