Saturday 11 April 2009

Meta-Landscapes

A quick post, to be expanded later... just noting this down whilst fresh in my head!

Having spent all day on the internet, pretty much re-organising, consolidating and ammending all the blos and social network sites I used, something ocurred. We describe the internet and all connected with the digital exchange of information as "cyberspace", and web content is displayed on "sites". The vocabulary is very much spatial, and we can quite easly picture the world wide web as a rich and varied landscape covered with interconnected communities and developments.

Like towns and cities in the real world, these towns and cities experience variations in fortune: they expand and contract, their populations (represented by subscribers and other contributors) fluctuate. However, as I browsed myspace i was struck by the number of abandoned profiles and inactive users. Many people seem to have moved on to other sites (in much as the same way as BEbo now appears to be occupied exclusively by Spanish twelve year olds). Are their parallels with the movement of workers and the decimation of communities when industries die? What are the consequences of these abandoned sites in the digital landscape?

I'm going to think about it for a little while. I'd like to point out that you can read some poetry and fiction of mine at the following website (ironically, on myspace):

http://www.myspace.com/youssefifscapulet

Promise to put up that lecture/ debate review shortly!

Friday 10 April 2009

SGLA Blogging

Long periods of inactivity chequer my life... this one is now unchequered. Just consolidating all my online platforms at present, hoping to utilise this blogspot for record of LArch projects and broader thoughts on space and culture... I'll leave my naive opinions concerning global security out of it!

Anyway, shortly going to blog recent lecture John Whybrow and I attended at The Barbican in connection with Le Corbusier exhibition, but until then please enjoy the SGLA blog on myspace (it's the first proper entry for about a year!)

http://tinyurl.com/dgh4gn

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