more thingy

I've liked noticing the solidification of the internet recently, it seems to be becoming more like a thing and less like a service or process.

It's cheap, a commodity, you market it like fish and chips or pizza.

You can get it with vouchers.

Or it's just floating about like those kite marks you get on car windscreens, or like the visa/amex stickers in shop windows. At the edge of our attention.

Soon we'll just stop mentioning it.

Comments

[Andrew Walkingshaw]

Maybe it works the other way round too. For example, the Moo cards are terrific - they're little bits of our digital lives crystallised; for folks like me who spend their lives on computers, more or less - for better or for worse - those markers linking between the physical and virtual are really important.

(Interesting2007 felt like it had a fair bit of that nature too; it was definitely post-Internet, or part of the Internet sphere, without actually being online per se).

All of this is bound up in my mind, in a way, with sense of place and identity; the way that different sites (especially social networks), or ad-hoc networks (stuff like the plannersphere, scientific blogs, etc), have different feels to them in the way that different pubs or libraries or shops do. Not just that, though; people act differently in each of these different environments. In a vaguely hippy sense, we've all got subtly different identities in each of these environments. It feels to me that, because of the technical barriers I guess, that in particular people've tended to think of 'online' places as distinct from 'offline' ones - but as the process of getting online vanishes, and little physical manifestations of the Internet like Moo cards, QR codes, etc becomes more common, maybe those artificial barriers'll begin to dissolve.

[russell]

I think you're right, the lines between analogue and digital are blurring both ways. One of the things I like about that is the way 'internet' is becoming a sort of folk object, the sort of thing you buy in newsagents and corner shops, or is just there.

[Rodney Tanner]

There is also a democratic element to it: cyber cafes in developing markets; the $100 computers for children; free wifi as part of urban development etc. A utility, like water and gas.

[Andy]

interesting that you should mention water. Humour me...

http://nowincolour.blogspot.com/2007/08/invisible-thingyness.html