User:Megan Hoogenboom/onlineoffline

On-line in Off-line

A few ideas:

• On-line there is no decay on anything that exists for a long time. In the off-line world, when you place something, like a statue, in public space, it will show a form of decay. This happens on many different ways with different causes. For example it can happen because of the weather, people who tag on it with spray cans or carve their name in it or it can happen because the environment changes. In the on-line world, this can not happen. A related question to this argument is: does something on the net exists on a certain server of is it on everybody's computer who watches/visits it? But, can you design a website or application that has a similar decay as something in the off-line world?
  
• People have developed a need to constant let everybody know where they are or that they are doing/seeing, and post this info on twitter, facebook or other network sites. They don't do this in the off-line world, only on hte on-line world. Why is there no place or way to do this in th off-line world? Mostly to let people know that what they post isn't that interesting at all. Everybody eats, sleeps etc.
  
• Thinking about the on-line and off-line worlds, it keeps on reminding me of the city. City's have abandoned places, buildings where nobody lives or visits any more. Do these places exist on-line? Are there on-line abandoned places, and do the same things happen to it as the abandoned off-line places?
  
• Things, objects, people, they all move and change. Can a website change location, form due to influences in the outside world? FOr example: a website is build out of a grid, and this grid you can change with real blocks in the off-line world. So when you make a small change, the whole website changes.
  
• Weight versus bits and bytes. How much does one gigabyte weights in the off-line world?

Abandoned Spaces

During my research I came to the discovery that there are on-line abandoned spaces, just like there are in a city (or just the off-line world). [1] [2] (this aricle I would love to read, but it is taken off-line, did it became a ghost website itself?) These online-abandoned spaces could be websites of companies that went bankrupt or company's old websites. The abandoned spaces could also be old profiles on on-line communities. Everybody had multiple on-line profiles and has singed-up at different websites. Me also. When I was younger, at the different internet-age, there was the upcoming of community websites for young people, kids, just to socialize. I had an Cu2 and later a That's me before I switched to myspace and after that to hyves and facebook. So I checked if my Cu2 or That's me were still on-line. My Cu2 was still there, although the design of the website changed, the information that I left there was still intact. [3] My That's me wasn't there any more, with is strange because I always had the idea that my That's me was still there. That's me became an abandoned website, probably with not enough visitors, so they removed the whole website, except the forum. [4]
For the on-line off-line assignment I want to connect my old Cu2 to spaces in the city. So I will write the link to my Cu2 on lot's of little papers, and spread them to the city, in the evening.