The world is sorting.

That’s the phrase that lept to mind last night, as I sat in a South bank cafe.  I was sitting with a small group people gathered in the National Film Theatre cafe, one of those end-of-week drinking places that London does so well, people spilling out of doors (the liquor license, what liquor license?) into the street, in this case, a concrete plaza, drinking, talking, flirting, exclaiming, declaiming, carrying on, leaping from one story to the next, in breathtaking acts of barely managed continuity.  The balance!  The dexterity!  The English, they sure can talk. 

The world is sorting because this particular group of drinkers (Russell Davies, Mark McGuinness, Jennifer Lyon Bell, Tim Plester, Marcus Brown and Lauren Brown would not exist were it not for Interesting2007, and this would not exist were it not for the bloggable world. 

I sat there at one moment thinking what it would cost me in time and effort to meet any of these people.  Tons.  Tons of time and effort. But these people have found one another, thanks to the internet, blogging and of course, the present master of ceremony, Russell Davies. 

If we are not "on the same page" we found that page with a conversational short hand.  And when compressed speech and nimble orientation failed us, we fashioned "same pages" in no time at all.  It was wonderful to see how few questions any one of us had to ask to "place" the other. 

We come from disparate parts of the world (planner, film maker, anthropologist, poet) and there are great pieces of each world were inscrutable or opaque.  But a little scrambling about on a shared but unsuspected catwalk and people began to work out what the other meant, may have meant, or under the circumstances and given what the listener knew about proximate or equivalent parts of the world, almost certainly did mean (give or take).

The world is going in two directions.  These differences are expanding.  What counts in the world of poetry and film-making may not be so very different, but keeping in touch with the trends, inclinations and cultures that produce the people that produce the poetry or the films, that’s a different matter, and if once London nurtured a shared creative culture, now it encourages many hundreds of them.  (Was there a big bang at some point in recent memory, our life times, that produced this expanding universe?  No, this is one of those cultural things we (we, the West, we the species) have been working up to over thousands of years.  It’s just the we can now see changes happening in real time.) 

Good thing that cat walk is expanding.  Good thing we all are pretty good at mobilizing our way out of our present world and transplanting, if only for a moment, into the world of someone else.   Our cultural literacy has so expanded, it turns out that most of these differences are negotiable. 

But what about traversing this expanding world not intellectually, but actually?  What about actually finding somehow in these expanding galaxies.  And this is where blogging comes in, as my table at the NFT cafe last night demonstrated so convincingly.  What one needs to get a seat at this table is not any of the other gate negotiated affiliations: the right family, the right college, the right club. What one needs is a blog, a readable blog.  By this means, we identify ourselves, and one another, as interesting and engaged, and eventually we find one another. 

The world is sorting and the implications are, er, interesting.  We can imagine a perfect world in which an invisible hand sorts the world so that each of us is put in contant all but only the people we find most interesting.  What would happen to what we do, think, accomplish, create?  Tons.  But what about the collective effects?  What happens to the social and cultural worlds are integrated, cross referenced, interpenetrating in this way.  This is the $64,000 question, isn’t it, and the great challenge for the social sciences and especially anthropology.  After all, anthropology was about two things: culture and kinship.  Both of these are changed beyond recognition, but not beyond the possibility of anthropological investigation.

Which brings me to Lance Ulanoff and the column he posted in PC magazine on Wednesday.  Lance thinks that the social networks are goners.  MySpace, Second Life and Twitter are, he says, "doomed," symptoms of the hype that now surrounds Web 2.0.  Lance, Lance, Lance. The social networking has only just began.  None of these sites (or the others, Facebook, Dopplr, Jaidu, LinkedIn) has got it exactly right, but that can’t be for of.  Most of us are still making connections by hand, using the bloggable world has our source and our quide.  Once someone finds a way to industrialize this process, and harness the power of a machine to replace handcrafting, things will really get going.  It may turn out that the ability to watch change happen in real time will be a brief episode that will end as it begins to happen so quickly it evades overwhelms our optic abilities. 

References

Ulanoff, Lance.  2007.  MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed: these overyped social networks will soon crumble under the weight of overhyped expectations.  PC Magazine.  June 13, 2007.  here.

Postscript:

Oh, and the photo was taking last night about 9:00 and it captures a cloud showing off shamelessly, but quietly, in the sky above London, looking north from Pall Mall.  North?