Sunday, July 19, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Belated Response to Carr/Cascio/Postman
Keeping it very short, as I noticed I neglected to respond to this post as I was checking over everything as a video uploads to my blog. . .I'll touch on two topics: the pharmacology piece of Cascio's article, and the assumption that the benefits of Google/technology in general are and/or will be evenly distributed. And what about the energy & natural resources required to build and run these increasingly advanced networks? Cascio admits to using modafinil in order to combat jet lag, slightly avoiding the fact that doctors are prescribing this drug outside of its FDA sanctioned uses. There's a term for this, but I'd have to Google it. Hmmmm. . . . On the other topic, what's going to happen to the have-nots whose brains are not stimulated to evolve? Will they be the Geico cavemen of the 22nd century media?
Friday, July 10, 2009
Response to Facebook
I wish the Facebook article had been broken into different articles: one rant about the neocon money & politics behind the scenes, and one about the data-mining and advertising connection. Hodgkinson has a couple different arguments going on, and the visceral nature of his anger in the first part kind of turned me off. For the author, or editors, to make the gaffe about the CIA & Sept. 11 also weakens the overall article. I wondered who the author was and whether he was a regular columnist or not. I did find the section on data-mining and us becoming shills for advertisers to our friends pretty interesting. Oh yes, read your privacy policies. But who really does?
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Response to Twitter & Postman
Twitter: I'm not sure whether to vomit or get some of my dot.com buddies together to create a service called Shitter that allows us all to keep up on the bowel movements of our favorite celebrities, preferably as an audio file, but obviously limited by technology to 140 seconds.
If we ever thought that Big Brother would be surreptitiously forced upon us by an Orwellian government, rest assured that we have not gone kicking and screaming to the Gulag, but have willingly offered up all the personal information the Corporation could have ever desired.
5-7 sentences is a mere pittance of a response, so I'll focus on this part:
“The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. “I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. “They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”
She has about 400 people she follows online but suspects many of those relationships are tissue-fragile.
Tissue-fragile? You think? It's not even that fragile. Tissue is physical. She put these personal details out into the twittersphere and is now complaining about the responses?
In the interest of fairness, I noted positives about Twitter:
One page 5 of 6, the New York Times actually started to mention some advantages, like its haiku-length, but my 140 characters just ran . . .
If we ever thought that Big Brother would be surreptitiously forced upon us by an Orwellian government, rest assured that we have not gone kicking and screaming to the Gulag, but have willingly offered up all the personal information the Corporation could have ever desired.
5-7 sentences is a mere pittance of a response, so I'll focus on this part:
“The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. “I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. “They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”
She has about 400 people she follows online but suspects many of those relationships are tissue-fragile.
Tissue-fragile? You think? It's not even that fragile. Tissue is physical. She put these personal details out into the twittersphere and is now complaining about the responses?
In the interest of fairness, I noted positives about Twitter:
One page 5 of 6, the New York Times actually started to mention some advantages, like its haiku-length, but my 140 characters just ran . . .
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