Every day, I get hundreds of emails on a wide array of topics. Many get deleted. Others I stored, and some I flag with the intention of coming back to them and writing about them. Yet too often, I never get back to writing about them. Now, as we start a new year, I’m going to try to do a little better at highlighting some of the emails and websites I see and commenting on them.

Netflix Origami. Cute little site on ways that you can fold up those old Netflix envelopes.

Wireless Sensors For A Better Life. A couple friends of mine are doing various bits of work with wireless sensors, so I thought this might be an interesting article. Unfortunately, it is a little short on content, mostly just talking about three different things you can purchase. Not as interesting as I thought it might be. However, I did wonder if I could program any of this for my N900.

The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets Reality. This is a long article by Micah Sifry that I’ve only scanned. He ends off saying:

I'm sorry, but when two million people are in motion in favor of something, because they put themselves in motion, we know what that feels like. It's called a movement. It started to happen in 2007-08, and it hasn't happened since.

Based on what friends who have been closer to OFA have been telling me, this sounds pretty much on the mark.

How Tweeting About “My Stupid Breakfast” Creates A Lifestyle Of Continuous Learning. I thought this was a great blog post and forwarded it to a mailing list, hoping to get some sort of discussion of the relationship between the lifestyle of continuous learning through online communications and other forms of continuous learning through face to face encounters. Unfortunately, the first response I received seemed to miss the whole point and resort to a knee-jerk response against online communications.

I think, time could be much better spent in real relationships and that all this is a only a sophisticated evolvement and substitute for extended families as well as a waste of time for those spending hundreds of hours updating their blogs & twitter accounts, instead of goiing out and meeting real people?

I responded in part,

it that makes a relationship real? Must a person actually see another person for the relationship to be real? Must a person actually hear another person's voice for the relationship to be real? What does this say about relationships of deaf or blind people? Perhaps we have to physically touch someone for the relationship to be real? Personally, as much as I've enjoyed meeting various people on this list face to face, I feel that there is a certain realness to the relationship with people that I have not had the opportunity to meet face to face.

Then, there is the 'substitute for extended families'. Yes, I think there is something important to that. I'd extend the concept not only to extended families, but also to the concept of tribes. Some of you may have been blessed with growing up with extended families, and still having functional extended families. Unfortunately, for many of us, particularly in the United States, the extended family structure, as well as local community involvement have all declined significantly during the twentieth century. Many attribute this to the change from an agrarian to an industrial society. The move from an industrial to an information society might be 'only a sophisticated evolvement and substitute' for the relationships that we once had in more agrarian societies, yet it seems to me that a sophisticated evolvement is better than further withering of personal contact that we saw during industrialization.

As to the dichotomy of either wasting time spending hundreds of hours updating blogs and twitter instead of going out and meeting real people, this seems to me to be a false dichotomy. In fact, much online communication often leads to the desire to meet real people. The efforts on this list to organize a face to face dinner at an upcoming conference and the expressions of eager anticipation of meeting people face to face, I believe illustrate some of the falseness of the dichotomy. Instead of seeing it as a dichotomy, I tend to see online communications as complimentary to face to face communications. Online communications can be used to establish desire to meet face to face, to organize such a meeting, even in an ad hoc manner, such as when a member of the list posted about being in New York City and I used it as an opportunity to meet him face to face. It also provides a framework of information, of knowledge about each person, so that face to face meetings can be deeper and more meaningful.

There is also the component about time and travel. I can communicate with four hundred people soon after crawling out of my bed, while others thousands of miles away are still in their beds, and then still get on with my day, meeting plenty of people face to face.

Yet all of this, I believe, misses the point of Joel's blog post. His post focuses on the developmental aspect of online communications, whether or not it might be inferior to face to face communications. It seems like too often people look at the initial form of online communications and dismiss it without thinking about the developmental aspects of online communications. It would seem as if people on this list might also have thoughts on how the developmental aspects of online communications relates to the developmental aspects of oral communications, or perhaps even the stages of engagement that people go through as they participate in face to face groups.

One final link for right now:

Life (and education) Changing Experience is a wonderful, though also long, and I’ve only skimmed it, post about using technology to builder closer relationships between students geographically and culturally far apart.

So, here are a few of the things I’ve been reading. Thoughts? Comments? Reactions? Also, what have you found of interest online recently?