We had a much smaller group in the happenings obviously — MUCH smaller — but a big concern of ours was Hospitable Hypertext. And that’s where this issue of the politics of the Stream comes in. The Stream is based in conversational modes, related to Bahktin’s idea of the Utterance:

“But in reality the situation is considerably more compl icated. Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their
character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word “response” here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes
them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. ” (Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p.91. http://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Speech_Genres_and_Other_Late_Essays.pdf )

When you look at that, you begin to see part of where the we-creation comes from. I’m not saying all of it, but certainly part:

“Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account…”

But if each utterance relies on the previous utterances to achieve meaning, then meaning is inaccessible to those not party to the previous utterances. This discourse coherence is powerful at we-making. And it’s desirable in many ways. In “real-life” it works quite well, in that people in a physical location often share a common conversational history.

The Stream, however, is something different — it’s the application of the principles of the utterance to the textual realm. This brings with it some unique opportunities, but some unique problems — all, well and good except that we have replaced EVERYTHING with stream these days, and lost some other digital modes that are more hospitable to conversational outsiders.

I don’t think there is a solution per se, but my intuition is that leaning a bit away from stream and a bit toward original hypertext visions (which were very textual, almost anti-utterance in nature) could help mitigate these problems.