I think a lot about your last wonder - why I write. I think its something about permenance. To be able to hold onto a moment, a thought, feeling, idea once it's gone. To have a record of a me that is no longer quite the same. To play about with thoughts and ideas outside of the head, in the hope of making more sense of them. That among many other reasons.

By  jem, at 25 February, 2009 03:28  

I asked a guy who was tagging his name inside the subway that the other day--who was he doing it for? He said the usual "just to let people know I was here," but I countered that most people like me can't even read the stylized signature so we don't know at all. He explained then that it was actually for other taggers, and told me that he recognizes other people's tags and that it's not really that many people who do the tagging--he's familiar with most that he sees. So in this way it's an interesting way of personalizing the city, so that wherever you go, these tags remain like little passing handshakes or caresses from friends and acquaintances. You may never have been in this particular stop or subway car or neighborhood before, but you see a tag you recognize, and it's no longer just a strange neighborhood or just a random subway car.

In this way I agree, it's not very different from the internet--like how I joined twitter to keep up with you and recognized Zoetica's name on your follow list. :-) I don't really know her at all, but since I interacted with her briefly before on another site, it was a neat little tying together or disparate worlds on the internet--of the kind that happens more and more frequently now.

By  Katrine, at 26 February, 2009 11:53  

@jem - Been thinking about the idea of permanence, how we can unearth cave drawings and fragments of ancient poetry millennia later. Can't imagine writers back then had any idea their words/images would be discovered thousands of years later but they must have had a hunch that the permanence of writing would outlast them.

@Katrine - Totally agree. I remember hearing that from taggers I know, how it's this secret language and set of social mores that's totally visible but invisible at the same time. Almost like how an ethnic group can speak their own language amongst themselves and still coexist w/ the larger society.

"I don't really know her at all, but since I interacted with her briefly before on another site, it was a neat little tying together or disparate worlds on the internet--of the kind that happens more and more frequently now." - That really struck me. I suspect it will be normal for these kinds of accidental acquaintances to crop up. Sort of like how you can see someone at a bar a bunch of times, and then see them again at a coffee shop.

By  An Xiao, at 27 February, 2009 10:56