I was recently on holiday in LA and one of the things I did
there was to visit the La Brea tar pits*. These are basically huge pools of tar
which would trap unsuspecting animals who wandered into them. The remains of
one woman were also found but there’s still no sign of Homer.The remains then sunk to the bottom where they were conveniently preserved so
that archeologists could recover them thousands of years later. It’s well worth
a visit.
One feature of the exhibit is the fishbowl laboratory they
have where passers-by can watch the archeologists at work. What was interesting
about the setup was that each person working in the lab had a small board upon which
they would write what work they were currently doing and display it to the
public. It was an unusual example of a facebook type status or a twitter
happening in an offline context.
It was a very useful way of making people aware of what they
were doing so that people could observe without disturbing. It also shows how
versatile and imaginative non-digital pen and paper methods of doing things can
be (I imagine the lab’s status system predates any online equivalent). We can
also learn from those systems and in digitising them make them more powerful
and more useful.
The concept of a keeping running personal status is very
popular at the moment, status updates are one of the most popular features of
facebook and the predominant feature of twitter. They are a simple and rather
effortless way of informing a wide audience of where you are, or what you’re
doing or thinking right now. The wide use and uptake of statuses suggest that it
is a feature which could also be harnessed for more productive purposes also as
well as the simple stream of consciousness that it tends to be currently.
*For those interested in the etymology of names, this means The tar tar pits. Like Mount Fuji means
mount mountain, and the rivers Paraguay and Avon both mean river river.