Fashion blog

I met this woman today at the Avenue A flea market. She runs a blog about wearing reduced, reused, recycled clothing (she’s a stylist, I believe) and took a picture of me trying on a really fabulous green 70’s maxi-skirt frock that I got for a whopping $5.

I’m trying to keep my fashion obsession out of this blog for the most part, so I won’t bother going on about how I wear 75% thrifted clothing simply because I’m really poor (rather than because it’s cute and different– there are economic realities of wearing vintage, even for a super fashion conscious gal like me - a full-price dress at Nordstrom or Barney’s could clothe me for a year). I AM interested in this sort of real world blog-to-blog contact. Like you meet someone at a bar and it’s like, oh, check out my blog. In 1999 that would have been “I have a homepage”, and that was only among the most geekiest dot.com people. In 2003 it would have been “Oh my god, you’re on Friendster? ME TOO!” And now it’s blogging.

It’s nothing new that internet content spills out into real-world interactions. In fact, I think the distinction between “online” and “offline” is pretty obselete. When I’m getting dodgeball messages, email, and text on my (not very sophisticated) phone, when I’m keeping in touch with my friends in Seattle primarily through LiveJournal, when I’m meeting people in “real life” that I’ve known on LJ for years and our relationships translate pretty seamlessly– what is the purpose of trying to draw any sort of distinction there? What would the distinction be based on? What kind of technology we use to talk to each other? Where we first met? Where I physically am located when I’m interacting with them?

In fact, the idea of “the internet” as “cyberspace” or “a place” is a stupid metaphor, because:

1) It assumes that there is a “cyber place” and a “non-cyber place” which, as I just said, doesn’t make sense.
2) It assumes that there is something specially unique about the internet (web, email, IM, SMS, etc.) that completely delineates it from ALL other physical locations. Would you think of the telephone as a place? Or reading the newspaper? Does. Not. Make. Sense.

Back to our fashion blogger. In order to swap URL’s, we had to write them down for each other and actually physically hold pieces of paper. There is something really weird about that, I must say: it almost seems like the papers themselves should be clickable, like the writing should resolve into hyperlinks like Word does when you start anything (anything AT ALL) with http://. But that’s just the visual metaphor from “cyberspace” spilling out into online space. (It’s similar to the desire to copy-and-paste text from a book to a computer screen.)

I have a couple of articles about gamespace and physicality of video games, which I think is really interesting w/r/t how you move your “body” in the game and how YOUR actual body interacts with the game system (e.g. twitch gaming, DDR, people who move the controller when they move, etc.) and where these boundaries lie. It’s not really clear. I’m pretty firmly against the disembodiment hypothesis of online identity (which holds that “going online” — again with the spatial metaphors– allows you to de-seat your “self” from your “body”) but I do think it’s totally possible that technology might influence you to think of space differently. Other things that overlap: physical tagging of spaces with flickr/folksonomic tags, sms/gps/cellphone location mososo’s, google map mashups.

I am starting to get really abstract so time for bed. Saw the new Harry Potter tonight: I won’t spoil it but I am kind of a book canon geek and I was a bit disappointed by some of the cuts that had to be made to get the movie down to a reasonable run-time.. but the effects were fantastic.