In praise of the dijalog
Things I love about living in the 21st century (a partial list):
- The way the advent of blogs and social tagging services (del.icio.us, Flickr, and the like) has created so many wonderfully geeky conversations about low-tech tools like pens and paper and notebooks.
- That I can share bookmarks pertaining to the kinds of obscure topics I wrote my dissertation about, and that I can see who else is interested in them.
- The way the language of information technology has filtered into the way we talk about the non-digital world. E.g.: "life hacks"; "I have to defrag my brain" (tm Michelle); this discussion of metadata for Moleskines; and my first thought on seeing this site on how to make your own lava lamp was "Wow! Open source lava lamps!"
- "That’s the curious space I and others like me inhabit today: Digital,
but not purely digital; analog, but not only analog. We live in the
space between these two, in the space carved out by their now
haphazard, now principled mixture. It is a space worthy, or so I like
to think, of its own name. I have taken to calling it ‘dijalog’, that
is, ‘digital plus analog’. We’re all — at least all of us of a
certain age — dijaloggers now." (Kendall Clark, "Geeks and the Dijalog Lifestyle," xml.com, 2/18/04) [yes, the article’s a year and a half old, but I’ve been wanting to quote it for a while]
I should’ve made that my catchphrase in the banner.
Neat observations! 🙂