b a t t l e c a t . n e t - DIYMasters

I’m not sure what people’s minds were like before this whole internet thing came along, but one of the results of growing up alongside the internet and web is that I notice and want to record links between everything I learn and hear.

A slightly trivial example is that I was listening to an In Our Time podcast on the history of Heat the other day and my immediate response was “XKCD!”

There have been moments when the potential world of knowledge seems to concurrently shrink and expand as I make connections between seemingly disparate topics such as a war in Congo being related to minerals running out. A connection is made, but it opens up so many more questions and things to learn.

Other people are thinking this way and are developing tools with which to record these connections. We can connect the people we know in networked graphs and record similarities between musical artists. We can draw mindmaps on pieces of paper, or represent them visually through software like The Brain or connect topics with tags as on delicious.

But how can we make and represent these connections in the real world?

When I meet a person who has a similar interest to someone I already know, I immediately want to introduce them so that they can benefit from their ideas.

That’s one way of making a connection, but besides that introduction being recorded by electronic social media such as Facebook how could these connections (and their history) be recorded and ‘tagged’ physically?

I guess part of this thought comes from a fear/worry that if the internet suddenly ceased to exist I would have no connection to the 450+ people I am connected to on Facebook.

If that situation occurred, would I really care? Are all relationships meaningful enough to be recorded in the real world?

Should I tie thousands of kilometres of string to the people I care about and am interested in, or do I take a photo? Should I send 471 postcards a day letting people know my status, and would they send a postcard back?

To that end, for 150 Things I’m thinking a lot about making tangible tokens as a way of recording the relationships I have with people.