>i observed that rhizome's traditional role as a platform for the insane
>has really abated this season.

Actually, you are so right. there's a really noticeable difference.
Less forged email addresses (or at least nobody cares, may happen
constantly still but we just never hear about it), less automated
mega-spam jobs, less people posting URLs to their work with no other
comment.

People are having more exchanges (a thread might get passed back and
forth between 10 people several times, rather than one lengthy
question and one lengthy response). More varied opinions from a more
varied audience.

Less art-code, less abstract ASCII art (I LOVE Jess' sig. file thing
because it makes people to use their imaginations to take the
abstract monospaced chars and see figures, as opposed to using
abstracted chars to construct more abstraction, so we end up just
seeing the ASCII chars again), less generating critical theory and
more plain talking to each other.

More plain talk like we are talking to actual people and less like we
are debugging for our compilers. More talk about replacing
yesterdays trend of computer art that only refers to its
"computer-ness", with subjects closer to people's hearts when they
aren't looking at a monitor (Eryk's 6 rules for example), speaking
about things beyond the digital and without a tin robot voice.


No matter how we feel about the change (if people think it's for the
better or for worse), it's change. Trying new things, since there is
so little at stake. Maybe someday there may be more. Seems if
people are pushing to make $$$, advertise, etc. whatever sliver of
commodity-less-ness there is left on the web, will be gone by next
week. But as of yet, there's still nothing to lose (to have email
addresses and browsers, we all have the minimal materials to play
around at no additional cost (we can write javaScript, HTML in the
notepad program that came with your computer) and everything to gain
(greater communication via creativity with this medium).

The big dot com crash was a lesson we can use, that people were
content to let the web grow without too much attention, took a peek
at how it was progressing, didn't like what they saw and pulled the
plug. So now we can experiment with all sorts of different stuff,
try a bunch of things. We can take advantage of this time because it
may not happen again for a few hundred years.

judson


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