It seem like all the meta-bloggers have been talking about two things over the last few weeks: YASNS (and their deficiencies) and tagging (as in tags for locating information, attached to the information itself, folksonomy, metadata, etc.).

I’ve been avoiding both topics, deliberately distancing myself from them.  My experience with YASNS systems has been less than satisfactory; my Orkut and Multiply sites have been abandoned for months because they simply didn’t do anything for me.  I wasn’t moved by them, if that makes sense.

And tagging?  Yikes.  What a mess!  Just look at how people tag information they find by watching del.icio.us; it’s only too clear that tagging is highly individualistic and personal.  One person’s tag is another person’s expletive (and I wasn’t even thinking in terms of politics)…

Avoidance of these topics worked – until today, listening to A Prairie Home Companion.

Of all things.  Go figure.  How would storyteller Keillor manage to unite these two topics, YASNS and tagging in the same radio broadcast without losing an audience.

He wasn’t talking directly about these topics.  It was his story that caught my ear, made me hear the relationship between these things.

Garrison was giving his usual weekly Lake Woebegone report, winding a story around fictional characters that sound so much like people I actually know.  Something about a fishing contest and people who moved away from town and the relationships between these people and other people with similar or the same names who lived in the same town.

If you’ve ever lived in or visited a small town, sat at a café counter or a bar, listened in on conversations between old-timers who’ve lived in the town forever, it would have sounded a lot like Garrison’s story.  The old-timers do this funky preamble before telling a story, sometimes regroup in the middle of the story with a post-amble (it’s not a preamble any more, is it?), and the listeners may counter with corrections at any time during the course of the conversation.

You know Bob Smith?  The one who owned the DeSoto dealership back in, was it the early 50’s?  Yeah, the one on Maple Street.  No? You think it was on Pine Street?  Nah, that can’t be, it had to be Maple.  I lived only five blocks away, over on Washington.  Anyhow, Bob’s daughter moved away after high school; can’t think of her name, doggone it all, can only think of her brother Bobby…yeah, he’s still a mechanic at the Chrysler dealership.  Anyhow, she’s moved back to town, looking for a job at the high school.  Yup, she’s going to have to talk to Myrna at the school board about the music teacher’s job.  I hear she’s a piano teacher, she might be able to fill that job that Sue left – Sue, you know her, yeah you do, Johnson, lives over on Edison, behind the Armory, near Ed and Rachel Gunderson – anyhow, Sue retired and left that music teaching job this spring.

Even if you were the spouse of this person, you’d still get the preamble; there’s no shortcut to the point of this story, the preamble being almost as important as the point itself.  I’ve seen it, up close and personal, my father-in-law telling this rambling story, my mother-in-law interjecting to correct him from time to time, father-in-law getting huffy, Oh-Jesus-woman-would-you-let-me-finish on her as the story wound on, in spite of the fact he’d need help from time to time assigning the correct last name to the correct Sue (since there were more than one).

Why is this necessary?  What is it about the triangulation process that requires these people who’ve known each other forever, been in each others’ backyards and pocketbooks, to spin this out each time?

And it happens in every small community, the kind of place where people know each other by nicknames they gave each other in kindergarten, the kind of place where everybody knows what to bring to a potluck because that’s what they bring.  My mother-in-law always brings the cream cheese with shrimp and cocktail sauce thing; if she doesn’t, somebody asks if she’s feeling alright.  Aunt Joan – Jo-Jo to all her peeps of a lifetime -- always brings the artichoke dip. Period.  Don’t even think about bringing artichoke dip or it will be ignored, while Jo-Jo’s is devoured.

Is that the point?  There’s safety in the sameness, danger in the strange?  Is this measured in the expectations that a community develops over time?

Is the point of the preamble to test the proximity of the listener, to make sure they’re still an intimate?  In my mother-in-law’s case, with the onset of cognitive dysfunction problems, this is less a measure of her continued tightness with the group in which she lives.  It’s a test of her cognition, her health and viability.  I’ve had two conversations with people who noticed she wasn’t participating in dialogue – the kind exemplified above.  (Her verbal skills are diminishing; we think she’s had some mini-strokes, TIA’s that have attacked her Broca’s portion of the brain.  Nothing has turned up in tests as yet.)  It’s not that she can’t talk; she simply can’t sustain a lengthy conversation with a lot of details as some of these rambling preambles intertwined and threaded within conversation require.

There’s something rather primal about all of this; I can’t imagine my in-laws or their comrades in their small Midwestern town doing without this orientation during any conversation about others in the community.  It’s under the skin, nearly hard-wired.  Anyone who can’t participate in this intimacy defined by unconsciously agreed-upon attributes is a stranger – that’s my speculation.

Intimacy is one of the qualities mentioned as lacking in YASNS systems.  After reflecting on this, I have say this does bother me about the two I’ve tried.  They’re more like broadcasting than not, far too wide; they make blogging feel more intimate by contrast, even though I know I’m not having a set dialogue with a specific group of friends or acquaintances, that I’m talking with virtually anyone and everyone here.  But there’s some element about the YASNS systems I’ve tried that doesn’t feel intimate.  I feel exposed there; the inflexibility of the interface compounds that feeling.  I have little control over my personal projection of self into that space, whereas I don’t feel that here.  Sure, I can see that Joe is Anne’s hairdresser’s cousin-in-law, married to Juanita who is my on-line buddy; this relationship is spelled out, the distance measured by a label.  But I have no vested interest in caring at all about Joe if he shows up at my YASNS site; there’s something missing even when his proximity in degrees has been outlined for me.  And I sense a similar feeling in return -- who the hell am I, after all, besides a partially-canned set of pixels in that formulaic environment?

The process of the preamble in conservations in small communities seems to be a validation process; it tests the listener and the teller both, reinforcing intimacy.  If you’re not listening, you can’t be intimate.  You might miss a detail by failing to actively question a detail and voila, you’ve exposed yourself as a poseur in the community.  There is no preamble in YASNS, save for some lame bio in a preset format; at least in blogging I have more control over my personal bio.  I’ve started the preamble of our dialogue by establishing the scope of who and what I am. 

Tags support this same triangulation process, the preamble that identifies the GPS coordinates of an individual within a community.  They’re tags that are social norms within that community – the DeSoto dealership owner, for example, is a tag that only works within that community’s locale, only works within the community that’s old enough to remember the dealership (let alone DeSoto automobiles).  Every community conversation is littered with embedded tags, markers that both orient the subject and orient the teller and the listener at the same time, within the community to which they belong.

I’ve thought about this topic a lot; I wish I was in some sort of degree program where I could concentrate on this as the topic of a thesis.  Why is it that communities, which exceed a certain size (roughly 10,000 people), don’t manifest these same kinds of conversations?  Really, do you have them with other folks if you live in large city?  If you do, are really only setting the coordinates around subjects within a smaller subset, a mini-community within a meta-community?  I guess I’ve never heard people who live in large cities expend the same amount of time and effort on the triangulation process; they seem more willing to live with the open-endedness of persons who’ve not been pinpointed tightly on the social grid.  They seem more at ease with a greater degree of distance between themselves and others at some level.

Perhaps the unconscious limits of mentally-supportable community size are reflected in the nature of the triangulating preamble?

Think about this, the next time you have a conversation with a friend or family member in your community about a third party: are you engaged in that preamble?  What happens when you don’t, if you opt out?  And what’s the size of the subject community?

11:01:45 PM    comment []

"The constitution is the most dangerous document in the country and the
most important one affecting the future of the country. It should be
written extremely carefully."
-  ALAADEEN MUHAMMAD AL-HAKIM, spokesman for a Shiite leader in Iraq.

[NYT, 06-FEB-05]

Bet that's exactly how the neo-cons in power see the U.S. Constitution, too.

Dangerous.  But not important or sacred...

What really gets my goat is that the neo-cons running the interim government insisted on equal rights for women and minorities in the first Iraqi constitution, but they won't insist on the same here in the U.S., let alone protect those rights.

8:27:56 AM    comment []