You AND me
Catching up with my blogcrawling, up early with the two boys. My beautiful girls still sleeping peacefully...Charlie, Ruairi and I sharing the silence of this bright feels-like-spring Saturday morning.
I've stumbled through the various discussions weaving in and around the WoE, Cluetrain and SPLJ extended family.
This stuff makes me realise there's more than just a business perspective to the "World of Ands" thought I've been chewing over in the last few posts.
I have to look at the personal side...
The discussion threads rippling out across the Net from the splash created by World of Ends are continuing to highlight the ways in which the Net allows us to celebrate our individual individuality: through our blogs, our post comments, our email threads, our photo galleries - while simultaneously helping us to build communities of shared interest, shared longing, shared thoughtlines.
Individuals and communities. Ends and Ands.
It is a World of Ends.
You, and you, and you, and you, and me. We're all bright ends individually connected into this swirling, thrumming hive mind.
Yet our "every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren't endpoints at all."
Every end... occasionally our every purpose.
And when your End connects to my End and all the other Ends, we wrap ourselves in the warmth of the community - the support network of our sideways world; firm friends loosely joined end-to-end across the far flung spaces in between.
"We’re falling into email relationships that, stretching themselves over years, imperceptibly deepen, like furrows worn into a stone hallway by the traffic of slippers. We’re falling into groups that sometimes feel like parties and sometimes feel like wars. We’re getting to know many more people in many more associations than the physics of the real world permits, and these molecules, no longer bound by the solid earth, have gained both the randomness and the freedom of the air-borne."
As our Ends join like this, we find ourselves forging faster, closer connections than any offline r/t experience could have prepared us to expect.
We're so comfortable, so fast in our online communities -- our bundles of Ends -- that we can and do talk about anything with and amongst the other Ends we meet online.
Anything. Even that definitive end: our own end and the ends of those we love. We're sharing things online, amongst friends at the ends, we might not share so completely, so candidly, with even close r/t family.
It's the positive flipside of the false authority syndrome that infects the Web and keeps the Snopes guys, and many others, busy debunking "FOAFlore" and hoaxes on the Net.
Sometimes, having one's credulity threshold lowered can be a force for good.
Sometimes: we're falling into online relationships that, in the space of hours or days, bring us as close together as family.
And when our Ends connect like this, AND logic acts as a transitive verb:
You AND me.
(And I love it when you AND me, baby).
The connections between and among our World of Ends add AND value to every node with every community that forms, every blogroll link added.
It's Reed's Law in action. When you link to this post in your own blog, the fact of the act ANDs me - enhancing and reinforcing my ties into the World of Ends, adding value to us both and all.
Our shared World of Ands can become so strong that together we can even face, perhaps even prevent, the End of the World.
Yeah, so I'm a hippy. So AND me.
