It would be great if we had the ability to export or download layers that were created from using the Sketch Tool. The tool is good for visualization but my team needs the ability to share these sketches with each other for use in ArcGIS Pro, Desktop, and Earth.
We do have in the sketch roadmap the ability to save it as a layer item and then you can do publishing to a hosted feature layer, exporting from the hosted feature to all the above formats and opening into other apps.
So, You can open the web map in Pro and do an export from the sketch layers. But our problem is that none of the title and pop up text comes over to Arcpro. We use AGOL to have people markup and add text comments to web maps using Sketch tools but have to leave the map open in AGOL to do the edits from their text comments in Arcpro.
This idea / tool is still very much needed in AGOL with custom WebApps. Allowing the AGOL community to have this function will help migrate stragglers that are still bound to GoogleEarth and the ease of sketching out polygons and sharing KML.
Thanks for the reply. I'm still in the implementation stage (hampered by the fact that I can't get a clear answer on whether Viewer licenses can make sketch notes that I can then harvest?). I expect that we will have fairly small layers with a mixture of points, lines & polygons. Of course, that will vary somewhat with the scope of the project. I expect that we will use these for project planning, so they certainly won't be massive datasets.
I personally like the energy of a class. Nothing helps one improve or try to understand concepts then trying to please the teacher. In art school, drawing classes could get pretty brutal for those not willing to put both effort, but evening classes can be a bit more chill. Live feedback is great to get when starting out. I do online courses occasionally, My lack of discipline is what makes those not as effective. With a class, you at least should feel like you must show up and put forth an effort. The online, for me, is done in an environment that is to ripe with distractions, like cats, spouses or kids or the Weather Channel!
While these sketches do not amount to a full account of how we find ourselves with others online, I suggest that they reveal how insights from the phenomenology of sociality can be used to show overlaps between offline and online interpersonal experiences of feeling togetherness.Footnote 2
On the other end of the spectrum are those who fear that the internet erodes community; a narrative that has gained increasingly popularity of late. Turkle (2017), for instance, claims that technology is becoming a substitute for connecting with others in person, and that technological connections, while numerous, are ultimately less substantial than face-to-face interactions. This has led her to state that while we may encounter other people online, we increasingly find ourselves alone and isolated:
Such views often suggest that individuals encounter each other online in a predominantly instrumentalist way, resulting in the erosion of deeper forms of togetherness (ibid.; Dotson 2017, 34). Technology use is also frequently linked to increased feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression. The conclusion is that technology is changing the way we encounter others and changing it for the worse.Footnote 3
Interestingly, though, when describing their interpersonal experiences online, people often do so in ways that resemble descriptions of offline experiences. For instance, online gamers talk about sharing worlds and experiences with other players (e.g. Ducheneaut et al. 2006; Scriven 2018), people talk about sharing interests or beliefs together in online communities (e.g. Gies 2008), and people talk about how online communication helps sustain a sense of togetherness with people they already know (e.g. Dotson 2017; Eklund 2015). What emerges from these descriptions is that, just as in offline sociality, people appear to experience a sense of being together with others online. Even Turkle and Dotson, in decrying the quality of togetherness found in online interactions, implicitly concede that there is a sense in which we can be together with others online, even if it is deemed depleted in some way.
Clearly, when saying that individuals are together online, we are not literally saying that they are physically together in the way that I am in the same spatial location as the others in the café I am currently sitting in. So, what do we mean by together here? Theorists such as Dreyfus (2008) have approached this notion predominantly in relation to questions about how being together is impacted when we leave our bodies behind and interact in disembodied online space; looking at how it is we find ourselves together in online space (spoiler alert: his conclusion is that when together online something is always missing compared to our embodied offline lives). Once again, we find the view that online life (in being disembodied) is essentially different to offline life (with its spatial implications). Rather than starting with an analysis of whether we can attain a sense of being together with others online (with its embodied implications), I want to approach this question by asking what it is to have a sense or feeling of togetherness with others.Footnote 4
Instead of weighing in on the debate about whether online communality is better or worse than offline communality, I want to take the notion of experiencing something together as a we and consider whether the requirements for such an experience can be met in the context of online interactions. If we are able to answer this in the affirmative, which I will argue that at least in some cases we can, I will suggest that this can be fruitfully appealed to as one way in which we can understand how individuals feel together with others who they are not spatially (or perhaps even temporally) with. This conclusion will also support the argument that we should not take it for granted that because online encounters occur in a different medium to offline ones, that they must always be deemed of an essentially different kind.Footnote 5 In the final section, I will show how such questions also put pressure on we-theorists to clarify exactly how the conditions of an actual we-experience are met (i.e. to what extent the individuals have to have a fully embodied encounter to meet said requirements).
By providing an account of communal experiences that can be actual, habitual, personal and objectual, I suggest that Walther provides us with a flexible framework for understanding sociality that can account (at least in some instances) for how we find ourselves feeling a sense of togetherness with others online.
What is interesting about this analysis is that if we accept that objectual communities can exist online, what this seems to reveal is that these kinds of online communities do not appear to be a new kind of community despite the new medium through which it is carried out. Rather, the internet simply provides a new means for us to discover objectual communities that we come to feel a sense of belonging to.
I now want to explore the idea that it is not only habitual objectual communities that might exist online but also personal ones as well. As noted in section 2, although anonymous online interactions often take centre stage in the discussion of online communities, many of our online interactions take place with people with whom we already have relationships in our offline lives. Think, for example, of the friends we stay in touch with via Facebook, our family group chats on WhatsApp, the partners we keep updated throughout the day on Instagram. Although these interactions do not take place face-to-face, I suggest that they can be permeated with a habitual sense of togetherness.
I think that online interpersonal interactions may also be characterised by a habitual sense of togetherness in this way. For example, if I message Judith over WhatsApp about what we are doing for dinner, our habitual sense of togetherness is still there. This habitual feeling does not only colour our face-to-face interactions but can also feature in our online interaction. Indeed, we can draw out this intuition if we compare how I might experience messaging back and forth with Judith about our evening plans with my messaging the electrician about the best time to come to the house to fix the boiler that night. What I want to highlight here is that the messages between Judith and I take place in the context of our relationship as a whole. Simply because our interaction has moved onto an online medium does not seem to warrant the conclusion that our habitual sense of togetherness as a we must evaporate. Indeed, I would argue that this kind of online interaction with those we already have a communal bond with offline can sustain a habitual sense of togetherness with those we have personal relationships with. This is not to say that these online interactions are simply contextualised by offline sociality but are structured by the same sense of togetherness as certain offline interactions. Again, what this seems to highlight is that although the medium for interaction might be new, the experience of feeling together with others in this way, at least in some instances, might not be that novel.
I now want to consider to what extent we can find adequate expressivity in online interpersonal interactions for them to be deemed, at least in certain cases, empathetic encounters and, in turn, meet the requirements for an actual we-experience. The question this raises, then, is do we really need a full-bodied embodied interaction with the other (in the sense of being together in the same physical space) for an actual we-experience to obtain? I think we are faced with two potential answers to this question:
that even though we have a certain level of expressivity available in online interpersonal interactions, either this expressivity is not sufficient for an actual we-experience to be established or something more than expressivity is required (thus pushing for a more refined description of exactly what it is about the face-to-face interaction that is special for actual we-experiences and empathy).
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