Like Matt and everyone else, I've been pondering the Francois Question for a while. Maybe it's the neo-luddite in me, but I see Francois as the John Henry of our time. He indexes, cross-references, tracks back, and links manually and cognitively better than any blog function or plug-in of which I'm aware. Why would he want an external memory cache when his internal one is so powerful? As a comment blogger, Francois redacts the classic tale of man against machine for the computer age. He out-blogs the blog.
Matt pines for a new MT feature that would "automagically" harvest and create a clearing-house for the many threads of a trans-blog conversation. Doesn't Francois in effect personify Matt's trackback spider? (For one example among many of his "clumping" skills, see his back and forth with Jill in the comments section of this post.)
Or maybe Francois is really an AI agent who has pulled the Turing Test over our eyes. I don't think so, though. There's an awful lot of humanity there.
Posted by karik at November 8, 2003 12:02 PM | TrackBackJust a gandy dancer.
Is it a question of memory pyrotechnics? It could merely be a clever usuage of the tools at hand: multiple windows for the copy and paste and search features of sites and the WWW. Very plain, very simple. Multiple windows or buffers plus a bit of fun with search strings. And a bit of familiarity with blending the diarist, the epistolary and the interview genres. More a hobo than a legend.
Francois, while I don't doubt for a second that you're hacking the tools in creative ways, I _do_ think hypermnemonics comes into play as well: your posts are always so densely allusive that I can't help but suspect there's a kind of photographic memory at work . . .
Kari, Remember your play with the AI agent possibility? There is a beautiful construction in that comment. See how that reference to pulling a test of all our eyes (implicitly including his own cybersight) viels a very deep consideration about forgetting and the nature of humanness? Turing's imitation game in his descriptionof it has three players: a man, a woman and a machine. It is an imitation game not a memory game. The appearance of allusivity is a function not of mnemonics but mimetics.
Humans can imitate themselves and each other. Metamimetics rather than hypermnemonics. For example, I began copying the rigourous distincition between "entry" and "comment" into postings, knowing that habitual readers would both recognize the pattern and be sensitive to any departure I might make from this reference system for the partitionned space of a blog. Repeated often enough it generates an allusivity effect. As players improvise on theis simple game of watching discursive habits. Elouise has a November 6, 2003, entry where a comment refers to Hobo signs. Elouise has a November 8, 2003 comment in a November 7, 2003 entry on Planned Obsolescene refering to hobo signs. Gues when and by who the hobo refering comment was left on Weez Blog? Split Adresee. Perhaps a coincidence that both she and I are interested in the externalization of memory, its reconstruction in sociality.
Kari, with you I share a interest in valorizing the accidental, especially the accidental imitating a substantive. And yes there is a connection between the metamimetic and the hypermnemonic. I concede. Unlike John Henry in the end who lost out to the steam shovel, no?. Did John Henery ever coo?
Rather ironic that the carrier pigeon was declared extinct in 1914. I think you can see my interest in separating myself from a style of tool hacking that belongs to all. It's about preservation of the artisanal. Which I now come to understand is perhaps one answer to Matt's question about how to reference, without Romantic
constructions of identity, that something tangible that a blog
provides that falls away in the cracks between comments. With your help I have been able to reparse that bit of prose that Matt wrote and come to the understanding that the "cracks between comments" are not the comments themselves. Those cracks, that something, beyond all pixel driving and mythification. Absoluting stimulating and oddly soothing.