life as transcript

last night, yochai benkler made the usual introductory remarks in advance of the berkman center's workshop on subject security. Some May Say that living online is gradually killing off living in meatspace, but it also increases the opportunities for interaction -- it's a new space for communication and association and it looks very little like the geographic space we're used to interacting in, and interaction is quite different from what we're used to. one of the comments yochai made was particularly apropos: the part of life lived online is, for the first time, one in which the vast majority of social relations are an explicit transcript. empirical variables for the study of social relations are, for the first time, not just oversimplified abstractions of social relations but the relations themselves -- for the social scientist with a methodological bent, this is huge.