Most compelling to me in Paul Graham’s essay on Cities and Ambition is the idea that “most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time”. Cities are made up of several voices, but one voice speak louder than the others. According to Graham, New York calls for you to make more money; Silicon Valley calls for you to be more powerful; and London calls for you to be more aristocratic. (But as Nancy Mitford put it: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”) Since we’re living in a world with penetrable social walls, we are able to move towards a city’s centre of gravity, if we want to go that way.

Brighton’s voice is: Decadence. There is a culture for enjoying oneself. Brighton is like a really thrilling romance that has the benefit of being wholesome. It reminds me of California – somewhere in-between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, with a touch of London cool.

It’s not just a party town – it is serious and ambitious as well. A prerequisite for my presence here is the fact that it’s full of people passionate about, and ambitious for, what they do. It’s hard not to be infected by the positivity and interest in life and work, and there is a community here. Paul Graham isn’t personifying architecture and geography; he is talking about people.

Chris just sent me a link to this fascinating New York Magazine article on how young people are using the internet to build their identity online.

I was, to some extent, part of the phenomenon of exhibitionist, obsessively-self-documenting teens on Livejournal. I started off on Livejournal writing plain, dull, what-I-had-for-lunch journal entries (FYI, I now do this on Twitter).

As I connected with other Livejournal users, I realised that I could tailor my posts to garner more comments (the cherished stamp of popularity). Comments motivated my writing, and I wrote to amuse, entertain, and to provoke commentry. I enjoyed having readers who commented on my posts as much as I enjoyed writing the posts.

I wasn’t as as obsessed with it as some. Some contacts on Livejournal would document themselves with endless photographs. And then I remember a community popping up on Livejournal, sometime in 2003, called “Nonuglies”. To join this community, wannabe members were asked to submit a journal entry to the community featuring three photos of themselves. Existing members would then vote “yes” or “no” on whether the applicant was beautiful enough to be accepted to the site. After the board had cast their votes, they would be counted. Accepted members were officially “non-ugly”. Rejects were hounded off the site.

Nonuglies was incredibly cold, elitist, and nasty. The original community shut down after a few months, and was reborn in various guises. And at the time, Nonuglies was very popular: loved and hated in equal measure — a squirming petri-dish of human nature.

What’s really amazing to me is the levels of self-exhibitionism the internet allows. Livejournal gives teens a platform to write about their lives, and garner popularity from it. We have self-made YouTube stars (leading to real-life, six-figure TV contracts). We have people documenting their lives in visual minutiae on their Flickr photo accounts. Facebook allows people to build an entire persona. Chris Pirillo streams live from his desk 24/7.

Who’s watching all this? What motivates it?

The “invisible audience” is an interesting term and is brought up in the NY Magazine article linked above. It really is possible to be famous on the internet, and I think it’s the motivation to be seen that motivates this self-documentation. Teenagers in particular battle for a sense of individuality, and they are making use of these online tools to do it. Inhibition is overcome in the process. On one hand, this self-confidence is great; on the other, it could be self-sabotaging — for starters, Google might be unforgiving to the data-trail you left throughout your confused teenage years. Nevertheless: the desire for self-invention in young people is there; the internet has given them the tools.

A conversation with a friend a few months ago got me thinking about the dynamics of dating online. Here’s some of my thoughts:

A bigger pool of choices
When the bicycle was invented, men and women looking to marry were no longer restricted to their own village, but the next one. Dating dynamics changed with technology, as it allowed the pool of dating choices to widen. (Can you imagine how dreadful it was for Joe, the farmer’s boy, when Albert from the next village swept by on his bicycle and went off with Joe’s sole romantic hope, Zaza?) The bicycle allowed people who were restricted by location to widen their travels and to meet people who would normally be out of reach.

If the bicycle had the power to change marriage & dating dynamics, we can only begin to comprehend the possibilities the internet has started to give us. The internet gives us a very large pool of dating choices, if that’s what we choose to use it for.

Well, technically speaking: the internet presents to us a pool of people who are willing to engage with this kind of networking website (dating sites). Perhaps your ideal mate would shun a dating website. Of course, some people have met their mate whilst playing World of Warcraft — apparently group raiding is a bonding experience.

Representation
But on the other hand, perhaps it is understandable if your ideal mate would prefer not to bother with a social site that is, at bottom, a meat carnival of winks, pokes, and surfaces; and, at top, genuinely inefficient because your entire experience of a person is reduced to whether they appear attractive (photographs can lie) and whether they can put words together into a compelling sentence (they can get a friend to write the profile). Furthermore, the fact you have so much choice can also be distracting: most dating profiles tend to sound the same, and they reveal little about what a person is like.

The internet is, unlike a bicycle, not a means of travel, but of communication. The distance remains, and the question is how to try to overcome the distance by representation. How to represent yourself online? Self-construction is all too tempting, all too dangerous, and can completely mislead.

With regard to dating, I’ve concluded that the computer remains a barrier, and the only way around it is to get on a bicycle.

Twitter is the closest thing I’ve seen to the “crystal goblet” idea applied to social networking. ‘The Crystal Goblet’ was an essay on printing by Beatrice Warde which discusses the idea that printing should be invisible; that printed words should do their best to communicate the information instead of standing in the way of it, so that the “vintage of the human mind” isn’t spoiled by swirling ampersands and looping descenders.

Ideas printed in a book and means of networking with people online are entirely different things, but I really like the idea that some of the principles in Warde’s essay could be applied to social networking. Most basically, online services should be as transparent and camouflaged to human need as much as possible. Search is a good example: Google has become like the Helvetica of the internet.

Twitter’s character limitation has endowed each character you type into the box with extra value, as there are only 140 you could use. Twitter is naturally integrated into life, being very location-centric. In the past week I could have joined a friend in a cafe, an impromptu picnic, or a party, based on information shared on Twitter. Twitter is basically transparent to conversation, limited to 140 characters. 140 characters is the perfect length: long enough for a sentence or a question, and anything longer belongs somewhere else (which is why Twitter hasn’t completely replaced my need to blog).

The social dynamics are different from instant message, if you bring followers into consideration. It’s a hybrid forum-im-social network, which gives it a lot of power, and a lot of potential. The main problem for Twitter is that at the moment it seems to appeal mainly to geeks, while Facebook has wide appeal for everyone. Maybe it’ll take longer for its appeal to spread, and it’s still in an early adoption period…