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Thursday 2 August 2012

We may not like Twitter for what it’s doing, but it’s not up to a multimillion-dollar corporation to act against its own short-term financial interests in favor of freedom of our speech. It is, however, up to those of us who want a free and open Internet to make the effort to understand how our technologies work and who controls them. Only then will we be capable of exploring alternatives to centralized corporate software, and of building and supporting them. Douglas Rushkoff

Dissing the Disinformation

At some point in the earliest days of e-mail, the internet began to take away our power of critical thought. It moved in slowly, taking hold like a cancer and then spreading. It preyed on our trust. It made us think it wanted to protect us from things or tell us about interesting things of which we were unaware. But the truth was, it was making us stupiderer. Soon, like the bleating sheep it wanted us to become, we began blindly forwarding an unwarranted tonnage of unfiltered bullshit. Some of us were telling everyone we knew about reverse phone-number scams and how to make famous cookies and how to avoid getting knocked out in parking lots by perfume-bottle-wielding bandits and how to get Bill Gates to give you a couple thousand dollars and how every e-mail you sent equaled five cents toward a kidney for some sick kid whom the doctors were otherwise just going to let die.

At first it was easy to spot because it came through our e-mail. All you had to do was look for this in your inbox:

Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Re:

This served two purposes. First, it let you know that a steaming load of incorrect information was coming your way. Second, it clued you in that you knew a gullible person who thought you were gullible and who knew a number of other gullible people with equally gullible friends.

Saturday 16 June 2012
The distractions of social media, 1673 style

With the promise of a constant and unpredictable stream of news, messages and gossip, coffeehouses offered an exciting and novel platform for sharing information. So seductive was this new social environment — you never knew what you might learn on your next visit, or who you might meet — that coffeehouse denizens found themselves whiling away hours in reading and discussion, oblivious to the passage of time. “Thence to the coffeehouse” appears frequently in the celebrated diary of Samuel Pepys, an English public official. His entry for January 11th, 1664 gives a flavour of the cosmopolitan, serendipitous atmosphere that prevailed within the coffeehouses of the period, where matters both trivial and profound were discussed:

Thence to the Coffee-house, whither comes Sir W. Petty and Captain Grant, and we fell in talke (besides a young gentleman, I suppose a merchant, his name Mr Hill, that has travelled and I perceive is a master in most sorts of musique and other things) of musique; the universal character; art of memory… and other most excellent discourses to my great content, having not been in so good company a great while, and had I time I should covet the acquaintance of that Mr Hill… The general talke of the towne still is of Collonell Turner, about the robbery; who, it is thought, will be hanged.

Enthusiasm for coffeehouses was not universal, however, and some observers regarded them as a worrying development. They grumbled that Christians had taken to a Muslim drink instead of traditional English beer, and fretted that the livelihoods of tavern-keepers might be threatened. But most of all they lamented that coffeehouses were distracting people who ought to be doing useful work, rather than networking and sharing trivia with their acquaintances.

When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffeehouses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities objected, fearing that coffeehouses were promoting idleness and diverting students from their studies. Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian, was among those who denounced the enthusiasm for the new drink. “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university?” he asked. “Answer: Because of coffee-houses, where they spend all their time.” Similar concerns were voiced in Cambridge, where one observer noted that

it is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?

Wednesday 28 March 2012
Cam Cardow

Cam Cardow

Monday 12 March 2012
Posting into the Aether

A month ago I turned 40. I’m not particularly happy about the fact. I’m penniless, friendless (in the ‘someone I can call to bail me out of jail’ sense), companionless, and have generally failed to meet any of my personal or professional goals in life - even the downgraded ones after I realized I wasn’t going to rule the world sometime in my early 30s. This would be bad enough, but I’ve also simultaneously watched a variety of people I’ve known personally become multimillionaires in the meantime, or at least enjoy great personal success. It’s not only depressing, it’s fucking annoying.

Anyways, after taking stock for a few days, I decided to begin my mid-life crisis in earnest. First, I bought a new car (mostly to replace my rapidly dying Saturn) but the fact that it’s a low-end Kia and not a typical crisis Porsche didn’t really help. I also decided to quit posting to Twitter and Facebook, as I decided they’re really not doing much to improve my life and are actually quite poor substitutes for actual social interaction.

I didn’t go on an all-out Mark Pilgrim pout and cancel all my accounts and try to disappear in some passive-aggressive cry for attention, I just simply stopped posting status updates, and chose to write to my blog instead. No, I’m not trying to recapture my blogging glory days, I just decided that if I’ve got something to say, I should write it on my own space, and in full sentences. Blogging is great practice for writing, and by not blogging regularly, I’ve lost both the capacity to quickly whip up my thoughts when needed, and the ever-so-enjoyable ability to say to someone, “Yeah, I thought of that years ago - here’s the link.” (And I wonder why I don’t have friends…)

Now, I’ve been a pretty regular Twitterer (which reposts to FB) for the past couple years or so, with at least 3 or 4 links or comments a day. I’ve made thousands of updates over the past couple years and well over 7,000 since 2006. So with regular updates, 1,680 followers on Twitter and 250 friends on Facebook, one might think that after a few days of silence, someone might @ respond to me with a “what’s up”, message me or simply email and ask where I’ve been.

A month later, and I didn’t get a single message.

Monday 5 March 2012
The Department of Homeland Security Searches Your Facebook and Twitter for "Marijuana," Other Keywords
Saturday 18 February 2012
Texting affects ability to interpret words

Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people’s linguistic ability to interpret and accept words.

Monday 14 March 2011
I’m a qwitter

I have backed up all the tweets from my Twitter account (@snej) to a local file, and am now mass-deleting all of them. This is a venerable form of protest that goes back to early BBSs like the WELL. Basically, I am no longer willing to donate my ‘valuable’ user-generated content to a centralized service that issues fuck-yous of this magnitude to its developers and users.

I could rant at length about the arrogance, stupidity and just plain creepiness of that message and the policies behind it, but I don’t know that it’s even worth it. Others have already done a pretty good job of deconstructing its marketroid Newspeak. I just can’t resist pointing out that two of the major components of Twitter’s content model—the @-mention and the #hashtag—were invented by early users and app developers, not by Twitter itself, then later integrated directly into the system to make them more useful. That’s a great example of collaborative development. Now, perversely, Twitter sees fit to tell app developers exactly how they can and can’t represent those same features in their UIs.

Monday 11 October 2010

The Social Network is an expertly crafted and exhaustively modern film, and one of its more pertinent flashpoints is the reminder that a resource that redefined the human interactions of 500 million people across the globe was germinated in an act of vengeful misogyny. Woman-hating is the background noise of this story. Aaron Sorkin’s dazzlingly scripted showdown between awkward, ambitious young men desperate for wealth and respect phrases women and girls as glorified sexual extras, lovely assistants in the grand trick whose reveal is the future of human business and communication. The only roles for women in this drama are dancing naked on tables at exclusive fraternity clubs, inspiring men to genius by spurning their carnal advances and giving appreciative blowjobs in bathroom stalls. This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency. Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement

Monday 17 August 2009
The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting

Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”

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