Place and Voice

Jonathan Peterson blogs today about the relation of voice and “placeness.” He says that this line of thought was spurred by one of the online chapters of my new book (ooh, two plugs in a day!) due out in April. I like his pulling together of these two notions, even though we have a semantic disagreement over what constitutes voice. Here’s how I see what Jonathan is saying, from my point of view about voice.

A chapter of my book asks why the Web feels spatial. Here’s what it says. (SPOILERS AHEAD! :) Real world space is an abstraction. Concretely, the RW consists of places, that is, areas that have meaning and emotional tone. The Web consists of places also. But RW places are in space while Web places (sites) aren’t. On the Web, we see places and think “Space!”. But the Web is in fact “place-ial,” not spatial. Its sense of spatiality comes from the fact Web has places that are linked and thus traversable. The links aren’t accidental the way nearness is in the RW; the links express human interest. It’s thus a geography of interest and passion. (It actually is more interesting than that in the book. Really.)

Jonathan links this to voice by noticing the relationship of place and voice on the Web. Web places/sites are written and thus have some type of voice (even if its the phony, affect-less fake voice typical of corporate sites). In a sense, the Web is a spoken place, a “story space” if you prefer (and I don’t). In fact, I like the way Jonathan puts it:

The “placeness” of the internet is the placeness of the marketplace, we know we are someplace when we are overhearing bits of conversation around us and able to step in, introduce ourselves and join those conversations at will.

He’s also got interesting things to say about authenticity and personalization.

Categories: Uncategorized dw