Cloudiness - some thoughts

so much going on - Bridging program I direct about to start at the high school, getting ready for my college classes, heading to Gen Con in a couple weeks, working on World of Depleted stories, wiki and more, excited about the Far West Kickstarter project, Held first meeting for starting up a shared storyworld, getting back to my writing group and more

But, as I flit and flutter from one point to another, I came across this article

http://cultureby.com/2007/01/cloudiness_of_s.html - Cloudiness: of selves, groups, networks and ideas by Grant. It is from Jan, 2011 and I meant to read it and talk about it way back then, but better late than never.

Anyone interested in how the Internet, community, communication and culture are changing should at least can this article.

He mentions the way we are turning into clouds of connections with all of the assorted methods we communicate these days. And the difference between self pre and post computer/digital communication.

The author offers some good examples of what cloudiness is and how this form of interaction works. Some might say this is an example of a digital native vs older generations.

He even has a “transmedia” example as cloudiness by nature is transmedian in nature

I really suggest you take a gander – I leave you with the last two thoughts from his article.

“Summing up. The self and the group, when electronically mediated, reaches out in all directions, embracing more topics and contacts that it might reach out and embrace still more topics and contacts. Selfhood is expanding outwards, and this be much more exciting and fun, if we did not finding ourselves expanding into a certain conceptual, categorical cloudiness and the task of thinking down to test our assumptions and up to query our purposes.

Or perhaps this is wrong. There may be a model out there that could give cloudiness a "house that Jack build" clarity. Perhaps all these things do go together and we just need to build the model that shows us how. When it works best, culture doesn’t just make the world intelligible. It gives the world a "just so" quality (and when it works really well it makes everything seems so just.) Maybe there’s a way to make this happen. Maybe you, dear reader, can explain this to me.”