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).

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