- – - -
Message:
greetings from lucas ihlein in australia

Dear SlowMedia Person

I am hoping you won’t reply to this, as i noticed on your blog that you are having time away from the internet.

I guess my email here is a bit of an experiment – do you have somebody checking your email? Do you have an automated reply?

I would like to send you a letter in the old fashioned post, so I am hoping a reply will tell me where to send it.
cheers
Lucas Ihlein
Sydney, Australia

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> From: Slow Media Person
> To: Lucas
> Sent: Thu, 2 September, 2010 17:11:53
> Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: greetings from lucas ihlein in australia
>
> Hello! As part of my Slow Media Project, I’ll be offline and on sabbatical until 2011.
>
> For urgent assistance, please contact [name] in the Journalism Department at [phone number] or [email address].
>
> Otherwise, you can reach me by these alternate methods:
> – Phone or fax at: [number]
> – Mail to: P.O. Box [number], Brooklyn, NY 11238
>
> Please note: If you print out a hard copy of the e-mail you’ve written and send it to me by fax or snail mail, I will not think it’s weird in the slightest. Thank you.
>

http://slowmedia.typepad.com/

That (by-now offline) blogger writes:

The overarching scenario is that I’ll adopt the media technologies of 1990, just before the Internet and cellphones began their ascent — which holds some rhetorical and romantic appeal (for me, at least) in being a tidy 20 years ago, at the dawn of my adulthood. Forgive me any accidental anachronisms but hey, I’m not a historian… yet. I’ll be living largely in the less-connected spirit of that time.

So… it seems that I’m being overtaken by others who have seized the moment before me! What a failure I am… I can’t even keep up with those who are not keeping up!

I’m going to sift thru that blog and see if there’s an offline contact address. Why not find out how someone else who had the same idea as me is coping with it all?

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…i am presuming that Anne got the tip off about all this from here...

you mean like “freaky friday“?

Lauren: OK, OK, you’ve got me! I’ll do it. Actually, I was thinking about the whole “chain letter” nature of this yesterday while I was standing in the shower. I would like to see a diagram, like a family tree, of who tagged who and what they led to. I think it would be an enormous job, and the diagram would be huge. Each site tagging 5 others, each of these tagging five in turn etc. Holy Exponential Growth, Batman! How would you even represent that graphically? It would begin to look like an enormous crystalline molecular map.

and you don’t get any of that quirky stuff in real life either. well, except porn of course. in fact, we generally shy away from that really lame stuff in real life and perhaps we all get a bit too cool for school.

i’m just sayin’…

Noticing that you’re ears pricked up too, I did some snipping from everyone’s comments:

“But wasn’t part of the motivation for the decision that you are not really in the emotional centre of your lived world?”

“validation from my social network”

“draws out feelings from within people. I’m interested in those feelings, I want to be a part of that discussion.”

“as an online persona, you are as real and present in people lives as the person sitting next to you..”

“wouldn’t it be plausible to compare your departure from a ‘contactable form’ to an overseas departure.. to an isolated island”

“For us, you having internet means little snippets of what’s going on with you. Do you REALLY think you will ring and send postcards?”

“it has created a whole lot of opportunities for staying in touch that were never there before.”

“We’re gonna have to make more time for face-to-face socialising. Which, if I can be honest, has actually been a bit of a lack in our friendship in the last few years. Which is a shame. You know, the old Sydney phenomenon: “we don’t have time to meet up, let’s just form an e-group”

PS….
Teddlesruss, I second Lucas’ question to you and add that the link under your name (where you commented) does not lead anyhere – so how do we find your blog?

But, with all the spare time I will have away from this infernal screen (and my compulsive desire to communicate) I am sure that there will be an obsessive postcard sending equivalent in the place of emails. And I don’t mind the idea of coming back to Perth for a while. Why not?

Diego, I’ll miss you too! We’re gonna have to make more time for face-to-face socialising. Which, if I can be honest, has actually been a bit of a lack in our friendship in the last few years. Which is a shame. You know, the old Sydney phenomenon: “we don’t have time to meet up, let’s just form an e-group”…

AnnaP, it’s funny how you describe those “old” ways as “analogue”. They are now defined in relation to the “norm” ie digital. Before, we never called them analogue. We never used the term “landline” before mobiles came along. etc etc. But yes, let’s do Post Office Box! What fun.

Lauren, I dunno about perpetuating this meme. I will think about it… It seems pretty daggy. But maybe that’s why I should do it…

Teddlesruss, what kind of cross-media projects are you thinking of?

For us, you having internet means little snippets of what’s going on with you. Do you REALLY think you will ring and send postcards? Maybe. You didn’t much before you got internet … (and neither did we, but we like the emails now!!)

P & J would be disappointed. Photos will not get sent because I never get round to printing them.

So, I’ve decided it will work for us if you move back to Perth for that year!

Maybe you could invest in a parental control thing (give Lizzie the password control if you’re really weak) and only set it to allow you 10 mins of internet time each day before you’re cut off.