[Air-L] Inside, Outside, Upside, Down - Privacy and Public presence in the Internet age

Matthew Bernius mbernius at gmail.com
Tue May 11 17:01:40 PDT 2010


>
> From: natalya godbold <ngodbold at gmail.com>
>
In the wifi party, copresence is not redundant but important and necessary
> to create a party:  people "dance off each other".  They respond to each
> others moves.  You need copresence for that.
> n
>

Building off of Paul's distinctions, and Natalya's clarification, it seems
like the party moves fully into the later model - a Warner/Habermass-ian
public in which discourse (dancing off of each other) is a key component to
the constitution --  a visual rhetoric. That said, were people dancing off
of each other in the WiFi street party? And if so, pulling in Goffman, were
there other audience members on the periphery who were front stage, but not
necessarily privy to the underlying channel of animating information -- i.e.
didn't have headphones/couldn't hear the music? How did that fit into
everything.

 Which moves this entire experience into a different register. Hearing an
account of people moving/dancing to internal soundtracks resonates with a
Pentecostal experience -- where, in the same moment, everyone is having a
synchronized "private", group conversation with the divine. Granted, in that
case each participant speaks their own language and derives their own
experience. That said, how different is that from dancing to music that the
out-group can't hear?

- Matt

-----------------------------
Matthew Bernius
PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/
Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl
mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius



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