Another difficult day to capture, which are, of course, the best days to have. (And the worst.)

I wandered through the perfect little town of Anacapri as work was beginning. It is carefully kept, in the manner of towns that live by creating memories. The buildings are small and many of the shops are quotidian, although others sell tourist gimcracks and the artifacts of fashion. Every turn offers at least one loveliness: Yellow flowers poking through a gray bamboo wall, a gate that opens up the aromas of a garden, a modest church newly painted a brazen white.

After breakfast with the course professor, Derrick de Kerckhove, at our lovely little hotel, the Bella Vista, we went back into the town to a 100-year-old building recently redone as a meeting center. The eleven of us filled the main room, its windows facing the sea. The grad students are engaged in projects concerning the sociology and philosophy of the Internet, topics such as the nature of scientific knowledge on the Net, the semantics of the Web (which embraces but is not the same as the Semantic Web), the Web as a public sphere, and the nature of space and time on the Web. Over the course of nine hours, broken by three hours for lunch together and time apart, we talked about whether there is a morality implicit in the Web’s architecture, why we talk about the Web in spatial terms, how the Web is affecting the nature of the self, whether we should understand history by looking for patterns or emergent phenomena (or both or neither), and more.

We went straight from the meeting room to Capri, a ten-minute bus ride through hairpin turns, each of which caused me to hold my breath involuntariliy. (I am not a fan of heights, so I want credit for, during the break, walking up the remnant of the mountain on which Anacapri sits.) We wandered through the center of the town, which caters to a social class several rungs up from Anacapri’s visitors. I wasn’t terribly comfortable in what little I saw of Capri. It seemed to be an Audrey Hepburn sort of place, selling clothes I wouldn’t wear at prices I can’t afford. But, I don’t want to judge a town by its swankiest part. In any case, the 11 of us sat on the veranda of one of the central hotels, drinking champagne we’d bought to toast the death of the Broadcast Flag. We were gently chased out by a young waiter who said that he was glad we had cause to celebrate, but that he would get in trouble if he let us stay.

So, we came back to Anacapri, had dinner in the same family-run restaurant as before. Topics included: Favorite Tarantino films, Half Life 2 and Steve Johnson’s new book, why marijuana is still illegal, comparative attitudes towards homosexuality, why flirting is no longer a social norm in the US, why it’s worse to get a blow job than to start a war, and how scientific learning is being liberated by metadata that expresses its degree of credibility.

To my surprise, we then all took a midnight walk along a path that led us to a scenic (= terrifying) view down the mountain and across the sea and up to stars as close as I’ve ever seen them. [Technorati tag: capri]

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