It’s not exactly "background noise", although in some ways it is like a small trickling stream somewhere nearby that occasionally burbles or splashes a little. Then some cute little icon changes color, sends up a balloon, does a little dance, makes a little "knock-knock" sound. Sometimes it catches my attention – for instance as when a "tweet" from Jon Cates in Chicago exactly matched the sound from my living room in Austria yesterday evening – sometimes I pay little or no attention to the burbles. Who is communicating with whom in this stream? Mostly, I think, it was Les who first lured me down this path of exploring distributed communication, which seemed strange at first, but has meanwhile become quite familiar, nice even. Now there are a number of people that I "follow" across Twitter, Facebook, blog posts via RSS feeds, delicious Skype and a few others. Especially the combination of being able to read a communication in one place and respond somewhere else is something that fascinates me as it seems to convey a sense of "I'm here and I'm aware of where you are too". So where are we then? Last night I was amused again by Jon's "tweets" (Jon has been one of my favorite Internet writers for years anyway, but now I especially enjoy his wonderful use of Twitter), but then shortly afterward a new blog post about Twitter from Jon showed up in my feed-reader, which caught my attention again: Who are these other 55 people, and do they all have the same impression that I do, namely that Jon is communicating directly with them? And what is Jon going to do if all 56 of us respond at the same time? At once I realized that there were a number of options open to me for signaling to Jon that I was reading this and thinking about it. The further implications of this, I think, mean that while it is possible to share reflections ranging from very personal to highly theoretical across various different platforms, one thing that will most likely not result from this is an orderly academic discourse, such as certain mailing lists have meanwhile become. I would like to think that some shared reflections may still have an impact on critical thinking, even though – or perhaps specifically because – they are not quotable, searchable and contained. But in the meantime, there's a cute little icon changing color, sending up a balloon, doing a little dance, making a little "knock-knock" sound … Who's there?