Blanketing the defense

No, I'm not talking about how surprisingly well the Bills are playing this year.

Rather, I'm talking about how the supposedly sensitive and endangered nation of the US needs to be so careful about itself that it can't produce the appropriate constitutionally-required evidence against John Perry Barlow in order to prove or disprove his claim of being duped.

I know I believe him, but believing isn't enough. They're supposed to give up the evidence in court and so far, his attempts to get them to produce evidence and testimony have met with the blanket statement that it is all so "sensitive" that it threatens "national security".

Yeah right. Reason 326 I'm glad I'm Canadian right now.

Missing online shopping

Despite the depressing media doomsday dialogue about online shopping, hackers, fraud, theft, blah blah, I'm not afraid to do it. I like the convenience of it, the selection, the fact I can do it in my bunny slippers at home (or would if I actually owned bunny slippers).

Since Canada is finally starting to get it and more and more stores are putting up an online presence complete with shopping cart ability, I'd love to do more and more of my shopping online through real stores rather than just eBay.

Don't get me wrong - I still love eBay. But when you're trying to buy a gift for someone and don't necessarily want to have to worry about whether it will cross the border in time for the big day, you'd much rather keep your money north of the 49th and buy from a store with a true money-back guarantee and liberal return policy.

So why don't I? Because the lack of a simple little piece of plastic prevents me. A credit card.

Used to have one, but ran it up scarily high. The stress of the debt was too much for me. So it got paid off and cancelled. And I'm now CC-less. Feels good...until I go try and shop online.

What I don't understand is why the Canadian banks don't get together and offer an online form of debit payment like the Interac system used in stores, restaurants and even for at-home pizza delivery now too. Heck, apparently 2/3 of the population of this country now use debit cards instead of cash.

Paypal is nice, but few large reputable etailers really want you to "wire" them cash like that. Switch-style debit-cards unwritten by Visa would be even nicer. I had these in Bermuda when I lived there in 1996 and adored it. I could use it as a Visa in places where debit cards don't tread, but the effect was still the same - money direct from my account, rather than ringing up a debt I'd have to pay off eventually.

It's not like it would be that difficult - Canada's banking system is much more homogenized than the US, given banking regulations here. But alas! The banks haven't yet figured out we'd depend on them even more if they offered this kind of service and thus I must live without access to the clicks-and-bricks shopping for the foreseeable future. And they wonder why Canadians lag behind the US in online shopping? Humph!

So when people ask me this year why I didn't do my Christmas shopping online this year, I'll end up mumbling something about the lack of plastic in my life and changing the subject quickly.

Google keeps its eye on search

Google is planning on scanning the collections of a variety of huge libraries in the US, including Harvard and Stanford universities and the wonderful New York Public Library and making them searchable through it.

Think it will let me take out books online using my Concordia U student card and have them USPSd to me? I'd certainly get much better access to digital culture books than I do here - Concordia has only 73.

Joke of the week

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the impending end of the semester, I found the following "Truth about Reindeer" while procrastinating hard on my sociology of fear and risk paper...

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa's reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen - had to be a girl. We should've known.

Only women, while pregnant, would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night and not get lost.

The empowered porn blog

What is beauty? What is pornography? What is empowerment? All key questions in the lives of the post-modern woman.

These are questions that the group blogcommunity SuicideGirls (warning! nudity!) takes head-on through their self-portrayals of actual digital-minded alterna-grrls in all their tattooed, pierced, goth, tech-loving glory, rendered in brutal honesty. It's a commmercial blog too - to browse it, at some point you've got to pay for it.

Found this via the Journal of Media and Culture, who said:

SuicideGirls.com is an adult community that offers a mix of eroticism, creativity, personality and intelligence. SuicideGirls is about so-called empowered eroticism; it provides a site where girls outside of mainstream culture can express their individual style through soft erotic images, and web logs

Truly a post-modern phenomenon - females using the Internet to willingly participate in former disempowering tactics (taking off their clothes for money) with the intention of showcasing a style of female beauty that has nothing to do with a $30 lipstick and $3000 set of silicones, all with the goal of self-empowerment outside the boundaries of the mainstream.

Cool vacation for music lovers

While doing some serious procrastinating on my SOCI 460 end-term work this afternoon, I was browsing through my favourite online new music site, Aware Store. In addition to finding out about two new artists whose albums I'll have to get (Marc Broussard and The Virginia Coalition) I also found out about the Rock Boat cruise tour that will take place next fall. It's a four day cruise on the Mississippi and the lineup of artists made me breathless. oh do I want to go! Might need to start saving my loonies....

One more reason I miss you, TO

While browsing Hodder's blog, I came across a post of hers about the term "album". What interested me is not the debate about what to call the digimusic we now all consume today (okay all of us who live any kind of wired lives). Rather, what interested me is the side note she posted below her primary post in which she says she's looking for a website or "podcast" that deals with the history of new music (okok I'm deliberately misinterpreting her, 'cause she was looking for history of "pop"). Still, it got me thinking about my favourite radio station on the planet, 102.1 The Edge out of my favourite city on the planet, Toronto.

So I clicked over to find that Alan Cross, Edge 102's resident new music historian, has put together an excellent historical overview of one of my favourite bands, Coldplay, whose song "Daylight" is one of my favourite ringtones on my LG5550.

(For those of you curious about this stuff, Alan has written a few good books about the history of new music, including this one).

Reading it and browsing the site makes me wistful and annoyed in equal measure.

Wistful because dammit I miss that city.

Annoyed that I can't find a station here in Montreal half as good - everyone here seems to want hiphop/pop, dance/house or "oldies). While I can tune into The Buzz out of Burlington, VT, their endless ads for VT merchants, annoying DJs and complete lack of Cancon bugs me. That, plus the fact their signal isn't strong enough to come through with distinct crackle.

And as cool as satellite radio is, it isn't really properly available in Canada yet.

All more reminders (as if I needed them) of why Toronto is so cool. The city of my heart.

God, I miss you, TO!

Going digital

A friend sent me a link to this Wired article about the "digital life" and the trends towards living it. While the article is interesting in a general way, it would have been more interesting by far if they'd spent more time on the social aspects of the life Mary Hodder lives in the digital, rather than dredging up tired stats about how people currently use the net.

The article cites an Online Publisher's Association poll that states that people currently use the net more for content than for communication or searching. Am I the only one that sees the flaws and biases in that statement?

First of all, searching isn't an activity -- you don't approach your web browser saying, "oh I'm going to spend an hour or so using Google to search the Internet". Searching isn't an end, it's a means. If I didn't see stats, then, that say that people use the net more for content than for searching, I'd be worried.

Another part of that which bothers me is the focus on "communications". I'd like to see such lists drop searching and add a different term: "sociability". In the sociological sense, sociability is the act of being social, of interacting with others, of connecting and sharing with other people in those uniquely human ways.

How is that different from communications? In its purest sense, communication is about sharing information; thus the end goal of communication is content. When used to talk about the net, as it was in the article, Communications is a lump-sum term that has come to stand-in for sociability, interactivity, tool-use, etc. As a result, it has been devalued. I'd like to see communication return to its roots as a term that really describes one-to-one exchange of information. In effect, the kind of communication I envision is a sub-set of sociability.

On the net, the term communication tends to mean email. Yes we all know that now, 10+ years after the dawn of the web, email is still the "killer app". It is the reason most people get their first access to the net and it is the reason why many people keep it. So yes, communication as done through email between individuals is important. So keep the term, preserve it for that.

I'd like to see sociability added in, though, to track, chart and allow us to ponder the myriad ways we use the net for social purposes. While I recognize that I may still be a bit on the vanguard of this style of sociability, I honestly do not believe it will be long before the rest of you follow closely behind me and start joining (or even forming?) your own online social spaces. So why not start studying and measuring it?

Of course, as you know if you this space often enough, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

So ... yeah....sociability. Important term, especially for the net and web. Had the Wired article paid sociability more attention, it would have been far more interesting and thought provoking.

Barlow is blogging

John Perry Barlow is a welcome addition to the blogosphere. Go read him. You'll see why.

Georgetown CCT program

Given that I'm getting closer to the finish line on my Honours BA studies at Concordia, I've started earnest research on graduate schools that have a program that jives with my digital culture and ispace interests. Through the excellent Association of Internet Researchers (AIR-L) list, I found this program at Georgetown University that seems to have everything I want - innovation, research-focused, respectable and prestigious university and generally like-minded people.

This one goes on my own personal shortlist and renews my hope that, given my academic performance to date, despite the fact it's at Concordia, I may have a chance of securing a fellowship in a program like this one.

eBay & Grilled Cheese

I was trying to figure out what pithy words I could come up with to go along with this unusual eBay auction...but words fail me. Just go check it out for yourself while I go buy myself a chocolate bar - I'm suddenly feeling peckish.

Dungeons & Dragons

I know several people who play the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. They're doctors, lawyers, programmers, bankers, in short - adults. Known as D&D to its fans and players, it isn't about maladjusted angst-ridden teen boys running around in dark caves pretending to kill one another and sometimes succeeding (That was the plot of a real movie I saw once - Tom Hanks was even in it).

Instead, D&D is old-school game play. There is no sleek console required, no computer, no wires, no chips (other than the potato kind maybe). It requires imagination, communication skills, some grasp of math (probably the reason I never got into it), some graph paper, a pencil and a motley assortment of odd multi-sided dice. It also requires that each player create an identity and the process of creating a character (referred to as "rolling a character") is all about coming up with something original and that feels like a person you'd want to embody while still respecting the rules of the game. Goffman would have loved it.

Another thing the game most often requires is time. While many newer gamers play weekly 2-3 hour sessions, many of the more hardcore players prefer games that last an entire weekend or even an entire week. These game groups become very dedicated to each other, creating their own small very loyal communities, occasionally travelling long distances to play with a specific group they've become a part of over time.

D&D is in its 30th year, and while it was touch and go for a while through the late 80s and into 90s as Pong gave way to Donkey Kong which lead to Halo, it's enjoying a resurgence despite our digitized world.

Wizards of the Coast, the owners of the license and copyright for D&D, could be credited with this resurgence. In a brilliant move that coincided with the 21st century ongoing clash around copyright versus freedom of information, WoC released in 2000 its new D20 way of playing version 3.0 of the game and announced that the new D20 game system underlying the play would be open source. So long as their well-laid out rules on using the system were respected, publishers were free to based other games on the system.

This has paved the way for other companies to use the game system to deliver games that use other themes not related to wizards and elves and orcs. A few such game are Star Wars and Spycraft.

This is significant because it allows players to built a base of knowledge in a single system that can be played across multiple environments, leveraging their investments in the game books, diversifying their world possibilities and giving WoC a dedicated and increasingly sophisticated pool of players to whom to market add-ons and magazines and such.

It also enabled a thriving online community of dedicated players who regularly contribute public goods to the gaming community, such as player character generators, world scenarios and maps and various kinds of arcana. With hundreds of websites, mailing lists, webrings and a still-thriving Usenet newsgroups centred around the game, D&D is very much a part of the net. One of the more popular gamer-run online communities, EN World, recently raised a respectable amount of money in a very short time to keep their community going, all based on a simple request for donations by the communities caretakers.

D&D play groups are among the more popular groups on Meetup.com.

The book players need to know the rules, the Player's Handbook, has a very respectable Amazon.com sales ranking of 1,031 out of all books on Amazon (it sells better than the Bible). There is even a Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies coming out in April 2005.

Hundreds from around the world flock annually to a gaming convention called Gen Con to learn more about what will be new and to reconnect with other avid players. There is even a decent book out that traces the roots of the current digital RPG and MMORPG to D&D.

Just goes to show that technology hasn't completely supplanted face-to-face game-centred group sociability. It also shows that community at all scales, small scale micro and massively networked, is alive and well as centred around D&D.

Patron saint of geeks?

Move over St. Isidore - it seems like there's another saint in town preferred by hackers, geeks and nerds.... and it's St. Expedite.

No special treatment for disgruntled Democrats

After Tuesday's disappointing result, it looks like there have been enough Americans eyeing the north border that the Canadian government felt compelled to release a statement saying, basically, that they'll have to get in the immigration line with everyone else.
[thanks to my pal Kelly for the link]

Election Day USA

No doubt that is the headline that will scream across newspapers and stream across television screens in the US today. Election Day. Time for change. Time to vote.

I'm Canadian so I can't vote in this one, as badly as I want to do something to show that I believe Bush needs to be turfed.

Instead, I have to sit on the sidelines and hope that people like my hero Derek can make enough of a difference to turf Bush.

Derek speaks of his usual approach to politics and news. As often happens with him, his views and attitudes mirror my own. He says:

I treat politics like dog shit on the sidewalk - I avoid it as much as possible, but every once in a while I forget and get some on my shoe. Then I hope the stink doesn't linger too long.But not this year. Because this year, even someone half paying attention has to see that George W. Bush is destroying America. A pointless war, a tanking economy, and a job market as bad as any I've ever seen. Clinton may have embarrassed us with a stain on a dress, but Bush has embarrassed with a stain on the world.

(To read Derek's entire post, go here...)

If you're American and you're reading this, please vote. I'm gambling on the fact that if you're American and you read my space often, you're a lot like Derek and me, and you wouldn't be voting for Bush. So -- go! vote! please!

Make a difference on election day. Put an X on the Democratic ballot on my behalf.

Dull Men's Club

Look here. Enough said.

Fear & risk on Halloween

Fear is supposed to be part of Halloween. That was the fun of it - the idea of things getting all spooky and scary and weird.

At the same time, the spookiness and fear was supposed to be safe. Then along came the stories and reports. Next thing you know, parents are scared for real. Should they send their kids out? Will the little devils and divas and witches and ghosts get sick from the treats they gather? Suddenly the fear was coupled to risk in a way that made my parents and many others very wary about All Hallowed Eve.

However, it turns out that all those stories you've heard about razor blades in apples and poison in candy are actually urban legends., the famous urban-legend-debunking site Snopes says. So, too, do all the sociological literature on fear and risk.

So send out the kiddies tomorrow and don't worry if they sneak a few chocolate bars into their mouths before you have time to check over their haul. The little goblins will be fine.

Virtual stranger

When is a phone not just a phone? When it is also a people tracker.

Word of the day

Move over liminality...

You've been replaced.

My new favourite word of the day is limerence.

It refers to that strong infatuation period you encounter when you meet someone new and feel an instant, deep and intense attraction to them.

I can see it working better though for my purposes as the deep infatuation feeling people get about a new technology or system...as shown to me recently when my colleague Michael was extolling the virtues of Flickr to me recently over lunch.

[Found via downloading the PDF (72kb) of Angela Lewis' article on cyberspace limerence. Her article was originally published in the ACA Journal, Vol 4, no 1, 2004.]

Mustard does not = ketchup

A great story from the New Yorker magazine, written by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame, it's about a man who gets inspired by mustard to create a better ketchup, but can't seem to beat out Heinz.

Considering that Canadians prefer their ketchup sweeter than Americans, I wonder if Jim Wigon considered trying to sell it here? After all, it has maple syrup in it...it's bound to sell well in Quebec, at least.

Quantum moments

I know I've said and thought stuff like this, though it was usually related to elections, not sports. [Requires free NY Times account to view] [found via Arts & Letters Daily]

New sidebar section

I'm trying to put my head further and further into the i-space by paying attention to what academics are saying and writing about the Internet or are actually doing on the Internet.

(I always wondered why, in English, the textual verb we use is on, not in, as in "I found this in the Internet, the way it is in French "dans l'internet".)

Thus, as of today, I'm going to try to maintain a list in the sidebar (over there on the right) of references to articles and books that have crossed my mental radar and that I want to get around to checking out in depth at some point.

If you have others you want to share with me, drop me a note or include them here in the comments. Given how little availability and few resources Concordia has on academic items of this subject, I need all the help I can get to self-empower myself through the completion of my Honours thesis.

Walking through wires

Part photo collage, part idea monologue, part free-form essay, Walking through Wires is all together rather fascinating.

Digital Future Project

Through the Digital Future Project, the University of Southern California's Centre for the Digital Future has released its New Internet report on the Internet use of Americans. Tracking usage over a four year time period, I'm not surprised they have noticed changes.

Among their findings:

• Internet usage is on the rise, with 3/4 of the US population now reporting they have access.
• Number of hours spent online has risen to an average of just over 12 hours a week.
• The websites users "trust" the most are those of the media and government agencies.

That last finding troubles me, along with its sister finding that people trust individuals' sites the least. While I'm not silly enough to think that there isn't a lot of inaccurate information out there on individual sites, I am Marxist enough to worry that the war for the eyeballs and trust of the masses is being given up once again to the status quo institutions.

Also, the study still conceptualizes online communications as being email only. While I can't contest this empirically, my gut feeling is that this is no longer the case. Even I was surprised at the number of people in one of my classes who report feeling "close ties" to various online communities. I would have preferred to have seen more nuanced questioning around this topic.

Still, in the conclusion of the study, the researchers are careful to note that online activity is just that - active. It isn't passive or uni-directional. They also note that the impact of the Internet on society must be taken seriously and that is certainly is being treated seriously by marketers.

They end the report with a shot across the bow of anyone who would attempt to trivialize the Internet's impact on society. They make a suprisingly empassioned case for the need to study the Internet's social impacts now, immediately.

Ten years ago, it would have seemed wildly farfetched to have predicted that the Internet might become the most influential change agent to affect culture since the creation of moveable type; today, that idea seems not so unreasonable" [P.98].

The group aims to keep the research going until they have hit the ten year milestone. I'm going to keep an eye on this reseach in the coming years - it will be interesting to see their progress and the evolution of their research approach and focus.

Download the PDF of the full report (251kb)

[report found via Tracy Kennedy's Netwoman blog]

Speaking of confessions...

Stumbled across this online space for anonymous confessions of every sort.

Browsing through the entries, my personal cares and woes fell away, humbled into silence.

Borrow "Farenheit 9/11" for free

In a brilliant political gambit, the documentarian Michael Moore has worked out a deal with video rental stores across the US to give free rentals of his movie Farenheit 9/11 on October 26.

Chuckle of the Day: Potential

Because not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up...

Decoding the discourse of negativity

In the Sociology of Fear and Risk course I'm taking this semester, I'm learning about how the discourses of power, fear, risk and hope are played out in the Western world. It has gotten me thinking a lot about these subtexts and how they're often applied to the examination and discourses around information technology generally and the Internet in particular.

One of the things I'm puzzling through is how or why the media choose to cover the negative or undesirable side effects of living with and through the Internet. Stories like this one about "cyberchrondia" (their term!) are examples of this decidely negative slant. The overall submessage seems to be that we need to fear the content we find online and fear our own desire to turn to the Internet as a source of information.

While I'm not so Marxist as to boldly claim that it is actually a message of containment, in which "They" want to keep us dependant on actual board-certified physicians and want us to stay disempowered, I can't help but wonder what the purpose of publishing such stories is. True, it is partly just market economics - negativity sells. But my studies this semester are starting to suggest other agendas as well.

Flash mobs

I'm quite interested in the type of transient and diffuse social phenomenon exhibited by flash mob behaviour. While the boundary between organized social action and flash mobbing seems a bit permeable, the latter fascinates me more probably because of its seeming randomness.

I found this overview of flash mobs and it even mentions Rheingold's concept of Smart Mobs. Good stuff!

Internet still seen as a tool

The third set of results of a mega study of young people's participation on the Internet in the UK was released today. In the report, they took the slant of trying to determine what the split was between levels of participation in civic interaction versus "other" activities. Sadly, there was no mention of community or even connectedness really with others -- the researchers seemed to have focused on Internet use as a solitary activity.

I find this notable and sad simultaneously because this survey was heavily funded, empirically driven, sociological in focus and sponsored by a large number of major corporations. The opportunity was definitely there to attempt to determine empiraclly how British youth use the online space for interpersonal connectedness, but the opportunity was ignored in favour of the entrenched view of the Internet as tool rather than space.

Pity.

Is Powerpoint evil?

I confess: I create a lot of Powerpoint presentations. I do a lot of standing in front of small crowds of people in corporate boardrooms hitting the [Enter] key and spouting off on my topic du jour. It's an unfortunate side effect of my day job. I never intended to become a Powerpoint dominatrix - it just sort of happened over the years.

Thus, it's probably not that surprising that I'm the go-to gal for any of my friends who need to learn and use this colourful tool of the Dark Side in order to better their grades and impress their profs.

My friend, Kelly has been availing herself lately of my help as she prepares to give a presentation of her digital game research in front of the GameCODE crowd today.

So I laughed out loud when reading Metafilter today. Kelly, this link's for you. Sorry I can't make it to the meeting today to cheer you on. Go on -- Break a leg!

Girls and their toys

The boys can keep their Xboxes, 21" LCD monitors and way-cool iPods.

This girl will take this comm toy instead. Or will dream about it at least - it isn't yet available in Canada.

Now if only you could buy colour skins for it. It would be mag cool in purple.

Chuckle of the day

From ABC News: Satellite destroys villager's house in China

Not laughing at the damage, but rather at the comment by the Chinese space experts, who say

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this."

He's back!

Sound the trumpets. Gibson's back in the blogosphere.

When asked why he's decided to start his blog up again, he quoted the Spanish philospher Unamuno, who said "At times, to be silent is to lie".

[found via webmink]

Bar-coding humans

The more I look for indications of fear at work in society, the more stories I find of technologies and processes put in place to manage possible "just-in-case" scenarios.

To whit: There is a growing interest in RFID technology in North America, as the latest thing in ruthlessly efficient supply chain management. Walmart is going to be one of the largest users of RFID on the planet when they finish their own project later in the year.

While I have no issues with the idea of tagging pallets full of dish soap, baby sleepers and women's shoes, I do have an issue when they start tagging babies and women. And men and boys too, obviously.

This story in eWeek speaks about just such a possibility for the purposes of ensuring consistent error-free medical attention. The underlying message in the article is that the technology is worth it to ensure that you are treated properly and not subject to medical malpractice.

Huh? Excuse me if I fell asleep and missed something, but isn't the responsibility for ensuring appropriate medical attention when one is in the hospital on the shoulders of the hospital and its staff themselves?

The fear that is communicated in that story, via telling us that this is a good idea, is the fear of being ill-treated at the hands of the medical profession. It is the fear of not having control over our bodies and health. But it still seems fishy to me that they'd prefer we bar-code ourselves so they can scan us like so much merchandise rather than figure out a more efficient way of managing information about us without making us feel like dish soap on a pallet in a medical warehouse.

So, once again, the classic Stuart Hall question - who is being served by this message?

I may dream of wetware that will make my life better one day. This isn't it.

Canada creates smart mob potential?

In Concordia's recent Thursday Report, I found this interesting presentation of the upcoming Mobile Digital Commons Network project that intends to create smart mob capability by overlap physical and digital space through the use of handheld technology such as cellphones and PDAs.

While we're going to take a bit longer than some countries to get to a smart mob mass, this project should still produce interesting fodder for study for those of us here in the Maple Leaf country interested in this sort of converged juxtapolisition of being and space and time.

Overstepping boundaries

The idea that you can host your server outside of countries that don't completely recognize free speech or open commerce has been an important concept on the net since the early days. I remember the first time I had to advise a client to host his server in the Philippines in order to get around a tax and censorship law that was looking likely to be passed here in Canada.

This concept of the absolute nature of physical national boundaries in the meat realm being ported into the digital realm has shaped many ways in which the net itself is organized or used. Just look at the country domains for many countries as n example - the notion of nation is still prevalent in the digital context.

Equally, the notion of nations being unable to flex their politico-legal muscle beyond their existing physical boundaries in non-digital space has been usually regarded as true for the net as well. So I'm more than a little alarmed at how far over those boundaries the US has gone recently in order to assert their cultural views of what is good or right or legal.

Case in point: The recent server and hard drive storage seizure by the FBI at Indymedia in the UK.

• The issue as covered on Metafilter
  
• News coverage of the issue at the Register, a UK alternate media outlet for IT professionals
  
• Statewatch's coverage of the issue - Statewatch is a civil liberties group that monitors happenings in Europe
• Indymedia's own "late breaking news" page on the issue
• The Slashdot post from a Seattle techie who said they received the order from the FBI (and she notes that she asked them for the URL they were concerned about, they "didn't know what a URL was")
  

What do I find disturbing about this? Quite a few things, actually.

First off, the fact that the FBI is supposedly an agency whose mandate is for work within the long-established, mapped and understood physical realm boundaries and borders of the US. The accepted split is that they take care of things at home and the CIA takes care of things abroad.

Secondly, why did the UK bow to this? One would assume they believe in the absolute sovereignty of their own physical realm boundaries and that they would reject any attempt by any other nation or state to control or dictate the social, political or legal happenings within those borders.

The third and perhaps most oxidize to my mind is the fact that this over-stepping of boundaries is intended to get at content and community that exists in the digital realm. Some will argues, "yes but it was just servers they seized" to which I would argue that this isn't the case. They have seized ideas, concepts, identities of individuals who participated in the Indymedia network, indeed they seized a part of a thriving community that was not under their control anyway.

Finally, I find it interesting that a few days have passed since the original incident and very little coverage of the issue has circulated in the mainstream media.

Ok so maybe I'm being an idealist. I'm sure plenty of arguments about traditional versus grassroots power could be thrown my way. And I don't say that they are necessarily invalid.

I guess I'm just disturbed by how intent the US is on maintaining hegemonic control over ideas, even in realms that they don't own, manage or have operated on their own physical soil.

Renovations

I'm making changes around here. I met someone recently who has given me the inspiration to say, "out with the old, in with the new". Talking with them about blogging, I realized that I've had the same interface for *gasp* 2 years! and it was getting creaky and things weren't working anymore, such as the permalinks, or weren't working well, such as the comment feature.

So don't be surprised if you find that on some days over the next few weeks that this space looks horrible.

I'll get it back in shape though. I-Space 2.0 I guess?! :-)

:: Images marry words in blogs ::

A few years ago, when I first started blogging here, I posted a few entries about how the blogging medium was strikingly word-centric. At the time, it was rare to find photos or images on people's blogs and I remember thinking that this pointed to a certain primacy of textual meaning over visual.

I've since had people criticize me for this view, by pointing out that text is visual. My argument was (and I guess still is) that the visual isn't the same - words still leave more room for imagination, interpretation, individual choice. Photos and images are so framed by their takers that they are easier to use to exclude or contain meaning, rendering the viewer of them more passive in their possibilities for interpretation.

(If you've ever seen photos of me, you'd know what I mean - In pics, I always look pasty, dull, fat, even somewhat vapid...not words most people who know me in the meatworld would use...)

But with the rise of systems like Flickr and Hello and the ascension of a whole new kind of blogging called photoblogging, what does this new wave and new style of blogging do to my argument now?

:: Smart & micro ::

While I don't usually pay all that much attention to news of cars anymore, a friend forwarded me this link to a Wired story about a new kind of car coming out of a new kind of car company.

The company is a spin-off of Mercedes and the car, called the ForTwo, is...well..cute. And smart. And micro. No, not as in techno-wired. Micro as in tiny.

To whit: "The Fortwo can park practically anywhere, even sideways in a compact garage spot" the article notes.

Just check out this picture [click on the thumbnail to expand it]

Oh..and it's interesting to note that CNN doesn't think that the ForTwo will take off in North America.

:: Slash Fiction::

In another of this semester's courses, I need to do a library research project on any topic of my choice, but it needs to be done in a group setting with other classmates. I put together a group that would be willing to do something that relates to the online context and so we are working on doing research on the concept of online fan and slash fiction communities.

With that in mind, I stumbled across this overview of The Hive, a fan fiction community for fans of Laurie R. King's mystery novels. It has an excellent description of the nature of fan fiction that I find quite useful. Plus the links to other fan fiction sites are quite helpful.

:: Permeable borders ::

While reading Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, I came across a passage on page 19 about the difference in people's impressions of nationalty and their nation's ability to be "ruled" based on how fixed/rigid or porous/flexible the borders of nation were. Anderson makes the point to show the difference between the dynastic system that is a monarchy and the supposedly merit-based system that is most modern-day governments.

His point leans more towards the difference between spiritual/divine oriented systems (i.e. monarchy) and rational-legal systems (i.e. democracy). However, his point about the permeability and fluidity of national boundaries in monastic systems got me to thinking about how this same issue in the online space might facilitate self-government rather than dynastic ownership, effectively flipping his argument on its ear for our purposes of studying online communities.

Here's my thoughts:

• The innate nature of the web allows for linking to other pages/sites on the web. If we equate the web to a world of its own, you could then equate each website to being its own webnation within that webworld.
• Because the innate nature of the web allows easy access and linking between these webnations, in effect, it makes the boundaries between nations porous, fluid. A webnation can always bring in ideas and symbols from other webnations by linking them in and then reuse those ideas and symbols for its own purposes.
• In effect, this creates a defacto grassroots style of community management that keeps the nation flexible, dynamic, interpretive, the antithesis of a "divine" controlled monarchy but also not really a rationalized place such as we see in Canada/US.

So..with this in mind, the questions I'm pondering have to do with the effects of this grassroots nature on any given community (what I was calling here a webnation)...

Does the permeability and fluidity of the community's boundaries in the online space account for the quicker speed in which members of an online community often find intimacy with one another, identity within the community and a feeling overall of connectedness and membership and belong?

P.S. An interesting overview of some of the ideas from the book are found in a culture course overwiew on the University of Chicago's website, not that I agree with all of their conclusions, mind you.... ;-)

:: Negativity and technology ::

Why is it that all the mainstream press seem to be able to talk about when discussing technology is the negative slants and aspects?

This recent article from the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans is yet another example. Instead of discussing the issue of how technology enables new ways of living and being, they use the example of a dead man who wasn't discovered dead for two years because his bank accounts were setup to automatically deduct all his monthly expenses directly from his account.

Of course, they bring techo-luddite Neil Postman into the mix as well.

Is this more fear-mongering? I think that's probably a bit harsh, yet still, with the the mainstream media stories seeming to consist only of news about computer viruses, hackers, credit card theft online, people lying about their age/identity in chat rooms and the supposedly bad side effects on children who play video games etc. etc. you'd never know there were upsides to our wired world's way of life.

:: Sir Tim and the Semantic Web ::

As this Technology Review article notes, Tim Berners-Lee did not gain a lot of financial advantage from his inventions of the World-Wide Web but has certainly been reaping status and other things as a result of it.

The truly notable thing though about this article is more the definition it provides of Sir Tim's latest baby, the Semantic Web. While I've heard a colleague extol the virtues of the semantic web for a few years now, I never really understood it that well or its advantages until I read this article.

Rather than botch my own explanation of it here, I encourage you to go read the article and learn about it and Sir Tim yourself.

:: Skepticism and vigilance ::

I've been told that I'm overly cynical of the members of the Fourth Estate, given that I once had aspirations myself of being a journalist, or at least a columnist.

Stories like these about the invented news that crops up in respected media channels give me food for my skepticism.

Cynical? No. Critical? You bet. And so should you be too. As the article states, "Today's reporting needs to be read with a great deal of skepticism and vigilance".

:: Another tool in the copyright wars ::

I came across a tool called Copyscape that boldly claims it provides "Interent Infringement Protection".

While I'm not sure exactly what they mean by that, I think it is an interesting tool for authors to add to their arsenal as they attempt to stem the tides of cultural appropriation in the war to preserve the Industrial Revolution's concept of copyright.

:: Blog of note ::

Jean Burgess is a graduate student who maintains a blog called creativity / machine centred around the emerging academic field of Internet Studies, the same field I want to hurry up and become a formal part of.

In any case, his blog is thought-provoking and definitely one to watch.

:: Cat lovers galore ::

People say I pay too much attention to my dog, Sandy. I have tons of pics of her (though strangely none have made it to this blog) in my wallet, my tube at work, on my laptop.

But, dog lover that I am, even I would not have had the weird but cool brain turn to come up with something as interesting, odd, photograph-filled and waste-of-time-yet-addictive as the Infinite Cat Project.

Brings to mind the Big Red Button from early 1995. You just can't stop hitting that "Next Cat" icon...

[thanks to Teri for the link]

:: Online resources ::

Once again, blogging to capture a link to Terri Senft's excellent journal - might provide me some links that would be useful for this semester's research into digital community.

:: Personal webpage = ?? ::

For my first real blogpost in a while, I've chosen to blog this musing from a british academic David Brake on the difficulties in defining the term personal webpage. This is a term that I thought had fallen out of favour but apparently not. David is working on a project in which a definition of this term would be useful and he has the admirable desire to consult his fellow academics for their take on the term.

While browsing his post, also go and check out the Habbo Hotel he mentions. I don't claim to have fully grokked its concept yet, but I will take a closer look at it when I start working intensively on my deliverables for my Community Studies class in sociology this fall. Could prove interesting and useful then.

:: Blogging, take 3 ::

As often happens for me, now that school has restarted for this year and now that I'm taking a few courses that require me to pay attention to various happenings, places and interactions on the net, I'll be blogging intermittently but with more frequency.

So consider this my blog, take 3. And...yes...I may once again be blogging for marks. More details on this to come in the upcoming days...

:: Walking the walk ::

So many of us have had to grit our teeth and slog our way through badly designed websites on a daily basis, just to get things done on the net. Thus, it is welcome news to hear that a few fed-up usability experts have started to do something about it by redesigning and hosting their own version of what they believe these sites ought to be. 

The companies who own the original sites on which these crusaders have done their guerrilla redesigns are not amused. If this is what it takes for companies to realize that bells and whistles and flash and sizzle aren't what is fundamentally important on the web, then I say to these usability champions, "HURRAH!" and "keep it up! Change is coming, thanks to you".

:: Blogs go black ::

Once upon a time, I paid Blogger for my blog so that this very situation at weblogs.com wouldn't happen to me. Since the acquisition of blogger by Google, I've not been able to continue to pay and thus have essentially been in the same situation as the bloggers who have now lost their blogs. Does give me pause.

:: Is "consumerism" a myth? ::

Rob Horning thinks so. Don't know if I agree with him, but his opinion and arguemnts make interesting reading.

:: One word. 60 seconds. Go!...::

How creative can you be with a word in 60 seconds?

Try it for yourself at One Word.

:: Email bankruptcy - stunt or trend? ::

I would be more inclined to see this as a stunt, if it weren't coming from Lessig himself.

:: A tattoo story? ::

Shelley Jackson takes performance art, writing and tattooing and mixes it up to create something entirely new.

:: Is it still bookmarking? ::

I realized recently when I told someone to "bookmark" a webpage that I was dating myself, as the Dark Side's browser uses the more unwieldy phrase "Add to Favorites". Can you tell I was there when?

In any case, the true point of this post isn't to do a netgramma routine but rather to bookmark this interesting discussion on technoshamanism, for me to read later when I have more time.

:: Foundations and feelings for a city::

While I live in Montreal now, Toronto is and perhaps forever will be the city of my heart. It is where I first forged my identity as an adult, where I made the break from family and the west that I grew up in, where I took a job that became a career and where I left my civic heart four years ago to move down the 401 to follow my new marriage.

All the same, it holds me.

And so I guess it is inevitable that comparisons between Toronto and Montreal are omnipresent for me: Montrealers are arrogant, Torontonians apologetic; Montrealers puff up their chests about their bars and nightclubs and terrace cafes where Torontonians extol their treelined neighbourhoods, streetcars and arts scene; Montreal wallow in their self-declared French europeanism, in contrast to Toronto's quieter pride in their UN-like multilingual polyglot culture. Montreal is proud of a few of their shopping streets and yet everything closes up tightly at 5:00 on most nights and there isn't a mall or drugstore open past 6 anywhere. In some areas of Montreal, even grocery stores hold to this.

Montrealers scream their virtues in the newspapers (in both official languages), on the airwaves and in conversations with others. They put down other cities achievements, belittle the sports accomplishments and commercial successes found outside their island and generally show a pettiness of civic spirit that seems to hide an actual sense of inferiority and backwardness about their place as a North American city. Outwardly they are proud, but looking inward they are scared.

Torontonians, on the other hand, self-flagellate themselves. To others, in the same venues and conversations, they will be self-effacing, openly insecure, too aware of the stereotype that the rest of the country either envies or hates them. They will state that they are second class, a good city but never quite achieving the hip bohemianess of Vancouver or the pulsing pace of New York or the gritty commercial dedication of Chicago. Outwardly, Torontonians are worried about their place, but an inward look shows they are generally comfortable with their city and their place within it.

Another major difference between the two cities is architecture. The European feel and influence may be obvious in the Old Port of Montreal, but elsewhere, the city is a jumble of endless streets of seemingly-dilapidated, graffitied, glued-together row top-down duplexes and triplexes, built for the sprawling turn-of-the-20th-century Catholic French families, on tiny lots with almost no greenspace at the front and sinuous concrete arteries as allies in the back. Toronto's landscape is more brash, more "American" it is said, at least in the business, restaurant and arts districts, but move a few streets away and you find Toronto's version of the duplex - a "side-by-side" as it is called, one roof holding two homes glued together at their centre, with greenspace surrounding it. The brick colour is mainly shades of red and the influence here is more obviously Protestant, someone like Max Weber might say, built for the more standard 4 person family plus dog and car.

I've often wondered if the increased amount of space each individual feels in Toronto is perhaps partly thanks to having ravines and a huge lake as opposed to being on an island in the middle of a marine shipping artery. Some might claim erroneously it is because Toronto is so close to the US, and yet in actual fact, Montreal might as well make the same claim, for just a bridge and an hours drive away and you can be either Vermont or New York.

I can't claim to totally understand the reason why Montreal is where people in Canada fly alone to party with others and Toronto is where they fly to do touristy stuff with their family. I also can't explain why Montreal will forever feel masculine to me -- is it the grittiness? The graffiti? The insanely-designed highways? Just as I can't explain why Toronto is forever female for me, why it feels like a well-kept lady of a certain age. The phallic symbolism of the CN Tower next to the Skydome notwithstanding, is it the family-oriented neighbourhoods? The politeness of muli-cultured people? The cleanliness of the streets? The arts scene?

One thing I can understand is why I don't much like Montreal and am therefore now content to live in one of his bedroom communities across another bridge and river, rather than living in the heart of everything the way I preferred to do in Toronto. In Toronto, living the in suburbs would be impossible for me, making the decision to live in a condo over a sprawling suburban house obvious for the payback of living in her.

Ultimately, Toronto is so much "me" that I have integrated her attitudes and gestures and habits into myself. The entire city has felt like home to me since the day I stepped off the Greyhound bus one dark and snowy late December day in 1989 and crossed the street to the enormous Eaton Centre shopping complex.

And perhaps because of the quiet fierceness of my love for her, since moving to this city of my current life and my husband's family, I have kept informed on her state and being as much as my homesick heart could handle. I have done so by reading the online version of the quintessential Toronto magazine, Toronto Life, in which I recently foundthis link to an excellent article on the architecture and feeling and foundations of Toronto.

Reading it, you will perhaps better understand her and, therefore, in turn, me.

Enjoy.

:: Continuing the copyright debate ::


My list of books from Lawrence Lessig that I've not yet read just got longer. He's released a new one into the fray called "">Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity". With a provocative title like that, it sounds like a must read and money can't even be used as an excuse for not reading -- Lessig has provided it for free.

A recent Miami Herald article on the book says this of it:

It's an interesting and provocative book, and one that ought to be read by artists and others who make their living creating, buying and selling pieces of culture"

Ok, ok..add it to the summer "want to be reading scifi but am catching up on my cyberculture instead" list then....

:: Passionate Purple Please! ::

Is this a good gift for the fruit lover who has everything?

:: Trying to make things easy often makes them hard ::

The "no fly" system is more proof that software or raw data alone cannot, at this moment in human history, take sole responsiblity for averting or solving human problems.

After all, they are designed and managed by humans who are, by design, biased and flawed.

:: Google, how I used to love thee! ::

It seems its time to look for a Dogpile toolbar for Mozilla!

Why?

Read on...

Back in the long-ago day of 1999, when I as a then-developing Googliophile was extolling the virtues of the super search engine, I would tell my enraptured (or was it captive?) audience all about why Google was great. To make a long story very short, it boiled down to one thing: Focus.

Unlike their rivals over at Yahoo and MSN, Google kept it simple, easy and focused on one thing only -- great search results. Not for Google were the bells and whistles of so-called Portals. Pay for positioning? Ads? Why bother? Free web-based email for the masses? No way!

Oh how things have changed.

In the last 90 days, Google has fiddled with their search algorithm, rendering it far less efficient and accurate (The answer for all searches these days seems to be something on eBay). They've added on a bunch of other services I've not even bothered to figure out. But perhaps the most striking sign that today's Google isn't my beloved Google of old is the news I read in Information Week today that says that Google is "in a fierce fight for web supremacy" which somehow translates to the fact that they are going to be offering "Gmail", a free web-based email service chock full of advertising links. Like fleas on a dog's back, these ad links will go along with your email to assault the eyes of your unsuspecting email recipients, whether you (or they) like it or not.

Google, how I used to love thee!

:: Identity Theft ::

It is because of the crooked tactics of identity thieves as described in this CSO Magazine article that I recently made a trip to Walmart solely to buy a cross-cut paper shredder for my annual spring cleanout of my personal paper files.

:: The never-ending story ::

In the never-ending story that is the Windows vs. Linux debate, this InternetWeek article gives a succinct analysis of the common conception that Linux is more secure than Windows.

:: Weblogs and Discourse ::

From one of my favourite soci mailing lists comes a link to a conference paper that was presented at the Blogtalk conference in Vienna last weekend. The paper is called Weblogs and Discourse.

I haven't had time to read it fully yet, but my preliminary scan of it shows a fertile set of possiblities, concepts and possible applications to some of the work I'm doing both personally and academically. I'm going to have to go back and read it through in some depth and see if I can apply any of the ideas to a site I'm putting together with my academic colleagues for the Montreal GameCODE project.

:: Marc Andreessen on open source ::

I like this article that details Marc Andreessen's 12 reasons open source software is better than proprietary closed system software. I just wish you didn't have to be such a code geek to be able to often take full advantage of it.

:: Better cellphone clip ::

According to a Wired magazine ad, the Rivet Shift cellphone clip from RadioShack will do what other clips have failed to do for me -- keep my phone clipped to my belt or the inside of my jeans pocket.

So, with one of these babies on me, my phone won't go flying across the pavement just because I bent down into the trunk? It won't fly off my belt and hit a hapless co-worker because I bent down to plug in the projector?

Cool! I want one!

Wonder if they're available in Canada?

:: Google goes Gaelic ::

I'm disappointed that both Google.ca and Google.com didn't honour St. Patrick's Day today!

In an attempt to see if the British or Irish version of Google did, I stumbled across the gaelic version of Google.

Wow! Tough language!

Oh! and Yes! Both the European sites honoured Clover Day.

:: Flying the Maple Leaf over Turks & Caicos ::

The dream hasn't died, apparently. There are still some influential people in both countries who hope to make the dream a reality. A tropical province? Is it possible?

:: Usable technology ::

I regularly have to fumble with the 600 different remotes that clutter my coffee table, because my hubby, who is a computer integrations specialist with a Bachelor's in Computer Science, hasn't been able to figure out the Harmon-Kardon "universal remote" universal. As a consequence, he hasn't been able to get the single spaceship-sized Harmon-Kardon remote to control these various components in our many-vendor home entertainment system:

• Harmon Kardon Universal Receiver
  
• Sony CD jukebox,
  
• Toshiba DVD player,
  
• Sony Playstation 2,
  
• Panasonic VCR,
  
• Hitachi HDTV
  
• Bell ExpressVu PVR satellite system

Therfore, I really do agree with Jakob Nielsen's take on inferior usability in consumer products.

:: Volvo YCC ::

Volvo decided that women needed to have a say in car design, so it let a bunch of female engineers, designers etc. design a car that is female friendly.

Dubbed the "YCC" for "Your Concept Car" , the car is easy to clean, has tons of storage, looks cool....but has no hood?!?

Not sure what I think of that. While Lisa Fitterman at the Gazette may think its because women don't actually want to drive, I guess I buck that trend. In my teen years, I restored classic cars.

In this case, the form is important and the function of the car is given over completely to the idea of transportation of goods and a few adults. This definitely won't be a car for those who like transparency in their technology.

:: Google as group mind ::

Those of you who read this space regularly know that I have a soft spot for Google. This is partly because of the fact that Google was responsible for bringing pure search back into style in the late 1990s, when it looked like the "portal" a la Yahoo and MSN would dominate everything.

The simplicity of the Google interface, coupled with its awesome power, fascinates me. As a software designer and student of human nature, I'm alternately awed, pleased and tickled at the effect Google has had as a technology, a philosophy and a pastime. Thanks to its citation analysis style method of determining rank relevance of a page to a search, based on how many other pages have linked to it, I agree that Google has evolved into the first semi-intelligent technological group mind of our times.

:: My future ::

If I don't make it to the ivory towers, will I end up working in this kind of environment?

:: Taking on Nielsen ::

While googling wiki usability, I found this article (it's somewhat old yet still relevant) that analyzes the usability mantras and myths of guru Jakob Nielsen. Good stuff.

:: Crying real tears ::

I'm shocked. Shocked almost speechless actually, and for those of you who know me, you know that's tough to do. Shocked and I have cried more than a few real tears this morning, because of what I discovered is happening here in Canada.

This morning, as usual, before starting work, I sat down with my cup of coffee in my office to read the morning paper. As a general rule, now that I live near Montreal, I read the Montreal Gazette, a paper not normally known for its treatment of animal rights.

Given what happened in Spain yesterday, the front page portion of this PMU animal issue story was relegated to a small bottom sidebar with a small photo. I noticed it but the copy wasn't compelling so I read it and kept browsing the front section. Then, on page A10, I came across the full story.

It is called "Adopt a Horse, stop its slaughter". I'd link to it here if it were possible but the Gazette only puts the most important news (per their decision of what's important) up on their site. However, here's a related story I found on MSNBC about the same thing in the US, all caused by the same pharmaceutical company, Wyeth.

The gist of the story is this - over 20,000 Canadian horses (with many more in the US), many of them pregnant, risk being sent to slaughterhouses and turned into horse meat for sale overseas because the ranchers that own them no longer need their urine for the pharmaceutical hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) market. All of these horses in Canada and the US were used as the key producers of the key ingredient for the HRT industry, pregnant mare urine (PMU). The HRT industry has undergone a serious downturn in the last year due to new medical information about HRT, with demand for HRT drugs dropping over 40%. This has prompted a severe production cutback by the pharma company, which, in turn, has hit the ranchers who kept these horses in factory situations. These ranchers now want to get rid of these money-losing horses and move on to other financial pursuits.

The woman featured in the story, Barbara Claussen, is trying to get as many of these horses adopted as possible by non-kill buyers. Given that the western Canada market is now reaching an adoption saturation point, she is trying to bring as many as possible to the Maritime provinces or is trying to compensate the ranchers while she tries to get them transported to recreation-oriented horse auctions in Canada and the US.

For more information on her efforts specifically, please visit her site and read through it carefully. Googling the issue shows that Barbara isn't alone in her efforts -- I got over 3000 hits on my initial search.

But I'm not posting just to alleviate my shock. I want to do something.

I grew up out west and spent tons of time on my family's wheat farms. There were always horses about for riding and just watching play in the fields. I was a horse mad little girl, like many girls. I might be all grown up, but I still have a large soft spot for horses. Soft enough that if I had the space, I'd adopt a few of these beautiful tragic animals myself.

Unfortunately, hubby and I didn't buy that large acreage up north like we'd dreamed about. Practical employment concerns forced us into the suburbs. However, I'll be donating whatever dollars I can to the cause, and I will do what I can to raise awareness of the plight of these animals in Canada and the US.

So...if you are reading this and you have a more influential and well-read blog than mine, could you consider doing a post about this issue and the plight of these horses? Tell your friends and family members. Spread the word.

I've sent Barbara an email suggesting she set up a free Paypal account. Thus, perhaps another way to help would be to put up a Paypal button on your blog to request donations to Barbara's non-profit organization.

In the interim, until she decides if she will follow through on my suggestions, if you have some money you want to give to this cause, send Barbara an email or call her.

:: Google bar meets Mozilla ::

Thanks to a heads-up post on Tama's blog, Ponderance, I now have a spiffy Googlebar in my Mozilla!

Whooho! Now I really _can_ almost use Mozilla exclusively. Thanks!

:: Net changes culture consumption ::

A great BBC article that contains concise synopses of the net's effect on popular culture.

:: Geek god ::

Found a book I'd like to check out, given my own interest in geek culture. It's called "Matters of Gravity" Written by Stanford university professor Scott Bukatman who is a self-professed "god of geeks" , the book is a series of essays on superhero comics, theme parks, movies, pop culture and digital culture.

Cool.

Kind of like the sort of things I'd like to study, if I can ever finish my BA.

:: Grad school option? ::

I regularly keep my eyes open for potential schools to consider for my grad and post-grad years. There aren't a lot of schools in North America that "get" the idea of digital culture and digital sociology. Also, I'd prefer a school that is well-respected in the field, since I do intend to go on to a life in academia.

So I perked when I read this story about the renaissance of the sociology department at Yale. Given that they're reviving themselves, perhaps they'll be open to someone like moi.

:: Youth culture ::

Found this excellent article in The Weekly Standard about youth culture. Seems a fairly balanced view and it really makes me want to take that 400 level sociology course on youth culture during fall term this year.

:: All in the family? ::

While I'm not claiming to completely believe the stats in this report, it is interesting to note the report's claim that british children seem to regard their PC in higher esteem than they do members of their family.

:: Is it true? ::

Will Google really lose its prominence as the search engine of choice for us "googlers"? Forrester Research thinks so.

:: Ludologist ::

I'm capturing this link to ludologist Jesper Juul's blog so that I don't lose the link. Through him, I finally have a good easy definition of ludology: the study of games.

:: Bush's misuse of science ::

From one of my soci email lists comes this report which states that Bush has been misusuing science to further his own ends and this is endangering science in general.

:: Interesting option ::

Found Squarespace today while looking around other blogs. Given its feature list, it might make a better blogging system for me. I think I may be considering switching.

:: Rationalization of ethics ::

In studying Weber this semester, I'm learning about his concepts of ethics, particularly rationalization and its effects on societies.

Perhaps that's why the whole debate about performance enhancing drugs in sports is interested to follow. And, as Harry Siegel points out in the New Partisan. the hue and cry is often not for the valid ethical and honour issues that have arisen, but rather the rationalized issue of whether or not the record books need to be adjusted.

How very po-mo!

:: Digital games awards ::

I didn't know these existed. Now I do.

:: Lifespan of email ensures honesty? ::

According to a the results of study by a Cornell University researcher, people are more honest in email than on the telephone.

Apparently, this is because emails can be retained and reviewed in the future.

:: IRV ::

I'm not quite sure I get how it works yet (I haven't had the time to truly research it) but apparently, there are many Americans pushing for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) to be used in the federal elections, to make running a third or fourth presidential candidate viable and to ensure that there are no more spoiler elections like those of 2000.

Much of the outcry has come on the heels of Nader's announcement that he will run again as an independant in this year's presidential elections. Nader's left-leaning detractors claim that he could spoil the Democrats chance at regaining the presidency and denying Bush a second term. Those who support both Nader and the Democrats are pushing for IRV to be adopted to avoid this.

If you understand the issue better than I obviously do, please feel free to email me.

:: Supporting gay marriage ::

The American Anthropological Assoication has come out with a statement in response to Bush's support for a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as something between a biological man and a biological woman only.

The AAA statement says that "more than century of anthropological research ...provides no support whatsoever" for Bush's view.

I commend them for taking a stand on the issue and supporting the vast numbers of individuals out there who have been excluded from a cultural practice solely because they are in a relationship with a member of their same sex.

[ AAA Statement found via the SASlist as posted there by John Glass, sociologist and director of The Family Place ]

:: Interesting ::

I don't know if I want to join this project but I certainly want to see the real-time map of the Web that is supposed to result from it.

:: Timely quote ::

While reading today from the works of German social philosopher and scientist Max Weber, a few passages from his "Politics as a Vocation" essay lecture stuck with me as being interesting and pertinent, particularly when juxtaposed into today's post-9/11 world.

"Damage to its interests a nation will forgive, but not damage to its honour" (Weber: "Selections in Translation. 1978. p.215)

Weber goes on to talk about the idea that the when a war is over, the vanquished nation should say to the victor:

"We lost the war, you have won it. All that is now over and done with: now let us talk about the conclusions to be drawn...in the light of the responsibility towards the future".

For today's world, his next words in this passage could be seen as a scathing view of the emptiness of the moral rhetoric we are bombarded with:

"Everything else is undignified. Every new document which comes to light years later leads to the revival of the undignified howls, the hatred and the anger, instead of allowing the war and its outcome to be a least morally buried. This can be done only if we adopt a realistic and chivalrous, but above all a dignified attitude. It cannot be done by insisting on 'morality': that really means no more than a lack of dignity on both sides". (p.215)

Particularly prosaic words, considering they were written and delivered by Weber in 1920, just after one world war and before the next one.

[ All italics are as shown in the original text ]

:: Gates is nuts! ::

So I get spam. So I don't like it. But so what? I have a delete button don't I? And filters that can filter out 90% of it? Why worry anymore about it? It is my opinion that the more visibility we give spammers, the more they will think that spamming works.

So you can imagine my reaction upon reading this story on CNN where the horned one himself, Bill Gates, is proposing that we start buying "stamps" for email which is somehow supposed to stop the proliferation of spam.

Yeah right. Like that will really stop the flow. Does Gates honestly think that spammers won't find a way around something like that? Geez.

:: Boundary erosion ::

I recently wrote a theory paper for my Digital Games indie course that examined the concept of "the virtual" and of "virtual reality". I proposed ditching the term, accepting that everything is real if someone perceives it so. However, given that we are still in the early days of the transition from an industrial age to a technocized age (thanks to my pal Kelly for the terms), I accept that, for now, we still need a term to differentiate the different realms in which we exist and experience life. Thus, I propose the use of the "digital realm" versus the "concrete realm".

One of my central arguments in that paper is that people need to get over the idea that the digital realm isn't real. One of the arguments I've heard used by detractors of the reality of the digital is the concept that the interface or tools used to interact in the digital realm are too artificial and not bio-body centric enough.

However, thanks to a colleague, I read this article about the new PS2 game, "Lifeline" that is completely controlled by voice. You speak commands, ask questions, etc. and the game responds. Unlike in other games, this isn't a gimmick that is added to spice up what would otherwise be a joystick/gamepad mediated experience. For this game, your voice is the controller.

Are the boundaries finally starting to erode in a way obvious enough for others to begin to grasp? Will the supposedly more "natural" mediation and control of this type within digital space make it easier for traditional or conservative individuals to accept the reality of the digital?

:: Shedding light on irrational reality ::

One of my academic email lists sent out this link for a new academic-focused research organization whose goal is to "promote research and discussion on irrational realities that are ubiquitously felt, tacitly accepted, but rarely addressed...The iARC communicates today's irrational reality for tomorrow's hope to facilitate "life with consciousness" rather than "life despite consciousness."

Interesting purpose and goal. Not sure yet how doable it will be, but this group's output will be interesting to monitor.

:: Fallen heroes::


Okay so maybe he wasn't really a hero, but I still don't think Stowe Boyd gets it right in his recent Darwin Mag post on why Wikis are wicked.

In my opinion, any technology that presents a barrier to a task is not good. Wikis break the web paradigm by paradoxically making it tough to post things for non-techie users. Ditto any software that goes against commonly held conventions in an attempt to go backwards in time. Thus, to my eye, Wikis are wicked bad in the true sense of those words.

Give me a graphical interface any day and leave the hard code in the hands of the slingers. Just let me get my words up there on the page without having to learn anything more complicated than how to use formatting buttons.

Yeah maybe I'm missing much of his points today cause I'm cranky. I'll re-read it later when I'm in a better mood. Maybe I'll refute my own position.

And maybe not.

:: Google fumbles social networking ::

Google is the latest company to enter the social networking fray with their Orkut service (dorky name!). Unfortunately, they seemed to have fumbled the ball. I could go into why and analyze it, but Rebecca Blood does a much better job of it. Just go read her take.

:: Differing levels of texting adoption::


I'm ankle-deep into Howard Rheingold's latest novel, "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution" and its already ringing all kinds of idea bells in my head.

In attempting to explain why Americans haven't taken to the texting phenomenon sweeping Asia and Europe, he quotes anonymous analysts who lay the blame on "clueless marketing" and "competing standards" (p.22). But later on in the same chapter, he raises a more intriguing possibility: the idea that the public and the private are more sharply delineated in North America, due to the sheer amounts of physical space, both public and private, that we North Americans have at our disposal.

He make the point that Japanese teenagers rarely have a private bedroom and have their lives tightly controlled by parents and teachers. Thus, texting via their cellphones gives Japanese teens the ability to have a private space of community that they wholly control and that they can occupy simultaneously with the more public spaces that is their life at school and in the family home.

Contrast this with the world of the US, with the average teen having their own bedroom, their own car, their own computer, a distinct sense of personality separate from their family and a picture of US teenagers with a defined feeling of entitled individuality emerges.

"Japanese don't have...homes large enough to entertain friends and colleagues, private bedrooms for children, kitchens with storage space and appliances, more than one car...free parking for card when out, cheap gas, toll free expressways, PC with Internet access (and space to put a PC in the home), more than one phone line with competitive rates...

All of these items work for the use of the private and against the use of street and public spaces. Americans move between private nucleated homes, private transport and often private offices and cubicles as well, with quick forays in the car to shop occasionally (not daily grocery shopping as in Japan)and use of public space and restaurants has the sense of an optional excursion rather than a necessity."::p.23::

One notable omission: Rheingold oddly ignores Canada completely. I say oddly because Canadians still have one of the quickest and highest adoptions of telecommunication techs in the world, certainly higher than in the US. I don't have an exact figure to quote or link to prove this assertion, however. If you've got one, send it over to me and I'll include it.