In celebration of my 1-year anniversary of having adopted wiki as a mode of output (thanks to the Good Doctor), I, er, Ygg, was reminded of my initial thoughts regarding this bizarre practice. In recognition of my initial confusion, and in celebration of my present ritualistic participation, I have some thoughts to share...
Not rules, because the wiki destroys them.
Not guidelines, because the only guide here is the medium.
So... observations? Offered to the uninitiated.
1. The confusion doesn't stop. You never figure out "what the website is for." You don't magically wake up one morning and think, "Oh! That's what Dr. Doyle is talking about." You never learn how or what you're 'supposed' to write. The longer you spend trying to find answers to these questions, the more lost you're going to be. It's called 'fighting the trip'. You aren't really "supposed" to do anything. The wiki (or anything else, for that matter) isn't asking you to explain it. Just play with it.
2. Use lots of pictures. They help to give your page color and a visual component to accompany the text. Just kidding. No, don't use any pictures. Just text. Preferably without any spacing or punctuation. Big fat blocks of text. Either that, or the other way around... massive visual displays without a single word. Words are dead, yeah. All pictures. Steal em from the internet.
3. Some healthy self-reference for psychological housecleaning. Such as: Feeling insecure about the number of pictures on his wiki, Ygg makes fun of himself on this one.
4. Numbered lists. Always helpful. (see #3)
7. Your audience is whoever you want it to be. Forget English 15. Hell, it's the internet! Woo!
8. A text has no owner. The concept of single authorship is a confusion of terms. "Who asks?" Who writes? Consider each text an opportunity to figure out the next term in the series: ("I, er, Ygg, er, Tek...")
9. Nothing persists. When asking \"Who asks?\" ask yourself about SergoZum, about posts written but never posted, about the redline of changes past.
N. Numbered wikilists like numbered wikithings are alot like that creepy elevator of childhood horror stories. \"Room for one more, honey.\"
Okay, this discourse is obviously deconstructing itself rapidly, and calls for abandonment. Point being, fuck the rules, forget any preconceptions, burn the map, etc etc. The point is to create something new out of old stuff. One year later, I finally feel like I know why mobius likes the following words so much: remix, wikidelic, nothing, information, noosphere, zero, map/territory, fnord.
I would like to leave you with a Nietzsche quote, as well as a YouTube video of Sam the Eagle (above), which I have yet to integrate in a clever way into my own nest.
A Nietzsche quote: "You are always a different person"
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09-16-08
I was once Jamie Dalton of State College, but now I'm a different person. In fact, I'm a different person in part because of wikis. Which is really to say that I'm a different person because of other people, who are each also and sometimes because of me different people. This is really to say that I'm a different person, I'm affected and perpetually mutable, by virtue of the nature of interacting intelligences, by the dance which information, ("Stay in formation!") performs on "its own", and yet always with hosts. People. People are the hosts. Different people are the hosts.
So this is an introduction to my meditations on wikis and the wikideliciousness. or Wikideliciciousness. Such eloquompetance. Quomp. I thank Ygg for this opportunity to quomp and explore the feelings this space invokes and spins.
Some, I know, have no taste for wikis. Some it is true, because they have no taste for interacting with other people, other intelligences, because they do not wish to be affected. Some, however, carry no wiki-taste because they feel wikis do not serve the interactions of intelligences so much as conversations do (which are, in fact very fast and yet cluttered and noisy wikis. Very much graffitti. In the faces.]
Some say we can not trust the public to provide the content in our participatory Noosphere. We can trust them to agree with themselves, to avoid corrupting truth or act in self-serving ways at the expense of other or the whole. I personally feel that we must have and give confidence (and thereby competence) to the public in order to allow for the space in which they can be participatory. What is "forcing" really anyway? If you force someone to do something (see: "the only times people change are when they have to"), you're actually raising their confidence to the point where the problem of not doing action A is so bad, the person feels something must be done about it, and acts with all intention to accomplish Action A, the solution to the problem. We always are participating. The idea, though, is to bring participation out of the nearly compulsory zone and into the spontaneous, creative, constructive, community zone.
Some say, 'the people' are not ready for power. They are not ready to carry the burden and responsibility of power, which is why power must remain "at least temporarily" (they've been saying for 15,000 years), with a few overseers and eventually the power can be redistributed when we're all ready. Well, first of all, how is power, especially over one's own actions, ever in anyone else's hands? Second, how would someone then give you power? Power can not be given or taken. It can only veiled or revealed. [(unveiled...!unvealed? unslaughtered? allowed to develop? realize its full potential...].
A future 'self-help' book of mine will focus on the lesson that, in general: Some people in this world, in your life, will try to convince you that you can not change your reality or alter your world; and Some people will try to convince you that you can. Hail the wikis.
Hail the Wikis. And like hail, may they fall on our heads, leaving marks or holes in our skulls, the better our minds might peer and pour out more easily.
Ninja Cat! NinjaCat!! Be the Ninja Kittie!
Maintain a path, but maintain the element of surprise. Be still and be reactionary.
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