One of the things I like about Sutton-Smith's seven-fold map of play forms - see Eric Zimmerman's great discussion of it in Rules of the Game (PDF) - is his identification of "play as imaginary", meaning the play of forms in art, music, ideas and science. It's this sheer joy in being able to connect ideas to one another, to pursue lines of thought, that the web enables.
Google keep confounding all big-company suspicions by link-ups like this - a scheme to put the contents of major world libraries online. Are they ensaring us with gifts to commodify us later? Or should we believe their company motto, 'Do no evil'?
But net-people keep coming up with new ways to explore this new global mind. I have been completely lost in something called del.icio.us for the last two days - which is the most mentally playful thing I've done in a while. It's all based on 'tagging' your blogged links - you make up your own taxonomies on the fly, initially based on what interests you. It's quick and easy - you build up a list very quickly.
But, fantastically, you can then check to see whether others in Del.icio.us have put up similar tags. Or (and I'm waiting for this) you make connections with someone serendipitously, who thinks that 'end-to-end' or 'castells' or 'precarity' is also a fascinating topic. Usual 'fax' law, of course - the more that use it, the more it becomes valuable. I've discovered this is called folksonomy (of course, there's a del.icio.us tag).
I always harvest more links than I blog to Typepad - so I've put my own del.icio.us in a feed at the bottom of this blog, liberating this site to be more of a publishing tool and discussion space, than a brain-dump. I may be posting less frequently, but more reflectively and substantively here...let's see what the right groove is. But bliss it is in this very dawn... (Thanx to Matt Jones for setting the precedent.).
Update: just found a posting from the Many-to-Many site, that compares del.icio.us's folksonomy to Carse's infinite game: "Digital networks have massively increased the scale of the intimate networks we can potentially create, and therefore have increased the number of participants that can create and share ad-hoc vocabularies. The internet has created tools that preserve the loosely-connected, the playful, the ad-hoc, vernacular, or amateur - the conditions of the infinite, rather than the finite game." Well, exactly!
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