Archive for October, 2009
I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…
How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?
I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.
Any thoughts?
the world famous Alberta Blue Sky, one of the few redeeming things about living here through the 8 month winter.
a view of a small corner of still-booming downtown Calgary, from across the tracks at MEC.
The Boy™ and I made a quick run down to MEC to exchange some cold-weather riding gear. I’d guessed wrong on the size for the shoe covers. Bring on the cold/wet weather!
Great, great article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone Magazine.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
and
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
and the tie-in to the next bubble – “green” carbon credits:
And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
holy. shit.
The greed inherent in unchecked capitalism is obvious. The rich get richer by sucking the less-rich into “investing” their money. They also provide “guidance” in the form of screaming “investment analysts” on cable news channels, ensuring the masses keep funnelling their retirement savings to prop up the pyramids so the rich can get their money out before it crumbles.
Why are there no mobs roving the streets with torches and pitchforks, demanding the heads of Goldman Sachs (and other leaders of this shitstorm)? Why are people taking the economic meltdown laying down?
Also, why are the best, most accurate, least adulterated sources of news and editorial critique coming from Rolling Stone Magazine and The Comedy Network? How fucked up do we have to get before we hold some feet to the coals? Does Mad Magazine need to scoop CNN on something big?
My folks droppd this off at our place on the weekend, along with some vintage 1971 Pooh books. This was one of my favourite stuffed animals as a kid – it must be very nearly 40 years old now – and I still remember the little guy’s eyes and red vest.
pre-dawn sunrise is reflected off streaks of high altitude clouds over northwest calgary.
anonymous blurs of light stream toward the downtown core during the morning commute.
I finally got my invite to Google Wave, and it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Google’s in a bit of a hard spot, because they have to live up to some insanely strong hype that was created by non-Google folks about how Google Wave Will Change The World! Google Wave Will Kill Blackboard/Windows/BinLaden/WorldHunger. Sure, there was some hype sparked by Google themselves, but most of the unrealistic stuff was spun by people dreaming about what Wave could possibly do, in some mythical Wave-enabled future.
Sure, Wave is big. It’s probably going to be useful. But for now, it’s really just a glorified, collaborative, polysynchronous “Hello World!” generator. Yes, you can embed Gadgets/Doodads/Whatnots. Yes, you can make it convert your text into Pirate Speak. Very cool. Awesome. I can feel the future changing.
So far, from my limited experimentation with it, it is too confusing to use as a conversation space. It’s too disconnected to use as a publishing medium. So, its real functions have yet to be discovered. It’s not email. It’s not the web as we know it. It’s something different. But that doesn’t mean there is anything necessarily wrong or broken about what we have now.
If I want to communicate, I’ll talk to people. Or IM. Or email. Or write a blog post. Or post a tweet. Or any of an uncountable list of other activities, none of which are replaced by Wave. And that’s OK. It’s not going to absorb and consume all online interaction. It’s not going to change the world. It doesn’t have to.
Now, get off my lawn.
Update: I hadn’t seen this post before I wrote this, but from Slate:
Live-typing illustrates Wave’s bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don’t need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it’s an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There’s too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that’s not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand. But Wave tries to fix these problems by replacing e-mail with an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and that introduces new problems of its own. You pretty much have to watch one of the Wave team’s instructional videos in order to learn how to do the simplest things—send a message, reply to a message, add more people to your message, etc. You’ve even got to learn a new nomenclature: In Wave, messages are called waves, which are themselves composed of smaller elements called blips. There’s also another class of message called pings, which are meant to be more urgent than waves—though once you’re done with a ping, it turns into a wave. Got that?
lines at the Crowfoot C-Train station, in a long exposure. There were maybe a dozen people walking through this shot, rendered invisible by time and light.
Cars slowly crawling along Crowchild Trail, which was backed up bumper-to-bumper all the way from Stoney Trail (nearly at the NW city limits) all the way into downtown. Neither the bus nor train were very crowded this morning. The people of Calgary have chosen cars above all else.