I may have mentioned before that I subscribe to the RSS feed for
my del.icio.us network. For me
this means big things. I use Google Reader to aggregate all of the links bookmarked in
del.icio.us by users I have identified as belonging to my network.
Twenty-two more or less active gatherers of the net’s goods, the whole team
working in service of, well, themselves (I almost wrote me). They
don’t necessarily post links for me (although del.icio.us makes this possible,
and others have shared links with me directly a time or two). But because
they post them for themselves, the bookmarks carry something like credibility, a
small portion of this sort of matters to somebody. How much time do I
spend sifting through the feed bubbling with all of these links from my
del.icio.us network? Rarely more than a minute. Sometimes I herd the
links into my own collection. Other times I open a link in a new tab and
see what it’s all about (this is the most time-consuming practice; also,
sometimes, the most rewarding). Most of the time I move along, having merely
glanced the bookmarks. Even when I pass them by, they give me a vague
sense of what someone else is collecting (or researching or doing or even buying
for holiday gifts…I won’t say whose gift ideas I borrow every
December). These practices, like many others (not all of them digital), promote
what I think of as network sense (this, a key idea I am developing in the
diss).

I learned about the Rutgers
Writers House this way.
The program has posted a YouTube video documenting the "house" (a lavish
basement, really). I would have embedded the video for you, but embedding has
been disabled (!). The video itself seems like the sort of thing that
would have been mentioned on a listserv. Perhaps it was. But I
didn’t find it that way. When I subscribe, I subscribe by digest, and
those listservs are either dead, dying, or–surprisingly–overflowing with such
torrential interchanges as to be unreadable. I learned about the Writing
House in this other way–from my del.icio.us network.
Alex and
Spencer recently posted it to
their del.icio.us accounts. I followed. A small, distal circuit, one
barely noticeable to anyone involved. Is there any value in this?

I think there is, and I’m more and more inclined to think of it as a nuanced
form of apprenticeship or something like a mentorship model. It’s not the
typical hierarchical mentor-mentee dyad, but it functions in a similar way,
fostering patterns of local, interested circulation among people who more or
less know each other and whose participation is both self-interested (a link for
one’s self) and transparent (a link you too can have if you care to). It’s
not the typical gift-economy, right? Instead it is driven by a strange blend
of beneficent self-indulgence (if collecting links is, indeed, indulgent…maybe
not). It doesn’t require thanks, (so the guides to netiquette tell
me…okay, I made that up; really I wanted to use "netiquette" for the first
time at E.W.M.to see whether anyone’s still reading). In fact, thanking someone
for posting to del.icio.us would be, uh, unusual, let’s say.

I mention the Writing House link because it is a tangible example of these
in-network practices–practices that because they manifest behind the scenes are
especially difficult to identify. We cannot easily tell if they are
happening for other people (even by asking, the decision to add a bookmark is
not always memorable). While I don’t want to make too much of this, I want
to note it because it seems important to me to be able to articulate that nexus
of exchange, particularly as an apprenticeship model. It’s one of the more
basic rationale when I encourage others to use del.icio.us, and it’s a variation
of connection that runs counter to the problems of isolation, insularity, and
dispersion bound up with distance, disciplinary geographies, and specialization.
I would like to see more people doing it, but to get to that point, I think we
need still more examples of these effects if they are, as I think they are, a
substantive form of something like apprenticeship (maybe holarchic
apprenticeship).