Interacting

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The main point to be developed—

On A Place to Study one engages in consequential interaction with cultural reasources, interaction that will have emergent effects on you as agent and on the cultural circumstances within which you live. The next few paragraphs are a first pass at an opening salvo in an effort to reclaim substantiality for interaction on electronic networks, which the rhetoric of virtuality has etherialized.

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We can and should pay attention to the subtle implications of ordinary speech. In current English, we describe something like A Place to Study as a site on the web, as a website. A site carries a strong connotation of an abstract location indicating where people might construct a building or structure to house varous contents. We come to think that a website serves abstractly to situate stuff—text, images, information, items for sale—and we go to the site to get or put stuff there, however it will suit our purpose. Such thinking leads us to subtley misconstrue what can and should take place online with A Place to Study by seeing it simply as a site for retrieving some piece of information stored on it.

In view of this discussion of site and place, on A Place to Study we will try to use "webplace", rather than "website," in order to keep in mind the recognition that what we do on the web, like what we do elsewhere, consists in consequential interactions shaping the substantive actuality of our lives.

Misconstruing A Place to Study in this way is not specific to to it. Rather our doing so is an instance of how we generally misconstrue our activities on networks. Unless one is an architect, one doesn't talk much about going to a site in the physical world; most people work in their workplace. In the physical world a site is a location with a kind of virtual reality, a place where one envisions something that might be. When one goes to a real place in the real world, one expects substantive experience, interactions with complex real effects. But we habitually think of cyberspace as a virtual reality, comprising many places where apparent actions and their consequences are substantially inconsequential.

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Living, we are continuously interacting. And thinking, we continuously verbalize—putting our living, not merely into words, but into verbs. Verbs do not describe causation; they instantiate our interacting with the actualities in our midst. Verbs serve agents acting in situations of constraint, risk, uncertainty, and substance.

Verbs express intentions. They inform us Why.
Verbs identify agents. They tell us Who.
Verbs locate happenings. They indicate Where.
Verbs announce events. They state When.
Verbs indicate means. They describe How.
Verbs point out activity. They suggest What.

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