Meta-Landscapes

A quick post, to be expanded later... just noting this down whilst fresh in my head!

Having spent all day on the internet, pretty much re-organising, consolidating and ammending all the blos and social network sites I used, something ocurred. We describe the internet and all connected with the digital exchange of information as "cyberspace", and web content is displayed on "sites". The vocabulary is very much spatial, and we can quite easly picture the world wide web as a rich and varied landscape covered with interconnected communities and developments.

Like towns and cities in the real world, these towns and cities experience variations in fortune: they expand and contract, their populations (represented by subscribers and other contributors) fluctuate. However, as I browsed myspace i was struck by the number of abandoned profiles and inactive users. Many people seem to have moved on to other sites (in much as the same way as BEbo now appears to be occupied exclusively by Spanish twelve year olds). Are their parallels with the movement of workers and the decimation of communities when industries die? What are the consequences of these abandoned sites in the digital landscape?

I'm going to think about it for a little while. I'd like to point out that you can read some poetry and fiction of mine at the following website (ironically, on myspace):

http://www.myspace.com/youssefifscapulet

Promise to put up that lecture/ debate review shortly!