{"id":558,"date":"2006-08-12T11:33:22","date_gmt":"2006-08-12T16:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=558"},"modified":"2006-08-14T07:24:46","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T12:24:46","slug":"oceangram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Oceangram"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now here is an interesting social… program… experiment… thingy. What do you even call this sort of thing? Oceangram<\/a> is a software implementation of the old message-in-a-bottle idea. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

You can write messages and chuck them into the ocean where they will find their way to other people, or just sit there until a message washes up on shore. When you get a message, you can choose to throw it away or add your own comments to it and throw it back in. You can’t change what others have written, only append your message to the end of what is already there. At first when I saw you had to wait for a message to arrive I was a little annoyed, but now that I’ve done it a few times I can see it’s actually an important part of the system. I’d probably sit there and “leech” if I could just click and get a message. Since you have to wait for them, I’m more reluctant to throw them away and more tempted to add to it and throw it back in. They seem to come at the rate of one every five minutes or so, although I gather some people get around this by opening the page in several windows at once. I suppose you could keep four or five windows open, which is probably plenty to keep them coming at a steady rate if you’re adding responses.<\/p>\n

Here is an example of one I found:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Go nesties!!
\n—
\ni have a fake life on the nest..muahahahah
\n—
\njust passin this on because I dont know what you are talking about.
\n~Jamie Virginia BBC
\n—
\nWhat the hell is a NESTIE?!?!?!?!\n<\/div>\n

The — marks seperate things that were written by different people, so we can see that this (stupid and pointless) message has been picked up and thrown back in at least three times. (Possibly more, maybe there were people who chose to pass it along without adding to it.) I passed it along again. I don’t throw messages away unless they are are gibberish or blank. <\/p>\n

More interesting is the next one:<\/p>\n

true friends are like diamonds, precious and rare.
\n—
\nfalse freinds are like autumn leaves, you find them everywhere.
\n—
\nNever have a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.<\/div>\n

So the second person turned it into a little poem, and the third person added some other stuff. Let’s turn it back into a poem. Hmmmmm…<\/p>\n

Never eat a fishbone you find floating in the sea.<\/div>\n

Erm. Okay, not Shakespeare, but at least it rhymes again. But I love the idea that four annonymous strangers from all over the world were able to collaborate and write a stupid poem. <\/p>\n

How popular is this? There are people who seem to write and read messages all day, and there are blogs dedicated to Oceangramming<\/a>, as well as various message boards where people try to “find” each other in the annonymous sea of messages. <\/p>\n

I can’t even explain why this facinates me. You send a message and you have no idea who will get it. You get a message and you have no idea who sent it. (Unless they put their name on it, which happens once in a while.) It seems like the whole thing would be pointless noise, but after observing a few messages you begin to see patterns and get a feel for the shape of the thing. There seems to be a lot of moms – mostly of the stay-at-home variety – and many of whom belong to little circles or bulletin boards outside of this thing. They have little catchphrases and such to identify themselves. (I suspect that Nesties are one such group. I could Google it, but it’s fun game of cryptanalysis to try and figure it out from what you find in the sea.) I’ve extrapolated this and most of the other knowledge here from simply reading messages<\/em>. <\/p>\n

I understand that getting one of your own messages (which other people may have added to) is a rare and much-sought coincidence. Hasn’t happened to me yet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now here is an interesting social… program… experiment… thingy. What do you even call this sort of thing? Oceangram is a software implementation of the old message-in-a-bottle idea. You can write messages and chuck them into the ocean where they will find their way to other people, or just sit there until a message washes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}