I had a longish essay half-conceived on this and partly written… but instead of that I’ll keep it short and let you fill the rest in for yourself (which I need to do way more often).
The gist is this: online sites and links exist for the sake of promoting offline experiences (communities, friendships, profit, adventure, education, fun, etc), while offline activities ought to constantly develop online, objective, semi-permanent presences…
Here’s the metaphysics:
Imagine there are two essential aspects of everything (that go by many names): space and time, body and soul, object and subject, rest and motion, permanence and change, solid and fluid, stable and dynamic, being and becoming, existence and experience…
These two aspects exist for each-others’ sake. Space couldn’t happen without time, while time couldn’t be measured or observed without space. The object can’t exist without a subject experiencing it, while the subject couldn’t experience without the existence of objects, etc.
Think in the practical terms of the web: if a site isn’t used, then it dies; if an event occurs but doesn’t leave a permanent record, then it dies too. The optimal arrangement is events-generating-artifacts, artifacts-generating-events.
The importance of the subjective, moving, living aspect should be self-evident: we’ve all experienced it — especially people who’ve nurtured relationships online before meeting in person. When we meet it’s pretty cool. This was the universal sentiment coming out of PodCamp London (stated perfectly by Titus and Karolijn).
Conversely, we sometimes forget how important it is to make permanent stuff. It’s more of a long-term investment (or maybe just an insurance policy that could never pay off — but just might…), the benefits of which aren’t immediately evident. It’s great to just enjoy life but activities that generate artifacts and monuments tend to be the ones that spread, replicate, repeat, and survive.
That was the point in my long tails post… the pictures, videos, and blog posts about PodCamp are virtually always going to be there for us to use and for other people to find and join us. If the offline aspect of our community loses its momentum, or has setbacks, then we have these fall-back reference points — benchmarks we won’t be inclined to fall below.
With all of these artifacts and records we’ll have the means to pull ourselves back up and back together if we begin to diverge or decline. Beyond that, these benchmarks allow us to explore further and take risks, knowing we can always find our way back.
That’s what “substance” means: sub = “under,” stance = “to stand.”
It’s about building platforms, foundations, frameworks.
But those platforms have to bend or they’ll break. They have to accommodate change. The have to enable things to flow — to live — like a road, like a bridge, like a river, channelling energy forward, containing it just enough to be something, but still free to become…
Photo by Kevin Van Lierop.
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