so I’ve had these ideas before but suddenly feel like my head will explode if I don’t blog them and say t hem again.
With the video and vlogging discussion, again, I love that everyone will be making home movies of their kids. – which susan mernit described rightly as “documenting families”. What will make it *different* from other times like when everyone had shoeboxes full of super8 home movies… is the metadata. You don’t know who is going to become interesting or important. Whose home movies of childhood do you wish you could see & why? various reasons, right? fame? relation to you? other reasons?
About social networking, again… I’d love very much to see historical friendster. Like, social networks 1870. Social networks 1926. Step through years, and get a picture of changing relationships & personal & power networks over time. Who knew who? Wouldn’t that be awesome to have? Get the NEH to fund it. And have it be very easy to contribute, be wiki-ish, so that anyone can log in and add people from history and add data and relationships.