OMG. OMG. OMFG.

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

No Comments

Internet! You’re OLD!

October 30th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz

The question of when the internet was born is a matter of some debate, but if you go by PC World’s version of things, then the web turned 40 yesterday:

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Look how far we’ve come–and how much further we’ve yet to go. The internet started with a lo, evolved into a social stream–what will come next? How much more pervasive will it be in another 40 years?

I can’t wait to find out.

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

No Comments

When Digital And Analog Don’t Coincide

October 25th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz

Ali: Are you usually this friendly with strangers?
She: Always.
Ali: Any particular reason?
She: A stranger is a safe place. You can tell a stranger anything.
Ali: Suppose I put it in my book.
She: You write fiction.
Ali: So?
She: So you won’t tie me to the facts.
Ali: But I might tell the truth.
She: Facts never tell the truth. Even the simplest facts are misleading.
Ali: Like the times of the trains.
She: And how many lovers you’ve had.

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

If there is any phrase that summarizes what enabled us to advance as far as we have, it’s “question everything.” Yet as more information becomes available to us via the web, we wander farther and farther away from this concept. Lost? Google Maps. Doubt? Wikipedia. New crush? Google.

This would be excellent if the information available to us was always accurate. The problem is that it isn’t and we’re no longer used to doubting all data until verified. The problem with the disparity between the digital and analog was illustrated perfectly today by Dr. Mark Drapeau, adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In a post on his Posterous, he detailed an incident at Washington’s Union Station, where he was boarding an Amtrak train.

An abridged excerpt:

A few weeks ago, someone installed new screens around Union Station that give gates and updated information about trains. You know, “On Time,” “Boarding,” and so forth. You can find summary boards around the train station, and individual boards near the gates. They’re coordinated, and most likely run by some central software.

As we were running a few minutes late to board, the automatic screen at the gate switched from “On Time” to “Boarding.” Except we weren’t boarding at all. The attendant said it would be just a few minutes, and the door was shut with a fabric rope. The attendant went in the back with his walkie talkie to check on something and we quietly stood by the gate, about a hundred of us.

Suddenly, we hear a shriek. A middle-aged woman is running at us, yelling about how her train is boarding, hurdling over people and their bags. “Where’s the train to Newport News?! My train is boarding!!” Before anyone could say two words to her, she quickly glanced at the sign that said “Boarding,” tore off the fabric barrier, barged through the door, and started running towards the escalator to the train.

This is a good example of how updated technology not only can be merely a cosmetic improvement, but also can be harmful when used improperly. In this case, Amtrak personnel clearly knew we were not boarding, yet the signs said we were.

In the minds of people these days, virtual boarding is as good as the truth, and we saw this with the middle-aged woman, who ran by a hundred people waiting to board because a digital display convinced her that her train was boarding.

This is a similar problem to the “celebrity death hoax” phenomena whereby Kanye West or a similar high-profile person is declared “RIP” by an enterprising Twitter user–and the information spreads like wildfire. Being dead on Twitter is now equivalent to actually being dead, unless you literally “resurrect” yourself via a YouTube video (Zach Braff) or a late-night TV appearance (Jeff Goldblum).

Today’s incident could have been prevented in a number of ways. It was very minor, but it serves as an example of what happens when half-assed technology is involuntarily injected into our daily lives by people we don’t know, who don’t care about us. If we don’t have standards about making digital information match reality, where does that logically leave society? Working bathrooms declared closed? Incorrect pricing on lattes? Misleading highway directions during an emergency?

What I want to know is: Who’s going to be in charge of coordinating the digital and the real as our country moves toward a more technocratic future?

It’s a loaded question. One of the greatest aspects of the internet is the freedom with which it provides us. Coordination would require regulation. Do you draw the line at stations and airports providing information? Doesn’t it logically follow that any resource offering information (be it medical, historical and scientific) should comply? And so would the content provided by citizen journalists who are more and more providing the information for their communities. What would this regulation look like? More importantly, how would it be enforced?

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

1 Comment

Girls Don’t Cry: “Feminism” As The Ultimate Silencer

July 5th, 2009 by AV Flox in freedom of expression, manifesto, oversharing

Once upon a time, humans sat around a fire telling stories. That’s how we learned about the journey before us, by listening to the trials and tribulations of those who’d ventured forth long before us. Time passed and we with changed with it: we became “civilized.” We stopped sharing. What would our neighbors think? What would our friends say? We became isolated.

The great journey of life became ours alone because we no longer shared in the wisdom of those who came before us or walked beside us.

I see this changing. More and more, people are telling their stories the web over. It is as though we have exchanged the fire for the glowing screen of our laptops. We may be alone in our apartments miles apart, but once again, we have each other.

We have made a brave return to the great tradition of story-telling. I see this as a wonderful thing. But there are those who are not so relieved.

CONFESSIONAL JOURNALISM

“There is a new and very weird and, to my mind, very wrong genre of journalism that is becoming all too popular: female confessional journalism,” writes Hadley Freeman at The Guardian:

Here’s how it goes: a female journalist describes her obsession with her weight/breasts/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship. The article is illustrated by the journalist looking as miserable as possible. There are tales of daily woe. It concludes with the writer still sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece.

This genre has nothing to do with journalists opening a window into what life is like for women today. It does women no favours at all. It is entirely about perpetuating an editor’s misogynistic image of what women are like (self-hating, self-obsessed) and making a semi-celebrity out of the writer in the belief that readers like to read journalists whose names and faces (and breasts) they recognise.

Perpetuating an editor’s misogynistic image of what women are like: self-hating and self-obsessed. Freeman completely ignores the feelings and trials of the women who inspired her column, labels their editor a misogynist and says that this form of writing is setting feminism back 50 years.

Who are these women?

TERRORISTS OF FEMINISM

Christa D’souza wrote about her three breast surgeries, the problems with encapsulated implants, breast cancer, and her final decision to have her implants completely removed.

Liz Jones has never loved food. Her need to be thin and have control of her life through food rationing has ruled her life since she was eleven. This summer, when her sister visited, she decided to eat normally for three weeks. Her journey of discovery is brutal, sad and heart-wrenching. She describes her change in mood—she’s happier, she feels better, she has more energy. Her skin is less dry. She is alive. But just the same, she knows that when her sister leaves, she will return to her regime. She is an anorexic. This is the truth she is facing within herself.

The story of the playwright Zoe Lewis was pointed out by Anna N in a post at Jezebel on what they’ve labeled “the business of self-hate.” Lewis is successful and independent, but she is questioning her choice of career over that of being a housewife.

NOT JOURNALISM

“Certainly, sometimes a bit of personal experience can add to an article,” writes Freeman. “A first-person piece about, say, drug addiction in the week the government is voting on downgrading the classification of certain drugs is journalistically justified. An extended piece pegged to absolutely nothing in which a ‘former anorexic’ journalist describes her hilarious horror at having to eat ‘normally’ for three weeks is not, and simply suggests that the journalist can think of nothing to write about but herself.”

But who said it was journalism? Is it really that surprising that, in an age where blogs are becoming more and more popular than print media, editors would seek to emulate their qualities in their publications’ lifestyles sections?

How about giving the finger to inverted pyramid style in a burst of first-person, politically irrelevant humanity?

“Many editors do love this genre of journalism,” Freeman adds. This sort of story drives page views. “But do readers [love it]? Well, speaking purely from personal experience, I have yet to encounter a single woman ever saying to me, ‘Hey, did you read that article by that woman in The Daily Mail about how she only eats 500 calories a day, and how she knows that all women are secretly as self-obsessed as her? Wow, I loved that!’”

Well, I’ll be the first, Hadley.

THINKING OF FOR YOU

“I have no doubt that the women who write these articles truly feel the emotions they describe,” Freeman says dismissively in her Guardian piece. “But these women need help; they do not need to be made to feel that their professional USP is to play up their misery. Yet I’m a lot less bothered about the effect these articles have on the journalists who write them than I am about the readers who read them.”

Why? Because we’re so suggestible that reading about a woman’s losing battle with anorexia or another’s miserable journey to find youth in implants will destroy our idea of what it means to be a woman?

Freeman’s verdict is final: “This kind of journalism sets feminism back by about 50 years, because not only does it perpetuate offensive stereotypes about women as needy, helpless, childlike narcissists, it suggests that the most interesting thing a woman can offer up to others is her own battered, starved, bloated, enhanced or reduced body. And that seems a lot sadder to me than any shocking revelation I ever read in a single piece of confessional journalism.”

What I see here is not the call of feminism, what I see is women trying to silence other women. I see women dismissing the realities of other women using words and phrases like, “dangerous,” “self-hating,” “self-obsessed,” “childlike narcissists,” “needy,” “fucked up by aesthetic and social strictures,” “twisted view of what it means to be a woman,” and “not normal.” And that is a lot more horrifying to me than anything I have read in a confessional piece.

It’s clear that the writers of the confessional pieces are not in a happy place within themselves. Should we silence them, then? Should we cut their experience away and lock it up somewhere lest they tarnish the notion that women are strong, are invincible, are women? Heaven forbid they influence other women, who obviously can’t think for themselves! How dare the press and blogosphere not do more to keep this sort of rubbish away from the masses?

Anna N makes a point for me when she points out that no one who reads D’Souza’s piece is going to run to get implants. There is a lesson in her story, just as there is one in that of Jones and Lewis. The decision to get implants involves more than knowing what size breast you wish you had. The decision to limit your calorie intake has more consequences than physical ones. The choice to give up a relationship for your career is a big one.

They may not be happy stories, but look at fairy tales—before Disney had its way with them, that is.

“Stories are medicine,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her classic work Women Who Run With The Wolves. “They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”

Sterilizing the media of the battles that women (or men, for that matter) face everyday is not going to make us stronger. What does make us stronger is not being alone in our struggles. And when we hear the stories of those who have lived what we are living, we are heartened.

PLEDGE

I’m a confessional columnist. I have made terrible and wonderful mistakes in my life. I have been hurt, I have hurt myself and I have hurt others. I have questioned myself, I have lost myself and I have found myself. And I have written it all. I will never stop.

I think of Muriel Rukeyser again as I write this, those immortal lines: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”

In victory or defeat, we will not be silenced.

And if that’s a threat to feminism, then down with feminism.

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

24 Comments

Nobody Outs Rosa Parks

May 25th, 2009 by AV Flox in oversharing

“Is there such a thing as overuse of social networking tools?” asked The New York Times over the weekend. “In the online world, is the notion of a public/private divide simply not applicable?”

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and scholar of the social effects of the web, presented an interesting point, complete with an anecdote about his wilder days:

When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester studying abroad. We were a small group of students, far from home and not well integrated into the life of our host country, so a typical Friday would involve settling in at one of our various seedy flats and drinking.

One particular Friday evening, which started with lime-free tequila shots and moved to swigging cheap vodka from the bottle, my hair caught fire. (I think — though I am hazy on the details — that I may have set it on fire myself.) In any case, my hair lit up quite nicely, which might have alarmed me while sober, but on that particular evening, it seemed like the sort of thing that happens from time to time.

Fortunately, my friend Paul was better able than I was to imagine a bad outcome from leaving my hair alight. He leapt to his feet, staggered to the couch where I was sitting, and extinguished my head. My haziness notwithstanding, I have an indelible image of Paul leaning over me, his face lit by the flame, as he blew out my hair like a birthday cake.

Good times.

It’s a safe bet that one or more pictures of those proceedings would be on Facebook, had I not been born so deep in the last century that we had no Facebook.

Society has always carved out space for young people to misbehave. We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn’t see, because it was hidden, and behavior we could see, because it was public. That bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption.

Given this change, we need to find new ways to cut young people some slack. Privacy used to be enforced by inconvenience; you couldn’t just spy on anyone you wanted. Increasingly, though, privacy will have to be enforced by us grownups simply choosing not to look, since it’s none of our business.

This discipline isn’t just to protect them, it’s to protect us. If you’re considering a job applicant, and he has some louche photos on the Web, he has a problem. But if one applicant in 10 has similar pictures online, then you’ve got a problem, because you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage for talent, relative to firms that don’t spy.

People my age tut-tut at kids, telling them that we wouldn’t have put those photos up when we were young, but we’re lying. We’d have done it in a heartbeat, but no one ever offered us the chance. Now that kids have these capabilities, it falls to us to keep our prurient interest in their personal lives in check. Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

Could our overshares ever be accepted and embraced? It makes me think of a piece in The Austin Chronicle from March, which predicted the changes in society if this were the case:

This is who we were: communities of individuals who forged identities, selves, and lives via formal (or informal) interactions within a societal whole. We met one another at home, school, work, play, and everywhere else, and we did it all face to face. We were first persons singular or plural, intensely social creatures with a craving for companionship but neurotically fixated on who, exactly, we really were. I was and we were writers who wrote, readers who read, and artists who actuated the unreal, cunningly, with artifice that reflected not only our own inner selves but also the identity – the soul? – of our surrounding communities. Persons of cerebral substance, literally, recognizing ourselves in the morning mirror and muzzily wondering if anyone else saw what we saw. That was us for millennia.

This is who we are: communities of individuals who are online half the time; often inseparable from our laptops; clustered in the muted, ambient click-type drone of coffee shops or working late into the night alone in home offices; hearing the quiet pattering of unclunky keyboards; the kids in the kitchen instant-messaging before the bus arrives, after the bus arrives, on the bus; Dad scrolling through Slate/Wired/Salon or eyeing the tumbling economic dice; Mom wondering why she even bothered to get that now silly-seeming Realtor’s license; chatting; texting; iPhoning; linked-in; sharing our individual triumphs and tragedies, from Obama to Mumbai, in real time, for all the online world to see, read, and share. We are as quick and relevant as our streams of consciousness (and Twitter) allow. Today, transparency trumps privacy, because, honestly, who wants to keep it all bottled up at a time like this? Share enough, and maybe somebody will care enough.

This is who we will be: a single community; global; linked-in; variegated and living lives beyond the passé 20th century notions of borders, beyond languages; a new species almost, Philip K. Dick-ensian in our comfort with multiple on- and offline identities; keenly aware of the marketers and corporate data-mining that exist primarily to sell us back to ourselves; and able to take advantage of the strange sense of slow self-empowerment that arrived near fully formed once we realized privacy as it once was is no longer privacy as it has become, or needs to be. The more we share – online – the less we have to fear. Transparency is the new privacy, the new safety, the new community, the new flesh, the new you, me, I, we.

In 10 years’ time, no one will remember that racy photo you uploaded to your MySpace profile following a drunken collegiate revel, even though it will still be there, for those who care to dig down through the Web 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, hacking back through the digital crust into the ever-present past. Ten years from now, your twentysomething predilection for obscurantist Japanese hentai B&D porn will seem more quaint than sordid or even titillating: archaic, digital daguerreotypes with tentacles. Does it matter? Do we care? We’re digital pioneers birthing digital natives who will have to evolve, socially, psychologically, possibly physically, as fast as the data stream. Their very concepts of “self,” “community,” “privacy,” and the way they view and mirror their world – as individual people and as part of a far greater, online whole earth – will be as different from our current definitions of the same, as the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux are to the digital artisans of EA or Rockstar Games. Long live the new unflesh? Maybe. Probably. Yes.

… Why not? As a species, we’ve been building walls and erecting boundaries, metaphorical and otherwise, since the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey upgraded bones and blood for bricks and mortar. Why not start cyber-kicking holes in the fences, the fortresses, the prisons with which we’ve surrounded ourselves? Personal and societal self-discovery on an epic, historical scale appears to be finally within striking distance for much of the online world. Humanity’s me generation is being force-evolved by onrushing technology into some new state of we.

On May 11, the acclaimed author Paulo Coelho blogged about revealing shameful acts. He asked his readers to respond in the comments.

He received 195 responses.

Sharing connects us. In the web, we have found a new way to do it. And as Coelho noted in his post, telling these stories sets us free.

Bruce Sterling, Austin’s “once-and-futurist post-cyberpunk seer,” who was interviewed by The Chronicle put it this way: “there’s a lot to be said for being ‘out.’ Put a bold, Nicolas Sarkozy-style public face on your indiscretions. If you quiver all over, thinking you should privately hide in the back of the bus–’I'm private and invisible here, no one should know I exist’–that just strengthens the hands of bossy people who want to keep you hidden in the back of the bus. Nobody outs Rosa Parks.”

I imagine that image of the future and I like it. But it’s not here yet. It’s in our hands to bring it, to shatter the world with our truth.

Who wants to go first?

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page