From: natalya godbold <ngodbold@gmail.com>

In the wifi party, copresence is not redundant but important and necessary

to create a party: people "dance off each other". They respond to each others moves. You need copresence for that. n

Building off of Paul's distinctions, and Natalya's clarification, it seems like the party moves fully into the later model - a Warner/Habermass-ian public in which discourse (dancing off of each other) is a key component to the constitution -- a visual rhetoric. That said, were people dancing off of each other in the WiFi street party? And if so, pulling in Goffman, were there other audience members on the periphery who were front stage, but not necessarily privy to the underlying channel of animating information -- i.e. didn't have headphones/couldn't hear the music? How did that fit into everything. Which moves this entire experience into a different register. Hearing an account of people moving/dancing to internal soundtracks resonates with a Pentecostal experience -- where, in the same moment, everyone is having a synchronized "private", group conversation with the divine. Granted, in that case each participant speaks their own language and derives their own experience. That said, how different is that from dancing to music that the out-group can't hear? - Matt ----------------------------- Matthew Bernius PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University | http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/ Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl mBernius@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius