Language, Currency and the Crow

Blogging and social media put amazing potential at our fingertips.  The image “platform” has currency for the vehicles that carry this potential.  If WordPress is my platform, then it’s useful to remember that its precursor, the sheet of paper and the envelope (or the rock wall of a cave for that matter) is also a platform.  Our symbol making an effort to make a moment again current to another mind at a later time.  All the excitement over real time web seems to miss the fuller reality which we already posses, namely a meta-time web.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation with Liz Strauss yesterday where, among dozens of other topics, language as currency and the changing culture of blogging stood out as particularly relevant for Blog World.

Some Blog World Reflections

Language shifts and will continue to do so.  Much of the energy poured into this digital culture focuses on the ever shifting language that supplies the platforms.  The other side of this cultural phenomenon has to do with the online relationships that utilize the platforms.   We are less clear of the shifting nature of the relationship currency, often take it for granted, or merely take a gold rush mentality to the unfolding field.

A word of caution…the efficacy of language has limits.  This point has been driven home to me in two distinct images this week.  Walking out of the hotel yesterday a group of common blackbirds was signing a tune foreign to my ear.  It was in every way unlike the song by the same species back in the Catskills.  When I shared this on twitter, JueL responded: “The Crows actually speak in diff tones in diff cities. If you take a crow and place it 40 miles away, it wouldn’t understand.” I decided to verify and came up with:

“We also know that the caws of crows can sound different to human listeners. Within the same group of crows in a limited territory, there can be considerable variation in how the caws sound to a listener, and it has also often been noted that crows in different parts of the United States sound different from each other.”

It’s an idea I’d never heard before and it leads to the next point.

In a dream last week a voice stated “The hardest thing for the immigrant to pick up is the language.”  As digital cultural natives, are our actions blocking or providing access to our field?  What are we doing to clarify the dynamics of the meta-time web?  If we do not claim the meta-time web, we could lose it.

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Also, I’ve written a guest post today, “Attitudes of Approach” over at Tarot Eon.  Please click on over.