Context is everything

It’s late on Sunday evening and I’ve just finished writing a column for Ariel, the BBC’s inhouse newspaper. I’m tired, but thought I’d spend five minutes installing Growl, the fabulous tool that tells you about what your Mac’s up to, on my new iMac.

And I came across a discussion thread on the Growl google group that included this fabulous aside from Brian Ganninger

Meta: Each discussion should be unto itself, bringing baggage in only leads to additional problems. We are in a neutral medium that doesn’t provide implicit contexts – your emotions, your tenses or speaking patterns, your anything else – and lends itself to exactly what is in front of the viewer.

Which is, of course, true. And is also what we want our social networks to make untrue.

Oh – and here’s my Seesmic video to show just how tired I am!