Chop wood, regain life.

I think Borgmann was onto something when he said that the focal practises of things sponsor skill and discipline and result in a stronger, more 'real' sense of community.

For example, the focal practises revolving around heating your place with a stove, as opposed to simply paying for central heating, involve the act of gathering wood, chopping it, gathering around the hearth, singing Kuymbaya and making banana boats ...

Borgman laments that we can now buy simulated pre packaged banana boats at Seven Eleven, without having to do much more than tug at a plastic wrapper for a few seconds. (I dont know if these actually exist, it's just my awesome example.)

Anyway, the point is, that while we are slaving away with these tedious tasks that go along with having a stove, something magical happens - We talk, we sweat, we swear, we hate life a little bit, but we form a rapport with our fellow creatures with whom we toil. We achieve solidarity through the communal struggle, we understand each other a little better.

A community happens !

(a low tech life + suffering = community)

It seems to me like that Borgamm laments the loss of the tribe we all once were. We used to travel in packs and search for food together, eat together, build out shelters together, and live together. We aren't animals anymore (at least we think we aren't) and we are becoming increasingly solitary. We have our digital communities to thank for this, I believe. We become less in touch with ourselves and each other as we spend so much time inside our space biased technologies.

I agree that community is more than simply communication, and that the world is comprised of the fruits of our labours, but why can't that include our ethereal productions online? Devices, devices ... these are devices, not things, Borgmann would say. They conceal their inner workings. Borgmann doesn't trust them. Well, just because you can't touch it doesnt mean its not real, or valid. Is an online idea in an essay or article inferior to a hard copy?

The funny thing is though, the space biased technologies that modern western society is so oriented toward are meant to overcome the natural boundaries of space and time, so that we save time. But then shouldnt we have time to do all these focal things?

What are people actually doing now that we save so much time?
Creating facebook profiles? Watching porn? Breeding hamsters?

There are a good many number of communities that revolve around doing things online. Like this student group I'm a part of, we have a blog for other students in the Faculty of Arts to submit poems and fiction and art. We consider this blog a store window of these labours. And it's not easy. There are a good many tasks involved, like layout, selection, organizing.

I wouldn't compare it to buying McDonalds on the way home instead of stopping at a farmers market to buy groceries.

Nor would I compare it to learning to buying an ipod instead of leanring to play the violin. Someone tried to make this comparison in a class I took in first year and I remember it to this day because I found it so positively ludicrous.

There are some things that are simply not comparable. A stove and A/C are not comparable to writing an e-mail to your favourite boy band. These ideas are both based in expediency, but aren't really on the same level. Sure, its easy to get to know someone when your both sweating your asses off chopping wood, but it's also pretty easy to get to know people when you are working on a creative endeavor that happens to be posted on the world wide web.

I don't need to be a part of this student group, but I need to keep my house warm in the winter or else I'll freeze to death. Is it possible that Borgman focuses only on parallel examples that are needs as opposed to wants? I think we could all acknowledge that we dont really need the internet, we could live without it, but life would be a lot harder and more tedious.

and we wouldn't have as much time to breed hamsters.