Commart's Life Online - Where Did the Time Go?

www.modelmayhem.com post count: 5,487.

www.zoetrope.com photography review count: 1009; review recipient score: 4.350 of 5.0.  I've been the "number one most active" participant in the Photo Wing of Francis Ford Coppola's virtual film studio for years, and while someone will surpass my count (the closest competitor has put up fewer than 600 criticisms of photographs), it will be hard to surpass the count and combined score.

Participation in both Model Mayhem and Zoetrope came about through photography.  In fact, I received an invitation from one of the first users and community moderators at Mayhem through participation in another model-photographer culture site, www.models.com.  My account has been long gone from that place, so I can't tell you the forum post count I racked up there, but I would bet it was prodigious.

This summer, I got my toes wet in the International Peace and Collaborative Development Network, a Georgetown hosted webmunity for the international relations set (http://internationalpeaceandconflict.ning.com/).  For yours truly, it' has presented a challenging step up for blather.  I've been quite impressed by many of the personalities I've met there, virtually speaking of course, and it's going to take some back room scholarship on my part to keep up with those I admire most.

In addition to webmunity thread chat, there has been in addition almost old fashioned 'Netizen personal correspondence, except lag time up from snail mail has set the pace of exchange to the tempo of latterday battlespace reporting: kaffee klatsch, data exchange, updated theory, and what used to be called letters, literally, get done by the hour.

All of that makes for some busy unpaid days.

And how productive is it or has it been?

There's intellectual battle to be done with the world's anti-Semites and other forms of bigot, that's for sure, and there's a need also to create and recognize a new global mindspace with a politics and value set commensurate with modernity and appropriate cultural and geophysical ecologies in mind.

However, I am finding (as must politicians, or so one might wish) the need to stop talking so fast and furiously and to retreat instead into the depths of a refreshed library, and then to come out of that methodically or programmatically.

In photography, there's some printing I mean to do here; in music, I need to hunt, select, and memorize a whole new repertoire.

The achievement of growth in each domain requires disengagement from other things, for ultimately time is space and time interpreted in relation to "mindspace" turns out a limited resource, not in terms of what a mind may contain, formulate, or imagine (or how quick and nimble it might prove) but in terms of what a mind may encounter and process by way of "material"--chatter, information, and miscelleneous input--across the course of a day and what it then may create and contribute within that same space.

Individually, we're only going to get and retain so much new data, experience, and insight in a block of time, whether a morning or a month, that with incoming information always on, we may now have to think a little bit how we're programming those blocks. 

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