E mail

Just thinking about e-mail. I say that because, well, distilling the content of that vision, of a space, populated with luminescent orbs, representing the future, and the possibilities the future offers me, which could be called my future - not what will happen, but what I can imagine, happening - into posts, the hyperspace, web 2.0 phenomenon - is definitely hard.

Just thinking about e-mail. And an extension of e-mail, comments on blogs, a problem I'm very actively aware of as I now launch into this new blog. I want to receive comments, but, in another, more temporal sense, I don't, because managing them is, well, beyond me. And if I don't manage them well, they become a problem. They could be a boon, but, from my present vantage, they'll be a problem. I'm searching for solutions. My mind has already, over a period of years, incessantly generated imaginary solutions. I can point to the orbs that focus on that set of problems. One is labeled e-mail, and it can flash other names - messaging or - i find i need to search for it - say, networking. Another is a little more difficult to name. I'm pretty sure there are people who do manage messaging effectively. Maybe I'm equivocating, there, because I know there are such people, and I'm reluctant to admit that my struggles with e-mail and comments are a result of my lack of wit, and initiative, and not attributable to limitations of available technology. So maybe I'll call that orb, that task, because that's what I first called the orbs, call it "managing e-mail effectively with existing technology.

Comments and e-mail are the same thing, right? They're little messages. I'm tackling the orb labeled advancing messaging technology, referred to by some similar name just now, here, first. It's the one that will easily be labeled wishful thinking, and tackling it first, or at all, could be labeled "impracticality," labeling me "impractical". I could be labeled "dismiss" for tackling it, or what I say about it could be labeled dismiss, it could be dismissed, as being madness. But I'm going ahead.

Imagine a large bin full of messages, that has just been delivered to me. I need to do something with it. I think it would be a good idea to put it on a table.

Let's rapidly expand this image. Maybe I'm trying to describe the process and experience of e-mail, and more generally of being on line, as an assortment of gestures. First, I want to know I'm getting all my messages. If, by design, the system places all my messages in a big bin by my front door, I'll know. All I have to do is go to my front door - a very easy place to find - and check the bin for messages. But it's very important that I immediately do something with the latest batch of messages. That's where the table comes in. It should be a large table, and I'll immediately start to lay the messages out across the table. Maybe I'll create some piles. The biggest one might be junk. I don't want to throw it away, at all, I just want to put it in an unobtrusive location, but one I can easily find again. And, I forgot something. Call me peculiar, but I'm really interested in what my messages looked like, piled in the bin, when I first got them. I want to create a record of that. Although, here's a difference between physical mail and on line messaging: in physical mail, unopened messages are rich with visual information. In e-mail, there is no provision for this. Yes, the about line is displayed, and looking at your in box is like watching some kind of festival, a parade, but there's a level of information, of informativeness, about its contents, that the day's physical mail provides, which the e-mail in box, or comment moderation system, does not provide.

Now, the problem of correcting that can be approached from one of two directions. E mail is linear, and has two nodes, the node where a message enters the system, and the node where it exits the system. Call them sender and recipient. As an aside, inspect either of these nodes more closely, and you find they are both complex functions. But for now the question is, how can we attach more meaning to the subject line of an e-mail? And in a way the obvious answer is to do it at the sender end. But, I wonder. Sometimes the obvious solution is not the ideal one. Attaching, or, as it may be called, developing, extra meaningfulness can be done at the receiver end, and that provides an opportunity for customization of the message appearance on behalf of the primer user of received mail. But let us not ever forget history. It is very important that  what the sender sent, in all its specificity, be preserved. I do like to experiment with archiving mail, and if I was making a record of messages received, I would create an image for each message, with several image in it. One image, I just remembered, shows what the bin the message came in looked like. Another shows what the message looked like as it was unpacked from the bin. It lay among other messages, and the messages that had already been unpacked from the bin are arrayed across the table, in this image, so you can see the message was only visible after half the bin had been unpacked, unpacked, that is, from the bin, an put in several piles on the table. And then we can see the motion we used to put this message in one of the pile, or maybe on its own spot on the table.

So, if we are unpacking an e-mail in box, each message, as it arrived, to our awareness, looked like a long string of textual notation, on a single line. And all the messages together were stacked in a long block of these lines. But here's another question that isn't being answered in our receiver interface to e-mail: how many messages were in the bin, when we checked it at 9 in the morning that day in November of this year? In fact, how many are in the bin right now? It's difficult to say. There's something we need to define, which is "what's in the bin." What's in the bin is new messages, ones that we haven't ever looked at before. And now we're going to unpack those messages, and begin the process of integrating them into Our Data Archive. But first we are going to make a note of what the bin looked like, as we began this session of message management.

Let's ramp up to another level of metaphorical abstraction. Actually, first let's do some more abstracted theory. Then we'll do the metaphor. Virtual reality, the world of information, information technology, the Internet, are all a form of abundance. This is not an abstraction, it is very real, but it is an abstraction, in that it is still being developed, and is even nascent. What is Reality? What is The Real? What does it mean that something is real, is a reality? There is a kind of deep abstraction out of which things can emerge. In the digital universe, this is an endless matrix of neutral nodes. They can be either positive or negative, and they can change from one state to another. Each node's location in the matrix is absolutely fixed. Some nodes may be neither positive nor negative: of indeterminate state. Maybe.

In the material world, it's a matrix of something like particles of light, and state is a function of orbits, or relative motion. But the effect is the same: matrix neutrality, out of which emerges That Which is Real: That Which Exists: Things. Now, things, as a class, have their own peculiar characteristics. These are the characteristics of the class "things." First among them is: surfaces. Things exist because they have surfaces. Edges. Defined limits. Inside this surface is the thing, and outside of the surface is the thing's environment. Surfaces have this characteristic, of defining what is within them and what is outside of them. A surface is really a volume. All surfaces are closed loops - in n dimensions - or else, infinite. Also, it is true of all things, all volumes, that they are made of some number of smaller things. Usually this is quite evident, though there are cases in which it is less easy to see. In those latter cases, if we study the thing closely enough, we will find that it is made of component things, but we need to study them very closely to distinguish the component things. When we perceive things of this sort, what we perceive is an empty thing. Emptiness is full of potential, but perceptually, temporally, it is empty.

Then there are things whose components we can easily perceive. These could be called full, or actively real. But I'm in a bit of a muddle. What defines a thing is that it is defined. It might be an empty thing, but, if we can clearly see - perceive - that it is a thing, it is a thing. Whether it is full or empty defines, to some degree or another, how we can interact with the thing. The thing itself is defined by some kind of variation in the density of the underlying matrix. And what is important about empty and full, about the fact that things are made of things, that things are collections of things, is that collections of things are things. For example, our unpacked mail is now a number of things, scattered across the table. We are accustomed, for some reason, to thinking that the things spread out across the table is an incidental thing, and what it really is is each thing, and that its meaning is found when we inspect one or another of those things more closely, but if we back up, and look at the table from further away, the whole complex - the table, the bin, the messages on the table - becomes a thing. And it has immense meaning as a thing in itself. It's really something very evocative, this composite of a table, and a basket, and some piles of letters.

This is abundance, to have a table, and be able to spread out the day's messages across it. We are beginning to define abundance, here, so that we can reproduce it in an abundant new world of fundamental matrix, the digital world. It is abundance to have a room, with a table in it, soft and beautiful floors of wood or marble, beautiful walls aglow with almost edible texture, tall windows admitting light and views, muted sounds from the world around us. In another room, we have many shelves, and, for now, we will just say they are for storing our messages.