Twittering led me to blog again

The quote below pretty much sums up why I’m blogging again, actually not so much wanting more space than Twitter allows in terms of some topics for me, but about my move to study more of what I do, to develop a deeper cultural understanding of the social web, now that the scale is there.

“…Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?

What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don’t do the job. We even don’t have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call “cognitive mapping,” you know, that you get an idea what’s going on. We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.” –Slavoj Zizek

Zizek is good at making provocative statements, and the above is not about the state of cultural awareness of the net, but of general global deterministic speed and lack of understanding. I saw him on democracynow.org and this quote just resonated to my local position and place today. I’m more focused now on methods of social awareness, from ethnography to meditation. This post is as good a start as any.

I had a filter blog 9 years ago mainly tracking web trends as they were rapidly evolving and only spent partial time on cultural observations and questions; quit after wanting my time back and seeing that so many other full time blogs kept better track. This time around, my motto is “less is more”. Quality posts less often, more around my current interests, more at length on the patterns that Twittering helps raise to the top of my awareness.

Topically this blog will also more squarely focus on my search for the state of Digital Ethnography… for designing web presences/products today we have developed methods and knowledge about the presentation layers, and the business layers, the software layers, and now the social layers are being well mapped out…. but what remains most out of awareness is the silent language, the cultural layer. So, in many ways I find my self returning to where I was subject matter-wise at the time I left my schooling 12 years ago to join the circus of the internet. Back then working on the web was like some esoteric new thing you had to explain to most who asked; now the net is a pervasively woven element in our global cultural fabric… accordingly worthy of deeper cultural awareness and study.

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