Posts Tagged ‘internet’

“Mommyblogging” (one word) was the recent topic of choice for Heather Lyn Fleming’s Master of Communications Thesis at SFU. Through a myriad of collective blog posts, Fleming wanted to know if she could delve deeper into the story behind the tweets. What were these writings telling us about modern-day mothers?

When the Mommybloggers in question saw the findings of the thesis, enough of them were horrified that the hash tag #creepythesis came to be. It’s not that Fleming was accusing them of locking their children in pet carriers or anything like that, it’s that the assumptions, gleaned from their publicly available writings, were incorrect. Fleming tried to paint a picture of these bloggers’ households that they had no control over, and this was simply unacceptable.

I can see how some people see the internet as this world-wide private journal. Look at my infinitesimal website stats if you don’t believe me. But if irrelevance is your only defense against scrutiny, you might be expressing yourself in the wrong medium. If we want the internet to fulfill its true potential, we need to accept that it is the most public and accessible form of communication there is. If people misunderstand you or if they don’t like your message, they are now able to tell you and the only thing you can do about it is write them a sternly worded note. This kind of criticism is no reason to abandon blogging all together. The greater good of any debate is served by more voices, not fewer. Just be prepared to take part in the debates that you start.

The nature of knowledge has become an interesting question lately. Knowledge used to take up space in the form of printed books. Now, a simple thumb drive can hold an entire library inside its RAM chips. MIT now posts course notes online for free, whereas before students would have to pay thousands just for the privilege of taking such notes. Many of the world’s websites are powered by Linux, an operating system that is free to download and completely open to anyone brave enough take a look inside its inner workings. If you want to be a knowledge worker, it’s not enough to have specialized knowledge. You must demonstrate that knowledge through blogs or collaborative websites like github.

If you ask me, I think that trade secrets are about to become obsolete. The idea that information can be controlled by legislation or ill-conceived software protection will soon be considered nonsense. Fortunately, this will not put an end to knowledge workers. While the human brain can never store as much data as a computer can, the ability to combine that data and use it to solve a problem is still the sole province of the good old wet noodle. It doesn’t matter that any knowledge, be it legal, medical, or mechanical, can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world. It still takes time to learn the information well enough for it to be useful. Humans can also categorize and prioritize all the right observations that correlate to the right kind of knowledge. Computers can only work with the data they are given. Even as computers get more complex, humans are still necessary to make sure the computer is solving the right kinds of problems. If or when human-like AI is invented, hopefully we’ll have a whole different set of problems to work with, like the coming robot revolution.

Fast Company posted an article on some revealing statistics about facebook users. While the total number of links, videos, and content are going up, the number of users actually sharing that content is going down. This should come as no surprise, since many online communities go through these kinds of usage curves (see The 90-9-1 Rule).

So once again, a social network has been taken over by a core contingent of oversharers. And farmville. Don’t forget farmville. If this is a stage that all web 2.0 sites go through, why do we bother with them in the first place? With the price of hosting going down every year, what’s to stop people who want to share links with their numerous friends from taking market share from these social media giants with sites of their own?

Miles Forrest tweeted this Mixergy interview between Seth Godin and Andrew Warner a little while ago. It talks about the “Lizard Brain”, the biological impulse towards safety and security that hampers our creativity. Godin’s secret to success is to test out lots and lots of ideas, bad ones, even. You might say he just throws crap against the wall and sees what sticks. The trick is to keep throwing the crap. Better yet, get a shovel.

The internet allows this process to happen at a vastly accelerated pace. You have your ideas out there and find out if they work in a matter of hours. The problem remains, what’s the difference between a failed idea and a successful one?

Take this blog for example. One could call it a failure just because it doesn’t bring down the traffic or revenue of John Chow or ProBlogger. However, I enjoy writing it. It’s a great space for self-talk. If anyone comments, hell, I’m over the moon. It doesn’t take much time, and I can write off the hosting.

In the end it doesn’t matter whether you pass one metric or another in your ideas. What matters is the action, even it’s small as getting someone else to say “Yeah, someone should do that.” Most important of all, it should make you happy in some way. Even if at the end of the day, all you have is some crap sticking to the wall.

The internet is a funny place to try and make your mark. Your success is not only dependent on the number of eyeballs you bring to your content, but also how many people link to your content. Think about this. The greatest entertainment force of the modern age is basically driven by banal e-mails spamming up some office’s Exchange server.

This presents a conundrum for anyone trying to increase their traffic. How does one go viral? Do you just get all of your friends to post links to your site? Does buying adspace work? You can have great content all you like, but it won’t matter if no one hears about it.

I think the big question is if there is such a thing as shameless promotion on the internet. How many links can you post to digg, twitter or reddit before it becomes annoying?  The problem with our society is that we’ve got it into our head that selling is not real work. We have all the tools of mass media at our disposal, but we shy away from using them out a sense of modesty. Unfortunately, if you are trying to start a business online, modesty might be a luxury you simply can’t afford.

Avatar is one of those movies that you just have to see. In our thousand-channel, billion-webpage universe, sometimes we need to have a collective cultural experience. The CGI is amazing. I couldn’t tell whether it was through the use of clever editing or new software tools, but the live action blended seamlessly with the animation in way I’ve never seen before. The story strikes a fine balance, incorporating enough hard science fiction ideas to inspire the visuals, but enough mythological tropes to keep the audience involved. It’s cheesy, but not too cheesy.

It is by no means a perfect movie. I would’ve liked to know why the corporation was willing to go through with genocide to get at their unobtainium (I would’ve called in macguffinite myself). This is a movie more about spectacle than nuance. But as the success of District 9 has shown us, there is room for intellectual SF movies as well as the booming blockbusters. Avatar has been an easy target for internet snark ever since the first trailers came out, but I find I part ways with the critics when they start talking about the film’s racist/mysoginist/ableist overtones.

I’m not going to go into every political grievance against this film. Even anti-smokers are getting into the game. Yes, Avatar is essentially “Dances With Wolves” in space, but that doesn’t make it white supremacist literature. People respond to this story, especially in North America because it is, in essence, their story. Most societies on the Western Hemisphere are here because of political edicts of older, more entrenched societies in Eurasia. As time went on, we adapted to our new home and eventually broke free of our autocratic masters from across the ocean. A lot of people died or were subjugated over this period of history, but it does not change the fact that it is our story. Instead of simply decrying movies like this, we should learn why they resonate with us, and in turn learn a bit more about ourselves.

What do stories like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, It’s a Wonderful life, and A Christmas Carol have in common? Now, I’m not talking about snow, Santa, and the Baby Jesus. That’s just trimmings on the tree, so to speak. If you were to take a critical survey of Christmas movies, poems, and literature, you might notice a few thematic trends. The protagonists all make a transition from a place of despair and doubt to a place of hope and belief.

Some people balk at this, claiming that these stories teach you that leaving behind your logical faculties is the key to happiness. While it’s true that these tropes have produced some truly awful Christmas specials, it addresses an issue that everyone (in the Northern hemisphere at least) has to deal with every December. The days are getting shorter and colder. The trees are black and bare. Those of us with central heat argue that there’s no reason for us to fear not making it through the winter in our modern society. Yet for reasons we cannot explain, we feel depressed. The negative thoughts and questions of our lives seem more present in the dark of winter. Are we good people? Are we living up to our potential? Do we really deserve all that we have? These thoughts begin to influence our decisions. At some point it’s not enough to know logically that winter will pass, that hope is real and just around the corner. We adorn our houses with the light that we so miss from brighter seasons. We give each other gifts so that we can symbolize in something physical. Some people even do daft things like erecting trees in their houses.

So if you’re concerned that you are celebrating a Holiday that is based on mere Christian/Pagan/Saturnalian traditions, or on things that aren’t real, ask yourself this. Is happiness you feel from Christmas real? If your answer is yes, then you understand that the celebration itself is its own reward. As long as we have the long, dark winter months, we will have Christmas.

How many of you out there practice digital hoarding? Do you have a collection of music, videos, or pictures that you’ve never seen before tucked away on some hard drive or other? These days, it’s so easy to generate large amounts of data with high resolution cameras, broadband internet connections, and DVRs that just squirrel away tv shows for you automatically. At the same time, because some of that data is protected by copyright, there is always some government or corporate agent in the press telling you that whatever you are doing with that data on your computer, it’s illegal and they are going to stop you by any means necessary. Most people’s response is to download like crazy before the hammer drops (it generally never does). To top it all off, the price of storage keeps dropping like a stone despite this recession.  This will only result in so much downloading that people can’t possibly watch, read, or listen to their entire ever-expanding collections. If the RIAA and the MPAA can’t stop downloads, they have certainly found a way to keep people from watching them.

Have you’ve ever seen a movie in the theatre, enjoyed yourself, laughed, cried, ate lots of popcorn, only to log on the internet to find out you are nothing but a big fat liar? This happened to me just a little while ago.  I saw “The Invention of Lying” in the theatre and had the grave misfortune of enjoying it non-ironically. The usual excuses were useless to me. Telling the nearby film snob to “turn your brain off” wouldn’t work. I believed the thought experiment of a world without lying was brilliant. I entered the theatre of sound mind and free of chemical influence. But when I say “The Invention of Lying” was a great film, I have a metacritic score of 58, a rotten tomatoes score of 56%, and a debut at #5 at the box office proving that I am nothing but an enemy of good taste.

There is a war going on in Hollywood. The talented writers, directors, and actors are locked in fierce combat with fearsome studio executives summoned from the stygian pits of ivy-league law schools. Their prize is nothing less than the creative soul of the developed world. The resources to create the films we enjoy are tended by soulless comptrollers with no regard for the product they are trying to create. When you see a bad movie, enjoy said movie, and then recommend it to your friends, you are feeding the machine responsible for “Meet the Spartans” or “Couples Weekend”. It doesn’t matter if YOU liked the movie. There is only one objective standard of taste, and if you can’t get in line, you are siding with the demons. In fact, for every movie you like, you are crowding movies that other people like. So if you want to cover all your bases, if you want build a film landscape that is pure and free of undue influence, you have to do the honorable thing. Never like anything.

Enlighten us. Fill us in. Give us the scoop, the lowdown, the dirt and the muck. What the hell were you just blathering about in that cryptic-ass facebook status?

Are happy? Are you depressed? Are you horny? Are you high? Really, it’s anyone’s guess. “So-and-so is…” are three dots really supposed to express yourself to your friends and family? Do we need to get the “real you” to get past the disjointed poetry, the typos, and the inability to use nouns?

All right. I get it. You’re deep. Special even. You have me completely enthralled with your non sequiturs. Now what am I supposed to do? Facebook messages often go unheeded because the reply box is aaaallll the way down at the bottom of the message. Should I phone you? Not a possibility. Your personal info was deemed much too precious to be molested by the rabble on the Internet.

Facebook has the potential to be the greatest gossip rag in the history of all communication. Tabloid celebrities are only a bland substitute for the people we are really obsessed with- each other.

Each one of us has a basic need to relate to the people we actually have a chance of meeting face to face. We want to praise the highs, console the lows, and occasionally engage in a bit of recreational schadenfreude. When we click “yes” on that friend request we not only agree to abide by the site’s terms of service, we pick up an obligation to relate to that person, as well as make some goddamn sense.