Thanks, Austin.  Your post, together with Anne-Laure’s friendly pestering, has finally pushed me to do what I have wanted to do for quite a while and join this conversation. I am in exactly the situation you describe.  I kept putting off posting anything until I had a chance to catch up on reading every post on the blog.  Politeness seemed to dictate it as a prerequisite.  But I never was able to make the time to do all that reading and I got further behind every day.  This space may not have walls that divide those who are inside from those who are outside, but it has memory and it is instructive that memory can serve so effectively as a boundary.

For me this raises two issues.  The first is something that Anne-Laure and I have written about which is that the affordances of a space have both a physical and a social component.  The fact that every post and every comment on the blog are saved and accessible at any time affords catching up and making yourself aware of the entire conversation that happened before you joined it.  The physical presence of the archive affords choice: you can read or not.  It also triggers (at least for Austin and me) an internalized social expectation that one should read everything before speaking.

As Anne-Laure has written about in the case of online forums, when we create a new kind of space we bring with us certain expectations and behavioral scripts from other spaces that we find similar.  We see the new space in terms of analogy with something familiar.  Which analogy we start with matters for the expectations we have.

If this blog is like a party then we expect people to come and go and join in the middle.  If this blog is like a panel discussion or like a book being written as we go, then we expect continuity of the conversation.  Over time, as we become more experienced in the new space, we stop thinking analogically and the space comes to have its own social affordances for those who live there.

The second issue that I find interesting is that the design of a space so often has unintended affordances.  Adding an archive to a blog creates a boundary.  I was reading the other day an article in Wired about the fact that pilots find the new Airbus A380 to be too quiet.  Airbus went to great lengths to make the A380 the quietest commercial airplane ever made, but pilots complain that the aircraft is so quiet that they can’t sleep.  The white noise of the engines is too faint to block out the sounds of crying babies, snoring passengers and flushing toilets.  Reducing noise in an airplane removes a boundary.

Randy Paush, in addition to his famous Last Lecture also gave a lecture about time management that has been watched more than a half million times on YouTube.  Many of Randy’s time management tactics are ways of changing your environment so as to trigger social expectations that will reduce the extent to which it affords other people access to you or at least shortens that access.  For example, he advises you to make your office comfortable for you but uncomfortable for other people so they do not stay as long.  Stand up when someone comes into your office so that they will leave sooner.  If you do invite them to sit down, make sure you have a clock on the wall behind visitors so you can monitor how long you have been talking with them without seeming rude.  When you deem that the time for the conversation is up, stand up, scroll to door, complement, thank, and shake.  Turn off email alerts, lock your door, unplug your phone, and never learn how to use the photocopier or fax (yes, Anne-Laure, he really does say that!).

I never met Randy Paush, but from what those who knew him have said and from his presence in his videos, he seems to have been a genuinely and even unusually nice person.  I think this is why he went to such efforts to use the physical and social environment to create boundaries between himself and those who would interrupt him and why he advises people to be so conscious and intentional of the affordances of their environment for social interaction.  Had he been a jerk, the video could have been much shorter: “Just tell people to f*¢% off.”

In other words, whether your preference is to encourage interaction or to discourage interruption, there is much to be gained by thinking about the boundaries afforded, intentional and unintended, physical and social, by the space.

MAGNIFICENT! walls alive with the wonderful inchoate cacophany of the virtual world.

–Sunita

This Journey of many months, endless adventures, and millions of words ends today in this space. What an experience this has been seeing this become here–in time and physical space–what was once words on a page taken from words in your minds. I thank you for bringing me along on this Journey. I hope this is the first of many stops

Cheers and Ciao,

Liz

this exhibit is truly evocative showing how in a visual way words and the online universe can be transported to the visual world. Different and enlightening concept

words enveloping bodies, bodies moving among, between words… in the space, through the sounds.

space shelters bodies and bodies make space visible… as well sounds make the space visible too…

Space is a word…

the blog is really fun to post on because you can type and then see your words on the maze and everybody can see it.

But it’s really hard to see because sometimes it goes fast.

Jyoti

I do think that the somewhat relaxed sense that developed in me in the exhibit seemed related to a sense of being in a community as well as a space. People at the show could post to the blog, the words moving through the visual area in a rhythmic fashion, the sound of voices in the background. It was like being able to work or just be, with a sense of people around you whom you could consult when you wanted to, but whose voices and words were accessible and connecting. Also the way the blog is written is welcoming.
Lynne Henderson

is easy, just need words

i love multi-layered compositions. they give you a good FEELING.